First, take a look at the first three-place shows by %
in IA, NH, SC and FL in 2008, and IA and NH in 2012:

Iowa
08/Huckabee-34, Romney-25, Thompson-13
12/Romney-24, Santorum-24, Paul-21

New Hampshire
08/McCain-37, Romney-31, Huckabee-11
12/Romney-39, Paul-23, Hunstman-17

Results summary....

Romney, 2 firsts, and 3 seconds; McCain, 3 firsts.
And no one in any of these six contests won as much as Romney, 39%, this year in NH, with a 16-point spread over number two Ron Paul, about twice the next highest (1st/2nd) point spread among the six contests, which Huckabee had over Romney in 2008 in IA. And McCain’s point spread in his three first place wins ranged from only 3 to 6%.

So why is Romney getting so much grief for not being able to achieve some kind of loving consensus behind his candidacy in the early contests, when McCain did no better and arguably worse by the same measure in 2008?

A divided Republican Party
The fault, I would argue, lies not in Romney, but in a Republican Party more divided than it has been since Barry Goldwater’s supporters shouted down Nelson Rockefeller at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964.

Romney has the Olympic-sized challenge of trying to corral four herds of conservative cats:

–Main Street/Wall Street balanced budgeteers
–Christianist culture warriors
–Latter day libertarians
–Big government, war-making neo-cons

Ronald Reagan, it is true, had to deal with the first three of those (with neo-cons waiting in the wings.) But he had three unifying, threatening menaces to fuse together the warring camps: The Soviet Reds, big government red ink, and Republicans seeing red whenever they contemplated the Internal Revenue Service. So he was able to pull off the feats of driving up big deficits, hated by Main Street, with anti-Commie defense spending; placating culture warriors with soothing lip service; and mollifying deficit-hawk economic libertarians with big tax cuts--while still keeping them all together in an electoral coalition.

Republicans have lost the Commies as their unifying bete noire; the Christianists lost the culture war Pat Buchanan declared in 1992, reaching their apogee in 1994 when they helped the GOP win back the House, and are now reduced to begging for attention; latter day libertarians like Ron Paul are now focused on keeping the government out of bedrooms and Baghdad, as well as bank accounts; and the oxymoronic “big government conservative” neo-cons have infuriated the economic conservatives of all stripes, including the Tea Partiers.

With that internecine warfare, Mitt Romney has little choice but to try to please all the internal factions with rhetoric, just as Bill Clinton had to herd left-liberal and identity politics felines in 1992 as a “New Democrat,” while triangulating to appeal to the center of the general election electorate. Obama has tried to do the same thing, but without Slick Willy’s political skills and his ability to seduce women, men and pets (I think Dee Dee Myers said that.)

The amazing thing in this Republican primary cycle is not that Romney is not loved; it’s that he is traversing the GOP mine field fairly skillfully, while running a reasonably good general election campaign during the primary season.

Among presidential wannabe's dubbed by the press as the seven dwarfs, the top three contenders got about three-quarters of the Iowa caucus vote--a congressman, a senator, and a Massachusetts governor (considered cold and analytical.) I'm referring, of course, to 1988: Dick Gephardt, Paul Simon, and the eventual nominee, behind whom the party coalesced, Michael Dukakis.

I understand why political journalists, pundits and conservative Republican ideologues hallucinate that the 2012 GOP contest isn't over, because they have professional and philosophical stakes in keeping it going. (It's called "confirmation bias" in scientific research.) But it's obviously ready for a fork! Is it difficult for any experienced observer to recognize the two issues that will unify the party behind Romney, a disastrous economy, and GOP hate for Obama?

A general election campaign is...duh!...about appealing to the center, and Romney has perfectly positioned himself to run toward the independents he'll need to challenge the incumbent, saddled not only with a disastrous economy, but with a base distressed about a 2008 peace candidate-turned 2009 war maker.

1988 was a very different year, with America at peace and a solid economy, but even with that, the third Reagan term could have been denied if Dukakis hadn't run one of the truly horrible campaigns in the modern era of presidential races. Second time around, Romney is running an excellent race, this time resisting his 2008 blunder of pandering to the social conservatives. He is staying on his economic message--letting Ann and the boys showcase his "family values."

Romney is making one big mistake, being hawkish on Iran, ignoring the overwhelming centrist opposition to more interventionism, which Ron Paul's support is reflecting.

Obama got a virtual free pass to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. four years ago with a nasty septuagenarian as his opponent. But the guy with industrial strength hair, a picture-perfect family, and a clearly moderate record is bad news for the incumbent, whose party is already on the ropes from 2010. As for the "health care mandate," it doesn't hurt Romney. It just neutralizes the mandate question, and lets him still run to the right, and to the center, with a promise to repeal the federal version.

And by the way....
The Iowa "ceiling" for the sitting Massachusetts governor in 1988: 22 percent, and he came in third! And in his neighboring state of New Hampshire, the Massachusetts Miracle governor and eventual Democratic nominee ended up with just 36% of the vote, with Dick Gephardt and Paul Simon splitting 38% (Romney has been around 40% in recent NH surveys.)

A libertarian alert: At their peril, both political parties and the press ignore the emerging libertarian center reflected in Ron Paul's youth brigade. I explained how Obama could have appealed to the classical liberalism of Jefferson (the founder of the Democratic Party!), now known as "libertarianism," in this piece for Reason.com in mid-September 2008.

It amuses and appalls me how clueless journalists--protectors of conventional wisdom and defenders of the status quo--ridicule libertarianism and treat it as unworthy of serious consideration, as something Martian-like descending from the heavens. For them, I would recommend my libertarian Democrat manifesto. As Dave Barry would say (he did write something like this but I can't find the damned quote): "You gotta' hand it to American journalists. They almost always get all their facts right. But they almost never get the story."

No worries, Mitt Dukakis.
Even if Gin-grinch steals Iowa Xmas,
it's 1988 deja vu all over again.

Just saw latest polls from Iowa 2012 GOP nomination contest
via “POLITICO Breaking News”--
“With just over a month to go, a new Des Moines Register poll of likely Iowa caucus voters released Saturday shows Newt Gingrich surging to first place, at 25 percent. Ron Paul is in second place, with 18 percent, while Mitt Romney has fallen to third place, at 16 percent. Michele Bachmann had 8 percent, as did Herman Cain, who suspended his campaign Saturday. Rick Perry and Rick Santorum were tied at 6 percent.”

Take a look at the final results in 1988 (when I worked for Paul Simon as communications director, so I remember it well):

February 8, 1988
Dick Gephardt (31%), Paul Simon (27%), Michael Dukakis (22%)
Bob Dole (37%), Pat Robertson (25%), George H. W. Bush (19%)

If I were Mitt Romney, I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over the Des Moines Register poll. The third place guys were the nominees. Deja vu all over again? A Massachusetts governor vs. the (sort of) incumbent?

We almost never elect, let alone nominate, sitting members of Congress for president: Garfield, 1880; Harding, 1920; Kennedy, 1960; and Obama, 2008. And, although Gingrinch is not sitting in Congress, he is the embodiment of a congressional approach to governance, complete with a K Street after-life and an appetite for Tiffany bling. He has never run anything except his mouth. The Grinch could steal Iowa just after Christmas, but the good little boys and girls of the Republican Party will be welcoming Santa Mitt for a late New Hampshire Christmas and New Year's Eve Party.

Pastor Perry--Godsend
to Mormon Mitt?

by Terry Michael

If he gets past Romney for the nomination, Perry's Bible-thumping may be the diversion from a hell-ish economy President Barack Obama needs to fire up a secularist Democratic base and appeal to younger, less religious independent voters -- especially as Perry's "job-producing" record is increasingly revealed as that of a tax-revenue-bestowing, special-interest corporatist, rather than a free-market conservative.

In a 2007 survey of 35,000 adults, Pew Research found a quarter of 18- to 29-year-olds had no religious affiliation. And one in 10 Americans self-identified as either agnostic, atheist or "secular unaffiliated." In both the Republican Party and the general electorate, God doesn't have the influence he used to, four decades after religious conservatives began pushing back through politics against abortion and the sexual revolution.

Too Cute to fail?
Surveying the 2012 GOP
presidential field

The 2012 Republican presidential wannabes may not have Mount Rushmore-ready leadership skills, but they're an unusually fine-looking bunch of politicians.

And that’s not even counting two of the hottest, but as yet undeclared candidates: Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the not-gay caballero on the Rio Grande, and former Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin, the not-Tina Fey, briefly employed as Alaska’s chief executive.

Observing this mind-numbing, made for cable-babble political pageant, those in the business of reporting politics as a spectator sport might ask, “Are these future commanders-in-chief just too cute to fail?”

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

A July 4th
Postcard to the President

It’s been a tough few years for us anti-interventionist libertarian Democrats (all six of us). Our split-every-difference, poll-driven, focus-groping president has started an elective second war in Afghanistan, continued (but pretended not to) an inherited disaster in Iraq, and initiated a third pointless, congressionally unauthorized, guns-a-blazing big adventure in the play land of an aging drag queen in Libya.

Sixty-something anti-war baby boomers will recall a bit of 1965 black humor in the disappointing aftermath of Democratic peace candidate Lyndon Johnson’s trouncing of Republican war hawk Barry Goldwater: “They told me if I voted for Goldwater in 1964 we’d be at war in Vietnam within a year. They were right. I did, and we were.”

The most recent Democratic president—a Nobel Peace Prize winner, no less!—announced his own war less than a year after inauguration, bravely speaking to an audience of approving teenage West Point cadets in December 2009. Bowing to demands of the military-industrial-congressional complex after several months of hand-wringing, President Barack Obama chose a theater for his military adventure not far from those Vietnam jungles, a few B-52 or F-16 flying hours across South Asia, in the tribal hills of the sort-of nation state of Afghanistan. There came the new boss, just like the old boss.

So the joke can now be updated: They told me if I voted for McCain in 2008, we’d be in a perpetual state of war within a year. They were right. I did and....well, you know the punch line.

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

As one who founded (22 years ago) and continues to operate a journalism-related non-profit/501(c)(3), I offer this commentary and some suggestions with regard to the NPR fund-raising debacle and the continuing debate over taxpayer funding of "public" broadcasting. I do so as an admirer of great reporting by dedicated journalists at both NPR and PBS, and their local stations.

Let me begin by observing and commenting on what an NPR spokeswoman had to say about a fund-raising employee (Betsy Liley, NPR's senior director of institutional giving), who suggested the corporation might shield a donor with anonymity:

An NPR spokeswoman, Anna Christopher, had no comment on the phone recording. But she said: "All donations, anonymous and named, are reported to the IRS. NPR complies fully with all tax and financial disclosure regulations."

Those are weasel words. I know them when I see them, having spent 16 years as a political press secretary.

Running a 501(c)(3), I am familiar with filing Form 990's. I've spent countless hours filling them out for over two decades. We list our donors over $5,000--names, addresses and amounts--on Schedule B of the Form 990--but the IRS does not make that public! When we post a copy of WCPJ's Form 990 on our web site, we voluntarily include the Schedule B...
http://www.wcpj.org/annual_report/Form990_2009_WCPJ.pdf
...because we believe in full transparency.

For two decades, we have made complete PUBLIC reports of every single donation and every single expenditure, by line-item. That should be REQUIRED BY LAW for all organizations that claim tax exemptions, and particularly by those to which donors can make tax deductible gifts. Over the last 22 years, several individual donors have asked that their names not be released by WCPJ. In each case, the gift was $500 or less, and we listed the amount with the word "Anonymous" in our regular reports of gifts, making the judgment that the donor either didn't want to be solicited by others, or just didn't want to brag about his giving. In no case have we ever accepted an anonymous gift from an institution.

The Washington Center for Politics & Journalism has never sought a government grant and never will, as long as I lead it. We (I) do it the old-fashioned way, begging benefactors to give money if they believe in our mission. And then we let everyone decide whether a gift or an expenditure compromises that mission.

With that background, here are my suggestions to NPR, PBS, CPB, et al......

(1) Wean yourselves off taxpayer crack. Tell the politicians who give you government grants that doing so compromises your ability to cover them objectively. You would never accept politicians making grants to The Washington Post, so why should you get them? Ask legislators and presidents to phase out federal funding for all "public broadcasting" over the next three years, which will give you a reasonable amount of time to come down from your addiction.

(2) End the fiction that "support provided by" is not advertising. That is a euphemism, which allows your benefactors to hide the amounts of their donations in the secret part of your Form 990 filings. Accept advertising, but publicly disclose every cent you get from advertisers, just as your reporters expect politicians to do so, when they file their FEC reports on campaign contributions. Your listeners and viewers can then decide for themselves whether your reporting has been compromised by your benefactors. That transparency occurs everyday in the profit-making newspaper and magazine business, when a reader can decide for himself whether The New York Times or Newsweek is being influenced by money it gets from advertisers who appear right next to news, analysis and opinion reports.

(3) Continue to operate as non-profits, if you must. You can do that and still take money from advertisers, as well as donors. Doing so frees you from that awful pressure of having to make a profit by satisfying customers--though a lot of good profit-making newspapers and broadcast networks still deliver excellent reporting to their customers, despite seeking that filthy lucre.

Call this Terry Michael's three-step program for ending the addictions of "public" broadcasting.

The End of the American Century
It's time to practice Jeffersonian
libertarianism at home and abroad

Though its first decade began with a security nightmare in lower Manhattan and ended with an economic collapse blocks away on Wall Street, the 21st century can still bring greater peace, prosperity, and individual liberty if American libertarians seize this moment in history. We must echo President Dwight Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” warnings in his January 17, 1961 farewell address and we must counter the “American Century” conceit still plaguing us from Henry R. Luce’s Life magazine editorial of February 17, 1941, the 70th anniversary of which is now upon us.

The contrast between Eisenhower’s historically informed wisdom and Luce’s jingoistic missionary zeal offer an opportunity for serious discourse beyond the empty choices presented by bloated government liberals and big government conservatives. Both “sides” pretend they want to downsize the fat federal beast, just as they both sell interventionist foreign policy with flag-waving “support the troops” propaganda.

More alike than not, Democrats and Republicans serve the narrow interests of the “government affairs representatives” who infest Washington’s K Street lobbying firms. They pander to both the procurers of middle- and elderly-class entitlements and to the rent seekers from scare-mongering national security industries, who profiteer from a permanent state of empire-building and elective warfare.

Mr. Obama's war
Why don't anti-war Democrats
support soldiers, straight and gay?

Liberal Democrats in Congress fought hard for open service by homosexual soldiers, persuading some Republican politicians that it was politically smart to catch up with a fast-moving culture. So now, when will the theoretically anti-war party in Congress use its constitutionally mandated war powers to legislate against President Obama's elective atrocity in Afghanistan? When will they speak out for bringing home from that corrupt hellhole all the troops, straight and homosexual, young men and women, lingering in harm's way for no discernible national purpose after routing the Taliban a decade ago?

Mr. Obama was nominated by Democrats and elected by partisans and independents precisely because he presented himself as the noninterventionist in a field dominated by "liberal internationalist" warriors like Joseph R. Biden and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Inscrutably to those who thought they were electing an anti-war president, he then proceeded to form a government with a vice president and a secretary of state from the "neo-con lite" wing of the Democratic Party, the foreign-policy "experts" who are part of a self-proclaimed Beltway consensus perpetuating the liberty-threatening permanent state of war James Madison counseled against two centuries ago.

My tart-tongued mother, of Scotch-Irish mixed-with-German descent, and with Southern Illinois wisdom to boot, would have had some good advice for President Barack Obama’s political message consultants had she lived to see the craziness of 2010 politics: "You can't turn shit into Shinola." And not just this bizarre year but every year, her son tells his political journalism students, "Money follows message. Not the other way around."

To summarize: No amount of dirty Chamber of Commerce foreign money—conjured up by the White House a few weeks ago in a vain attempt to fire up left-liberals—could create the crappy set of electorally damaging facts that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid visited on both the Democratic base and the relatively apolitical center of American politics over the past 22 months.

In other words, "It's the policies, stupid!" that have created the forthcoming November disaster for Democrats, not some failure to communicate.

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

It’s not the economy, it’s the war, stupid!

I’m talkin’ to you, Democrats in the House and Senate. Scores of you are about to lose your jobs, while the rest forfeit coveted committee chairmanships because you don’t realize the way to avoid defeat is to appeal to your base with an anti-war message.

No smoke and mirrors in the next seven weeks will convince Republican, independent, and conservative-leaning centrists—the motivated voters of 2010—that President Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats have a plan to restore home equity and retirement savings, stimulate investment, and reduce unemployment. Those are functions of the business cycle, impacted by the irrational exuberance that fueled the illusion that real estate and stock values could rise forever. Tea Partiers may irrationally blame Democrats for most of that pain, but they’re certain big government—especially ObamaPelosiCare—is making things worse.

Read original here....

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

“Man Accused of spraying semen led a normal life. Suspect never had any issues. Showed no indication of bizarre behavior.”

You just read the headline and sub-heds for a story in the Metro section of last Sunday's (August 15, 2010) issue of the ink-on-dead-trees edition of The Washington Post. It led the front page of a section charged with reporting important District of Columbia news. It did so only four weeks until a local election, featuring a Post-endorsed young mayor who seems to think DC’s treasury is his personal piggybank for friends--though you wouldn’t necessarily know much about that from the meager space devoted to Mayor Adrian Fenty’s alleged transgressions. But I digress....

Don't Eat the Rich,
President Obama

Terry Michael | July 31 , 2010

WASHINGTON -- Keeping the Bush tax cuts from expiring at the end of the year would be both good policy and good politics for President Barack Obama.

If he wants to avoid a double-dip recession, fend off double-digit unemployment and retain a Democratic majority in at least one house of Congress, the president needs to embrace tax policy focused on the political center. He can throw out a little populist red meat to his demoralized base, but he'd better not taunt the middle-class Tea Party monster ready to devour left-liberal congressmen. The president can skewer Wall Street, but not eat the rich.

There may be a good time to raise taxes on the super-wealthy, but Dec. 31, 2010, when the Bush tax cuts expire, sure as hell isn't one of them. Obama's market-savvy fellow Democrat and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D, N.D.) acknowledges that. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner understands it, even if he can't say it. Job-producing investment demands it.

Anybody with a lick of political economic sense knows the Great Recession was not caused by low tax rates. It was the mortgage meltdown, stupid! Housing-bust-driven loss of home equity and mutual-fund retirement savings are the caffeine that stimulated the aging Baby Boomer, vote-rich, amorphous Tea Party. ...

In Defense of Libertarianism
An open letter to left-liberals

Terry Michael | May 28, 2010

To my left-liberal Democrat friends:

As you engage in intellectual dishonesty using Rand Paul’s silly comments on the 1964 Civil Rights Act to misrepresent libertarianism, perhaps you might want to consider a little history of the political philosophy of the founder of our party, Thomas Jefferson, the original libertarian. Let me help you escape your ignorance about libertarianism without a capital L, a political philosophy far from conservatism.

As a child of the 1960s, I was one of you. I wore a “Madly for Adlai” button, delivered Kennedy brochures on my newspaper route, and defended Medicare in speech class. Growing up in the Bible Belt, I was the only kid in town to subscribe to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a near-communist rag according to neighbors who read the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, for which a young Pat Buchanan was writing editorials.

After three years of reporting, I became a press secretary, arriving in Washington in 1975 with Rep. Paul Simon who embodied the Progressive Era. He believed programs, regulations, and social “science” expertise could lift the poor and end corruption.

Read more here....

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

******************

Lies of the Ethics Industry
How the champions of "good government" suppress speech
and sow cynicism

Our 21st century politics might be regarded as an ethical golden age—at least in contrast to the corruption of the 19th century, when senators were on railroad payrolls and urban machines pilfered public treasuries. Yet according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, only 22 percent of citizens now trust government "almost always or most of the time."

Ironically, the trust deficit is partly a result of the very transparency rules adopted to encourage confidence in government. Enacted after some idiots in Richard Nixon's White House broke into the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee—apparently guided by the aphorism "nothing's too cheap to steal"—transparency laws were supposed to shine light on the influence of cash. Which they did. But they also left an even bigger impression that money is the root of all public policy evil.

Read more here....

A Nanny State Assault on Internship Programs
The trouble with the Labor Department's one-size-fits-all agenda.

As if I didn’t have enough to worry about raising money for my non-profit college journalism education program in this lousy economy, the nanny state is now threatening my Politics & Journalism Semester with one-size-fits-all regulations written for the blue collar employment era.

Twenty-one years ago, I founded, and still run, a semester-in-Washington effort to teach real world politics (maybe an oxymoron) to college journalists who want to be political reporters. In spring and fall classes of 16 weeks each, I give my dozen students a twice-weekly seminar series featuring top political practitioners and political journalists. The rest of the week, they work in news bureaus as interns, usually unpaid. Few of them receive college credit, and many have already graduated. I guarantee each a $3000 living expense stipend if they aren’t paid, and don’t charge any tuition or fees. Generally, my “graduates” have nothing but praise for the experience, reflected in hundreds of them making personal donations to our 501(c)(3) non-profit, which has a budget of about $250,000 per year.

Read more here....

Elective Wars.
Brought to you with a little help from
our friends in the MainStreamMedia.

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) let his anger get the best of him recently, when he exploded at America’s press for obsessing on a disgraced congressman while blood and treasure is spilled for a corrupt U.S. client government in Afghanistan. But Kennedy got it mostly right, despite his over-the-top angry tone.

Years ago, America’s now decimated newspapers and broadcast news divisions shut down all but a handful of foreign bureaus, leaving international coverage to flag-waving Cable TV anchors, embedding themselves with troops to market their “shows.” American journalism has scant resources--and even less will--to investigate foreign affairs.

With military boosterism substituting for intelligent foreign policy coverage, America’s mainstream media has made itself the propaganda organ for a phony bi-partisan, military and congressional industrial complex.

"We've got a government in a box, ready to roll in," Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, told The New York Times last week about the largest military offensive since an American-led coalition invaded the country in 2001. Six thousand U.S. Marines, plus British and Afghan forces, descended on a Taliban stronghold in Marja, in the southern Helmand Province, a mission described as a "test" of America’s new counter-insurgency strategy designed to win over civilians and establish order, all while chasing away or killing Taliban fighters.

Government in a box? What a foolish thing to say, what hubris. Ironically, it’s probably more truth than the general wanted to reveal about American manipulation of the Afghan "government." But what should we expect when we put a military commander—underscore the word commander—in charge of a nation-building folly. Apparently, the general thinks you can bring in a government as easily as he requisitions more meals-ready-to-eat for his troops.

Of course, we’ll get a result as tasty as those MREs. The outcome will be what any intelligent observer with a sense of history will understand--a client government in name only, in a failed non-state, rife with corruption. If that sounds familiar, you probably know what we tried unsuccessfully with an earlier American client regime, in “South” Vietnam in the early 1960s. And it’s what another general touted by the Military Industrial Complex, David Petraeus, did with his rent-a-bad-guy “counterinsurgency strategy” in Iraq, heralded by neocon loonies as the “victory” for their elective war.

Read more here....

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

On first year failures
of President Barack Obama....
(from RT TV, February 12, 2010)

A Back to the Future
Jeffersonian Liberalism
How the Democrats can thrive in the Information Age

Hopes dashed by the first-year bumblings of Barack Obama and three big GOP victories in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, Democratic campaign strategists, policy-mongers, and populist fire-breathers are touting formulas for party renewal. Nothing new here. Re-branding has been a cottage industry for Democrats since Lyndon Johnson dashed liberal dreams of wealth redistribution with his war in the 1960s, and mush-mouthed Democrats abandoned the toxic “L” word and started calling themselves “progressives" in the 1970s and 1980s.

While short-term thinking, focused on the November election, will dominate Beltway chatter about re-tooling Obama's legislative agenda, Democrats desperately need a new informing ideology to replace the 19th and 20th Century brand of statist programmatic liberalism rejected by the political center, in a choice-demanding information age.
..... Read all here:
Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

Health Care Reform (HCR) died Jan. 19 in Massachusetts, shortly before his 19th birthday. He was a victim of a mass suicide pact by economic left-liberals swilling Kool-Aid ..... Read all here:
Original Washington Times Link or PDF File

Pastor Perry--Godsend
to Mormon Mitt?

by Terry Michael

Too Cute to fail?
Surveying the 2012 GOP
presidential field

A July 4th
Postcard to the President

The End of the American Century
It's time to practice Jeffersonian
libertarianism at home and abroad

Mr. Obama's war
Why don't anti-war Democrats
support soldiers, straight and gay?

Don't Eat the Rich,
President Obama

Terry Michael | July 31 , 2010

WASHINGTON -- Keeping the Bush tax cuts from expiring at the end of the year would be both good policy and good politics for President Barack Obama.

In Defense of Libertarianism
An open letter to left-liberals

******************

Lies of the Ethics Industry
How the champions of "good government" suppress speech
and sow cynicism

Down the Health Care Wormhole

How ObamaPelosiCare
will saddle future generations
with a public policy disaster

A Nanny State Assault on Internship Programs
The trouble with the Labor Department's one-size-fits-all agenda.

A Back to the Future
Jeffersonian Liberalism
How the Democrats can thrive in the Information Age

Pastor Perry--Godsend to Mormon Mitt?

by Terry Michael

Too Cute to fail? Surveying the 2012 GOP presidential field

A July 4th Postcard to the President

The End of the American Century It's time to practice Jeffersonian libertarianism at home and abroad

Mr. Obama's war Why don't anti-war Democrats support soldiers, straight and gay?

Don't Eat the Rich, President Obama

Terry Michael | July 31 , 2010 WASHINGTON -- Keeping the Bush tax cuts from expiring at the end of the year would be both good policy and good politics for President Barack Obama.

In Defense of Libertarianism An open letter to left-liberals

******************

Lies of the Ethics Industry How the champions of "good government" suppress speech and sow cynicism

Down the Health Care Wormhole

How ObamaPelosiCare will saddle future generations with a public policy disaster

A Nanny State Assault on Internship Programs The trouble with the Labor Department's one-size-fits-all agenda.

A Back to the Future Jeffersonian Liberalism How the Democrats can thrive in the Information Age

Pastor Perry--Godsend
to Mormon Mitt?

Too Cute to fail?
Surveying the 2012 GOP
presidential field

A July 4th
Postcard to the President

The End of the American Century
It's time to practice Jeffersonian
libertarianism at home and abroad

Mr. Obama's war
Why don't anti-war Democrats
support soldiers, straight and gay?

Don't Eat the Rich,
President Obama

Terry Michael | July 31 , 2010

WASHINGTON -- Keeping the Bush tax cuts from expiring at the end of the year would be both good policy and good politics for President Barack Obama.

In Defense of Libertarianism
An open letter to left-liberals

Lies of the Ethics Industry
How the champions of "good government" suppress speech
and sow cynicism

How ObamaPelosiCare
will saddle future generations
with a public policy disaster

A Nanny State Assault on Internship Programs
The trouble with the Labor Department's one-size-fits-all agenda.

A Back to the Future
Jeffersonian Liberalism
How the Democrats can thrive in the Information Age