Ramesh Ponnuru

What if the Democrats win? The prevailing assumption is that Republicans will take the Senate in the midterm elections on Nov. 4. It would be a surprise if they didn’t. But not a huge surprise. In the poll averages at RealClearPolitics, Republican Senate candidates have leads smaller than 2.3 percentage points in Alaska, Georgia and […]

It was a long and meaty debate by talk-show standards, which is to say it was short and stupid. Ben Affleck, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Nicholas Kristof and Michael Steele spent several minutes debating Islam on Maher’s HBO show last week, and the debate among the liberals in the bunch got pretty heated. (Steele didn’t […]

Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton went to Iowa for the first time since she lost the caucuses there in 2008. If her remarks there are any indication, she’s planning to campaign­­ for president in 2016 on two themes: the war on women and middle-class economic struggles. Not everyone understands what she’s up to. The Washington […]

What the poor need now, according to some pundits, is more inflation. The latest to make the argument is Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, writing at The Week. Others argue further that central banks throughout the developed world have been held back from generating the required inflation because it would hurt the rich. This sort of class-based analysis […]

With elections looming in November, Republicans are counting on President Barack Obama’s unpopularity to deliver them control of the Senate. They’re not running on an agenda, refusing even in broad outline to say how they would reform the tax code or replace Obama’s health-care law. Some conservatives are unhappy about that. National Review complained in […]

This week, Mitt Romney said there was a “one of a million” chance he’d run again for president in 2016. Political journalism being what it is, his comments were taken to mean that he was “opening the door” to another campaign. Never mind that Romney was quoting a part of the movie “Dumb and Dumber” […]

Polling turns out to be a business in which generating data that confirm the thuddingly obvious can get you both money and news media attention. Politico tried hard to make its story on a new poll sound exciting, choosing the headline, “Exclusive: GOP poll of women: Party ‘stuck in past.’” Did we really need an […]

Israel is a democratic state that is trying to respect human rights while defending itself against an adversary, Hamas, that does not. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is obviously right to say that the killing of Palestinian children is something Hamas desires as part of its strategy. My sympathies are therefore entirely with Israel, and […]

“I don’t think you have until 2012 before this gets out of control and there’s hyperinflation. It could go past that to 2014, but we’re seeing all sorts of things happening now that are accelerating the inflation process.” Thus spoke economist John Williams in May 2011. The Consumer Price Index rose 1.6 percent in 2012 […]

A trio of billionaires — Sheldon Adelson, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates — say they want to “End the Immigration Impasse,” to quote the headline of their recent New York Times op-ed article. The article will do nothing to end that impasse, however, because the authors show no understanding of why it exists in the […]