The Obama administration recently ruled that churches and other religious organizations who provide health insurance to their workers at their non-church businesses must include free birth control, as indeed all health insurance plans are now required to do. This decision does not affect the churches themselves, but instead such satellite...

I'm in this race because I care about Americans. I'm not concerned about the very poor -- we have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich -- they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of America,...

Well, that was a pretty good week, at least seen from the Democratic perspective.

Mitt Romney, frontrunner for the Republican nomination, announced he wasn't too worried about poor people. Maybe it would be fun to see Romney debate Joe Biden, just because nobody would know what to expect from either...

More Good News For Obama

President Barack Obama continued a three-month upward swing in the polls in January, with his average job approval rating for the month ticking up 1.2 points, and his disapproval rate falling by exactly the same amount.

For both approval and disapproval, this adds up to...

As we wend our way through the Republican primary season, at times predicting the outcome of a single state's race is very hard to do. At other times, it is actually pretty easy. Florida looks to be one of the latter.

One short week ago, the Florida political landscape was...

Well, that was an eventful week in politics, wasn't it?

On the Republican side, we've endured two more of a seemingly-unending series of televised debates between the candidates. Newt Gingrich did not physically attack either Mitt Romney or a member of the media, for which we can all be thankful....

President Obama last night unveiled a new twist on an old idea in his State of the Union address to Congress -- limit the loopholes and tax giveaways that very wealthy people use to reduce their taxes far below the rate honest workers pay. Obama called for a...

What a difference a week makes, at least in the Republican primary contest.

Last week, I was (along with many other pundits) of the opinion that Mitt Romney was going to wrap things up quickly with a victory in South Carolina and Florida, and the rest of the primary season...

We're going to start off in an odd way today, as two of my column series collide. Because the South Carolina primary is tomorrow, first we're going to announce our picks. Afterwards, we'll get on with the usual Friday blathering, rest assured.

South Carolina is a real dart-at-the-wall pick, due...

The 2012 Republican primary election season, so far, has been a fairly normal one, at least on the surface. The "next in line" candidate (traditionally either a sitting vice president or the guy who lost the last GOP nominating contest) seems about to coast to a pretty early and pretty...

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone!

The last Friday the 13th of political note took place last year, when Ron Paul announced he was running for president last May (which we noted in FTP [167]). Nothing as momentous seems to have happened today, at least as of this writing, but...

Two hundred and thirty-six years ago this week, a pamphlet was published in Philadelphia. There is some disagreement among historians over the exact date (variously given as January 9th or 10th), and the pamphlet's title page itself only lists the year, 1776. Whatever the actual date, though, Thomas Paine's Common...

Tomorrow, New Hampshire voters will go to their first-in-the-nation (don't-mention-Iowa-to-us-that's-a-caucus-dammit!) primary, and cast their votes in the Republican nominating contest. Which means it's time to haul out the old crystal ball and attempt to predict what's going to happen. If you hate these types of speculative wonktastic articles, then I...

Welcome back, everyone, to our weekly political roundup! We've been away for three weeks, two of which were taken up by our annual year-end political awards columns, and last week was way too close to New Year's Eve to think straight (that's our excuse anyway), so we just...

Trending Upwards

President Obama had a pretty good month last month in the job approval polls, bettering his standing in both approval and disapproval by roughly three-fourths of a percentage point. This may not sound like that big a deal, but it was the second straight month of solid gains...

I realize everyone is probably already sick of hearing predictions about the Iowa Republican caucuses, and if this does indeed describe you, then you should probably go watch a football game or something -- because that's exactly what we're going to do today: throw prognosticatory Hawkeye darts at the wall,...

Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!

In case you missed it, Part 1 of our "McLaughlin Awards" (named for the television show where we get these categories, of course) ran last week, so check it out.

Also for your convenience, here are all the previous years of...

[The Scene: A cozy room lit with a roaring fireplace. Santa sits at his desk, looking over his paperwork, a smoking pipe and a cup of hot chocolate at his elbow. Head Elf enters the room, and speaks to Mr. Claus.]

"OK, big guy, you keep putting it off, but...

American troops are, finally, out of Iraq. The war is technically over. Our men and women in uniform will be home for the holidays. This is all good news, and is worth celebrating by a nation weary of decade-long wars.

As with everything to do with Iraq, the end of...

For the next two weeks, instead of our usual nonsense here, we bring you instead our year-end awards columns. The categories for these awards are presented as an homage to the television show The McLaughlin Group, because they thought them up in the first place.

At this point, it seems...