Foreign Policy

On Thursday, Venezuela's Supreme Court decided to grant Bolivarian socialist "President" Nicolas Maduro what an unbylined Associated Press report described as "broad decree powers" to deal with the economic crisis and humanitarian nightmare he and his predecessor Hugo Chavez created. Maduro's government now for all practical purposes has total control of that nation's economy, which in the…

As Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential effort has weakened, many on the left in fairly prominent places have begun releasing years of pent-up frustrations about her, her husband, and their record. At long last, the long knives are beginning to come out. Many of these missives are unhinged, but one which isn't, and deserves a closer look, comes from Camille Paglia at Salon.com. Given that Paglia'…

Playboy has jettisoned the nudity, but the Interview remains, and its subject in the new issue is MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who discusses topics such as her fondness for the music of Thelonious Monk; the recipe for a cocktail called an Aviation; and (mostly) politics. Maddow declares that she’ll never run for office and says an imaginary Maddow presidency would consist of her “getting sworn in and…

On Judge Jeanine Pirro's Saturday Fox News program, Judge Andrew Napolitano succinctly summarized the implications of the latest revelations concerning Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was the Obama administration's Secretary of State. One can't help but notice that almost no one else is making Napolitano's obviously valid points. If a Republican or conservative had done…

As Utah GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz -- who has endorsed Marco Rubio for President -- appeared as a guest on Monday's The Situation Room on CNN, host Wolf Blitzer repeatedly questioned Rubio's fitness for office, with seven out of his first nine questions and setup statements challenging the Florida Senator on issues ranging from his repetition of lines during Saturday's debate, to his level of…

As former GOP presidential candidate and Senator Lindsey Graham appeared as a guest on Thursday's The Situation Room on CNN, after the South Carolina Republican bashed candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump as possible GOP nominees, host Wolf Blitzer repeatedly pressed Graham to voice a preference for someone other than the GOP nominee, suggesting Michael Bloomberg or Hillary Clinton might be…

MSNBC host and Thursday’s Presidential Candidates Debate co-moderator Rachel Maddow wondered aloud to Hillary Clinton whether some of the positions she’s held at various points warrant concern for the Democratic Party that she’s “too far to the right...to be the party's standard bearer” in the 2016 general election.

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, New York magazine's Frank Rich asserted that GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio is "quite far to the right" and has a "very truculent neocon foreign policy" as he and host O'Donnell discussed whether the Florida Senator has the best chance of the "establishment" Republican candidates of being nominated.

In trying to explain the current situation in Venezuela, the Washington Post's Matt O'Brien, in a post at the paper's Wonkblog, also inadvertently identified two reasons why authoritarian socialist tyrants like Huge Chavez and Nicolas Maduro are able to achieve and retain power. The formula is simple: When you first gain power, garner international and media goodwill by giving stuff away, like…

This afternoon, Catherine Herridge at Fox News reported that "the intelligence community has deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails 'too damaging' to national security to release under any circumstances." This eighth "smoking gun" — on top of the seven an Investor's Business Daily editorial identified last week — wasn't enough to move the Associated Press Bradley Klapper from the AP's default…

For anyone whose knowledge of history extends beyond the current season of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" or the latest instant replay of an NFL game, the four days of meetings involving Iran's president Hassan Rouhani, European leaders and businesses should remind people we have seen this show before.

The Des Moines Register likely broke new ground when it endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination on Saturday. The Register may be the first major newspaper to endorse a major-party presidential candidate under investigation by the FBI at the time of the endorsement. The time stamp at the editorial's link is currently and inexplicably this morning, but pundits and…

These people play the press and the courts like a fiddle. At 2 p.m. Friday — just in time for a slow-news weekend and the onset of what is supposed to be a serious blizzard in the Northeast — the State Department asked a federal court for an extension of time to February 29 to complete its interagency review and release of Hillary Clinton's private-server emails. But State didn't merely use the…

When the Associated Press issues a brief unbylined report on an obviously important matter, one's first instinct should always be to ask: "What are they deciding not to tell us?" More often than not, the answer is "Plenty." An example justifying the need to look further appeared this morning when the wire service published a five-paragraph report on inflation in Venezuela's economy: