New Hampshire prides itself on its independence from the conventional wisdom. It's also a state that allows independent voters to cast their ballots in either of the party's primaries. Candidates are feverishly appealing to independents ahead of Tuesday's primary, but how much will the "maverick caucus" affect the nomination?
America, meet the new Mitt Romney. Having been walloped in Iowa by upstart Mike Huckabee, the man who loves data took a look at the dismal Iowa numbers and concluded America is looking for a "change" candidate. Mr. Romney is now presenting himself as that man, the person who can transform Washington, or at least do it better than his main rival here in the Granite State--four-term Arizona Sen. John McCain. The question is whether voters will buy it. Chats on the campaign trail suggest quite a few New Hampshire Republicans and independents are having trouble making that leap.
There is nothing contemptible about a reluctance to change. Most of us have it pretty good in this country, and can’t be blamed for wanting things to stay that way. For that to happen, though, will require some wrenching changes. The list isn’t surprising, or really very long, compared with the list of our blessings. We need to use less energy and borrow less money. We need to fix our schools and reform our health care system. We need to end a stupid war.
Mike Huckabee's surging presidential bid has brought a fairly old tax reform idea to the forefront of public attention: the Fair Tax.
Fundamental tax reform is long overdue. Consumption taxation is the way to go. The Fair Tax is a reform every Democrat who cares about equity should love. And it's a reform every Republican who cares about efficiency, transparency and growth should champion.
There's a flip side to the fair tax economic utopia. The transition to tax-inclusive pricing would increase every price tag by 30 percent, potentially reducing consumption via nationwide sticker shock. And since the fair tax only affects federal taxation, some of us would still have to pay state income and sales taxes, meaning our wallets may not be as full as optimists suggest.
George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon in 1972, but the former Democratic standard-bearer says that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have done far more damage to America than Nixon ever did. But even McGovern admits that "there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment." So what's the point of talking impeachment in the last year of the Bush administration?
McGovern's Bush derangement has been on slow cook for eight years – after which, he tells us, he has “belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.” So behind the curve is McGovern that he’s still using debunked Iraq war casualty figures.
Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.
Pakistani officials flatly reject the idea, but President Bush and his advisers are considering a plan to launch covert military operations against terrorists in the lawless tribal regions of Pakistan -- whether the Pakistanis approve or not. U.S. incursions into Pakistan could lead to the capture and killing of key terrorist leaders.
Diagnosing the roots of an insurgency take time: it requires a vast investment in learning the language and the culture of the area and probably means making a lot of embarrassing mistakes early on -- mistakes which will be ruthlessly punished by press ridicule, committee investigations and combat loss. But it may be far easier to learn how to defeat al-Qaeda in Anbar and the Taliban in Pakistan than it will be to learn how to beat politics in Washington.
The idea of U.S. advisers in Pakistan's tribal territories strikes some weathered counterinsurgency officers as absurd. “Who are they going to talk to when they get there?” a special operations veteran asked over a hamburger at the Pentagon food court last week. “And when they get there, how are they going to change the view of the people and the tribes there?”
When editorial writers at The Dallas Morning News chose the illegal immigrant as the newspaper's Texan of the Year, they expected some criticism. But not this: 800 blog postings and more than 150 letters to the editor blasting the decision.
Some of the critics threatened to cancel subscriptions or pressure advertisers to stop doing business with the paper."What an asinine article!!!" exclaimed one reader.
I respect the Dallas Morning News editorial board’s desire to foster debate and break new ground. But it always amuses me when newspaper editors think they’re doing something fresh and new in putting a “human face” to illegal immigration. Most immigration news coverage amounts to little else besides peddling illegal immigrant sob stories and whitewashing the negative consequences of open-borders chaos on the law-abiding population. This is the rule, not the exception.
I have some news for these demagogues. If they think this country or this economy can succeed in coming decades without tens of millions of additional immigrants, they’re not thinking straight. The huge baby boom generation -- 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 -- will be retiring, and there aren’t nearly enough native-born Americans after them to keep this economy going, let alone keep money flowing into the boomers’ Social Security and Medicare trust funds. The graying of America means we need this new wave of immigrants.
