The oil spill is an environmental catastrophe for the Gulf Coast and a political disaster for Barack Obama. It is doing significant, and possibly irreparable, damage to his presidency. That may not be fully clear now, since Obama's approval ratings have certainly not collapsed during the span of this crisis. The deeper concern for the

“When one begins with an initial error,” Aristotle wrote in Book V of “The Politics,” “it is inevitable that one should end badly.” Almost 17 months into his presidency, things are going badly for President Obama on multiple fronts. That is in part because he entered office with, and has governed based on, several initial

It's all coming together now. On Wednesday, we learned, in the words of The Denver Post, that: U.S. Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff acknowledged tonight that he discussed three possible jobs with the deputy chief of staff of the Obama administration — all contingent upon a decision by Romanoff not to challenge U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet.

Like a rock emerging in a sea of lies, we know important facts about the confrontation that took place on Monday between Israel and a flotilla of ships making its way to the Gaza strip. The blockade was justified by international law. (Egypt, by the way, had also imposed a blockade on Gaza because of

In their book “The Battle for America 2008,” Haynes Johnson and Dan Balz wrote this: [Chief political aide David] Axelrod also warned that Obama's confessions of youthful drug use, described in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, would be used against him. “This is more than an unpleasant inconvenience,” he wrote. “It goes to your

The best news Democrats received from Tuesday's election was not the victory of Mark Critz over Tim Burns in Pennsylvania's 12th District. It was the Senate primary victory in Kentucky of Republican Rand Paul, son of Rep. Ron Paul. The reason is that Democrats are going to take the views of the younger Paul, also

Elena Kagan may be a brilliant constitutional scholar and first-rate legal mind — but if she is, she has done a mighty fine job of hiding her intellectual light under a bushel. She has left almost no paper trail and has made no significant, or even particularly notable, contributions to our understanding of law, legal

Those were the words of Pete Schoomaker, then chief of staff of the Army, to General David Petraeus, who at the time (2005) was commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The context of Schoomaker's remarks was that the war in Iraq, which had been going on for more than two years,

The April 2010 issue of Scientific American includes an article by Thomas Insel, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who is the director of the National Institute of Mental Health. In “Faulty Circuits,” Insel describes new findings in the neurocircuitry of mood disorders. Many illnesses previously defined as “mental” (like autism and schizophrenia) are now recognized to

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center is filled with bleak news for Democrats and the cause of liberalism. “By almost every conceivable measure Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days,” according to an overview of the Pew survey. It finds “a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of