Pete Spiliakos

This is a frustrating moment if you believe in limited government. The statist left seems to be ascendant. We are on the path to a full government takeover of healthcare as premiums rise and Obamacare unravels the system of employer-provided health insurance. The failure to implement entitlement reform means that we are on the road to sharply higher taxes… . Continue Reading »

I watched the CPAC speech from conservative donor and philanthropist Foster Friess. Friess said we have to learn from the left: They speak to the heart and the emotion. We have a tendency to speak to the brain and the intellect. I don’t think that is the problem. I think that conservatives do . . . . Continue Reading »

I want to like the new Ryan budget, but James Pethokoukis points out several of its problems. The new Ryan budget drops the top marginal income tax rate to twenty-five percent. That is lower than the top marginal tax rate proposed by Mitt Romney. Who outside of a mental institution believes that . . . . Continue Reading »

You should read this article by R. R. Reno. I’ll wait until you come back. He gets to the point in his first paragraph where he writes: Our political culture is now being shaped by liberals. That’s not because their ideas are sound. They’re often not. But conservatives largely . . . . Continue Reading »

1. I saw Paul Ryan on today’s Fox News Sunday . Ryan did a pretty good job making his proposed spending cuts and premium support Medicare policies seem like nonideological common sense He did about as well as could reasonably have been expected given the subject matter. I was really impressed . . . . Continue Reading »

1. Don’t cry for the Obama administration. If Bush-appointed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had made the same mistake as Eric Holder, and left the door open to the assassination of American citizen noncombatants on American soil in areas where the courts were still operating, the Democrats . . . . Continue Reading »

I’ve had my differences of emphasis with Ross Douthat on the subject of Republican donors, but he nailed it today when he wrote: a party that seems out of touch and out of date on basic pocketbook issues probably isn’t going to rebuild its support just by converging with the Democrats on . . . . Continue Reading »

I think my main problem with this Arthur Brooks article is that it gets the emphasis backwards.  The main Republican problem isn’t that they seem uncaring.  More skilled campaigning would be nice, but better emoting about the plight of the poor with the same message of tax cuts for . . . . Continue Reading »

Kate is right that the Arthur Brooks article is interesting, but I would come at it from a different direction. I think that the economic challenge conservatives (to the extent they were embodied in the 2008 Republican field) face is not that they seem to be uninterested in the poor. It is that . . . . Continue Reading »

Today, on Fox News Sunday , Mitt Romney complained about the “long and blistering” primary that created an “unfavorable impression” of him. This outbreak of narcissism and self-pity has a chance to distort our perception of what actually happened during the Republican . . . . Continue Reading »