[The Scene: A cozy room lit with a roaring fireplace. Santa sits at his desk, looking over his paperwork, a smoking pipe and a cup of hot chocolate at his elbow. Head Elf enters the room, and speaks to Mr. Claus.]

"OK, big guy, you keep putting it off, but we have got to get to the Washington naughty/nice list. It's almost time to load the sleigh, and we've got to issue orders to the Toy Room."

Santa sighs deeply. "You're right, I've been procrastinating too long. Well, draw nigh and let's see what they've asked for this year."

Head Elf whips out an iPad. Santa leans over to take a look. "Hey is that the new model?"

"Yeah, Steve Jobs got me a beta unit to play with... nice, eh?"

"Steve's been the greatest help this year, I have to admit. The North Pole is indeed Heaven for Steve, coming up with insanely great ideas for new toys for all the girls and boys. But let's get to it... who's on the list?"

"Barack Obama asked for..."

"Let me guess: a second term?"

"No, no, he asked for a quickly-falling unemployment rate for America. In his letter, he says he wants America back to work, and he figures the re-election will take care of itself if we can get unemployment below 7.5 percent by the election."

"How the heck am I supposed to wrap something like that, much less get it down the chimney? Never mind... who's next?"

Continue Reading »

Once again, we're tying something new with our annual awards columns, by asking for your nominees in advance. We got plenty of good suggestions last week, and we're hoping to get a few more this week.

Here are the categories for the second installment of our year-end awards. The column will run this Friday, instead of our usual talking points of the week. So put on your thinking caps, review the year that was, and let everyone know who (or what) you'd nominate for the following awards.

Continue Reading »

American troops are, finally, out of Iraq. The war is technically over. Our men and women in uniform will be home for the holidays. This is all good news, and is worth celebrating by a nation weary of decade-long wars.

As with everything to do with Iraq, the end of the war isn't without its own controversy. Voices from the left ominously warn that with thousands of security contractors remaining behind, the war isn't really over. Voices from the right ominously warn that the war is being "lost" even though most Americans are beyond caring how they're exactly defining a win or a loss at this advanced date.

I'm going to set these arguments to one side, however, since I don't think either one is immediately resolvable at this point (more time will be needed to see whose predictions come true, to put it another way). I'm also going to set aside the emotional question of whether Iraq was "worth it" or not (which is highly subjective, depending on how you personally define "worth it"). Instead, to mark the milestone of the last American troops to leave Iraq, I'd like to take a wider view and look at the entire region, post-Saddam and post-Arab Spring.

Continue Reading »

For the next two Fridays, instead of our usual nonsense here, we bring you instead our year-end awards columns. The categories for these awards are presented as an homage to the television show The McLaughlin Group, because they thought them up in the first place.

At this point, it seems 2011 was the "year of the primary debate," since the precedent set by Republicans this year for seemingly having a debate every week for six months will likely be followed for every election cycle to come. But that's just because it is fresh in everyone's mind -- a lot of other things happened this year which bear mentioning, so let's get right to the awards.

As always, if you disagree with any (or all) of my picks, feel free to make your own in the comments. The categories are completely open to interpretation, and don't forget that there will be a "Part 2" column next week, so I can likely squeeze things I forgot in there.

For reference, before I begin, here are the previous iterations of this column, should you want to go even further back upon Memory Lane:

2010 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]
2009 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]
2008 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]
2007 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]
2006 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]

   Biggest Winner Of 2011

As always, we're tempted to just hand the award to Wall Street and be done with it. Seems like they emerge winners no matter what else is happening (sigh).

We could also give it as a generic, for the idea of "running for president as self-promotion" -- an idea whose time has obviously come. The list of characters who used a run for the president as a clever method to sell books or television shows is quite impressive this year, in fact, and includes Donald Trump and Sarah Palin (even though neither one actually ran), as well as Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich who both shoehorned a run for the Oval Office into their pre-scheduled book tours.

Or we could define the award category as "the biggest absolute value of a win" and hand the award to Representative Kathy Hochul, who captured a seat in the House of Representatives (NY-26) that had been held by Republicans since the Civil War.

But instead we're going to interpret it more literally, and not politically. Militarily, in fact. The Biggest Winner Of 2011 was a combination of the Libyan rebels and N.A.T.O. airpower. You won't hear the line "airpower alone never wins wars" much in Washington anymore, one assumes, after the spectacularly quick victory by an untrained group of rebels in combination with high-tech precision bombing by the allies. No matter what happens to the actual government of Libyan in the future, the victory of the rebels, taken alone, has to be seen as the biggest winner of the year. From our point of view, this was about as good as war gets -- no American boots on the ground, no American fatalities, and the entire cost was nothing more than a rounding error in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Win-win, all around. Except for Ghaddafi, of course.

Continue Reading »

Two hundred and twenty years ago today (perhaps I should say "eleven score years ago...") America ratified the Bill of Rights -- the first ten amendments to our Constitution. Today we're all supposed to celebrate this achievement in American politics by making full use of our First Amendment rights of free speech (and, for me, the press).

Instead, I'd like to gently point out that the same Founding Fathers that achieved this monumental milestone in government (some of them, at least) were the same ones who tried to eviscerate these same basic protections -- within seven years of the Bill of Rights' ratification.

I speak, of course, of the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. Within the first decade of Americans enjoying the Bill of Rights, one political faction tried to silence its opposition by instituting severe government censorship on newspapers and printers. "The press" is the only industry specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights. It was the only private enterprise to be singled out as a basic human right. And -- in peacetime, no less -- it was the first to be attacked politically. In times of war, America almost always throws a large portion of the Bill of Rights out the window (see: every war we've ever fought, pretty much), but the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were passed when America was, technically at least, at peace.

Continue Reading »

'Tis the season to once again draw nigh and engage in our annual ridiculousness over the "War on Christmas," it seems. My fellow Huffington Post blogger Jeff Schweitzer has a rundown on what this all means, for anyone unaware that such a conflict is happening in America -- or, at the very least, in the minds of some Americans.

But just because the modern-day "War on Christmas" may not, in fact, exist does not mean that such a war never existed in America. The subject of Christmas was indeed at the heart of a previous bitter political dispute, but you've got to go pretty far back in time to find it. All the way back to the New England Puritans.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded, as we all know, on religious intolerance. Yes, you read that right. Contrary to what we are all taught as schoolchildren, the colony was not, in fact, founded on the principles of tolerance in worship. Far from it. In fact, the Puritans were actually fleeing such religious tolerance in the Netherlands (because they were, quite rightfully, afraid their children would be so influenced by this tolerance that they'd leave their parents' stiff and intolerant religious sect -- which the children simply wouldn't be able to do in the New World). To make sure they wouldn't be tempted by such intolerance in their new home, they went about legislating their version of Christianity to rule over the colony.

Continue Reading »

Hot on the heels of yesterday's contest, we're once again going to our readers for suggestions. This Friday and next Friday will be our annual hijacking of the year-end awards categories from The McLaughlin Group. So it's time to review the year, and come up with some names to fill the following slots.

Feel free to suggest anyone or anything you'd like. The only rules of interpretation for what the categories mean are your own. If I think they're the best suggestion I've heard, I may use some of your suggestions in this Friday's column. We'll be returning to this subject next week, for part two, with a whole new set of categories. For now, who would you select for any or all of the following? Post your choices in the comments!

Biggest Winner of 2011

Biggest Loser of 2011

Best Politician

Worst Politician

Most Defining Political Moment

Turncoat Of The Year

Most Boring

Most Charismatic

Bummest Rap

Fairest Rap

Best Comeback

Most Original Thinker

Most Stagnant Thinker

Best Photo Op

Worst Photo Op

Enough Already!

Worst Lie

Capitalist Of The Year

Honorable Mention

Person Of The Year

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Peggy Noonan, a consummate Washington insider with impeccable conservative credentials, recently came up with a nice turn of phrase to describe Newt Gingrich: "He is a human hand grenade who walks around with his hand on the pin, saying, 'Watch this!' " Back in Newt's heyday, the comic strip Doonesbury portrayed Gingrich as a lit bomb with a short fuse, who would occasionally explode with a bang. Right and Left seem to be in agreement on Newt's resemblance to trinitrotoluene, in other words (or, maybe, "Newtroglycerine"?). Which leaves only one key question to be answered: When, exactly, will this "Newtsplosion" take place?

Seeing how it's an interesting test of political prognostication, and seeing as how we haven't done one in a while, we're going to hold our very own "Call The Newtsplosion" contest. First we're going to outline the possible impact on the presidential race in a few wide ranges (so we all understand what the Newtsplosion's timing will mean), and then we're going to throw the contest open to all commenters at the end.

So, ready to play? Here we go....

Continue Reading »

We've got quite a few awards to hand out this week, so we're going to just quickly note two events from the past week, and move right along. Oh, and as for this week's article title, well, it just felt appropriate, somehow. I promise, by the end, we'll have at least one blatant Alice In Wonderland reference to justify it, OK?

The week dawned with the exit of Herman Cain from the Republican nomination battle. Cain, love him or hate him, will be missed on the campaign trail because he had two qualities most of the other Republicans are sorely lacking: personality and cheerfulness. Cain was a character, you have to admit. And -- right up until he had to defend himself from the echoes of his social life -- he was almost always smiling and upbeat. After his sex life entered the discussion, he looked a lot more annoyed and a lot less cheerful, but while it lasted Cain was a bright spot in the Republican field of snoozers and the Uncles McGrumpy (and Aunt Shrill). So Cain will be missed, at least for that.

That wacky gang of Republicans running the House of Representatives acted swiftly and decisively this week -- to overturn a big, bad environmental rule that didn't actually exist. At some point, this morphs from sheer ridiculousness into downright Swiftian satire. Or, perhaps, "clinical paranoia" (but then I am no doctor and do not even play one on the internet, so I'll leave such sweeping conclusions to others). Seriously, we pay these guys for this? Sigh.

You know, it strikes me that this week may be one politics-watchers look back on when proving the thesis: "Anything can happen in politics, and usually does." I can picture seeing some wise pundit a few years down the road making the historical reference: "Yeah, but remember when Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul were leading the polls in the Iowa caucuses? Anything can happen... just anything..."

Continue Reading »

[Program Note: Two-and-a-half years ago, I wrote the following column, hoping that the Obama administration was going to live up to its promise to have a "science-based" drug policy. I spoke of two examples: medical marijuana, and the "morning after" pill. Today seemed a real good day to re-run this column. While some on the Left are expressing surprise and outrage over Kathleen Sebelius' recent overturning of the FDA's scientific conclusion on the morning-after pill, some of us weren't so surprised because we've been paying attention to this from the beginning of Obama's term. Politics, sadly, has trumped science in the Obama administration's drug policies -- as it has in all previous administrations. Anyway, here's a trip down memory lane, for those interested. Two points about the article: the links to the White House site are old and may not work. Also, there is an update at the end about the question Obama did answer at his press event.]

[Originally published 3/25/09]

President Obama is taking your questions now, and will answer them tomorrow. In a move to make Obama more accessible and answerable to the public, the White House web site is soliciting questions from the public for Obama to answer on their new "Open For Questions" page. So, given the opportunity, what question would you ask the president? Personally, I would choose: "Will drug policy be included in your new science-based approach to government, or will you let politics continue to trump science in this arena?" Because there have been two specific news items in the past few weeks, and while they are almost completely unrelated, they both come from the "science/politics" debate on drugs. The first is the "morning after" pill, and the second is medical marijuana.

Continue Reading »