Columns

WASHINGTON -- Weve heard much these past few years about small town values, most recently iterated and personified by Sarah Palin.

It never ceases to amaze that Oliver Stone thinks Ronald Reagan was a dunce. When it comes to judging iron-fisted dictators and anti-American despots, Stone is the intellectually incurious simpleton. He thinks Reagan was stupid because he clung to an all-encompassing ideology. But so does Stone.

Asked if the United States might send still more troops to Afghanistan, if the Obama surge is not succeeding by year's end, Vice President Joe Biden answered, "I do not believe so."

Democratic spin doctors have set out how their side is going to hold onto a majority in the House. They'll capture four at-risk Republican seats, hold half of the next 30 or so Democratic at-risk seats, and avoid significant losses on target seats lower on the list.

Many of the wonderful-sounding ideas that have been tried as government policies have failed disastrously. Because so few people bother to study history, often the same ideas and policies have been tried again, either in another country or in the same country at a later time -- and with the same disastrous results.

Grass somehow manages to grow up through small cracks in the sidewalk. Similarly, the American private sector somehow seems to be exerting itself despite the vast expansion of government by the Barack Obama administration and congressional Democrats.

School's almost out for the summer oops, I mean Congress. The House will recess at the end of this week for a six-week summer vacation. The Senate will follow suit at the end of next week.

Congress spent the week preparing for its more-than-month-long recess by finally passing the extension of the federal unemployment benefits. This $34 billion bill was passed in the Senate on Tuesday, just minutes after the newest senator from West Virginia was sworn in as the 100th United States senator for the 111th Congress.