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Cold War enemies the United States and Vietnam demonstrated their blossoming military relations Sunday as a U.S. nuclear supercarrier cruised in waters off the Southeast Asian nation's coast — sending a message that China is not the region's only big player. The visit comes 35 years after the Vietnam War as Washington and Hanoi are cozying up in a number of areas, from negotiating a controversial deal to share civilian nuclear fuel and technology to agreeing that China needs to work with its neighbors to resolve territorial claims in the South China Sea.

CASA GRANDE - A Pinal County sheriff's deputy is hanging for dear life after he's shot by a group of suspected illegal immigrants Friday. It happened during a traffic stop on the I-8 west of Casa Grande. The deputy stopped a vehicle containing a group of suspected illegal immigrants when he was shot. He radioed in to report he was shot with an AK-47. His injuries are life-threatening, but authorities have not been able to find him.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Republican Party asked the Supreme Court on Friday to allow political parties to raise unlimited contributions, the latest outgrowth of the court's decision to unleash corporate and labor spending in federal elections. The filing sought to undo the ban on the raising of soft money — unlimited donations from corporations, unions and others — by national party committees. The GOP said the Supreme Court's rationale in January for removing restrictions on corporate and union spending in federal elections should lead to a similar removal of the restriction on such fundraising by national political parties. The soft...

Gay rights supporters in California say they have found an unlikely ally in Cindy McCain, the wife of Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who lent her name this week to the cause of same-sex marriage. McCain’s support comes as Proposition 8 proponents and opponents battle over the constitutionality of California’s ban on gay marriage in San Francisco federal court. The ad features McCain, right hand over her heart, wind rustling her blond locks, with “No H8” written on her cheek and silver duct tape over her mouth. “To have the wife of a Republican presidential candidate really turns everything...

The Democrats’ biggest accomplishment of this decade was getting a package through both houses of Congress mandating that every American have health insurance. Their biggest accomplishment of the next decade will be watching it fail. Then they can get what they really want, a government takeover of health care. That’s my prediction. It’s based on what I call the Frito-Lay theory of health reform: Mandates are like potato chips; you can’t have just one. Just for fun, I ran that theory by someone who has been watching the health care debate up close, Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, a...

If you are under 30, you really need to read this column and pass it on to your friends. Your elected officials are dooming you to a new sort of bondage, a form of 21st Century slavery, if you will. First, some background. On October 16, 1854, Abraham Lincoln, then a former one-term Congressman, gave a three hour speech in Peoria, Illinois in which he decried the extension of slavery into the territories. The Republican Party was barely three months old. Lincoln warned that slavery was a “monstrous injustice” based on the raw principle of “self-interest” at odds with the...

Now that the Obama administration is attempting to take a victory lap on the U.S. economic recovery, claiming the $787-billion stimulus passed earlier this year was what did the trick, despite a cost of $160,000 per 'stimulus' job, as ABC's Jake Tapper pointed out, it has come at the cost of the U.S. dollar. Since then, the stock market has rebounded nicely. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is off a March low of 6,547 points, even topping the 10,000-mark recently. But what has caused this nearly 50-percent jump? According to CNBC's Larry Kudlow - loose monetary policy by the...

WASHINGTON (CNN) – The banking system today may be in a more precarious position than it was a year ago, the man charged with overseeing a $700 billion bailout program said Wednesday. Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general managing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that the government's decision to support bank mergers over the past year may have put the U.S. economy more at risk. "These banks that were too big to fail are now bigger," Barofsky said. "Government has sponsored and supported several mergers that made them larger and that guarantee, that implicit...