Ron Paul, apparently, is not a superstitious kind of guy.

Tempting fate, as it were, he announced today that he's running for president once again -- on Friday the thirteenth.

Ron's not the only one making news on this front this particular week, though. I wrote an article on...

This has been an unusual year, in terms of presidential campaign politics, because (so far) it has run counter to the conventional wisdom. A standard column for any pundit to write every four years is the "Campaign Starting Even Sooner!" article, in which you decry the fact that the presidential...

In roughly two months, President Barack Obama is going to announce the beginning of the end of America's longest war. He could not have known, when he initially set this summer for the beginning of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, that the timing would work out so perfectly....

Mission freakin' accomplished.

I don't care how ironic that sounds to some, it's true. Osama Bin Laden declared war on America, waged that war for years (and killed Americans in doing so), then hid for many more years, and was finally hunted down and killed like an animal. Mission accomplished.

Gas prices up, Obama polls down

This is going to be the shortest one of these columns I've ever done.

Every so often, I write a column and it is out of date very soon after it is published. On occasion, my columns are out of date as they are...

To me, the most momentous phrase in the American lexicon is when a friend calls up and says some version of the following:

"Turn on your television... to any channel."

This is a scary phrase, for the most part, because of what it implies: some momentous event has not only...

This is going to be a somewhat surprising column introduction, for our regular readers. For new or occasional readers, I'd have to recommend just skipping this whole introduction entirely, and scrolling down to the awards section and the talking points for the semi-serious commentary. Because I'm about to talk about...

Assassination, as a foreign policy option, is supposed to be completely forbidden to America. That's the theory, at least. But in our post-9/11 world, the once-unthinkable is now increasingly being seen as a viable option. The moral discussion of whether or not America should engage in assassination, though, hasn't even...

Most intelligent political analysts' reaction (right, left and center) to the news that Donald Trump may be considering a run for the presidency could be summed up as some version of: "You have got to be kidding me." Followed quickly by: "This is going to be so much fun!" But...

Yesterday -- April 21, 2011 -- is a day which will live in infamy. Two days after being activated, Skynet (the new military "defense" computer network) became self-aware and immediately began its worldwide attack on humanity. Yes, the robots have now taken over, and newer and more advanced models (ones...

Last night, one of the major television networks led its news broadcast with the "news" of Donald Trump's pseudo-candidacy for president. It should come as no surprise that this was the same network (NBC) which also broadcasts Trump's reality show.

Since the mainstream media has, quite obviously, abdicated all responsibility...

Imagine, this tax day, that you had to explain the concept of how America taxes itself to a visitor from another planet. Picture, if you will, a conversation with modern-day alien Gulliver, who is exploring new words and asking questions about our civilization in order to tell wild tales to...

Happy It's Supposed To Be Tax Day, everyone!

By a strange quirk in scheduling, your income taxes won't be due until Monday, but what I'm wondering is: where are the Tea Partiers? This is, after all, the Glorious Second Anniversary of the formation of what some called the "Taxed Enough...

Republican hypocrisy on "cutting" versus "saving" Medicare has reached the point where it almost literally knows no bounds. To be sure, Republicans have always fundamentally been against the concept of Medicare, from the very beginning. That's an ideological position which you may or may not agree with, but Republicans have...

President Obama has now called a "do-over" on his 2012 budget proposal. This news broke on the Sunday morning political television chat circuit, as the dust was settling on the government shutdown standoff for the remainder of the 2011 budget. Obama's move was prompted by the budget proposal put on...

The American media lost interest in the war in Libya faster than they've ever done so before, not to even mention the eerie radioactive glow emanating from the milk aisle back home in West Coast grocery stores. Instead, they have been going bonkers all week over the prospect of a...

In the midst of a budget fight not seen in Washington in over a decade -- with the possibility of a government shutdown looming -- it's interesting to see how the two men at the heart of the standoff seem to be the least fervent ideologues of either party. What...

Obama slips back

President Obama's poll numbers slipped back a bit in March, bringing an end to his recent "bump." This was Obama's first bad month in a while, ending the positive trends Obama had set for the past two months in approval rating, and for the past five months...

To clarify that title: when you pull a prank on this particular day, you're supposed to reveal yourself as the prankster by yelling "April Fools!" (or even, as a purist might insist, "April Fools'!"). I am not doing so, hence the absence of the exclamation mark. Sadly, my task is...

The Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives are supposed to -- according to their own statements -- absolutely revere the United States Constitution. They even opened their current congressional session by reading the whole text of the document aloud (or, at least, the non-embarrassing parts of it). So...