There is an unprecedented dream-like quality to this year’s mid-term national
elections. Normally, regardless of political conditions, the two sides engage in a
comprehensible back-and-forth competition for votes. On some occasions this
produces a one-sided result, but there is at least some kind of debate about issues
and the record of those in power, [...]

A family is a living novel. Only a few families’ sagas are ever
written down; even fewer are ever published and read, but every
family has come directly from the first families whenever they
arose and wherever they emerged on this little planet hurtling
through vast and incomprehensible space in what we call [...]

Less noted in the discussion this year’s mid-term elections, preoccupied as it
has been with party labels (and which party will be in control of the senate next
January), have been signs of rejuvenation in the Democratic Party’s centrist wing.
(This trend, I hasten to say, does not include President Obama and the [...]

Since the 1970s, I have been writing about my concern about the impact of public
pension funds on the local, state and national economies. My original interest was
provoked after I read Peter Drucker’s brilliant and prescient book “The Unseen
Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America” published in 1976, and
later doing [...]

After Tuesday primary results came in from several states, several media analysts
and commentators repeated their opinion that voters were surprising conventional
wisdom.
Hello?
There is, in fact, no conventional wisdom worth talking about this political cycle.
I am suggesting that the surprises have only begun. No incumbent this year,
particularly no Democratic incumbent, [...]

The political news is not very good for Democrats as they approach the national
mid-term elections in only two months, but there is at least one bright new
Democratic figure who is about to enter the national stage after the votes are
counted.
After Democrat Robert Byrd, the senate’s oldest member, died recently, there [...]

Barack Obama has a huge ego. This is not a unique condition for someone who has
been elected president of the United States. Even men and women who have not been
elected president have huge egos. He also has concluded, I believe, that he is a
political genius. I remember that midway in [...]

There are bumper stickers which label current hostilities in the Middle East as
“Endless War.” This particular theater of war has lasted for nine years, and may
seem interminable both to its proponents and critics, but I want to make a simple
point about warfare and human civilization.
That point is that what [...]

As I have been suggesting for some months, President Obama may be the first
incumbent in the past century not renominated by his own party. His popularity has
fallen steadily, spurred on by his radical political agenda and the lavish style of his
incumbency in the White House, i.e., his frequent and expensive [...]

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor-Party (DFL) in Minnesota today is perhaps the most
self-destructive state political party I have observed in more than three decades of
professional political observations.
Insisting on an undemocratic and arcane political endorsement system that has for
decades produced one political defeat after another for the party establishments and
elites (but not always for [...]