Columns

WASHINGTON -- The passions that swirled around Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that ended 10 years ago Sunday, dissipated quickly. And remarkably little damage was done by the institutional collisions that resulted when control of the nation's supreme political office turned on 537 votes out of 5,963,110 cast in Florida.

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 -- and House Democrats don't have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years -- which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?

Derrick Burts, 24, started working as a porn-film actor in June. By October, he'd contracted the HIV virus. The AP story on Burts contained this jaw-dropping sentence: "He said he began to have doubts about the business after contracting chlamydia, gonorrhea and herpes in his first month of work, but was convinced to keep working."

Reality strikes. Barack Obama spurned the advice of columnists Paul Krugman and Katrina vanden Heuvel and agreed with Republicans to extend the current income tax rates -- the so-called Bush tax cuts -- for another two years.

On Dec. 7, the notorious radical mastermind of WikiLeaks turned himself in on a sexual assault charge in London. But in the liberal media, the condemnations are few. There are no real enemies to the media elite's left, especially if they can be (very loosely) identified with journalism. Julian Assange may be highly motivated to cripple American "imperialism," but his relentless efforts to disrupt American foreign policy is a good thing when the media are manipulating the government's reaction by choosing which leaks they will publish and promote.

Walter E. Williams is my oldest and closest friend. But I didn't know that his autobiography had just been published until a talk-show host told me last week. I immediately got a copy of "Up from the Projects," started reading it before dinner and finished reading it before bedtime.

Over the last month I have had the opportunity to meet with government and business leaders from Japan and Italy -- including the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Ichiro Fujisaki, and the president of Umbria in Italy, Catiuscia Marini.

The Senate met in an unusual Saturday session to vote on two tax proposals doomed to fail from the start.

The Senate and House spent much of this week behind closed doors discussing the tax deductions that will expire in a few weeks. These Bush tax cuts that became law in 2001 and 2003 number in the 60s.