Fernando Espuelas

The recent controversy surrounding a visa for Fidel Castro's daughter to visit the U.S. is another example of the obvious: the United States' embargo of communist Cuba is a failure.

Fifty-two years after U.S. policy first sought to break the communist dictatorship with an economic embargo, the Castro regime is...

Living in Los Angeles I drive by multi-car pile-ups on the freeway at least once a week. An occurrence so common that it no longer shocks or surprises. Yet it is impossible to take your eyes off the wreckage.

Similarly, you'd think that when the Republican presidential candidates debate each...

Forget everything you're reading about Newt Gingrich's supposedly ephemeral boom in the polls.

Disregard the increasingly sardonic mini-exposes of the former Speaker's hypocrisy, such as attacking former Senator Chris Dodd's financial industry reform, even as he was becoming a super lobbyist cha-chinging millions of dollars for "strategic advice" as...

Why is Mitt Romney so unloved by the Republican base?

Even after Rick Perry's meteoric rise and fall in the polls, the main beneficiary of the Texas governor's stumbles has been Herman Cain, not Romney.

In a series of polls over the last few days, Cain, a man...

The second largest city in America has the public education system of a poor, sub-developed third world nation.

Los Angeles' public schools are factories of failure, despair and poverty. The kids who survive this system, the students and parents that somehow transcend the culture of dysfunction to graduate, are...

The Obama Administration's announcement that it would review, on a case-by-case basis, the approximately 300,000 pending deportation cases in immigration courts to weed-out non-criminal immigrants and focus on deporting felons was greeted with both high praise and wild alarm.

A wave of celebration broke out yesterday among undocumented kids...

Not that you'd know it by the pie-throwing contest in Washington over the last few weeks, but America is actually not falling apart.

The ideologically pure politicians in the Congress, with their ability and lust to disagree on even such idiocies as to what French fries should be called in...

Can the United States pay 100% of its financial obligations? Of course. That is not the issue driving the downgrade of U.S. creditworthiness by Standard & Poor's.

Rather, S&P's downgrade is a pointed critique of our political system -- the reality that we have a group of political extremists,...

So it's not about the deficit after all.

For months we've heard the increasingly shrill alarms being sounded by supposedly sober-minded Republican Congressional leaders that America is the next Greece -- balancing carefully over a debt precipice, destruction inevitable unless radical action is taken.

These alarms have been so effective...

Dear Congressman Gutierrez,

Are you a secret Republican? Are you now actively engaged in making sure that Obama is a one-term president? Are you trying to destroy any chance for comprehensive immigration reform for the next 10 years?

Based on your words and actions over the last two years, it...

If the American Revolution started with the flinging of British tea into Boston Harbor, the new American Revolution started last week -- when a majority of parents in a poverty stricken part of Los Angeles took control of their dismal, failing public school.

California has been going through some tough...

The Republican Party is killing the dream - again.

The 42 Republican U.S. Senators have signed a pledge to filibuster all pending bills, except those dealing with spending and taxes, during the lame duck session of Congress.

Harry Reid and the Democratic leadership, with support from the White House, have...

Listen to right-wing talk radio and well, it would seem that America has been taken-over by Lenin and the rest of his Communist cadres. Depending on the radio program, we're either about to become a communist or fascist nation (okay, sometimes both), all because of the suspiciously foreign-looking guy in...

You could almost hear Meg Whitman's campaign coming off the rails the day she became "tough as nails" on undocumented immigrants.

Faced with the accusation by her GOP primary opponent, Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, that Whitman was soft on "illegals," the Whitman juggernaut responded with the political equivalent of...

A job-less recovery, ballooning deficits, fraudulent foreclosures, middle class anxiety -- let's face it, we are feeling the mother of all hang-overs from the Great Recession.

But there is one major catalyst, an economic engine that we've ignored, for igniting robust, sustainable economic growth that will lift...

California was set abuzz this week as Meg Whitman, the self-proclaimed "tough as nails" anti-illegal immigration candidate for California Governor, was confronted with her own undocumented maid problem.

While the timing of the nanny-gate disclosure is suspicious at best - coming just a few weeks before a very tight, heavily-fought...

With Sunday's election results, it is clear that President Hugo Chavez has been dealt a significant blow by the people of Venezuela.

Gone is his super majority in parliament with its rubber-stamp willingness to enact Chavez's program. Also gone, perhaps, is the idea of the conquering revolutionary, remaking Venezuela in...

Right now, at this very moment, the future of thousands of kids is being decided in Washington.

Will they have the opportunity to join America as productive members of society - or will they be shunted to the margins, forced to live lives of under-achievement and ostracism?

The DREAM...

Nicolae Ceausescu was one of the most brutal dictators of the Communist-era.  Ruling with his wife Elena, the Ceausescus spread terror and poverty across Romania.  They jailed, tortured and killed their opponents. 

They lived like a king and queen, while enforcing a brutal austerity program meant, in part to...

The so-called immigration debate has descended into a caricature of a serious discussion on what is the best policy for our country. As demographers will tell you, America needs a steady influx of immigrants in this century in order to maintain our historically robust economy -- and pay for what...