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President Obama needs an exit strategy. I am not referring to Afghanistan or Iraq (though there are quite a few similarities between the situation Obama is in on health-care reform and the political difficulties President George W. Bush faced on Iraq). Congressional Democrats and Obama are headed toward a "catastrophic success" politically if they pass health-care reform in its current legislative form. And catastrophic success was a term then-President Bush used on Iraq when he acknowledged the great initial victory but didn't take into account the long-term calamity and costs. I am not seeking to argue the substance of health...

Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos, one of the Left’s leading blogs, is fuming. For months, he has been leading the charge on Obamacare, drumming up support amongst Democrats while keeping the Left’s many camps united behind one goal: passing a health-care bill. Now, with Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) caving to one senator after another, Moulitsas sees his cause being destroyed by his own side. And he’s fighting back. In a post on his website, Moulitsas writes that if Reid’s bill is gutted of a public option, but still includes an individual mandate, then it should...

Here's one from the Department of We Are The World: Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will address the U.N.'s climate summit in Copenhagen. Say what you will about these two gentlemen—the support for terrorists, the Holocaust denial, the suppression of civil liberties—at least nobody can accuse them of being global warming "deniers." On the contrary, the two leaders, who met in Caracas last month for at least the 11th time, have been nothing if not cooperative when it comes to environmentally friendly and carbon-neutral technologies. Bicycles, for instance: In 2005, Chávez directed his government to "follow seriously the project of...

So we’re going to shut down the detention center at the U.S. naval base on Guantanamo Bay and move the 200-plus terrorists detained there to a seldom-used civilian correctional center in Thomson, Ill. And we’re doing it, the Obama administration and Sen. Dick Durbin assure us, not because they want to use federal money to indemnify their home state for a white-elephant prison Illinois taxpayers should never have built, but because Guantanamo Bay simply must be closed. Gitmo, they say, causes terrorism. It’s worth remembering that the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, perhaps the world’s most influential jihadist, was never...

The Palestinian American Research Center (PARC), a U.S. taxpayer-funded organization noted for the virulent anti-Israeli attitudes of its academic members, held a conference in October at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Most of the conference was apolitical, but two lectures in particular raise (again) the question of whether PARC should be the recipient of taxpayer monies. Indeed, this is not the first time the public has been warned about PARC's questionable scholar-activism. Titled, "Palestine: What We Know," and billed as "a multi-disciplinary survey of the state of scholarship on Palestine," much of the October event was scholarly...

Last Friday, the state's biggest public employee union came up short. Again. This time Service Employees International Union Local 1000 backed the loser in a runoff board election for CalPERS, the mammoth government worker pension provider. The board signs off on annual payments that the state and local governments must make to their employee retirement funds. It also sets how the $200 billion system spreads its investments on behalf of CalPERS' 1.6 million members. Local 1000's handpicked candidate, Cathy Hackett, lost to J.J. Jelincic, who was backed by several other unions, 49 percent to 51 percent. It's the latest in...

Everyone seems to be waiting for someone to break the dam. And everyone knows who that someone is. Because of the size and weight of the United States, and the moral power invested in the current president, it is Barack Obama, and Barack Obama alone, who can rescue the climate negotiations from the dismal bickering into which they have slumped. To save him the trouble, I have written the speech that could turn the talks around. "All those of us who are elected to high office dream of a time when we might do what is right, rather than what...

The most endangered species in Washington may well be the moderate. Consider the long knives pointed at the heart of Sen. Joe Lieberman. The Connecticut Democrat-turned-independent (but caucusing with the Dems) announced that he would not support Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's plan to pass Obamacare by allowing Americans who are 55 or older to by into Medicare. Given that Medicare is, as Lieberman put it, "on the verge of insolvency," he made the right call - and for that, the left wing of his party has savaged Joe the Senator as a sellout and turncoat. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.,...

NEW YORK – Gold prices have been rising sharply, breaching the $1,000 barrier and in recent weeks rising towards $1,200 an ounce and above. Today’s “gold bugs” argue that the price could top $2,000. But the recent price surge looks suspiciously like a bubble, with the increase only partly justified by economic fundamentals. Gold prices rise sharply only in two situations: when inflation is high and rising, gold becomes a hedge against inflation; and when there is a risk of a near depression and investors fear for the security of their bank deposits, gold becomes a safe haven. The last...

If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill. Any measure that expands private insurers' monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform. Real reform would insert competition into insurance markets, force insurers to cut unnecessary administrative expenses and spend health-care dollars caring for people. Real reform would significantly lower costs, improve the delivery of health care and give all Americans a meaningful choice of coverage. The current Senate bill accomplishes none of these.

Here's what Democrats need to ponder: Can they prosper in the absence of George W. Bush? His presidency was a tonic for Democrats and led to a blossoming of political creativity on the center-left not seen since the 1930s. No tactic, no program, no leader ever did more to catalyze the party than the rage Bush inspired. The whole effort was summarized nicely by the party's slogan in 2006, "A New Direction for America." There was no need to specify north or south, east or west, up or down. Compared with Bush, any alternative destination seemed appealing. And by becoming...

Politics: If the Democrats' stitched-together Frankenstein monster of health care reform gets the 60 votes to get through the Senate, it will have been done through an assortment of bribes and brass knuckles. (snip) Sen. Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, has also been critical of the buy-in and public option, but he has an additional issue about whatever comes out of the Senate not involving public funding of abortion in any way. Michael Goldfarb on the Weekly Standard blog quotes a Senate aide as saying the White House is now threatening to put Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base on the...

The Obama administration is effectively siding with America's enemies in Lebanon. Sure, President Obama said all the right things after his Monday meet-and-greet with Lebanese President Michel Suleiman. But Suleiman is aligned with Syria -- and thus, by proxy, with Iran and the Hezbollah terrorists. Hezbollah, recall, is responsible for killing 220 US Marines in 1993 and for the murder of scores of innocents in places as far as Argentina. Meanwhile, the administration in the last few months has told the heads of the Western-allied Lebanese factions -- who used to visit Washington to discuss ways to confront Iran, Syria...

The Palestine Liberation Organization's Central Committee yesterday extended Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's term until new elections are held in the West Bank and Gaza Strip - elections in which Abbas reiterated that he would not run. The Palestinian leader is now officially a lame duck. That's not an insult. Many renowned international leaders achieved their greatest accomplishments when it was clear that they were about to exit the world's stage. In Israel, it has been lame duck leaders with nothing left to lose who have offered the Palestinians the best offers they have received. On January 23, 2001, just...

On Tuesday, Danielle Pletka wrote in the Washington Post that “Iran is proceeding with an aggressive nuclear weapons program,” and that apart from “a few dogged holdouts,…much of the Obama administration has come to terms with that reality.” By “coming to terms” Pletka means that, while recognizing Iran’s aggressive intentions, “official Washington has resigned itself to pursuing a containment policy”—which, as Pletka effectively argues, would be misplaced and unavailing in the case of Iran. But Pletka adds that “privately, Obama administration officials confess that they believe Israeli action will preempt our policy debate, as Israel’s tolerance for an Iranian nuke...

To help justify its commitments to dramatically cut U.S. fossil fuel use, Obama administration officials have contended that our national security is at stake. The president argued in his Nobel Peace Prize speech in Oslo that vast changes in the Earth's climate triggered by global warming will lead to widespread economic and social dislocation, instability and more wars. Unilateral U.S. emission reductions would be a massive subsidy to carbon-intensive imports from developing countries, which would be cheaper than the products of carbon-constrained economies. Because developing countries would be loath to relinquish this advantage, and because some of them believe they...

WASHINGTON Rushing to lock the nation into expensive health care and climate change commitments, Democrats are in an understandable frenzy because public enthusiasm for both crusades has been inversely proportional to the time the public has had to think about them. And the president pushing this agenda has, with his incontinent hunger for attention, seen his job approval vary inversely with his ubiquity. Consider his busy December – so far. His Dec. 1 Afghanistan speech to the nation was followed on Dec. 3 by his televised "jobs summit." His Dec. 8 televised economics speech at the Brookings Institution was followed...

The "jobs summit," the economy, Copenhagen (and East Anglia), Tiger Woods -- in the news an abundance of the bizarre. And let us not overlook Tareq and Michaele Salahi, that other uncredentialed couple oddly winding up in the White House. Socializing Medicine The Democrats are fixated on doing it. Barack Obama wants a bill, any bill, rather than no bill at all -- and has dispatched the estimable Bill Clinton to beg the Senate to borrow and steal to get it. No worries that the 4,000 pages of health-care legislation before both congressional houses would fail all three of the...

For over a year now, the American public has waited patiently for their elected leaders in Washington to provide the necessary leadership to turn the U.S. economy around and put the nation back on track toward low unemployment. At the same time, top union bosses have made it very clear that they are more interested in “union jobs” than they are in jobs. And they are more interested in their “take” from the small business owners of our nation than they are in the take home pay of their employees. Labor bosses have been declaring that the Employee ‘Forced’ Choice...

Most people who haven't finished (or even begun) their shopping are starting to worry about what gifts to give a friend, relative or spouse. Quick, what did you give or receive last year? How about two years ago? Most of us can't remember, unless it was a big-ticket item. What if you could give a gift that mattered; one that literally kept on giving and improved the life of another person? Would you buy that gift? Two years ago I bought two gifts for people I have never met. One was a goat and the other a sewing class. Both...

One of the oldest clichés in the book defines insanity as doing the same thing “over and over again” and expecting a different result. In that case, it’s a pity we can’t give our federal and state governments long-overdue lobotomies. In spite of overwhelming evidence that the $787 billion bureaucratic bailout passed in February has failed to “stimulate” the economy, President Barack Obama is now proposing that Congress pass a “second stimulus.” After months of record unemployment and signs pointing to an unprecedented holiday retail disaster, Obama still doesn’t get it. America must “spend our way out of this recession,”1...

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference enters its second week in Copenhagen, California will send a delegation to showcase the state’s own climate change policies. Since his election to office in 2003, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has made global warming and climate change a cornerstone of his gubernatorial legacy. When he addresses conference delegates this week, Schwarzenegger will boast that under his watch the state has implemented some of the strictest and most comprehensive environmental regulations in the world. But delegates won’t be presented with the true cost of Schwarzenegger’s war on global warming. Californians know better than anyone else...

James Brown song "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" got it wrong -- there is a quiet revolution underfoot that one day might make it more of a woman's world than a man's. They vote more, they study more, and they spend more. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 70 million women and 61 million men voted in last year's presidential election. This reflects both the higher total number of women in the population (107 million women versus 99 million for men) and their higher turnout (66 percent versus 61 percent). In the 2006-2007 academic year, women earned a majority...

Pope Benedict XVI released a letter for the World Day of Peace entitled “If You Want to Cultivate Peace protect creation” bore absurd titles as “Pope Goes Green”. The reports intimated that the Pope had somehow joined the fringe of the environmental movement.In fact, he called for a proper stewardship of the environment rooted in our obligations to - and solidarity with - one another. We have been given to one another as gifts. Creation has been given to us as a human community, with responsibilities which we must now share. "There exists a certain reciprocity: as we care for...

Barack Obama has won a place in history with the worst ratings of any president at the end of his first year -- snip -- Mr. Obama may believe, as he told Oprah Winfrey in a recent interview, that he deserves a "solid B+" for his first year in office, but the American people beg to differ. A presidency that started with so much promise is receiving unprecedentedly low grades from the country that elected him. He's earned them.

WASHINGTON -- I am rather sorry that Myles Brand has passed on to his reward. Brand is the fellow who, as president of Indiana University, gained enormous respect among liberals for ruining the basketball program of that basketball-loving university in that basketball-loving state. He fired basketball coach Bob Knight, one of the sport's greatest coaches, for a minor altercation that was an obvious setup. Knight had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the institution and overseen an athletic program that insisted on academic seriousness from its players, as well as competitiveness. Under Knight, IU won three NCAA championships and...

Americans overwhelmingly like their health care and their health insurance. While Americans reject ObamaCare, the President and Congress insist on driving it through. Most Americans, up to 85 percent, already have health insurance and are satisfied with it. Lacking health insurance is different from lacking health care -- which, by law, emergency rooms must supply. Millions go without health insurance by choice and not due to lack of resources. Deduct from the number without insurance those who have access to it via entitlement programs, those temporarily without it while between jobs, those here illegally and those who could go on...

President Obama is about to accomplish what many previous Democratic presidents have tried to do, and failed. At least that's what the White House spin would be, and it will largely be echoed throughout the Democratic Party. No, they will say, the health care reform bill won't have a public option, but it will extend coverage to millions of people and provide a framework to build on for the future. You would expect the liberals who put him in office to be thrilled. They're not. Here are a couple of highlights from the liberal blogosphere: Taylor Marsh (Huffington Post) "Pres....

If you listen to U.S. officialdom, Iran is a pariah, cast out by the world community for its sanctions-violating, nuclear-wannabe ways. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just warned Latin American nations that in choosing to "flirt with Iran," they should "think twice." Last month, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told the press that Iran is "choosing to isolate itself." But is Iran really isolated? Fresh from a meeting in Tehran with the head of the terrorist group Hamas, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is free to rub shoulders at the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen with a UN summit...

While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid scrambles to assemble 60 Democratic votes for health care legislation that, according to the Realclearpolitics.com average of recent polls, is opposed by a 53 percent to 38 percent margin, several Democratic members of the House are scrambling for the exits on what is starting to look like a sinking ship. You may have noticed that I avoided using the cliche "rats leaving the sinking ship," because the four Democratic House members who over the last three weeks announced their decisions to retire rather than run for re-election cannot fairly be characterized as rats. (snip)...

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In this country, even a global warming denialist with a carbon fetish and bad intentions has the right to see the inner workings of government. Or, at least, he should. When leaked e-mails recently exposed talk of manipulating scientific evidence on global warming, Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at The National Center for Atmospheric Research, argued that skeptics had cherry-picked and presented his comments out of context. To rectify this injustice, I sent Trenberth (and NCAR) a Freedom of Information Act request asking for his e-mail correspondences with other renowned climate scientists in an effort to help...

Illusions and bitternessDecember 16, 2009, 5:42 pm There’s enormous disappointment among progressives about the emerging health care bill — and rightly so. That said, even as it stands it would take a big step toward greater security for Americans and greater social justice; it would also save many lives over the decade ahead. That’s why progressive health policy wonks — the people who have campaigned for health reform for years — are almost all in favor of voting for the thing. The argument about the evil of the individual mandate is,as Jon Cohn says, all wrong. It was wrong during...

Girls, can we talk? I don’t really like piling on a man in the midst of a multi-million-dollar public and personal implosion, but here’s one big obvious lesson to be learned from Tiger Woods: Sex makes people stupid. And not just the men. How else do you explain the mistresses and semipros coming forward to say that a married Tiger betrayed their trust by sleeping with other women, too. Sex makes people stupid. This is why we need a little thing called “civilization” to intervene between people and sexual passion, so we don’t leave the young-uns to rely on their...

Rushing to lock the nation into expensive health care and climate change commitments, Democrats are in an understandable frenzy because public enthusiasm for both crusades has been inversely proportional to the time the public has had to think about them. And the president pushing this agenda has, with his incontinent hunger for attention, seen his job approval vary inversely with his ubiquity. Consider his busy December — so far. His Dec. 1 Afghanistan speech to the nation was followed on Dec. 3 by his televised "jobs summit." His Dec. 8 televised economics speech at the Brookings Institution was followed on...

Nuclear Diplomacy: President Obama has sent a "personal" letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, hoping to coax him back to the table to talk about cutting his nation's nuclear program. Good luck with that. Repeated U.S. entreaties to the hermit state to cut its nuclear arsenal have availed us nothing. Just this month, U.S. envoy Stephen Bosworth traveled to North Korea with a bunch of new diplomatic carrots for the regime. The result? Bosworth put it this way, in classic diplomatese: "We identified some common understanding on the need for and a role of six-party talks and the...

Politics: If the Democrats' stitched-together Frankenstein monster of health care reform gets the 60 votes to get through the Senate, it will have been done through an assortment of bribes and brass knuckles. With the Medicare buy-in and the public option seemingly gone, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may be getting close to what he needs to get the nationalization of one-sixth of the nation's economy through the Senate. We'll just be forced to buy the insurance the government wants through its power to tax and regulate the insurance industry. This seems to be enough to secure the vote of...

Paul Samuelson, the dean of American economists, died last Sunday at 94. An MIT professor and Nobel Prize winner, Samuelson made one major venture into public policy. This was when he advised the John F. Kennedy campaign and economic transition team in 1960 and 1961 and thereafter consulted with the new president's Council of Economic Advisers. Obituaries have been quick to credit Samuelson's advice to JFK for launching the great 1960s expansion. The Boston Globe quoted Samuelson's recommendation to JFK in 1961 — "a temporary reduction in tax rates on individual incomes can be a powerful weapon against recession" —...

Lost in all the coverage of accused Islamic terrorist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's penetration of the military's officer corps is a deeper problem within the military — its radical Muslim chaplain corps. One of the groups the Pentagon turns to for clerics to minister to its growing ranks of Muslim soldiers is the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council. The group was founded by presumed "moderate" Muslim leader Abdurahman Alamoudi, who described his endeavor as "an excellent opportunity to show my community we have people who are patriotic." This flag-waving patriot turned out to be one of al-Qaida's...

Regulations: The Clean Water Act is being rewritten to give a government bureaucracy the power to regulate every body of water from the Mississippi River to a rain-flooded field. The first casualty may be American coal. With all the concern for the harm that cap-and-trade and regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant might do to the American economy and free markets, the Environmental Protection Agency is doing quite enough damage with an existing law on the books — the Clean Water Act. Congress plans to revise it to make it an even more powerful bludgeon against industry, energy producers and...

Health Reform: The president used an illuminating choice of words to describe the transformation of the health system Congress is set to enact. We are indeed "on the precipice" — staring into an abyss of statism. After emerging from a White House meeting with Senate Democrats Tuesday, President Obama said: "We are on the precipice of an achievement that's eluded Congresses and presidents for generations, an achievement that will touch the lives of nearly every American." It was another of history's memorable Freudian slips. Neville Chamberlain in 1938 disembarked from his plane and told the crowd, "This morning, I had...

Politically, no Israeli prime minister could survive the fact that Iran became a nuclear-armed state, officially or unofficially, on his watch. The pressure on the Israeli government to do something to counter Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons would be so strong that it could well be tempted to play a desperate gamble, regardless of any security guaranties that the U.S. might offer. Similarly, no U.S. president (especially one endowed with a Nobel Prize) could escape blame for having let Iran become a nuclear-weapon state by consistently underestimating its ability to conceal its preparations. The intelligence community's credibility would be devastated,...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has entered a strange new world where a substance harmless to fauna and essential to the continued existence of flora is the target of an "endangerment finding." During its first 36 years, the EPA focused on demonstrably hazardous substances used or emitted by manufacturing and transportation industries, agriculture, energy producers and individuals. The menace du jour is carbon dioxide, a substance for which humans have a high tolerance and without which all plant life would die, and humanity along with it. The argument is CO2 caused by the burning of fossil fuels causes warming because...

LifeNews.com Note: Bryan Kemper is the president of Stand True Ministries, a pro-life group that reaches out to youth and young adults. He is the author of a new book, Social Justice Begins In The Womb.  I'm against abortion, but...I think the statement that bugs me most when talking to people about abortion is, "I'm against abortion, but..." I can actually respect someone's total pro-abortion position more than someone who tells me, "I'm against abortion, but..." It just makes no sense to me at all; how can they be against something as vile and deadly as abortion and have...

If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill. Any measure that expands private insurers' monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform. Real reform would insert competition into insurance markets, force insurers to cut unnecessary administrative expenses and spend health-care dollars caring for people. Real reform would significantly lower costs, improve the delivery of health care and give all Americans a meaningful choice of coverage. The current Senate bill accomplishes none of these.

From NBC's Mark Murray and Domenico MontanaroJust how angry is the public with the country's two leading political parties? Angry enough that the conservative, libertarian-leaning Tea Party movement is more popular than either the Democratic or the Republican parties, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The Republican Party maintains its net-negative favorable/unfavorable rating in the poll, with 28 percent viewing it positively and 43 percent seeing it in a negative light. For the first time in more than two years, the Democratic Party also now holds a net-negative fav/unfav, at 35-45 percent. By comparison, the NBC/WSJ poll...

LESS HEALTH CARE FOR MORE MONEY: WHAT'S THE CATCH?December 16, 2009The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof recently wrote a column about John Brodniak of Oregon, who developed a cavernous hemangioma, causing great pain as blood leaks into his brain. According to Kristof, Brodniak can't get medical help because we don't have universal health care. Senators who vote against ObamaCare, Kristof said, are morally equivalent to someone who would walk past a man "writhing in pain on the sidewalk." In another article in the Times, William Yardley wrote about Melvin Tsosies -- also of Oregon -- who ended up with $200,000...

According to a recent statement from the White House, President Obama “strongly opposes efforts, such as the draft law pending in Uganda that would criminalize homosexuality and move against the tide of history” (Is “tide” the most appropriate word, since ocean tides are beyond man’s control? History is made by man, for better or for worse). Is this the same Obama who, when recently in China, murmured some generalities about human rights, in a country where a one-child policy has murdered millions of babies and freedom of expression is tightly controlled? Or is interference in and action on the affairs...

One need look no further than my home state of Arizona to see the result of limp-wristed, nice-guy politicians who have abandoned conservative principles and how they will fare in the current political climate. Senior Sen. and former presidential candidate John McCain is in a battle for his political life as he faces re-election in November 2010. His anticipated competition, a former congressman turned radio talk-show host, J.D. Hayworth, is a mere two points behind McCain in a head-to-head Rasmussen poll for the upcoming primary. It is a statistical dead heat. So much for the power of incumbency. But why?...

a CBO memo ... was released with little fanfare over the weekend.... the "smoking gun" showing that there has been a concerted effort among Democrats to make sure the CBO does not start taking into account the cost of mandates and new regulations. The memo concerned a proposal by Sen. Jay Rockefeller -- reportedly part of the now defenct Medicare expansion "deal" reached last week -- that would require insurance companies to spend 90 of the money collected in premiums on medical claims. Their conclusion was: "In CBO's view, this further expansion of the federal government's role in the health...