National Debt

If form holds, the Democratic Party's presidential candidates in the U.S. will continue to spout various forms of socialism and class warfare as the answers to this nation's woes in hopes of buying enough "free stuff" votes to hang on to the White House. Venezuela's apparent imminent economic collapse poses a problem for this strategy. The country's problems are the direct result of 15 years of…

CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria lived up to his reputation as someone who’s always willing to trash conservatives and praise liberals at the top of his Sunday morning CNN program by blasting the GOP’s “unwillingness to produce serious proposals” verus the “responsible” Democrats who “buttress their policy with real research.”

Joan Walsh, who after a long tenure at Salon.com is now National Affairs Correspondent at far-left publication The Nation, is responding as leftists usually do when their favored candidates and causes are in trouble: immaturely, and by smearing recalcitrant people who, in their fevered minds, should be supporting them. Walsh is a big fan of Hillary Clinton, whose legal and electoral situations…

Poor President Barack Obama. Juan Williams, in a Monday column at The Hill, insists that "the president is not to blame for the rancor and polarization that have characterized his presidency," and "is not responsible for the unprecedented obstructionism employed by (Mitch) McConnell’s Senate Republicans." Why, In Williams's world, Obama has apparently been the very model of civility, while…

The Associated Press's coverage of Friday's deep U.S. stock market dive in two Friday afternoon reports engaged in the reality avoidance longtime readers here have come to expect. An item by Stan Choe ("Get used to it: Big drops for stocks are back again") spent most of its verbiage on "volatility," and only cited "China's sharp economic slowdown ... Tensions in the Middle East ... the plunge in…

On Friday's Erin Burnett OutFront on CNN, during a segment devoted to discrediting President Ronald Reagan's conservative credentials and painting modern Republicans as far right, host Erin Burnett proclaimed that Republicans "would hate that guy," and joined with CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley in suggesting that Democrat Hillary Clinton's views on some issues are closer to Reagan's.

After serving as the virtual mouthpiece for the "there is no crisis!" crowd for at least a decade since George W. Bush's attempt to partially privatize Social Security in 2005, someone at the New York Times has finally recognized that there is one — but still won't level with readers about the system's true condition. Eduardo Porter "writes the Economic Scene column" for the Times. Before that…

While the establishment press lies in wait for Republican and conservative candidates to make some kind of off-color or foolish statement — or one that can be twisted to become one, even if it originally wasn't — it consistently ignores howlers made by leftists and liberals. The list of President Barack Obama's gaffes alone, all totally or almost completely ignored by the press when they were…

For a change, Martin Crutsinger's coverage at the Associated Press of the federal government's November Monthly Treasury Statement wasn't completely full of rose-colored baloney. Crutsinger managed to note how auto-pilot entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are bankrupting the country (not in those words, of course). That said, he somehow thought that highlighting a rare and…

You're Definitely A Liberal When ... Assertion #7,546 -- You claim with a straight face that taxpayer-funded food stamps are wondrously stimulative for the economy.  It's been so long since this one crossed my path that I'd begun to believe it was too delusional even for the left.  But sure enough there it was, making its inevitable reappeance on Thom Hartmann's radio show last week. Perhaps…

The "fact-checking" press has become a parody of itself during the past several years. It's not only because of their irritating penchant for putting statements by Republicans and conservatives under a twisted microscope while ignoring drop-dead obvious falsehoods delivered by Democrats and leftists. It's because, among other things, the fact-checkers often admit that a statement is true, but…

It was an '80s flashback in the New York Times Sunday book review. Serge Schmemann attacked a new book about Russian dictator Vladimir Putin by Garry Kasparov. Schmemann seemed to take personally Kasparov's criticism of Barack Obama and his celebration of Ronald Reagan. Schmemann gave all the credit to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "...ultimately it was Gorbachev, more than any American or…

Hillary Clinton was in Alabama a few days ago. As she has in the past at least two other times when south of the Mason-Dixon line, she decided that she could drop the letter "g" from several of her "i-n-g" words while affecting a sort-of Southern accent. This time she was in Alabama. Mrs. Clinton cut the "g" from the at least the following words she has no trouble fully pronouncing when she's in…

Is the Republican party actually two parties? In a sense, believes The Washington Monthly's Martin Longman, who contended in a Monday post that the forty or so congressmen who constitute the Freedom Caucus “are best understood in the parliamentary sense as being a party in their own right. In our system, they are still called Republicans, but in any other system they would be a minor party that…