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WASHINGTON -- Ever since President Obama won re-election, the news media and their pundits want us to think the Republican Party is in steep decline. But nothing could be further from the truth. Obama won only 51.1 percent of the popular vote, hardly a strong vote of confidence in his presidency -- though he managed to turn out just enough voters in a handful of swing states to win 332 electoral votes. But dig a little deeper into last year's elections and the nation's electoral infrastructure, and a far different political reality emerges: Republicans are much stronger than they are...

Section 7 of House File 5 reads: Sec. 7. [62V.06] DATA. (a) The definitions in section 13.02 apply to this section. (b) Government data of the Minnesota Insurance Marketplace on individuals, employees of employers, and employers using the Minnesota Insurance Marketplace are private data on individuals or nonpublic data. The Minnesota Insurance Marketplace may share not public data with state and federal agencies and other entities if the exchange of the data is reasonably necessary to carry out the functions of the Minnesota Insurance Marketplace. State agencies shall share not public data with the Minnesota Insurance Marketplace if the exchange...

North Korean parents 'eating their own children' after being driven mad by hunger in famine-hit pariah state A starving man in North Korea has been executed after murdering his two children for food, reports from inside the secretive state claim. A 'hidden famine' in the farming provinces of North and South Hwanghae is believed to have killed up to 10,000 people and there are fears that incidents of cannibalism have risen. The grim story is just one to emerge as residents battle starvation after a drought hit farms and shortages were compounded by party officials confiscating food. Undercover reporters from...

Time Inc. has started its long-anticipated "restructuring" of staff and will eliminate an estimated 500 jobs today, or roughly 6 percent of its workforce.

The Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee did not endorse colleague Dianne Feinstein’s assault weapons ban at a packed Capitol Hill hearing on guns Wednesday in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shooting. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., called for “common sense reform,” that closes loopholes in current gun laws and enforces background checks. Buthe did not endorse Feinstein’s tougher ban. “I know gun store owners in Vermont,” Leahy said. “They follow the law and conduct background checks…why should we not try to plug the loopholes in the law that allow (criminals and the mentally ill)

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say: the more housework married men do, the less sex they have, according to a new study published Wednesday. Husbands who spend more time doing traditionally female chores -- such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping -- reported having less sex than those who do more masculine tasks, said the study in the American Sociological Review.

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‘Carrying a Gun Saved My Life’: Meet Ryan MoorePosted By Paul Hsieh On January 30, 2013 @ 12:00 am In Crime,Gun Control,Legal,US News | 81 Comments On December 11, 2010, in Conyers, GA, 22-year-old Ryan Moore was at a friend’s house for an evening of leisure. He borrowed a friend’s car to drive to the nearby grocery store, where his handgun saved his life [1]. I interviewed Ryan Moore over e-mail about that evening. What happened that night at the Ingles (grocery store) parking lot?I had parked near the front of the store. A man approached as I was about...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said today that he prefers to deal with sequestration in a series of steps. "What we think would be a better effort would be to move forward and, on short increments, to pay for the sequestration," Reid told reporters in the Capitol. “There are many low-hanging pieces of fruit out there that Republicans have said they agreed on previously. I'm not going to go into detail, but one of them, of course, is to deal with oil companies," he said, adding that he wants any sequester-avoidance deal to include revenue.

NEW DELHI: Faced with a China that is aggressively pursuing its territorial interests in the South and East China Seas, Japan and India on Tuesday decided to coordinate moves and exercises in the first ever maritime dialogue held here. The India-Japan maritime dialogue was decided during a meeting of foreign ministers last April. Interestingly, India decided to hold a maritime dialogue with China over a month before the India-Japan decision. The Indian move to start talks with Japan ahead of the dialogue with Beijing points to a stress on New Delhi's security priorities. The Indian side was led by D...

For all the talk about President Obama’s liberalism, his immigration agenda is the last thing you might expect: conservative. His enemies might deny it. His staff might not recognize it. But the argument Obama presented Tuesday for a path to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants is rooted in economic and social conservatism. First, in a Las Vegas address that included the words “economy” or “economic” 10 times, Obama argued that immigration fuels corporate innovation. “It keeps our workforce young. It keeps our country on the cutting edge,” he said. “And it’s helped build the greatest economic engine the world...

Rick Santelli made a stunning observation Wednesday about the shocking report that the economy actually shrunk in the fourth quarter last year. "We are now Europe," he declared on CNBC´s Squawk Box. "Hey Joe," Santelli said, "when you act like Europe, you get growth rates like Europe, and our discussions with economists sounds like we´re in Europe. They have the same discussions constantly." "They’re always doing the right thing," he continued. "They’re always thinking they know better. And this is the kind of growth. We have become Europe. We are now Europe."

President Obama is a uniquely gifted demagogue. An orator of unparalleled skill supported by a gushing media, Obama has yet to present a major policy proposal geared toward solving specific problems. But he has won elections. And he has done so by implying -- over and over and over again -- that his opponents are morally deficient. It is truly astonishing just how thin President Barack Obama's playbook is. Since his re-election, Obama has boiled down that playbook to one play, which he runs with the regularity of a team quarterbacked by Mark Sanchez. It usually involves children. It always...

"In my own native state of Massachusetts, the battle for American freedom was begun by the thousands of farmers and tradesmen who made up the Minute Men -- citizens who were ready to defend their liberty at a moment's notice. Today we need a nation of minute men; citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom. The cause of liberty, the cause of American, cannot succeed with any lesser effort."...

This morning, many in the media went all in with a sanctimonious attack against gun-rights supporters who they accused of heckling Neil Heslin, the parent of a 6-year old boy murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre. The only problem is that it was all a lie. Mr. Heslin was not heckled. If you look at the full, unedited tape (which was first obtained by Twitchy), you'll see that after 15 minutes of the audience remaining respectfully silent as Mr. Heslin spoke out against assault weapons, he then turns to ask the audience a direct question: I ask if there’s anybody...

If you read this column very often you know the frustration and disgust I feel for our government, their profligate spending, their all consuming passion for self-preservation, and the inevitable fall at the end of the ruinous path they seem so determined to force this nation down. You know I'm deeply concerned about the rapid erosion of personal liberty and our president's cavalier attitude toward the Constitution and consolidation of power into a monolithic central, federal government, a bureaucratic nightmare that makes and enforces the rules, controlling even the administration of health care and the curriculum our children will study...

Gov. Deval Patrick's pick for interim U.S. senator, William "Mo" Cowan, has been a loyal donor to Patrick and other Democrats with one exception -- a Republican Democrats love to hate: Mitt Romney. Cowan, then an attorney at Mintz Levin, contributed at least $200 to Romney's 2002 gubernatorial campaign, according to Massachusetts campaign finance records. Cowan did not give money to Romney's Democratic opponent, Shannon O'Brien, records show.

The U.S. economy unexpectedly shrank from October through December for the first time since 2009, hurt by the biggest cut in defense spending in 40 years, fewer exports and sluggish growth in company stockpiles. The drop occurred despite stronger consumer spending and business investment. The Commerce Department said Wednesday that the economy contracted at an annual rate of 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter. That was a sharp slowdown from the 3.1 percent growth rate in the July-September quarter. Economists said the drop in gross domestic product wasn't as bleak as it looked. The weakness was mainly the result of...

Almost a decade ago, Europeans and many progressive Americans were lamenting how the United States was going to miss out on the 21st-century paradigm symbolized by the robust European Union. Neanderthal Americans were importing ever more oil while waging a costly “war on terror” and fighting conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our budget deficit in 2003 hit $374 billion. The European Union avoided foreign conflicts and embraced soft power. Its declining military budgets and centralized transnational government ensured that it could address climate change and fund ever-expanding entitlements. Even the poorer Mediterranean nations reached new heights of prosperity. The Greek...

When I was a boy in the 1960s, my father had nine season tickets to the San Francisco 49ers, and on Sundays in the fall would often bring as many as seven of his 11 children to see the team play at Kezar Stadium. Kezar was at the southeast corner of Golden Gate Park, adjacent to the Haight-Ashbury District. In 1967, there was probably no greater side-by-side contrast of the diverging trends in American culture than between the people inside that stadium, watching a game played on grass, and the people outside the stadium, smoking grass. At the age...