Michael Barone Quotations

When you're looking at California, Texas, New York, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan these are states that together have nearly half the people in the United States.

We Americans are lucky to live in a country with a history full of noble ideas, great leaders, and awe-inspiring accomplishments. Sadly, many of our elites want no part of it.

Multiculturalism is based on the lie that all cultures are morally equal.

All of which raises another question: If Obamacare is so great, why do so many people want to get out from under it?

Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money is this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.

Punishing enemies and rewarding friends - politics Chicago style - seems to be the unifying principle that helps explain the Obamacare waivers, the NLRB action against Boeing and IRS's gift tax assault on 501(c)(4) donors. They look like examples of crony capitalism, bailout favoritism and gangster government. One thing they don't look like is the rule of law.

Campuses that were once havens of free speech are now patrolled and regulated by thought police. Intellectual dishonesty has become a job requirement for university administrators.

Obama's attitude toward the rule of law is apparent in the words he used to describe what he is looking for in a nominee to replace Justice David Souter. He wants 'someone who understands justice is not just about some abstract legal theory,' he said, but someone who has 'empathy.' In other words, judges should decide cases so that the right people win, not according to the rule of law.