Paul Mirengoff, Power Line
The Washington Post has obsessed over an incident in which Mitt Romney allegedly cut the hair of a fellow high school student. The mainstream media paid plenty of attention to George W. Bush’s “irresponsible youth,” and speculated about whether he had used cocaine. Yet, the MSM has essentially ignored Barack Obama’s admission in his autobiography of cocaine use, of attending Socialist seminars while in college, and of being drawn as a young man to Marxists and Communists.

Kyle Smith, New York Post
This island off the course of northwest Europe is turning out to be an excellent viewing platform for three blockbuster shows this summer: Queen Elizabeth’s 60th anniversary Jubilee, the London Olympics and the implosion of Europe.The group of countries using the euro as a joint currency is “a burning building with no exits,” says Britain’s foreign minister William Hague. The Europeans with flames lapping around their ankles are the Greeks, but the whole continent is about to feel the burn.

Jim Treacher, The Daily Caller
Unless you’re a credulous rube, it sure does look like Obama told his literary agency that he was born in Kenya for some reason. And the false information wasn’t corrected until April 2007, a couple of months after he launched his presidential campaign. “But wait,” you protest. “How do you know Obama wrote that? How do you know he ever even saw it? Shut up!” Well, we all know that Obama is the exception to every rule, so maybe he’s the exception to this one too. Author and television producer Steve Boman writes at...

Cate Plys, Northwestern Magazine
No wonder you can date pictures of Rahm Emanuel by the darkening circles around his eyes, the way botanists count tree rings. Most people settle for half-circles under their eyes. The famously competitive Emanuel goes the full 360 degrees. Chicago’s new mayor never stops, and sleep is seemingly optional.A look at Emanuel’s daily schedule, courtesy of a Chicago Reader investigation, shows why the mayor is in a hurry. The down-to-the-minute itineraries typically track him from breakfast meetings through dinner receptions. In three months the phrase “lunch with a...

Jamelle Bouie, American Prospect
The defining feature of the Republican presidential primaries was the constant Sturm und Drang over Mitt Romney’s ability to win Republican voters. Pundits claimed that Romney had a “ceiling” with conservatives in the party, and opponents like former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum routinely assailed the front-runner as a candidate whose commitment to conservatism was short-lived and inauthentic—a human “Etch A Sketch,” in the words of Romney’s own campaign spokesperson. But when Romney locked up the nomination...

Ben Shapiro, Big Journalism
Never mind that the agency used the “born in Kenya” biography until 2007. Never mind that authors who have worked with the agency state that the agency asks that authors pen their own biographies. Never mind that Obama has routinely padded his biographical details to appeal to particular audiences. Nothing to see here. Michael Shear, at the New York Times, was in full defense mode: “Perhaps the darker side of politics is always close to the surface … the conservative Drudge Report Web site published a headline: “BORN IN KENYA,”...

John Nichols, The Nation
Voters across Europe are rejecting politicians who have placed the mania for deficit cutting above all other needs, and the mainstream media are beginning to echo the mood, with even The Economist arguing that austerity is “strangling the eurozone’s chances of recovery.” As deeply flawed as the European experiment with austerity has been, however, at least it is commonly understood as a policy response to serious fiscal challenges. It’s different in the United States, where there has been little honest debate about the reasons for or the failures of...

Steve Kornacki, Salon
At the very least, the Republican Party base's revolt against its own establishment cost the GOP a 50-50 Senate tie in 2010, with primary voters forcing unelectable nominees on the party in three races that it had otherwise been on course to win. A decent case can be made that the uprising actually cost Republicans outright Senate control.And now the same thing may be happening all over again, with Nebraska joining a growing list of unexpected 2012 Senate battlegrounds "“ at least for the moment. 

Victor Davis Hanson, National Review
Over the last four years, almost all of the news about the shaky European Union has been financial, with some attention paid to southern Mediterranean tabloid attacks on Germany and the German media counter-stereotyping of irresponsible siesta-loving sunny Mediterraneans.But as Greece falls apart, and as panic spreads to other debtors, we are starting to see a stage II political crisis, with socialists and extremists, both left and right, revolting over “austerity” — or rather over the mere taste of austerity that has never been really swallowed in whole. But all...

Aaron Blake, Washington Post
President Obama said in an interview airing Tuesday that he will win reelection this year.“I’m going to win,” he said in an interview with ABC’s “The View,” which was taped Monday.Obama acknowledged continued difficulties with the economy present a challenge for his campaign, but also said that the election should be a choice between candidates. He said he hopes American voters will make a decision between his and Mitt Romney’s visions for the country.

Ezra Klein, Washington Post
According to Best Lawyers — “the oldest and most respected peer-review publication in the legal profession” — Emmet Bondurant “is the go-to lawyer when a business person just can’t afford to lose a lawsuit.” He was its 2010 Lawyer of the Year for Antitrust and Bet-the-Company Litigation. But now, he’s bitten off something even bigger: bet-the-country litigation.Bondurant thinks the filibuster is unconstitutional. And, alongside Common Cause, where he serves on the board of directors, he’s suing to have...

Paul Krugman, New York Times
One of the characters in the classic 1939 film “Stagecoach” is a banker named Gatewood who lectures his captive audience on the evils of big government, especially bank regulation — “As if we bankers don’t know how to run our own banks!” he exclaims. As the film progresses, we learn that Gatewood is in fact skipping town with a satchel full of embezzled cash.As far as we know, Jamie Dimon, the chairman and C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, isn’t planning anything similar.

Carl Campanile, New York Post
Bill Clinton thought so little of President Obama — mocking him as an “amateur” — that he pressed his wife last summer to quit her job as secretary of state and challenge him in the primaries, a new book claims,  “The country needs you!” the former president told Hillary Clinton, urging her to run this year, according to accounts of the conversation included in Edward Klein’s new biography of Obama.  The title of Klein’s explosive, unauthorized bio of Obama, “The Amateur”...

Tim Stanley, Telegraph
Here’s the problem with the press coverage of Barack Obama: the mainstream media is so overwhelmed by his charisma that they often miss the important details. Every decision, speech, policy statement or impromptu visit to the bathroom is presented as a piece of “history” – the dawn of a new era. The Prez could go seal-clubbing and much of the media would see it as a new epoch for winter sports. “Barack Obama Becomes the First President to Kill Six Seals in Under One Minute,” the New York Times would proudly report, while Twitter...

Ron Brownstein, National Journal
In the six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988, Democrats effectively competed for so few states that their own strategists lamented that the party needed to draw an “inside straight” to reach the 270 Electoral College votes required for victory. But since then, the parties have played very different hands.In that earlier period, Gerald Ford in 1976 was the sole Republican presidential nominee to win fewer than 301 Electoral College votes. Jimmy Carter, who beat Ford, was the only Democratic nominee during those years to win more than 191. 

Brian Wesbury & Robert Stein, First Trust
The Social Welfare State is dying. Like the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, the cradle-to-grave social welfare experiment must eventually collapse. A system of taxing work and profits, while subsidizing leisure, sloth, and retirement, must eventually fail.The end of the Social Welfare State is painful for many, and it will not end quickly or quietly as the elections of this past weekend prove. Francois Hollande, a Socialist, was elected president of France, while Greece saw a surge in votes for “anti-bailout” political parties in parliament.

Ezra Klein, Washington Post
In August 2005, Raghuram Rajan, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, predicted the financial crisis. And he did it at possibly the least friendly of venues: a conference of high-powered economists who had convened in part to honor Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Rajan presented a paper titled “Has Financial Innovation Made the World Riskier?” His answer, put simply, was “Yes.” He was dismissed by the assembled masters of the universe. “Misguided,” said Larry Summers. But Rajan was...

Wynton Hall, Big Government
In an explosive Newsweek article set to rock official Washington, reporter Peter Boyer and Breitbart contributing editor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer reveal how Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice are operating under a “justice for sale” strategy by forgoing criminal prosecution of Wall Street executives at big financial institutions who just so happen to be clients of the white-shoe law firms where Holder and his top DOJ lieutenants worked.

Ezra Klein, Washington Post
Europe is a mess. But it’s a peculiar mess that both the left and the right think validates everything they’ve been saying about what we should — and shouldn’t — do here in the United States.“The right argues we have to cut deficits now, or we’ll be like Greece,” says Tom Gallagher, a principal at the Scowcroft Group. “The left argues we can’t cut deficits now, or we’ll be like Europe.”

Michael Shear, NY Times
Nearly 20 years ago, a multimillion-dollar ad campaign created a fictional couple — “Harry and Louise” — to dramatize the dangers of President Bill Clinton’s health care reforms.Now, President Obama is trying to use the same Madison Avenue-style technique to demonstrate how his policies would be better for women than would Mitt Romney’s.

Dana Milbank, Washington Post
With “more discipline and more courage to be more outside the mainstream,” Newt Gingrich told USA Today on the eve of ending his presidential bid, “it might have worked better.”Actually, Mr. Moon Colony was plenty outside the mainstream. But discipline? Yes, that might have helped.

David Maraniss, Vanity Fair
Barack Obama transferred from Occidental College to Columbia University in 1981, his junior year. Although he left Los Angeles with enough ambitious propulsion to carry him into a more active period, he instead receded into the most existentialist stretch of his life. As he put it himself dec­ades later during an interview in the Oval Office, “I was leading a very ascetic existence, way too serious for my own good.” In most outward ways, compared with what had come before, his life in New York was a minimalist one, without the sprawling cast of characters that had...

Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
The implosion of the Newt Gingrich presidential campaign--the first implosion, before the weird resurrection and inevitable second implosion--came because he used four words: right-wing social engineering. He used the phrase, last May, to describe the Republican budget designed by GOP icon Paul Ryan. It was as if he had urinated on Ronald Reagan’s grave. Party leaders rounded on him. In Iowa, an angry voter cornered him and fumed, in a video captured by Fox News that quickly went viral, “What you did to Paul Ryan was unforgivable … You’re an...

Michael Tomasky, Daily Beast
It couldn’t be more hilarious, watching these Republicans rend their garments over the Obama administration’s bin Laden video. Imaging the paroxysms we’d have been forced to endure if George W. Bush had iced the dreaded one is all we need to do to understand how hypocritical it all is. But what obviously gets under Republicans’ skin is not the fact of this video’s existence, but the fact that Barack Obama got him and they didn’t, which destroys their assumption of the past decade that they are “the 9/11 party.”...