Does the term "social welfare" come to mind if you play word association with phrase "Tea Party"? Probably not. What words do: Ted Cruz, perhaps; Richard Mourdock; Sarah Palin; Todd Akin; Rand Paul; Marco Rubio (until lately)? Yes indeed, all once and future candidates for public office, all backed quite...

It's been a good week or so for victimhood, especially if you are the Tea Party, any association using the label "Patriots" (except Tom Brady's bunch in New England, and assorted other "good government" types on the political Right). Having campaigned against the president on the theme that his policies...

Apart from John Bolton's call for Obama's impeachment over Benghazi, the 2016 election will probably be the next chance the Republicans will have to capture the presidency. With the current Benghazi hearings, they are trying to reduce the chances that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination and then ride...

1. Why didn't background checks pass the Senate? Not just because the 10 percent of the population that fears them (thanks to Rush Limbaugh's hold on that percent of the population) happens to live in States where key Democrats and Republicans are up for re-election (or thinking of running in...

One can perhaps understand why the New York Times has its nose out of joint about online anything, given the destructive impact of Google and its progeny on the traditional newspaper business. At least that is an online subject which the Times can rightly claim some degree of actual knowledge.

Obama got his tax rate increase for the top 1 percent in the fiscal cliff" resolution in January, and Speaker Boehner got his forced budget cuts with the sequester, and both have apparently silently agreed to finesse the end-March "continuing budget resolution'" without another "government shutdown" moment by simply living...

There could be several answers to this question, not all of which are contradictory.

Some market participants may believe that one side or the other in the political game of chicken will blink and pull off the road at the last minute (or the minute after the last minute,...

Here's a user's manual on the latest effort to bend the Constitution to rig the next presidential election, and the next and the next, for that matter.

Step 1: Start with an effort to make sure that you win every state legislature you can for your political party -- either...

We learned over New Years that certain Republicans have a very hard time saying yes, and certain Democrats have a very hard time accepting wins!

Let's just say this: A deal that removed permanently the threat of an Alternative Minimum Tax springing on unsuspecting middle class households;...

The late comedian George Gobel had a rueful line that neatly described the painful realization of being out-of-place, out-of-step, or just plain on the wrong side history precisely when history is being made: "I feel like the whole world's a tuxedo, and I'm a pair of brown shoes!" More than...

We know politics sometimes makes strange bedfellows. But the emerging alliance between the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party led by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (and lately David Korn, the "47 percent video" man of Mother Jones) and today's Wall Street heirs of The Bonfire of the...

There is a shorthand phrase in media circles for the case where a moderately successful TV show finally wears out its core plot concept and, in an effort to reboot its ratings, takes things to such a preposterous extreme that instead it loses all credibility (and viewers). It's called "jumping...

WINNERS

Let's start with obvious: Obama. He took on all the negatives -- persisting unemployment, birtherism, Super PACs, the Limbaugh hard-right, Trump, Rick Santelli and CNBC, the Catholic hierarchy, Fox News, the US Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street, Bibi, -- and beat them all, with a coalition that held. He...

In the wake (in many senses of the word) of the aptly-named Sandy, an "October surprise" that actually proved that the Weather Bureau could sometimes be very right, let's see if we can forecast a few more tricks and treats to come in our new month. Make it a "top...

Thanks to Nate Silver and his blog, "FiveThirtyEight," for the New York Times, we are on notice of the elemental math that raises the specter of a tied Electoral College on November 7. What we've not thought through to, however, is what happens "the morning after the morning...

1. Why did Obama pull his punches on Romney at their first debate?

The night before the debate, Fox News ran a tape of an Obama speech from 2007 about the federal response to Hurricane Katrina that purported to show his "true colors" as a prototypical angry black man....

In the words of the great political philosopher (and successful basketball coach), Pat Riley, "The playoffs don't really start until the home team loses." An incumbent president is the "home team," and Obama "lost" the first debate. So did Reagan and George W. Bush, by the way, and they both...

Anyone obsessively following the commentary of financial news on cable news networks or the Wall Street Journal - all based in New York City - would be struck by the almost unrelenting pessimism that characterizes their editorializing and "straight" reporting, on the actions of the Federal Reserve and the European...

Google owns YouTube. We don't know just who owns, wrote, produced, directed, edited or posted the 14-minute video "trailer" to an alleged "film" called "The Innocence of Muslims" that exhibits a hate-filled libel of the prophet Mohammed and the Muslim religion.

What we do know is that the translation of...

On the day that Chicago's public school teachers went on strike (they wanted a 19 percent pay increase, the city's education board was offering 2 percent), it paid to read and reread Thomas Friedman's weekend column in the New York Times of Sept. 8....