Columns

"Housing Market Setback Forecast" the newspaper headline said. A recently released report on housing says that home sales are down more than 25 percent and the inventory of unsold homes is about 50 percent higher than it was the same time last year.

Rick Scott won Florida's governorship as an outsider who took on the state's political establishment. As he takes the oath of office Tuesday, the former health-care executive will have the opportunity to extend his attack to Washington, D.C.

WASHINGTON -- New Republican legislators should come down Capitol Hill to the National Museum of American History, which displays a device that in 1849 was granted U.S. patent 6469. It enabled a boat's "draught of water to be readily lessened" so it could "pass over bars, or through shallow water." The patentee was from Sangamon County, Ill. Across Constitution Avenue, over the Commerce Department's north entrance, are some words of the patentee, Abraham Lincoln:

While Florida is the fourth largest state and a battleground every presidential election, neither of the major parties has ever included a Floridian on its presidential tickets. There are plenty of reasons for this -- Florida was a member of the Solid South after Reconstruction and took decades to develop, for example. But one of those reasons is that rising political stars from the Sunshine State quickly fizzle.

2010 may have been an encouraging year for political conservatives, but it wasn't so rosy for America's culture. The most depressing result was the Second Circuit Court of Appeals granting our television networks the right to employ the nastiest curse words in front of children at any hour of the broadcast day.

According to a George Washington University study published in May 2010, in 2009 the Obama administration cranked out regulations as if regulators were on steroids.

Back in June, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniel, whom many think would be an attractive 2012 presidential candidate, was quoted by Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard as saying the next president "would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues."

WASHINGTON -- Cowlitz County in Washington state is across the Columbia River from Portland, Ore., which promotes mass transit and urban density and is a green reproach to the rest of us. Recently, Cowlitz did something that might make Portland wonder whether shrinking its carbon footprint matters. Cowlitz approved construction of a coal export terminal from which millions of tons of U.S. coal could be shipped to Asia annually.

Economists are the real "party of No." They keep saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch -- and politicians keep on getting elected by promising free lunches.