November 2013

In an interview with Barbara Walters on Friday, President Obama again acknowledged problems with the roll out of the Obamacare website Healthcare.gov. At one point, the president referred to Healthcare.gov as "my website" (via CNN):

Our economy is increasingly policy-driven, at least in the near- and medium-terms. What Congress and the president do or don’t do, what incoming Federal Reserve Board chairman Janet Yellen does or doesn’t do, will be important determinants of our growth, inflation, and job creation rates. So here…

Sheera Frenkel, Buzzfeed’s recently-hired Middle East correspondent, should know the Israel beat better than most: She reported from the country for more than seven years, speaks Hebrew fluently, and knows Israeli society intimately.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama have joined immigration activists today on the National Mall. Via the White House pool report:

The trials of Obamacare continue with a one-year postponement of the requirement for small business signups.  The people who designed the scheme and are charged with implementing it are plainly having their problems.  Which is to be expected … except that it wasn’t. They clearly thought it would…

Blaise Misztal writes:

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the virtues of Thanksgiving and Hannukah.

It is the pièce de résistance in feast that includes, in my family’s case: smoked turkey with oyster stuffing, Smithfield ham, Brussels sprouts, green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and various other basics. For desert there will be pies: pecan, apple, pumpkin, shoo fly, and coconut cream.…

In his celebrated Thanksgiving proclamation, Abraham Lincoln struck his customary note of hope tinged with a kind of fatalistic melancholy.  

On the one hand, this is a pretty dour Thanksgiving. Iran has just won an enormous diplomatic victory, which not only sets them on the road to nuclear weapons but makes the fecklessness of the Western powers clear to the world. Harry Reid's decision to destroy the filibuster signals an escalation…

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on the President, Obamacare, and his (shocking!) favorite Thanksgiving side dish.

Last week, the Obama administration announce its intention to delay next year's open enrollment period for individual insurance coverage from October 15, 2014 to November 15, 2014 with the closing date moving from December 7, 2014 to January 15, 2015.  Although the change moves the beginning date…

Though news of a one year delay in the online Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) marketplace just broke early Wednesday afternoon (via Politico), Healthcare.gov wasted no time in updating the page on the website dealing with online functions of SHOP, though there is no notation that the…

Everyone could use a nice government subsidy and bailouts aren’t just for broke car companies and derelict banks anymore.  Baseball teams need that same kind of taxpayer love.  No surprise then, as Mark Segraves of NBC’s channel 4 in Washington reports:

On Tuesday night, Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner debated MSNBC host Chris Hayes and former Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke over the question of the religious freedom and Obamacare's mandate that employers provide insurance that covers contraception. Watch the video below:

The Internal Revenue Service is conducting a pilot program allowing IRS employees to use personal smart phones to access government email accounts and other work related information.  The program is known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration…

An Obamacare event in Arkansas offered a prize for those who attended: Free condoms.

Iran will continue to enrich uranium under the new nuclear deal, according to the Iranian foreign minister.

Remember the old song, There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays?  The federal government has a rewrite in mind for this Thanksgiving: "I met a man who lived in Tennessee and he was heading for Pennsylvania and some homemade pumpkin pie a big bowl of fresh fruit." At least that's the implication…

Could Obamacare flip the Senate next year?

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the repeated "pivots" by President Obama to the economy that appear not to be doing any good.

Today in Afghanistan, as Gayle Tzemach Lemmon at Defense One reports:

The past two months have laid bare the emptiness of the president’s most prominent Obamacare promises.  Millions are losing the plans they have and like against their wishes, contrary to the president’s oft-repeated pledge.  And those being forced into Obamacare could lose access to the doctors and…

John Kerry today thanked rapper Ludacris for helping the victims of Typhoon Haiyan:

The Washington Post's Sarah Kliff reports: 

The headline on the Washington Post story by Jim Tankersley and Scott Clement reads:

Michelle Jamrisko of Bloomberg reports:

The politics of Obamacare have erased a lead Democrats once held in the generic congressional ballot for the 2014 elections, according to a new poll from CNN. Here are the details:

The second line of the new nuclear deal with Iran is curious, to say the least: “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek or develop any nuclear weapons.”

At a Beverly Hills estate last night, President Obama heard a complaint from a major donor: There's no valet parking at the White House. The complaint was made by Haim Saban, who hosted a fundraiser with the president last night.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes that Obamacare is a success in California, and the Golden State experience is proof that the entire program would be great if they could just get that darn website to work. 

At a stop in San Francisco on a three-day fund raising swing along the West Coast, President Obama said during a speech that "sometimes people forget I'm not running for office again."  The president was talking about Republicans in Congress and the immigration reform that he is trying to get…

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior editor Lee Smith on Iran, the Geneva deal the U.S. has struck, and his recent piece "Kerry Says 'No Daylight'".

Adam Kredo reports for the Washington Free Beacon:

In the wake of the interim deal that the White House signed with Iran Saturday, Secretary of State John Kerry said on the Sunday talk shows that nothing has changed, not with the American position in the Middle East, or with the U.S. alliance system in the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin…

Mark Dubowitz and Orde Kittrie, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

Max Boot, writing for the Los Angeles Times:

George E. Condon Jr. at the National Journal delivers a piece of Beltway analysis that is sure to gladden the hearts of all those living and working (or looking for work) out beyond the Potomac. The insider news is that, while the Obama administration has been through a bit of a rough patch, there…

The terrorist attack against the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012, awakened renewed interest in the security of overseas consulates and embassy facilities. A recent report by the State Department's Office of the Inspector General spotlights some major concerns regarding…

A Virginia employer is being forced to cancel the health care plan it offers its employees due to Obamacare. As a result, WDBJ reports, one cancer victim will be forced off her employer's plan:

Danielle Pletka on the Iran nuclear deal:

U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton believes the nuclear deal with Iran isn't a good one. "With this agreement, the United States has suffered an unmitigated, humiliating defeat and Iran has won a total victory. The United States will ease sanctions and give the mullahs billions of dollars in return for their…

First, a matter of numbers and nomenclature: Bill de Blasio, who is being hailed like Eliot Spitzer before him as the new face of American liberalism, won his race to be New York City’s next mayor with a near-record victory margin but also record low turnouts in both the primary and the general…

Congressional Republicans have Obamacare right where they want it. The idea of a one-year delay of the law, always far-fetched as long as the Democrats controlled the Senate, is suddenly looking plausible.

Though four decades shy of being an octogenarian myself, I’m starting to know how they feel. For at the hurtling speed of change these days, even a casual observer of the scene is unwittingly turned into a perpetual obituarist, forever marking the loss of old friends. So it was again last week,…

In the 1970s and ’80s, American museums reinvented themselves as dazzling arenas of art and culture. Sacred temples of tradition suddenly heard the siren call of show business: Spectacular exhibitions took center stage, and museums became the most exciting sites in town, with visitors flocking (and…

If you’re looking for a clue to what a Hillary Clinton administration might get up to, check out her husband’s speech at the annual meeting of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. His idea du jour is to jump-start the economy by depositing all bank fines into an infrastructure…

On November 20, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons program recommence in Geneva. The last round two weeks ago ended with egg on the Obama administration’s face after Secretary of State John Kerry failed to clear “bracketed text” with his own side in the talks. French foreign minister Laurent…

Michael Barone may well have intended his exciting new book to make its appearance precisely when Congress turned its attention to immigration reform. That Congress had its attention turned elsewhere should not surprise him. One of the themes in this lively, entertaining, and informative work is…

The national conversation about simplifying modern life continues unabated. 

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), arguably the greatest of all opera composers. (Mozart and Verdi fans: Please note the “arguably.”) Accordingly, the Wagner industry, active enough in off years, has kicked into high gear. The major recording companies…

The Sunday after Kennedy was shot my dad and I drove downtown to Dealey Plaza. It was an apology of sorts since my parents had refused to let me skip school to see the presidential motorcade on November 22. We were standing on the grassy knoll between the Old Red Courthouse and the Triple Underpass…

When in trouble, presidents have ways to escape the hubbub, deflect attention from what’s causing the problem, and wait for the whole thing to pass. In 1974, as Watergate was engulfing his presidency, President Nixon traveled to Egypt. A million people lined the roads to see him. Nixon aides…

Between 1942 and 1945, Hollywood produced a plethora of antifascist movies. Of the 1,500 titles released during this period, over half of them referred to the Second World War; 242 made reference to the Nazis, and 190 mentioned Adolf Hitler. The role American movies played in helping the United…

November 19 marks the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—rightly judged to be the greatest speech in America’s history. And while there have been innumerable books and articles written about the content, language, and rhetorical sophistication of Lincoln’s remarks,…

Donald Rumsfeld, the implacable ex-defense secretary, sniffled through his remarks about President Ford. Former vice president Dick Cheney recalled Ford’s kindness in hiring him despite his having dropped out of Yale twice and been arrested two times. Henry Kissinger, whom Ford inherited as…

Reading this provocative and compelling analysis of John F. Kennedy’s political vision, I could not help but think of the reaction Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. had when his colleague John P. Diggins told him he was writing a book favorable to Ronald Reagan’s presidency. “Please,” Schlesinger said,…

Thirty years ago last month, Hezbollah blew up the barracks of the U.S Marines and French paratroopers stationed at the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 Frenchmen. It wasn’t Hezbollah’s first terrorist operation, but this attack, the most memorable in Lebanon’s vicious and chaotic…

Ocean Grove, N.J.

John Forbes Kerry is one of those upper-middle-class East Coast types of estimable lineage and impeccable credentials (St. Paul’s, Yale, U.S. Navy) whose tribal habits were the subject of the late sociologist E. Digby Baltzell (The Protestant -Establishment, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia,…

Israel’s primary adversary is acquiring powerful new weapons that will overturn the military balance in the Middle East. But it needs at least a year before its weapons will be fully functional. In the meantime, the Israelis are signaling that they are contemplating a preemptive war. In Washington,…

New York senator Chuck Schumer is "disappointed" with the nuclear deal with Iran, according to a statement released by his Senate office. 

The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reports that "Syria welcomes Geneva agreement between Iran and P5+1 countries." SANA is an organ of the Syrian regime.

Negotiations for an “interim” arrangement over Iran’s nuclear weapons program finally succeeded this past weekend, as Security Council foreign ministers (plus Germany) flew to Geneva to meet their Iranian counterpart.  After raising expectations of a deal by first convening on November 8-10, it…

The nuclear deal with Tehran is a "pause that refreshes" for Iran, says the Emergency Committee for Israel in a statement released tonight:

U.S. Rep. Ed Royce of California, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on the Iran-deal reached tonight:

In light of the Geneva Agreement, I went back to read Winston Churchill's October 5, 1938, speech in the House of Commons on the Munich Agreement. Here are a few highlights:

Scott Johnson calls attention to a column in the Roanoke Times by Sharon Ingerson, a registered nurse in Salem, Virginia.

Go into almost any shop and hear Christmas carols and read signs trumpeting enormous discounts. Unusual, since the scramble for discounts traditionally begins after, not before, the first turkey has made the ultimate sacrifice to celebrants of Thanksgiving. By the end of next week, 45 million…

Continetti: Meet our secret masters.

Minnesota senator Al Franken, a Democrat, opens the door to a delay of the Obamacare individual mandate in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio.

Meir Soloveichik, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Though the Obama administration has been promoting the benefits of Obamacare for several years now, one perk of coverage through the exchanges that has gone largely unnoticed is a mandated three-month grace period for unpaid premiums.  The rule, however, only applies to those receiving subsidies…

We learn more about the vagaries of Obamacare every day.  People who thought they were somehow okay are discovering that they are getting it in the neck and wondering how this could be.  One tends to feel sympathy.  But in some cases, not so much.  As for instance, the situation described by…

Remember carbon credits.  This was the magical scheme that would allow Al Gore to live in his energy profligate house and various celebrities to fly around the globe in the private jets, pumping tons of carbon into the atmosphere, and do so with a clean conscience.  They probably would have done it…

Robert Zarate and Daniel Blumenthal, writing for Foreign Policy:

An infographic from the Israel Project, found at NoBombforIran.com:

On Thursday, a scathing article by Ron Fournier titled, "Obama’s Image Machine: Monopolistic Propaganda Funded by You, at National Journal, took the White House to task for shutting out press photographers from presidential events in favor of official White House photos taken by White House…

The Obama administration has decided to delay next year's enrollment period for Obamacare to begin after the November midterm elections. Bloomberg reports:

This afternoon, Senate majority leader Harry Reid deployed the so-called "nuclear option," changing the Senate rules to get rid of the 60-vote requirement to end a filibuster on judicial nominees or executive-branch nominees. The Washington Free Beacon reports that in 2008, Reid denounced…

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with frequent contributor Adam J. White on the so-called "nuclear option" used today in the United States Senate by Majority Leader Harry Reid on judicial nominees that were awaiting an advise and consent vote by the Senate.

A statement from a bipartisan group of senators pushing further sanctions on Iran:

Seth Lipsky, writing in the New York Post: 

UPDATE: Coburn's spokesman called to say that his boss was joking. Says the spokesman, “Dr. Coburn was poking fun at himself and the focus on presidential politics and rivalries three years ahead of the next election.  The exchange characterized below was a joke – it didn’t happen in real life …”…

Even before the October 1 launch, concerns were mounting over the ability of the government to handle the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Though many expressed those concerns publicly, insiders at the White House, Health and Human Services, and the contractors hired to…

It’s been all Obamacare, all the time, for weeks now and the media, as Howard Kurtz at Fox reports, is getting a bit bored with it all:

A video from David Rutz of the Washington Free Beacon showing President Obama and his fellow Democrats abandon the term Obamacare:

An Ohio company is scrapping health care for 1,000 employees due to Obamacare, WEWS-OH reports:

The Senate is preparing to go nuclear, according to the Huffington Post. Which is to say: Harry Reid wants to change Senate rules in order to roll Republicans who he believes are getting in his way.

James C. Capretta, writing for National Review Online:

From "Four Score" to "Yes We Can."

As Congress moves ahead with the farm bill -- legislation that has historically been full of (figurative) pork -- there's one really obvious measure that needs to be eliminated. A new program that will require that catfish be monitored by the Department of Agriculture. Catfish, like all fish…

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Jay Cost on Obamacare's fate in the polls, and whether the Senate is in play for Republicans in 2014.

The battle over government's role in society has been raging for some time—culminating in today's clash over Obamacare. But for how long? In The New Deal & Modern Conservatism: A Defining Rivalry, Professor David Davenport, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Gordon Lloyd, a professor…

The Department of Health and Human Services revealed on Wednesday a plan to spend up to $7 billion to find ways to reduce spending under the Affordable Care Act while maintaining or improving the quality of health care.  The solicitation for bids for this wide-ranging project appeared today on the…

It has certainly been a rough ride for Obamacare to date, to say the least.  But in an eye-opening indication of just how close Obamacare might be to really going off the rails, the reliably left-of-center Yahoo! featured an article yesterday afternoon entitled, “Obamacare Individual Mandate May Be…

Is performing an abortion no different than pulling a tooth? The idea that there isn't a difference is the basis of a new federal bill that would wipe hundreds of state abortion laws off the books--striking down everything from late-term abortion limits to health and safety regulations in many…

The Republican National Committee announced today that it is hosting a press conference for Democrats who will be running on Obamacare. They've invited a host of Democratic politicians who think Obamacare is a good idea, though it's likely none will show up:

In August of this year, a Quinnipiac poll found that Colorado senator Mark Udall's approval rating was +13 (47 percent approved of his job performance and 34 percent disapproved). But a new Quinnipiac poll out today shows that Udall's positive approval rating has evaporated, and just as many…

The state of Oregon set up its own exchange to provide people with health care insurance that would not be “substandard.”  And it has delivered … sort of.  No “substandard” coverage has been sold on the site.  Which is a good thing.  But, then, no coverage at all has been sold over the site,…

Annika Hernroth-Rothstein, writing for Mosaic:

In an interview on BET last night with Bow Wow and Keshia Chante, First Lady Michelle Obama talked up her husband, President Barack Obama. "I always say my husband has got swag," said Mrs. Obama. "He’s got a little swag." The audience applauded.

Not so long ago, the fate of democracy in Central America was a prominent and deeply controversial issue in U.S. politics. Throughout the 1980s, Republicans and Democrats clashed bitterly over how to address the civil wars raging in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. In 1983, President Reagan…

Florida Republican congressman charged with coke possession.

It is distressing to many that President Obama chose not to attend ceremonies marking the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg Address. But the president, no doubt, has his reasons and among them, the one most deserving of respect, perhaps, is the fact that he is an orator,…

Democratic congressman Nick Rahall of West Virginia was one of the 39 Democrats to vote last Friday to allow insurance plans that were on the market in 2013 to be sold next year. But during a radio interview, Rahall made it clear that he didn't regret voting for Obamacare in the first place.

Just when you were getting used to U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East, here comes our formal withdrawal from the Western Hemisphere. Yesterday, November 18, Secretary of State Kerry repudiated the Monroe Doctrine in a speech to the Inter-American Dialogue.  Here's what he said:

No, this isn't from Saturday Night Live, even if it looks that way. It's Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif preaching free will in a new YouTube video:

The White House has admitted that it was wrong to promise that people would be able to their health care plans under Obamacare. "With respect to the pledge I made that if you like your plan you can keep it, I think -- you know, and I’ve said in interviews -- that there is no doubt that the way I…

Chris Plante, a WMAL radio host, noticed something odd about this video of President Obama reciting the Gettysburg Address in anticipation of the 150th anniversary of the speech:

John Kerry is calling the attacks against the Iranian embassy in Lebanon today "terrorist bombings." And the U.S. secretary of state is condeming the action.

“We passed Obamacare — yes, I like the term — we passed it because I do care, and I want to put these choices in your hands where they belong.”  As Reid J. Epstein of Politico writes, that was what the president was saying back before some of the other things he was saying turned out “not to be…

It’s Congress’s fault if there’s a war with Iran, says the White House. Last week administration officials showed their frustration with lawmakers who seek to impose another round of sanctions on the Iranians. "It is important to understand that if pursuing a resolution diplomatically is disallowed…

Vice President Joe Biden told the president of Panama that they'll "talk about" a future presidential run. The president of Panama is term limited, and will not be running again, so it's clear the president of Panama and Biden were referring to a possible presidential run for Mr. Biden himself.

Barack Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer says the president won't be attending the Gettysburg address anniversary today because the "whole website thing." He appears to be talking about the ongoing problems with the Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov.

Cotten Timberlake of Bloomberg reports that the big retailers are:

The Obama administration's Justice Department has dropped a lawsuit aiming to stop a school voucher program in the state of Louisiana. A ruling Friday by a United States district court judge revealed that the federal government has "abandoned" its pursuit of an injunction against the Louisiana…

CNN reports that a woman the president hailed as an Obamacare success story just realized she won't be able to afford Obamacare because it's too expensive:

The nomination of Janet Yellen to chair the Federal ­Reserve has come down to this: a referendum on quantitative easing and zero interest rates. The money-printing program that Ben Bernanke started five years ago this month remains Yellen’s answer for how the economy will get back on solid ground.…

Isn't Obama more like Lincoln's adversaries?

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on the foibles of the Obama administration and whether the president can dig his administration out of its second-term hole.

Vice President Joe Biden says that "God willing" the Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov, will be fixed. He made the remarks at the Port of Houston today.

Over at Politico, Josh King reflects on the disastrous Michael Dukakis presidential campaign—specifically the moment the Massachusetts governor donned a helmet and rode around in an M1A1 Abrams, trying to resemble a muscular commander in chief. Except he didn't.

First Lady Michelle Obama is telling Democratic donors to pay. "[I]t's simple, you can write a big ol' fat check," the first lady told Democrats at a fundraiser. "That's what we need you to do. Right now, write a big check -- big huge one --  write the biggest check you can possibly write. Take…

This isn’t going to be a good week for me. Friday will mark the 50th anniversary of the death in Dallas of President John F. Kennedy, and between now and then I expect a complete media blitz—make that a blitzkrieg—of stories, films, docudramas, book reviews, and counterfactual explorations about…

When the Obama administration launched the Healthcare.gov website on October 1, the president and his officials focused on the coverage that would now be available to the uninsured as of January 1, 2014.  However, with the recent flood of cancellations of those who were told they could "keep their…

Views of the latest ad from the Emergency Committee are outpacing Obamacare signups. As of this writing, the ad, titled "Obama's March to War," has been viewed 114,312 times. By contrast, "Around 106,000 enrolled in new plans during October — with approximately 27,000 coming from states where the…

Democratic congressman Nick Rahall says he voted for the Keep Your Health Plan Act because President Obama's Obamacare fix lacked the "legal underpinning" he believes is necessary:

Robert Gibbs wants to see somebody fired over the Obamacare breakdown.  As a way of restoring public confidence, of course.  If this were the public sector, after all, we’d be dodging the rolling heads anytime we crossed a street.

Washington, D.C. is booming. That's in large part because of a massive growth in lobbying expenditures and federal contracts.

The big topic of discussion on the Sunday shows was, of course, Obamacare.  And the big challenge for supporters of the president, and his signature program, was to parse the language of “If you like your plan …” so as to make it mean something other than what millions reasonably assumed it meant.

Former press secretary Robert Gibbs again called for heads to roll in the government after the botched rollout of the Obamacare website. He made the remarks today on the Today Show:

Americans are methodically dealing with the Kübler-Ross stages of Obama-care grief, with our national healing process moving briskly through roughly one stage per week: (1) denial upon realizing that the website HealthCare.gov didn’t work; (2) anger at the realization that the technical back-end of…

Next month’s meeting of the U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade in China will feature a familiar ritual. American negotiators will face intensified pressure for Washington to lift restrictions on the sale of military and dual-use technology to China. Over time, the perennial drip-drip…

Late last August, along the coast of New Hampshire, Kevin Walsh, police chief in the town of Rye, got a lecture on law enforcement from a bunch of grown-up bicyclists. Local law requires bikers to ride single-file when there is traffic. But this day, a pack of a dozen or so bikers were racing down…

Andrew Marshall, the longtime director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, has had a number of titles conferred on him over the years. A 1999 profile in Washingtonian magazine dubbed him “the most influential policy maker you have never heard of.” Others of us who have known him over the…

While the Second World War is considered the necessary war against Nazi evil, World War I is widely seen as a pointless tragedy, an impression first shaped by the British trench poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, then reinforced by Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August (1962). That book, which…

I have this thing about schlock books, those that cater to our enduring fascination with public portrayals of manners and morals, especially failures in that regard. 

The line that opens Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1944), a minor novel but a masterpiece of addiction literature, is bracing and unforgettable: “The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.” That the line is not Jackson’s own—his protagonist and surrogate, Don Birnam,…

"Kosilek is now 64 years old, and she has spent the last 20 years of her life at MCI Norfolk, a medium-security men’s correctional institution in southern Massachusetts. She has attempted suicide twice. She has also tried to castrate herself  .  .  .-” (“Should this Inmate Get a State-Financed Sex…

The governorship of Virginia has been held by some of the most eminent men in American history: Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Randolph, Henry Lee, James Monroe. And now, Terry McAuliffe will sit in their chair. Depressing? Perhaps, but it is worth remembering that for about half a…

During the Great War, an accidental respite from battle enabled two poets to establish a friendship, a literary journal, and some of the era’s finest poetry. 

The Good Book tells us “God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the work He had done in creation.” What biblical scholars cannot tell us, however, is precisely how God spent his Sunday. Did He go for a run? Read the paper while sipping on a venti macchiato at…

Morris Plains, N.J.

In March 2010, Barack Obama placed a giant bet on the docility and stupidity of the American people, when he decided in the face of three huge electoral warnings to force his health plan down the unwilling throats of the American people. And by November 2013, it was clear he had lost. It was not…

Among the many parts of our big government is something called the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund. Congress created the fund almost 20 years ago, placing it in the Treasury Department. As stated on its website, the fund’s purpose is to promote “economic revitalization and…

The least interesting thing that happened in the odd-year election was Chris Christie’s reelection as governor of New Jersey. It was like a football game between Alabama and Vassar: A Republican governor with extraordinary political skills and an impressive record in his first term crushes a…

Here’s our travel advisory for New York City: It’s always a great time to go, given the restaurants and the museums and the other sites and attractions. But starting January 1, the city may not be as safe.

It may have been the worst moment for Jay Carney in what was a very bad press briefing. The president’s spokesman was fumbling his way through the administration’s justifications for the catastrophic Obamacare rollout when ABC’s Jonathan Karl pressed him about the fines the law imposes on the…

There are few better examples of the fecklessness of the Obama presidency than the sight of the huckster-in-chief speaking at a conference to sell foreign companies on the advantages of investing in the United States, which is what he stooped to on October 31 at the SelectUSA Investment Summit.

Flannery O’Connor once famously said of To Kill a Mockingbird that “it’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they are reading a child’s book.” Which is true enough. But it seems that its 87-year-old author, Harper Lee—recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal…

Thank God the baby boomers are long-lived, because without them, there’d be almost nothing worth seeing at the movies. Boomers may bankrupt the country with their retirements and suck their kids and grandkids dry with their Medicare Part D, but they remain a large cohort of moviegoers and they…

This account of George Washington’s wartime precedents regarding prisoner abuse, congressional power over war policy, military tribunals, and civilian rights represents one of the best and most colorful uses of history to help shape our understanding of the commander-in-chief clause of the…

Stephen Jimenez sounds remarkably chipper on the phone when he calls in from Portland, his thirteenth city on a seemingly endless book tour. He’s plugging The Book of Matt, and the reason he’s chipper is that he hasn’t been burned in effigy, yet, or heckled mercilessly, yet, or denounced, at least…

The Obamas are attending a University of Maryland basketball game in College Park, Maryland tonight. The home team is playing Oregon State, which is coached by Michelle Obama's brother. The fans are, apparently, excited to see the first family. 

There is widespread opposition to the latest federal initiative aimed at improving education in this country.  And the secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, knows why. It is because the imposition of something called the “Common Core State Standards”has exposed a terrible truth to many:

Every time you think that we've finally touched bottom on Obamacare, some new problem emerges. So what began merely as a dysfunctional website became a broken and mis-designed system. When it turned out that lots of people were paying more for their plans, it then turned out that others were having…

In Geneva, the famous “Pink Star” diamond fetches $83 million at auction, almost double the price ever paid for such a stone, and in Arkansas, Walmart lowers its sales outlook for the holiday season. That might be a metaphor for the holiday shopping season, where grouchy retailers are predicting a…

Ponnuru and Levin on a conservative alternative to Obamacare.

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol reviewing the week that was in Washington: Obama's non-apology for breaking his Obamacare promise about keeping your insurance and how that promise might be kept.

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Vice President Joe Biden and Democratic senator Kay Hagan attended a fundraiser today in North Carolina, where Hagan is up for reelection. But Biden and the senator did not bring up the Obama administration's signature achievement--Obamacare.

Remember back (a few short weeks ago) when the Democrats were arguing that Obamacare was the law of the land, that it hadn’t been struck down by the Supreme Court (as if avoiding that ignominious fate by a razor-slim 5-4 vote were a selling point), and that Republicans—and the American people—just…

The House of Representatives voted Friday to pass a bill that would allow health insurers to continue selling plans they offered for 2013 in 2014. Fred Upton's "Keep Your Health Plan Act" received 261 aye votes, including 39 from Democrats, and 157 nay votes, including 4 Republicans.

Republican congressman Fred Upton, the Energy and Commerce chairman and author of the "Keep Your Health Plan Act," spoke on the floor of the House of Representatives Friday morning, ahead of the vote on the bill. Here's an excerpt:

In light of yesterday's press conference, it's perhaps worth remembering these lines from a 2008 presidential debate from Barack Obama on his greatest strength and weakness:

Albuquerque, New Mexico preferred Barack Obama to Mitt Romney by double digits in 2012, but the city could become the site of an important pro-life victory this coming Tuesday.

The White House has cordially invited executives from the insurance industry to drop by, this afternoon, for a little chat.  The topic for discussion will, presumably, be how to “move forward,” on the Affordable Care Act now that the president has announced a temporary fix that amounts to…

Harvard professor David Cutler, a so-called architect of Obamacare, says we "could be" witnessing "the beginning of a death spiral" for the unpopular health care bill. Cutler made the comments last night on Fox News:

Yuval Levin, writing for National Review Online:

The White House this evening released a veto threat of the bill, "Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013." The bill is expected to be voted upon tomorrow in the House of Representatives.

One week ago, President Obama apologized for giving millions of Americans false assurances that they could keep their health care plans if they liked them. At a press conference Thursday evening, House Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Xavier Becerra, and Jim Clyburn were asked if they…

Obamacare’s woes seem to have come as a surprise to many in Washington. Wait, you mean people actually won’t be able to keep their insurance? Quick, pass a law.

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with James Capretta, a senior fellow from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, on the President's healthcare "fix" press conference earlier this afternoon.

The White House will not be dismayed.  In the wake of yesterday’s Obamacare enrollment numbers, it Tweeted out a song of joy.

Gwen Graham, a Democratic candidate challenging Florida GOP congressman Steve Southerland, tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that she backs the Keep Your Health Plan Act.

The latest ad from the Emergency Committee for Israel warns that President Obama might not keep his word on preventing Iran from acquiring nukes:

Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean questioned whether President Obama has the "legal authority" to carry out the Obamacare fix the White House outlined today:

Earlier this week, former President Bill Clinton advised President Obama to "honor the commitment" he made and to allow Americans to keep their health care plans, if they like them. That was a central promise Obama made when he sold Obamacare, but one that turned out not to be true when Obamacare…

WFTV in Florida reports that a woman with cancer has been dropped from her insurance plan due to Obamacare:

Politico argues that, with the recent departure of some high-profile reporters and editors, "The New York Times is suffering a brain drain."

According to one U.S. senator, the Obama administration is pushing a "fairly anti-Israeli" line as they advocate for a deal with Iran. 

Those whose insurance has been cancelled as “substandard” don’t have much recourse.  They can go to the government’s website, which isn’t working so well.  Or they could write their person in Congress as some 30,000 of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s constituents have.  And, then, they can submit their…

Two former CIA officials who fought in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, were asked to sign additional nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) more than six months after those attacks. The two officials, who will testify Thursday before a subcommittee of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,…

White House photographer Pete Souza tweets this picture of President Obama and Vice President Biden holding hands "during a prayer at end of mtg w faith leaders on immigration reform."

The full reality of what Obamacare will mean for average Americans is only now becoming clear as the crisis over cancelled insurance plans in the individual market has steadily unfolded in recent days. Some 3 to 4 million people have already received notices from their insurers that their policies…

The federal health insurance exchange website created by Obamacare has been a "complete disaster" said CNN analyst Gloria Borger. Speaking on Jake Tapper's program Wednesday afternoon, Borger was asked to respond to the enrollment numbers released by the administration following the first month of…

A friend re-writes the White House's readout of President Obama's call today with President Hollande of France (the actual White House readout is at the end of this post) to include the "thoughts behind the president's call" with his French counterpart:

There's a black and white photo, a little grainy and slightly out of focus, of Igor Stravinsky greeting Mstislav Rostropovich at the Royal Academy of Music, London, in June 1964. Standing in the background in the upper left hand corner is a tall lanky figure, a 20-year-old music student named John…

The State Department announced today that Boko Haram, a prolific terrorist and insurgency group based in Nigeria, has been added to the U.S. government’s list of designated terrorist entities. Ansaru, a Boko Haram “splinter” group, was also added to the designation list. Boko Haram has targeted…

In mid-October, the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange quietly postponed all of the forums it had scheduled to inform small businesses about the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP), as we reported.  Now, in a Friday press release, the Maryland board overseeing the state's Obamacare website…

Elliott Abrams, writing for the Washington Post:

What does Ken Cuccinelli’s narrow loss in the Virginia governor’s race tell us about the future of the GOP?

They sure know how to pick 'em at the U.N.   As the AP reports:

In a November 8 letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) warned that a contractor that had been identified with the insurgency had been granted access to a Coalition facility last November, and that the threat of further access…

WRTV in Indiana reports that a man has tried for 6 weeks to sign up for Obamacare, but is still unable to:

Sam Baker of the National Journal writes that:

A video from the House Republicans points to President Obama's statement that "there are some stray cats and dogs that got in" the health care bill:

On October 28, 1913, a trial ended in Kiev, then in imperial Russia and today capital of Ukraine. Mendel Menahem Beilis, a 39-year-old secular Jew and father of five children, a Russian military veteran, and manager of a brick factory, had been accused of murder for alleged ritual purposes—the…

Health insurers trying to get around healthcare.gov.

With millions of Americans losing their health insurance because of Obamacare, bills have been introduced in Congress to let people keep their plans.

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer John McCormack on Bill Clinton's recent Obamacare comments, and the preliminary Obamacare exchange enrollment numbers.

A new Quinnipiac poll finds that the majority of Americans disapprove of the job Barack Obama is doing as president and oppose his health care law. According to the poll of more than 2,000 registered voters, 39 percent approve of Obama's job while 54 percent disapprove. That shows Obama in a worse…

The death of Manfred Rommel last week, at 84, ended a life that might be taken as a metaphor for contemporary Germany.

Democratic National Committee chair and Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz told CNN this weekend that House Democrats would run--and win--in 2014 by embracing the Affordable Care Act. 

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) reported last week that in 2011, the IRS paid out $3.6 billion in fraudulent refunds on tax returns filed by identity thieves.  Even that amount was an improvement over the previous year when the total fraud was $5.2 billion.  However,…

House speaker John Boehner says in a statement that he agrees with former president Bill Clinton when it comes to "honoring the committment" President Obama made that if Americans like their health plans they can keep them.

It’s not been a good week for Secretary of State John Kerry. Savaged in a Jackson Diehl column for his vision of a “Middle East dream world,” Kerry went from one miscue to another.

From the Washington Post comes an:

Former President Bill Clinton said that President Obama should keep his pledge to allow people to keep their current health care plans, if they like them, under Obamacare:

Rep. Kurt Schrader, a Democrat from Oregon, said that President Obama was "grossly misleading" on Obamacare:

The launch of the health exchanges has produced diverse images of failure: blank screens, improperly released Social Security numbers; a White House official undermining congressional oversight on September 6, 2013, with a phony security certification; and political appointees blaming their…

Last Saturday marked the 24th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the International Spy Museum in downtown D.C., the day was commemorated by a parade of colorful Trabants, those wonderful symbols of East German innovation and efficiency—central planning at its best.

"Obamacare or Kafkacare?"

Fewer than 50,000 Americans have signed up for private health insurance plans via healthcare.gov, the federal insurance exchange website that opened on October 1. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Over a century ago George Santayana wrote that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

So the Obama administration is, after all, capable of tough, bull-necked diplomacy. These guys go for the jugular—for them diplomacy is a blood sport where anything is licit so long as victory is the endgame. Too bad the White House deploys those skills not against U.S. adversaries but against…

It’s a pity that there’s no Portland, Oregon, edition of the New York Post. After all, one can only dream of the headlines the wags at the Post would come up with to describe the ongoing travails of (now former) Multnomah County (home of Portland) Commissioner Jeff Cogen.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

The rallying cry among those who still believe in Obamacare, and that it will fundamentally transform health care in America, like to say of the program’s current problems, “It’s just a web site.” Implying that it can, like the transmission on your automobile, be fixed and you can then proceed to…

Speaker of the House John Boehner's letter to veterans on Veterans Day:

It is always nice to find a columnist looking past the political controversy of the moment, to write instead of great men and more permanent things. And so it was a pleasant surprise to find not one but two Bloomberg View columns dedicated to Whittaker Chambers—by Harvard law professor and former…

One of the many fine features of Veterans Day is that it's observed on the date on which it should be observed.

Obamacare has now been unpopular for more than an Olympiad—an amazing feat for a law that’s just now going into effect.  It’s been unpopular since the summer of 2009—which, come to think of it, is about the time that President Obama first starting saying that if you like your health plan, you can…

By now we know that winning the war on terror requires a commitment to peace and stability in far-flung places—a component that goes hand-in-hand with military might. Of course this is easier said than done. Certainly there are a slew of organizations focused on relief efforts, but how many of…

There’s a Washington think-tank variation on the board game Risk, and here’s how it goes: I give you a short statement about Obama policy in the Middle East, and you have to say who it’s from. 

The president’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is in serious trouble. As a result, so is modern liberalism. The problems with Obamacare are increasingly obvious, beginning with the administration unilaterally delaying the employer mandate. But that turned out to be…

Cormac McCarthy’s script for The Counselor offers a new twist on the immortal George Orwell crack that some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual would believe them. Only a truly gifted writer could have written something quite as awful as this jaw-dropping fiasco, simultaneously so overwrought…

Congress has rebuked President Obama. It may have come in a subtle or backhanded way and thus was ignored by the media. It may not have been intentional. But it was a rebuke nonetheless.

Everyone’s angry at American colleges. Parents groan about tuition, students pile up debt and can’t find work, employers gripe that graduates lack job skills, conservatives decry liberal bias, Ph.D.s without a regular post become bitter transient adjuncts, and politicians suspect that tax dollars…

The Scrapbook was understandably intrigued when Cass Sunstein, a former Obama White House official and former Harvard law professor, published a Bloomberg.com column headlined “How the Alger Hiss Case Explains the Tea Party.” If you know anything about the famous perjury trial of the high-ranking…

It's no secret that the value of an honorary degree—not to mention the value of an actual degree—has declined in recent years. Recently minted “Doctors” include Ben Affleck (Brown University), Jon Bon Jovi (Monmouth University), and Morgan Freeman (Boston University). Tufts University, meanwhile,…

Believers in limited government and privatization lost one of their unsung heroes with the death of distinguished economist Ed Clarke on October 10. Clarke conceived of an idea he called revealed demand, a notion that helped make the case for having the market allocate goods and services formerly…

It’s become nearly dogmatic in academic history that the writer ought to focus as much as he can on the disenfranchised, the “marginalized,” to avoid “privileging” the viewpoints of the upper classes, of men, and of white people. And so anxious are the historians not to perpetuate injustice that…

Taipei

As surely as the Obamacare rollout has been a disaster, the calls are now ringing throughout Washington, especially in conservative ranks, for Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to resign. It won’t happen. And if The Scrapbook has its way, it shouldn’t happen, either. 

Mike Lee, the senator from Utah, gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation last week that demands attention. The takeaway: Candidates need policy ideas that address the concerns of ordinary voters—and they have to campaign, and win, on those ideas. Lee noted that conservative scholars have a number…

The Scrapbook is not a watcher of the NBC drama The Blacklist, but we note with amusement that the episode set to air on November 4 is titled “Frederick Barnes,” and the promotional materials describe “Barnes” as “quite literally the most dangerous man in the world.” We’re programming our DVR right…

For five years, Barack Obama repeatedly, emphatically, and unequivocally promised that under his health care scheme, “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” That promise has now been proven to be blatantly untrue. Multiple reports during the last 10 days of October made it clear that…

At  the start of last month’s government shutdown, a mostly overlooked message emanated from the Twitter account of Michelle Obama, informing her followers: “Due to Congress’s failure to pass legislation to fund the government, updates to this account will be limited.” The conventions of American…

When South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham threatened last week to place a hold in the Senate on all Obama administration nominations until the president and his advisers cooperate fully with investigations into the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, White House press secretary Jay Carney…

In “The Eternal City,” the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai observes that his native city has rebuffed most of those who would project onto her their own ambitions, imperial or religious or otherwise. Neither Jerusalem’s conquerors nor its miracle-seeking glorifiers, he wrote, stopped to wonder why /…

For about a decade now, Jeff Bezos has been swallowing an ever larger percentage of my household’s income. In addition to our buying everything from dish soap to movies online, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com will no doubt be pleased to learn that my wife and I recently started receiving the…

The tragedy of Paula Deen, I believe, is not her heart-rending choice of pink liquid cosmetics on the occasion of her famously damp sua culpa (my term for blaming current shortcomings on one’s social origins). Nor is it her provocative defense against accusations of racism: “I is what I is” plays…

Let’s face it, we millennials need all the help we can get. We’ve spent our 20s either engaged in Apatow-ian bromances or trying to figure out if we’re Mirandas or Samanthas. We invented Facebook and insist on using it at all hours of the day, for no earthly reason whatsoever. Heck, we even…

It is often remarked that espionage is the second-oldest profession. Written records from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Iran suggest that spying and civilization sprang up together. In antiquity, spies could be the hidden bureaucrats of tyranny or good governance (a ruler needed to know whether a satrap…

The other day, I picked up my guitar and didn’t know what to play. This is happening more and more, and I guess it’s because I pick up the guitar less and less. When I was 15, I could strum my way through the entire Beatles catalogue, half the songs on classic rock radio, and any number of…

In last week's issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, I wrote "The Media Kowtow" a feature about how "a hugely influential portion of the American media has vacillated between openly admiring the Chinese government and providing a forum for its apologists." A large part of that story is how China has wooed…

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that the reported U.S.-Iran nuclear deal favors Iran. "Iran gives practically nothing and it gets a hell of a lot," Netanyahu said on CBS this morning. "That's not a good deal."

In North Dakota, only 30 people have so far signed up for Obamacare. Meanwhile, 35,000 people have already or will be losing their existing health insurance plans in that state alone. WDAY reports:

The French administration appears tougher on Iran than the Obama administration, reports from Geneva, where the nuclear egotiations are currently taking place, suggest. 

Senator Mark Kirk's statement on the possible U.S.-Iran deal:

Speaker of the House John Boehner released this statement on the supposed U.S.-Iran deal:

That’s the way globalization ends, not with one large headline, but with several changes in the direction of policy, caused by events seemingly unrelated to the policy changes they produce. That’s bad news for those who believe that freer trade and an increase in the international flow of capital…

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior editor Lee Smith on President Obama's puzzling new Iran strategy.

The Emergency Committee for Israel released this statement on the Iran deal:

Senator Ted Cruz says that the proposed U.S.-Iran deal is "dangerous for America." He made the comments in a prepared statement sent out today by his Senate office.

Senator Ted Cruz has organized an effort to urge President Barack Obama to help free Pastor Saeed Abedini, an American pastor imprisoned in Iran.

Could former Massachusetts senator Scott Brown run again, this time next-door in New Hampshire? The Boston Globe reports that two Republican senators are urging their old colleague to make a run against Democrat Jeanne Shaheen:

In a statement released today, Senator Jim Risch says he's trouble Secretary Kerry is rushing the United States into a deal with Iran.

Ben Sasse is doing what few Republicans have been able to accomplish: He's uniting the GOP establishment with anti-establishment conservatives in his bid to become the next U.S. senator from Nebraska. 

The FBI is offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the return of 2 rifles that were, as O’Ryan Johnson of the Boston Herald reports, “stolen from an FBI SWAT emergency response vehicle.”

In light of recent developments with the U.S., Iran, and Israel, the boss's editorial, co-written with Michael Makovsky, of a month ago is well worth re-reading:

A very unusual statement from the Israel prime minister on the eve of a possible nuclear detail between the U.S. and Iran:

Matthew Continetti, writing for the Washington Free Beacon:

President Obama said that "I've been burned already with-- a website," before correcting himself and saying, "the American people have been burned by -- a website that has been dysfunctional." He made the comments in an interview with MSNBC host Chuck Todd.

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on his recent advance editorial.

“Detroit civil rights lawyer Shanta Driver made a last-minute decision to argue in a high-profile Supreme Court affirmative action case on Oct. 15 in part, she said, because so few African-Americans appear before the justices.”

Colonel Rob Maness, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Louisiana, is asking any and all 80,000 Louisianans who are expected to lose their health insurance due to Obamacare regulations to email his campaign with their stories.

Watching the Obama administration at work this week, a friend offered this judgment: Under Obama, Iran keeps its nuclear program and Americans lose their health insurance.

The Club for Growth PAC has endorsed Ben Sasse in his bid to be the next U.S. senator from Nebraska.

By now it's an understatement to say—as Senate Democrats said to President Obama yesterday—that Democrats face a national "crisis of confidence" in the Affordable Care Act. And their confidence likely wasn't buttressed by the closing weeks of the Virginia gubernatorial campaign, in which the…

Last week, after the President started receiving a torrent of criticism over his broken promise that Americans who wanted to could keep their health insurance plan under Obamacare, I wrote an item asking the question "Will PolitiFact Ever Correct Its Biggest Obamacare Error?" I noted that the fact…

Their betters from both coasts spent big to enlighten the people of Colorado which, east of the Hudson, is considered one of those square states full of primitives who don’t know what is good for them.

A report issued in September and released this week by the IRS's Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) found continuing problems with the agency's Volunteer Program, which provides free tax preparation and electronic filing for "low- and moderate-income, elderly, disabled, and…

Several members of the Senate – all of them Democrats and up for reelection next year – went to the White House yesterday for a meeting with the president during which they told him about their constituents' struggles with Obamacare and how those difficulties are making reelection increasingly…

Jimmy Carter's grandson, Jason Carter, will run for governor of Georgia. The younger Carter is currently a state senator.

In a bid to confuse and/or deliberately mislead voters in her native Texas, gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis announced today that she is “pro-life.”

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes recapping the 2013 elections in Virginia, New Jersey, New York and across the country.

Vice President Joe Biden flubbed the name of the president of Panama earlier today:

CNN reports:

Abortion advocate Wendy Davis has a strange claim. She now says that she's "pro-life," a term usually associated with those who are against abortion.

Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius said today that Obamacare navigators don't need to undergo criminal background checks:

It looks like labor unions might be getting tax relief from Obamacare, according to a report from kaiserhealthnews.org.

Seems the shutdown increased the public’s esteem for government workers.  As William C. Adams and Donna Lind Infeld of Government Executive report:

The boss on last night's election results:

The White House is ramping up a new push for the president's version of comprehensive immigration reform. In an opening salvo, White House advisor on Violence Against Women Lynn Rosenthal wrote a blog entry titled, "Comprehensive Immigration Reform: Survivors Can’t Afford to Wait," saying that…

Chris Christie can afford to be magnanimous, so that is what he is doing.  If there are hard feelings, he seeks to soothe them, though this is not what is known best for doing.  But in a national contest against Hillary Clinton he will need all the troops he can muster and so we read in Mike…

This year, Virginia Republicans were divided and had an easily caricatured candidate at the top of the ticket who ran a defensive campaign and was massively outspent ... and the state still broke basically 50-50. Next year, incumbent Democratic senator Mark Warner will be on the ballot.

Terry McAuliffe will win his bid for governor Virginia, both Fox News and NBC News are projecting. McAuliffe, a Democrat, will defeat his Republican opponent, attorney general Ken Cuccinelli.

As expected, the networks were able to project Chris Christie the winner of the New Jersey gubernatorial election moments after the polls closed at 8:00 p.m. The only questions now are how much he won by and whether he had coattails in the legislative elections.

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on his most recent piece on Benghazi and Obamacare.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a Republican, is on his way to winning big in his bid for reelection Tuesday, and there's already talk he may be on his way to running for president in three years. Speaking to CNN's Jake Tapper, Christie argued he's not a moderate as he's sometimes portrayed.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman and chair of the Democratic National Committee, told viewers of MSNBC Tuesday that Americans were not "myzled" by President Obama when it came to being able to keep their health plans under Obamacare.

In a continuing crackdown on the federal government's Lifeline program, sometimes known as "Obama phones," the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has revealed that fraud and abuse in the program exceeded two million subscribers. New rules were established after it became clear that subscribers…

Toronto mayor Rob Ford told reporters, "Yes, I smoked crack cocaine. Do I, am I an addict? No. Have I tried it? Probably in one of my drunken stupors--probably, approximately, about a year ago."

ABC reports that, two weeks later, one man still can't sign up for Obamacare using the telephone number President Obama gave out:

Elections, as we are too-often reminded, have consequences. You vote for someone who says that you can keep your health care plan and … er, bad example.

The National Football League recently "issued a rule to deny entry to any off-duty police officer who brings a concealed firearm to one of its stadiums  …”  And, as Eric Katz of Government Executive reports, it is being challenged by the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association which represents…

When Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff canceled her October 23 White House state dinner, she created yet another foreign-policy embarrassment for the Obama administration. Rousseff’s visit, which was announced back in May, was supposed to be an opportunity for highlighting a new era of strategic…

During an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Congressman Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that al Qaeda has changed the way it communicates in light of Edward Snowden’s leaks. Rogers said of Snowden (emphasis added):

Senator Mary Landrieu, the Democrat from Louisiana, has introduced a bill called the "Keeping the Affordable Care Act Promise Act." The bill recognizes that Americans are losing their individual health plans because they don't conform to the new regulations under the Affordable Care Act, better…

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on Obamacare suffering from the one-two punch of 'misstatements' and failing policies.

Stepping into the controversy over the team name for the Washington Redskins in early October, President Obama said in an interview with the AP:

Warrenton, Va.

The head of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, was killed in an American drone strike in northern Pakistan late last week. Mehsud can now be added to an impressive list of senior terrorists killed in the U.S. drone war. But how effective are such decapitation strikes?

Elliott Abrams writes:

According to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's leading gay rights group, eighty-eight percent of Fortune 500 companies have formal employment policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. And it's likely that almost all other businesses, like Senator Rick…

Losing the argument and running out of ideas, Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu resorts to a tactic that worked wonderfully for President Obama.

A final poll from Quinnipiac on Tuesday's gubernatorial race in Virginia shows Democrat Terry McAuliffe with a six-point lead over Republican rival Ken Cuccinelli. Forty-six percent of likely Virginia voters say they will vote for McAuliffe, according to the poll, while 40 percent say they'll vote…

President Obama's former press secretary, Robert Gibbs, says it was "certainly" wrong for the president to continuously promise that people would be able to keep their health care plans under Obamacare:

President Obama campaigned yesterday in Virginia for Democrat Terry McAuliffe, whose election in the governor's race is Tuesday. Obama praised McAuliffe's wife, their "unbelievable children," and McAuliffe himself.

There is probably no harder beat in Washington than intelligence. 

Among the first cases heard by the Supreme Court in its new term is one from Michigan. The state stands accused of violating the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee by requiring equal treatment in public-university admissions decisions. Michigan has committed no such violation. Yet to judge…

A recent spate of newspaper articles suggests a concerted media campaign targeting Turkey’s foreign intelligence service, the MIT, its director, Hakan Fidan, and almost surely his boss as well, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In a piece published by the Wall Street Journal and another by the…

Rutland, Vt.

The 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy is nearly upon us, and it feels as if Camelot has returned like Brigadoon. Many a navel is currently being gazed upon in the media in an attempt to wring some contemporary meaning out of JFK’s tragic end. Some of this was inevitable—the…

Herr Riegel’s father vas a candy maker. Was, I mean. Was a candy maker. This morning, over the phone, a friend made some passing reference to German economic policy—speaking, unfortunately, in that exaggerated German accent that used to be a standard of American comedy. You remember? Sgt. Schultz…

London 

Anyone who doubts that truth is stranger than fiction should reflect on the fact that one of America’s leading “prosperity” preachers is named Creflo Dollar. The owner of two Rolls Royces, he shames and cajoles his congregation, most of whom are poor African Americans, into giving their money to…

The recent government shutdown illustrated a lot of political truths. For starters, people are unhappy when the government is shut down, and they naturally tend to blame the party of less government. The media instinctively help them conclude that the Republicans are at fault.

By now, a good portion of America is familiar with Moneyball, either Michael Lewis’s book or the movie, but here’s an abridged explanation: A baseball obsessive and amateur statistician named Bill James began positing data-driven theories about what makes for a winning team. James’s research…

I saw Gravity several weeks ago, so it’s interesting to reflect on what kind of staying power this box office sensation actually has. Once you’re out of the theater and away from director Alfonso Cuarón’s mind-boggling success in convincing you that you’re actually watching astronauts struggling to…

As  metaphors go, “train wreck” turned out to be pretty apt. That’s how retiring Democratic senator Max Baucus described his expectations for the implementation of Obamacare at a hearing last April. If anything, he could be accused of soft pedaling the fiasco that has been on full display since the…

Shakespeare wrote about kings. Not, as the tour guide at the Globe Theatre told me, because the nobility were the reality stars of their day and the masses wanted to know all their business, but because Shakespeare, like his near-contemporaries John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, was a serious political…

Now that President Obama’s oft-repeated claim that Obamacare lets people keep their current health insurance has been exposed as false, it’s a good time to examine Politifact’s track record on the matter. It isn’t good.

The Scrapbook is thrilled to note the publication this week of Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics, a collection of essays by our friend and contributing editor Charles Krauthammer. Needless to say, this is a book that matters, by a thinker and commentator who…

On October 17, Saudi Arabia was elected by the United Nations General Assembly to a nonpermanent seat on the Security Council. The next day, Riyadh made a stunning announcement: It was declining the seat, because of the council’s longstanding “inability to perform its duties and responsibilities”…

President Obama is facing the abyss. It’s that moment when a president’s plans are overwhelmed by his problems, and he’s relegated to playing defense for the rest of his White House term. Obama’s agenda already lingers near death. His poll numbers have slipped to new lows. His speeches are full of…

Technology is a problem, not only for President Obama but also for Republicans and conservatives. In fact, technology is several problems, practical and theoretical, all relating to and interacting with one another. And none of them can be ignored.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union opened the space age by orbiting Sputnik, history’s first artificial satellite. Four months later, the United States launched its own first satellite and began hiring astronauts in the hopes of beating the Soviets to a manned space flight. President Eisenhower…

Sterling, Va.

It would be a rare week in political journalism when there wasn’t a story somewhere about a lifelong Republican who doesn’t recognize his party nowadays.

When John Hay’s name is mentioned today, it is often as a footnote attached to the names of the two giants he worked for, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. But he was much more than an associate of great men. Hay was a creature now mostly extinct on our national stage: a genuine man of…

Could the focus on Obamacare in the last couple of weeks before Tuesday's Virginia gubernatorial election enable the Republican nominee, Ken Cuccinelli, to come from behind in the homestretch? He's run a pretty awful campaign so far, and has been trailing badly for months, but ...

The Washington Post has done a thorough job of reporting on the creation of Obamacare. It is a tale of how political hubris prevailed over prudence, as summed up in a single quotation:

Justin Hadley was using the Obamacare website when he was accidentally sent "eligibility letters" addressed to other people -- in other states.

Some attribute the recent spate of less-than-encouraging news about the U.S. economy to the  government shutdown, the battle over the debt ceiling, and to the reprise due in a relatively few weeks. They point to the decline in consumer confidence during and immediately after the shutdown: the…

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on his view from the bleachers at game six of the world series and the failure of the President's promise on keeping your health insurance policy if you like it, and whether the president will sacrifice part of Obamacare to help the…

A new website from conservative organization Independent Women's Voice is looking for submissions from Americans who have received letters from their health insurer notifying them that their plans have been cancelled due to Obamacare.

Is Ken Cuccinelli closing in on Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor's race? The latest poll from Emerson College shows McAuliffe, the Democrat, with 42 percent support and Cuccinelli, the Republican, with 40 percent. Libertarian Robert Sarvis has 13 percent in the poll of 874 likely voters.

Foreign Policy reports:

Stalin once asked sneeringly (that was his style) “how many divisions” the Pope had.  The answer, of course, was “none.”  But, then, Uncle Joe never had 10 million Twitter followers.  That’s almost as many people as the Big Evil killed.

The bad news is about a global shortage in something critical to the pursuit of happiness. Namely, wine. As Aaron Smith of CNN Money reports:

The government shutdown drama is over, and already it feels like ancient history. But Republicans made missteps and suffered for them, so it’s worth pointing out how Republicans can recover and succeed in 2014 and beyond. In short, they must adopt an agenda— and run on it.

Senate Democrats, including those up for reelection in 2014, voted three years ago against removing a grandfather rule from Obamacare. Because that rule remains in the law, insurance companies are being forced to cancel policies that don't comply with the Obamacare regulations. CNN's Chris Frates…

Matthew Continetti writes at the Washington Free Beacon on Hillary Clinton's cozy relationship with the investment banker types at places like Goldman Sachs:

Although CO2 is considered a "greenhouse gas" that contributes to climate change, if the Energy Department (DOE) finds partners to capitalize on the research of one of its laboratories, someday cars might run on sunshine.  Technically, cars would run on the product of sunlight, CO2, and water using…