Since arriving in the Senate in 2011, Rand Paul has been probing here and there for issues of populist resonance. Audit the secretive, sinister Federal Reserve. Rein in those TSA screeners patting down little girls.
Out of Mississippi, a milestone in the AIDS pandemic, or at least proof of concept: If you treat an infant early enough – in this case, within 30 hours of infection – it is possible to prevent a reservoir of the virus from being established, as well as to avoid serious damage to the immune system.
On a rainy Saturday morning, in the packed gym at the Blessed Sacrament School in Northwest Washington, D.C., a parade of middle and high school basketball players, many with Down syndrome or autism, follow behind the tinfoil torch of the Special Olympics. As each athlete is introduced and cheered, he or she basks, with high fives and blown kisses, at the center of attention for all the right reasons.
‘I don’t know whether to kill myself or to go bowling,” goes the old country song. Official Washington has apparently decided to do both – permitting a self-destructive sequester while heading off on vacation, to bowl or maybe to golf.
President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address and his recent State of the Union have been described as “two acts in the same play.” They are matched “bookends.” They belong together “like bagels and toothpaste.”
Even among the few, odd, nerdy children who want to be speechwriters when they grow up (I was one), none dream of writing a State of the Union address. These tend to be long and shapeless affairs, lumpy with random policy, carried along by strained applause lines, dated before they are transcribed.
‘If George W. Bush was whacking American citizens on the basis of secret legal memos,” writes Dick Polman, “Senate liberals would be conducting hearings.”
The Obama administration’s latest revision of its contraceptive policy was welcomed by some religious people as a breakthrough, even a “miracle.” Upon reflection, it seems less like the parting of the Red Sea than a parlor trick.
President Barack Obama has grown testy about reporters who have a “default position” that policy debates have two sides.
Just before noon on Jan. 14, Mitch Daniels ceased to be governor of Indiana. By 2 p.m. he was in West Lafayette conducting a meeting as the soon-to-be president of Purdue University.
Here is my nomination for the lowest moment of the “fiscal cliff” debate. Right before Christmas, President Barack Obama met with Speaker John Boehner in the Oval Office.
Following the “Les Misérables” incident on Christmas Day, I suspect I will never convince my teenage sons to attend a movie with me again.
This is a Christmas season shadowed by sorrow. We know, of course, that human beings, even small ones, sometimes die in horrible, unfair ways. But all the horror and unfairness seemed to arrive at once in Newtown, where some parents wake on Christmas Day, if they slept at all, to mourn their absent children.
It is a particularly bad election when a party’s principal source of confidence is also its main form of a self-deception.
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