Columns

WASHINGTON -- Hearing about a shortage of farm laborers in California, the couple who would become Susumu Ito's parents moved from Hiroshima to become sharecroppers near Stockton. Thus began a saga that recently brought Ito, 91, to the Holocaust Memorial Museum here, where he and 119 former comrades in arms were honored, during the annual Days of Remembrance, as liberators of Nazi concentration camps.

When Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement, President Obama promised he would appoint someone like Stevens, who "knows that in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens."

Remember, I'm just a political analyst and pollster. Perhaps President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress know more than the rest of us. But with a new poll out showing the president with his lowest approval rating since taking office, the last thing I would advise him, were he to ask, would be to even hint at his potential receptivity to a "value-added tax." Especially with elections just around the corner.

Veteran member of the Legislature Dan Webster is starting off his bid to knock off U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson with a bang -- the endorsement of former Gov. Jeb Bush. That will help Webster in a crowded Republican primary field that also includes businessman Bruce ODonoghue, Rep.

Almost a year ago, in a Washington Examiner column on the Chrysler bailout, I reflected on the Obama administration's decision to force bondholders to accept 33 cents on the dollar on secured debts while giving United Auto Worker retirees 50 cents on the dollar on unsecured debts. This was a clear violation of the ordinary bankruptcy rule that secured creditors are fully paid off before unsecured creditors get anything.

MORRISVILLE, Pa. -- The bridge spanning the Delaware River connects New Jersey's capital with this town where the nation's most interesting governor occasionally eats lunch at Cafe Antonio. It also connects New Jersey's government with reality.

MOUNT VERNON, Va. -- It was fitting that the buzz around George Washington's homestead recently was about the first president's overdue library books, just as the estate's guardians were plotting a new presidential library in the founding father's name.

When I first began to study the history of slavery around the world, many years ago, one of the oddities that puzzled me was the practice of paying certain slaves, which existed in ancient Rome and in America's antebellum South, among other places.