The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote Tuesday on the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan. In a panel made up of 12 Democrats and seven Republicans (the most lopsided party ratio of any Senate committee), the outcome is not in doubt. But a serious question remains: How can any senator reconcile an "aye" vote with Kagan's troubling actions in the Clinton White House on partial-birth abortion?
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What will it take to get Hillary Clinton into a 2012 run?
The answer can be found in the top item on the secretary of state's itinerary this week: Afghanistan.
She is spending a few days in Afghanistan to get a sense of the mounting problems for the U.S. mission there.
And according to some longtime Clinton backers, including one veteran of the Clinton Democratic National Committee, the Afghan war is the catalyst that could start Clinton toward a 2012 run.
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Aug. 29, 2005. It was the worst of times.
At 6:10 a.m., Katrina made landfall near Buras-Triumph, La., winds howling at 125 miles an hour. Within hours, it destroyed or degraded most of infrastructure in a 90,000-square-mile area and disrupted the lives of millions.
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Over the last eight years, most Democratic politicians have made a distinction between the Good War (Afghanistan) and the Bad War (Iraq).
That very much includes Barack Obama. As an Illinois state senator, he spoke out against military action in Iraq in 2002, and as a U.S. senator at a September 2007 hearing, he offered a blisteringly negative assessment of Iraq so lengthy that it left no time for Gen. David Petraeus to reply.
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Democrats are having a jolly good time beating up the White House.
You can see why. President Obama has caused the party to squander a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reclaim permanent majority status.
Of course, Democrats were cheering as they followed Obama off a cliff during the heady days of 2009, so they should share in the blame for the wasted moment. But they won't. They'll keep blaming Obama. Churlish, perhaps, but very human.
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Home mortgage interest rates are the lowest in history, but house sales are plunging. Banks can make money easily because of the Federal Reserve's low interest rates, but they're not making many loans. Major corporations are sitting on something like $2 trillion in cash, but they're not investing.
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President Obama is not "anti-business," as many conservative critics charge. He's just anti-free market. To better understand this distinction, just look at his latest initiative: trying to double U.S. exports in five years.
Obama's National Export Initiative, embraced by the big business lobby, is a raft of subsidies, handouts and "public-private partnerships." Obama uses the phrase "free trade" to describe this push, but there's nothing free about corporate welfare.
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President Obama and his party have taken a huge political gamble on the issue of illegal immigration. It could turn a bad political year into a catastrophe.
Worse still for the president and his party, 2010 may sow seeds for future defeats.
Obama is resisting efforts to stop illegal immigration -- suing to block Arizona's crackdown and holding hostage federal enforcement of immigration law until Congress agrees to some sort of amnesty program for those already here.
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If you've ever seen the pitiful bedridden 700-pound man who can do nothing for himself on one of those cable TV medical documentaries about morbidly obese people, you've caught a glimpse of Leviathan's future.
If you doubt me, just ask Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal or Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. You could even ask CNN's Anderson Cooper.
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In 1978, Justice Lewis Powell wrote an opinion in the Bakke case asserting that the need for diversity could justify racial preferences in university admissions. No other justice joined this opinion, but because the other justices were split 4-4, Powell's opinion decided the case, and in time his argument has been embraced by a majority of the court. A regrettable result, in my view, but a consequential one.
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