Author: Norman Leahy

House Republicans will limp back into Washington, D.C., with a speaker nominee in Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who, as of this writing, didn’t have enough votes, even from his own caucus, to win the job. That’s hardly surprising, given the party’s recent descent into self-parody. Jordan, whom former Speaker John Boehner once described as a “legislative terrorist” and much more recently, was a full-throated election denialist, may yet bully his way to a bare majority. We shall see. But if he fails, the Republicans are forced to go back to the drawing board…a natural question arises: is this the most…

Keeping up with this week’s theme on out-of-control federal spending…the traditional argument from our friends on the left about how to fix our debt and deficit problems is simply to tax the wealthiest people and corporations more. A lot more. The sky’s the limit. But no tax hikes for the middle class. So long as the IRS squeezes the robber barons hard enough, all will be well with debt, deficits, and government spending (we could probably spend even more!). Except…those numbers don’t add up. As the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl writes, spending has outstripped the ability of even confiscatory taxation…

Unserious people doing profoundly silly things is usually fodder for a network sitcom, a buddy flick or possibly a web short. It’s not the kind of thing that’s supposed to happen in the House of Representatives. But in the wake of Speaker Kevin McCarthy and an overwhelming majority of House members voting to pass a 45-day funding bill that avoided a government shutdown, the unserious are unleashing their silliness in spades. The spectacle began with Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz bringing a motion to the House floor declaring the speakership vacant. Once the motion was on the floor, the House…

While we’re on the topic of the Department of Defense and how it spends all those hundreds of billions of dollars every year…it looks like they splurged on office furniture to the tune of more than a billion dollars. During the pandemic. When most of the workforce was doing its thing at home. As Open the Books Adam Andrzejewski writes, the DOD wasn’t the only part of the federal government to spend big on office spaces and furnishings: …in 2021, at the peak of the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent $237,960 on solar powered picnic tables.…

Defense spending is one of the biggest items in the federal budget, and may get even bigger in the near future as we provide assistance to nations at war with rogue states and authoritarian regimes. But for all the hundreds of billions spent on defense, it seems the DoD has an enormous problem paying for the essentials. As a recent Government Accountability Office report found, that includes a harrowing, and potentially dangerous, inability for the DoD to provide safe, clean, healthy barracks for hundreds of thousands of servicemembers. According to GAO investigators: DOD does not reliably assess conditions, and some…

You likely missed it, but former Texas Rep. Will Hurd has dropped out of the GOP presidential nomination race and thrown his support, such as it is, behind one of the remaining candidates: former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Hurd lays out his reasons for backing Haley – who is currently polling second in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and 3rd in Iowa. While former President Donald Trump still has a commanding lead against all comers for the nomination, that he still doesn’t have 50% or more support in those early states…

A new and potentially devastating war in the Middle East has spotlighted intelligence failures, military preparedness, and more inside Israel. That light spills over into that nation’s greatest ally, the United States, where our political class is mired in parochial squabbles. At the top of the list: a House of Representatives that is in the hands of a caretaker speaker following the ouster of Rep. Kevin McCarthy a few days ago. While the handful of Republicans…and the Democratic caucus – were able to throw the always conditionally in charge McCarthy overboard, there is no consensus pick to lead the increasingly…

Conservatives long held the belief that their ideological opponents on the left had taken control of academia, the media, cultural institutions and, of course, government. Not necessarily elected office. But the bureaucracy, where it’s long been an article of faith that the federal workers reporting to the office each day were really agents of a long-standing plot to entrench liberalism. Or something. It never made much sense, really, as conservatives, as they once existed, managed to create their own media/academic/cultural biosphere. And it did very well for itself, collecting millions in grant money and billions more from marketers. But it…

In the last decade, tens of thousands of households have put solar panels on their roofs. The reasons for doing so vary, but the commercial operations that are supposed to service and maintain many of those solar systems are doing a bad job of it. Very bad. So bad that according to this Time Magazine piece: There were 5,331 complaints containing the words “solar panels” submitted on reportfraud.ftc.gov between Jan. 1 and Sept. 19 of 2023, up 31% from the entire year of 2022 and up 746% since 2018, the first year for which the Federal Trade Commission has data,…

Lower-tier presidential campaigns have long been known to float novel ideas as a way to try and separate themselves from the rest of the pack. It’s no different this year on the crowded GOP side, where would-be upper-tier candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has proposed that the minimum voting age be raised from the current 18 to 25. With exceptions, of course: …unless a citizen 18 or older is enrolled in the military, works as a first-responder or passes the same civics test given to immigrants seeking American citizenship. Such a change could only be implemented by passing a constitutional amendment. Well,…