On Tuesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi explained to the Commonwealth Club the reason Washington passed Obamacare. Even if everyone in America "loved" his own health care plan, Pelosi argued, Congress had to pass President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act because American health care was "unsustainable financially."
Editor's note: Nathan W. Monroe is a political science professor at the University of California, Merced. He studies American politics with a focus on legislatures, especially the U.S. Congress.
It's hard to figure who looks worse in this story, Elizabeth Warren or Harvard Law School's affirmative action policies.
In the 1967 comedy "A Guide for the Married Man," Joey Bishop's wife catches him in bed with another woman. As his wife stands at the bedroom door screaming at the sight, Bishop and the mistress calmly get up, make the bed and get dressed. The mistress leaves. Bishop nonchalantly sits down in the living room, lights up a pipe, picks up the newspaper and casually leafs through it. "What bed? What girl?" Bishop says. ...
WASHINGTON - As a crowd of high-school students offloaded from the tour bus for a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial aka "The Wall," he yelled, "There are no good wars!" Hemmed in on the crowded sidewalk, I tried to ignore his rant and noted the bus had a Pennsylvania license. The shouter was far too young to have fought in Vietnam, and he was wearing a dirty T-shirt, ragged jeans - and Gucci loafers. ...
It's that time of year. What's the old song? "I can still remember..." And I do. It's what I talk about when I'm invited to be a graduation speaker and what I write about every year at this time.
Mitt Romney is right about one thing: Too many American children do receive what he this week called a "Third World education." A disproportionate number of them are children of color. It is indeed "the civil rights issue of our era." It is also the economic issue and the security issue.
When Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., lost the GOP primary to challenger Richard Mourdock this month, Beltway types saw the voters' verdict as a victory for the tea party and a defeat for the kind of Republican who could work across the aisle. I think Lugar, 80, lost because he is out of touch with Indiana. He started the primary registered to vote at an Indiana home he had sold in 1977. The Lugars have resided ...
You'd think the largest legal action in American history in defense of religious liberty would be a major news story. But ABC, CBS and NBC don't judge news events by their inherent importance as relates to the future of our freedoms. They deliver the news according to a simple formula: Does it or doesn't it advance the re-election of Barack Obama?
Three months ago, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., shot and killed Trayvon Martin.
Among the more controversial chapters in "Suicide of a Superpower," my book published last fall, was the one titled, "The End of White America."
WASHINGTON - Forty-three years ago this week, the fabled 101st Airborne Division launched Operation Apache Snow - a major ground offensive against North Vietnamese army invaders in the treacherous A Shau Valley. Though fighting raged over hundreds of square miles of triple-canopied jungle, the focus soon became a single terrain feature, a mountain, with peaks as high as 3,000 feet, the Vietnamese named Dong Ap Bia, or "Mountain of the Crouching Beast." The ...
The Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that Skechers USA Inc. will pay $40 million to settle charges that the shoe company made "unfounded claims" about its Shape-ups.
It's that time of year. What's the old song? "I can still remember..." And I do. It's what I talk about when I'm invited to be a graduation speaker and what I write about every year at this time.
When the April figures on unemployment were released May 4, they were more than disappointing. They were deeply disturbing.
They're hunkering down at SAC Capital, the hedge fund empire of billionaire Steven A. Cohen. Federal prosecutors have been picking off SAC's second bananas one by one, plea bargaining for information that brings them ever closer to Cohen.
No one should pretend that dealing with leaks of highly sensitive and classified national security documents is easy. I remember hearing plenty of conservatives taking to the airwaves to accuse The New York Times of nothing less than "treason" for publishing materials provided by WikiLeaks. I thought the Times publication was squarely within the bounds of First Amendment law, just as I think James Rosen was acting within the bounds of the First Amendment in ...
When you win the White House, you get to pick the team you want. Sure, that sounds simple and doesn't need any clarification, but it's clear that simplicity and clarity is lacking in Washington, D.C.
On Sunday, Fox News' Chris Wallace spoon-fed former GOP Sen. Bob Dole one of the media's favorite questions: Could Ronald Reagan - or Dole - make it in today's Republican Party? "I doubt it," Dole answered. "Reagan wouldn't have made it. Certainly, (Richard) Nixon couldn't have made it, because he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it."
After a British soldier wearing a Help for Heroes charity T-shirt was run over, stabbed and slashed with machetes and a meat cleaver, and beheaded, the Tory government advised its soldiers that it is probably best not to appear in uniform on the streets of their capital.
No, this is not Watergate or Iran-Contra. The AP, IRS and Benghazi matters represent a scandal not of presidential wrongdoing, but of presidential indolence, indifference and incompetence in discharging the duties of chief executive. The Barack Obama revealed to us in recent days is something rare in our history: a spectator president, clueless about what is going on in his own household, who reacts to revelations ...
I hate Apple. There was a time when I would look at my iPhone, and my heart would skip a beat. With its stylish white-and-gray cover, it felt like a luxury car I could hold in my hot little hand. It told me things I didn't know. It told me how to get where I wanted to go. It was exciting. It purred cute little noises that let me know I was wanted, desirable, in demand.
Whenever one of our cities gets a star turn as host of some super-sparkly event, such as a national political gathering or the Super Bowl, its first move is to tidy up - by having the police sweep homeless people into jail, out of town, or under some rug.
How can it be that with Washington simmering in scandals, with Republicans (not to mention talk-show hosts) using the "I" word (impeachment) with abandon, with calls to bring back Ken Starr (of Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky fame), President Obama's job approval rating is holding steady at around 50 percent, thank you very much?
Gov. Jerry Brown recently stepped in it when a reporter asked him about the Bay Bridge. In March, 32 of 96 key rods in the under-construction eastern span cracked after they were tightened. Dao Guv -- who, as Oakland's mayor, helped delay construction of the new span to win a tony, world-class design -- gave the wrong answer: "(Scatological stuff) happens."
California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom likes to be out front on issues. As San Francisco mayor, he approved same-sex marriages in City Hall even though they weren't legal. He pushed for a first-of-its-kind ban on city pharmacies selling cigarettes. Likewise, he signed the Special City's first-in-the-nation ban on groceries giving away plastic bags.
It is that time of year again.