Columns

WASHINGTON -- Intellectually undemanding progressives, excited by the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. -- advocate of the downtrodden and the Export-Import Bank -- have at last noticed something obvious: Big government, which has become gargantuan in response to progressives' promptings, serves the strong. It is responsive to factions sufficiently sophisticated and moneyed to understand and manipulate its complexity.

We have found the new normal in America.If you are truly outraged by some action of police, prosecutors, grand juries, or courts, you can shut down the heart of a great city.

WASHINGTON -- Old habits die hard. The media are so enamored of the continuing (and largely contrived) story about the great Republican civil war that they fail to appreciate that the real internecine fight is being waged on the other side of the aisle..

It's an obvious rule: Never pick on a president's family.Elizabeth Lauten, the formerly unknown "communications director" for two-term GOP congressman Stephen Fincher resigned after a national-media feeding frenzy over some stupid words about the president's daughters on her personal Facebook page.

WASHINGTON -- In 2010, Plymouth, Conn., was awarded $430,000 for widening sidewalks and related matters near two schools. This money was a portion of the $612 million Congress authorized for five years of the federal Safe Routes to School program intended to fight childhood obesity by encouraging children to burn calories by walking or biking to school. Really.

Super-lawyer John Morgan is not about to give up on medical marijuana in the Sunshine State, despite the defeat on Election Day last month -- and based on what we know, that's a bad thing for those like me who support some kind of workable drug law reform that would make marijuana available to Floridians suffering or in pain.

In July of 1967, after race riots gutted Newark and Detroit, requiring troops to put them down, LBJ appointed a commission to investigate what happened, and why.

Karma -- the idea that what comes around goes around -- can sometimes come back to bite you in the derriere.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. -- Newton's Third Law of Motion

No one in Washington much cares what House Democrats do these days. House rules tend to ensure that the main job of members of the minority is to show up, vote "no" and lose. And in the next Congress, Democrats will have fewer seats in the House than they've had since 1929 and 1930.

"It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."Edmund Burke's insight returned to mind while watching cable news coverage of the rampage in Ferguson, Missouri, after St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced that officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted in the shooting death of Michael Brown.

Some 3,370,761 people -- almost 58 percent -- voted for medical marijuana in Florida. This total -- half a million more than Gov. Rick Scott and almost 900,000 more than voted no -- is clear proof that the people of Florida want a medical marijuana law.

On an interview tour for his new book on President Obama, NBC's Chuck Todd told Larry King that his conversations with Obama are "very nourishing." Even after six or seven years of adoration, reporters still sound like then-NBC reporter Lee Cowan admitting in 2008 that being assigned to the Obama campaign made his "knees quake." He wondered if "he could do the campaign justice," since it was "truly historic."

During the 2012 campaign, President Obama often resorted to his favorite substitute for thinking: ridicule. Before enthusiastic audiences (who were assured his re-election would spell a thriving economy and a revived middle class), the president would mock Republicans by suggesting that "they have the same prescription they've had for the past 30 years. ... Take two tax cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning."