Do Washington state Democrats have a death wish? That's the question many locals must be asking after the Democrat-controlled Senate held hearings last Thursday, with little notice, packed with supporters for a new bill that would impose a statewide income tax. They tried to sell the proposal as a populist measure. The tax would only apply to wealthy earners and it would allow the state government to reduce the sales tax. By bringing the bill up so late in the legislative session - business is supposed to be completed by this Thursday - the Dems were not seriously trying to pass the...

The undertakers of Bill Clinton's political doom showed up in Little Rock, Ark., in 1992 for a meeting with the president-elect two months before his inauguration. They were the leaders of the Democratic Congress, and they might as well have been draped in black crepe. "You can trust us," House Speaker Tom Foley told Clinton, in an assurance as false as it was sincere. "We all want to make this administration succeed." Two years later, Clinton stood among smoldering political ruins. Democrats had lost both houses of Congress. A Republican upstart had defeated Tom...

(Note: Yesterday, RealClearPolitics tracked down Mickey Kaus, the prominent blogger and author who surprised nearly everyone last week by announcing he had taken out papers to challenge Barbara Boxer in the Democratic Senate primary in California.) RCP: Did you gather enough signatures to challenge Barbara Boxer in the Democratic primary? Kaus: I think I did. I'm going over them right now and last night when I went over them I had enough. RCP: You need 65 valid signatures out of 100 submitted. That seems an absurdly low number. Kaus: It seemed low to me but it's harder than I...

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: It's a dogfight on Capitol Hill, both sides fighting for every single possible vote on the health care bill. So what's going to happen? Republican congressman Mike Pence went "On the Record." (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) VAN SUSTEREN: Congressman, nice to see you, sir. REP. MIKE PENCE, R - IND.: Thank you, Greta. VAN SUSTEREN: All right, where does this all stand, the votes? I mean, it's getting a little bit confusing for everybody. PENCE: Right. Well, they don't have the votes. I mean, I think the American people deserve to know that...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI, D-CALIF: The March 18th is an interesting date. As I say our clock starts ticking when we get the final CBO report. We don't have the final yet, but we have a pretty good idea of where we are going on it. GIBBS: If it takes a couple extra days after a year, it takes a couple of extra days. SENATE MINORITY LEADER MITCH MCCONNELL, R-KY: Americans aren't in any rush to pass this or any other 2,700 page bill that poses as reform but actually raises the cost of health care. And members of Congress shouldn't be deceived by these...

WASHINGTON -- As the Afghanistan War intensifies -- Marja, soon Kandahar, and the steady arrival of 30,000 new American troops -- it has come to be seen as Obama's war. Not so. It's become America's war. When the former opposition party -- habitually anti-war for the last four decades -- adopts, reaffirms and escalates a war begun by the habitually hawkish other party, partisanship falls away, and the war becomes nationalized. And legitimized. Do you think if John McCain, let alone George W. Bush, were president, we would not see growing demonstrations protesting our continued...

Tyranny is afoot. And this evil arrives in the guise of secondhand books and cheap Chinese trinkets. So beware. Actually, if anyone ever needed an obvious illustration of how government overreach can damage an economy, he need look no further than the Colorado Legislature's foolish attempt to wheedle a few extra bucks out of consumers via an Internet sales tax. After legislation forcing online companies to collect sales tax passed, Amazon.com moved to protect its consumers and long-term interests by severing its ties with Colorado. Unfortunately, this meant closing its associates...

WASHINGTON -- It took the case of "JihadJane" to illuminate what should have been obvious by now: Anyone who claims to be able to identify a potential terrorist by appearance or nationality is delusional. There's a reason why all of us have to take our shoes off at the airport. For years, some voices on the right have argued forcefully for racial-ethnic-religious profiling. After the Christmas Day attempt to bomb an airliner, Newt Gingrich wrote that the time has come "to profile for terrorists and to actively discriminate based on suspicious terrorist information."...

"You've heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don't know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future . ... We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy." -- Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, March 9, 2010 Pity the Democrats. They just can't get their message out. Not with a charismatic president (who has delivered 52 speeches on the subject), control of both houses of Congress, the gooey enthusiasm of 90 percent of the press, and more than a...

(En route to) KABUL -- Other than spending lots of time covering soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen, Marines and special operators who routinely get shot at, I'm not a gambling man. Those I know who frequent the casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City all claim they go to these places to "win" and are willing to settle for a break-even "draw." None of them professes to be satisfied with a loss. Unfortunately, when it comes to gambling in the life-or-death contest against radical Islamists, all three outcomes appear to be equally acceptable to the Obama...

Though Bush 41 and Bush 43 often disagreed, one issue did unite them both with Bill Clinton: protectionism. Globalists all, they rejected any federal measure to protect America's industrial base, economic independence or the wages of U.S. workers. Together they rammed through NAFTA, brought America under the World Trade Organization, abolished tariffs and granted Chinese-made goods unrestricted access to the immense U.S. market. Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services has compiled, in 44 pages of charts and graphs, the results of two decades of this Bush-Clinton experiment in...

"Maybe it will take a woman to clean up the House," Nancy Pelosi boasted before the 2006 midterm elections. Looks like those XX chromosomes didn't give her much advantage over the old cleaning crew. The swamp she was supposed to drain is overflowing. And fewer than four years after a sordid sexual predation scandal involving a creepy congressman rocked the Republican Party, a sordid sexual predation scandal involving a creepy congressman is now rocking the Democratic Party. The same questions that dogged House leaders then are dogging House Speaker Pelosi now: What did she and...

On the night gold dust fell on the stars in Hollywood, millions of men and women were putting their lives on the line in Iraq merely by casting a vote. Hollywood nervously measured the size of the television audience for its Academy Awards ceremony while a different statistic was measured in Iraq, where 62 percent of the eligible voters demonstrated courage at the polls. Accepting his Oscar for writing the best original screenplay, Mark Boal said he tried, in writing "Hurt Locker," to capture the essence of the experience of "men on the front lines of an unpopular war." He...

WASHINGTON -- The increasingly puerile spectacle of presidential State of the Union addresses is indicative of the state of the union, and is unnecessary: The Constitution requires only that the president "shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union." But a reaction may be brewing against these embarrassing events. Speaking in Alabama, Chief Justice John Roberts said "to the extent that" this occasion "has degenerated into a political pep rally," he is "not sure why we're there." He was referring to Supreme...

11:30 A.M. EST THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, everybody. And thank you, John, for that generous introduction. Congratulations to you and Fabienne and Luis for the recognition your companies so richly deserve. And thank you to the Chairman of the Export-Import Bank, Fred Hochberg, for having me here today, and for all the important work the Ex-Im Bank is doing to help American businesses sell their ideas to the world. I also want to recognize the Secretary General of the OECD, Angel Gurría, for his leadership at that institution. (Applause.) Let me also acknowledge some members of...

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: Did Senate Republicans just declare war? Earlier Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl went "On the Record" about a letter more like a missile that is rocking Capitol Hill. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) SEN. JON KYL, R - ARIZ.: There are 41 Republican U.S. senators, all of us, who have sent a letter to the majority leader saying that if you bring a reconciliation bill from the House of Representatives on this health care issue and it is subject to points of order, we will not waive those points of order. We will raise them and uphold them. That means that the bill that...

BLITZER: Karl Rove is opening himself up to tough questions now that he's out promoting his new book. We spoke earlier here in THE SITUATION ROOM about the biggest -- some of the biggest controversies of the Bush era including the Iraq war, the hunt for those weapons of mass destruction. Now we turn to the current political climate. Here's more of my in-depth interview with the former adviser to President Bush. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BLITZER: Let's talk about some of the current issues under way right now. Who do -- who are you with? Are you with Liz Cheney or her critics among...

St. Charles High School St. Charles, Missouri 3:58 P.M. CST THE PRESIDENT: Hello, Missouri! (Applause.) It is good to see you. I know you guys have been a little bit here; it's a little bit warm in here -- you're all fanning yourself off, whoo! It is good to see everybody here today. How's everybody doing? (Applause.) I've got a couple of acknowledgments I want to make. First of all, Mayor of St. Charles, Patti York -- where's Patti? (Applause.) Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thanks for the great weather. We also have the St. Charles School District...

WASHINGTON -- There are legislative miles to go before the government will be emancipated from its health care myopia, but it is not too soon for a summing up. Whether all or nothing of the legislation becomes law, Barack Obama has refuted critics who call him a radical. He has shown himself to be a timid progressive. His timidity was displayed when he flinched from fighting for the boldness the nation needs -- a transition from the irrationality of employer-provided health insurance. His progressivism is an attitude of genteel regret about the persistence of politics. Employer-paid insurance...

WASHINGTON -- There is a pathetic quality to our discussion of deficits and fiscal responsibility because we never face up to how much we need government to do. Our debates are also characterized by a politically convenient amnesia. Just a decade ago, we were running surpluses so big that Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, worried about what would happen once our national debt was liquidated. We had this problem well in hand until we started waging wars and cutting taxes at the same time. What would a rational approach to the budget look like? It would begin by accepting...