Columns

One of the more delicious aspects of the recent election is that the biggest supporter of Democrats the powerful teachers' union bosses may have cost Democrats the election.

WASHINGTON -- Seen through the prism of subsequent national experience, Nelson Rockefeller resembles a swollen post-war automobile -- a land yacht with tail fins, a period piece, bemusing and embarrassing. He remains, however, instructive.

Since I became commissioner of the Florida Office of Financial Regulation (OFR) in 2012, protecting consumers and increasing the safety of Floridas securities industry has been one of my teams highest priorities.

WASHINGTON -- Historic. Such is the ubiquitous description of the climate agreement recently announced in Beijing between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping in which China promised for the first time to cap carbon emissions.

The Islamic State beheaded another American this week. The Obama administration's response revealed its stubborn determination to deny reality.

After the 2012 campaign, liberal journalists swarmed around Republican Party chair Reince Priebus offering what was called an "autopsy" on every way Republicans failed, with a special emphasis on more outreach to minority voters. Democrats and their media enablers painted a picture of demographic doom for an aging white Republican base.

Tuesdays failure of the U.S. Senate to authorize the Keystone XL Pipeline is a vote against all construction workers, a vote to keep good, middle-class jobs locked out of reach and a vote to continue to rely on nations that hate America for our energy.

Were the polls wrong? It's a question asked after every election. Sometimes, as in 1948, the answer seems as obvious as the answer to the question, "Why did Custer lose at Little Bighorn?" Sometimes the answer is less obvious, as it is this year.

WASHINGTON -- It's not exactly the Ems Dispatch (the diplomatic cable Bismarck doctored to provoke the 1870 Franco-Prussian War). But what the just-resurfaced Gruber Confession lacks in world-historical consequence, it makes up for in world-class cynicism. This October 2013 video shows MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, a principal architect of Obamacare, admitting that, in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive. It constitutes the ultimate vindication of the charge that Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies.

In July of 1941, after Japan occupied French Indochina, the Roosevelt administration froze Japan's assets in the United States.Denied hard cash, Japan could not buy the U.S. oil upon which the empire depended for survival. Seeing the Dutch East Indies as her only other source, Japan prepared to invade.

If you're a political junkie -- or at least if you're a conservative political junkie -- you've probably seen the map. It's a map of the United States showing the congressional districts won by Republicans in red and those won by Democrats in blue.

Jobs matter. With voting results in, Florida voters made it clear they want to keep Florida moving in the right direction with a private-sector jobs agenda, and so do we.

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama's coming request for Congress to "right-size and update" the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against terrorism will be constitutionally fastidious and will catalyze a debate that will illuminate Republican fissures. They, however, are signs of a healthy development -- the reappearance of foreign policy heterodoxy in Republican ranks.

Americans of most political persuasions tend to view the United Nations as corrupt and morally inverted. An organization supposedly dedicated to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights regularly overlooks abuses by the world's worst actors (Cuba, North Korea, China, just to name three) while expending vast quantities of outrage at the efforts of one tiny democracy, Israel, to defend itself.

Just what happened last week on Election Day? And what is going to happen in the years ahead?The most important thing that happened last week was that the country dodged a bullet. Had the Democrats retained control of the Senate, President Obama could have spent his last two years in office loading the federal judiciary with judges who share his contempt for the Constitution of the United States.