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what is viewed as a rush to the exits in the face of the Obamacare disaster and the Obama scandal machine bleeding into the 2014 mid-term elections, three prominent democrats in the U.S. Congress have announced their retirement this week. On Monday, 40-year Capitol Hill veteran and Pelosi Democrat, George Miller (D-CA) called it quits. Miller, 68, has been in the House since 1974, the year of Watergate. Miller stated that he looked “forward to one last year in Congress, fighting the good fight and then working in new venues on the issues that have inspired me.” Miller also indicated...

The discord between Democrats and Republicans regarding the three-month extension of unemployment benefits will be used by the Democrats for political fodder against the Republicans, if Republicans let them. The mid-term elections during a president's second term tend to be tough on the president's party. Additionally, Obama's approval rating tanked in December to 40 percent as the rollout of his signature health plan foundered. With the recent passage of a bipartisan budget bill, the need for a diversion -- a new target to focus political operatives and therefore voters -- is key. President Barack Obama laid out his 2014 agenda...

According to Yahoo!News the top story of the year was the Jodi Arias trial. I confess. I never heard of her. Had to look it up. Most of the Yahoo!News top ten would not have made my top 100. My criteria includes events that have a chance to shape history in a major way. Here are my lists, county by country, theme by theme. United States Obamacare Obamacare has been in the news multiple times a day, for months on end. Republicans attempting to overturn Obamacare made fools of themselves doing so. They lost a major budget battle in the...

The temptation for Republicans will be to sit idly by and let Obamacare deliver victory to them on a silver platter. Yet Republicans would be foolish to sit on their hands. Voters loathe being taken for granted. Republicans who doubt this should check what happened in the 1998 midterm elections. Since President Clinton was on the verge of being impeached, Republicans were confident they’d pick up seats in Congress. They lost seats. It was one of the rare times when the party in the White House triumphed in the sixth year of a presidency. What Republicans should reject is the...

For Republicans, winning enough races next year to take control of the Senate and expand their current majority in the House is suddenly oh so easy. Democrats are already underwater because of a flood of clear and compelling evidence that Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster. And there’s no end in sight to the rising tide of bad news, which won’t begin to ebb until painfully close to Election Day 2014. Horrendous as the stories about the damage Obamacare has inflicted upon the individual market have been, certain to be even worse will be news yet-to-come about its damage to both...

What an awful coming down. “The problem is that I’m president of the United States; I’m not emperor,” he explained to us. From a Nobel Prize to a booby prize; From the smartest guy ever to hold the position of president of the United States to one of the most obtuse. “A few of us saw a backbencher from the Illinois state legislature,” wrote long-time Obama watcher, John Kass of the Chicago Tribune, “a guy who took orders, then rode to the White House on a personality cult, finally exposed.” We’ll not really “finally.” But more like “disastrously” exposed. “We...

Amidst all the liberal doom and gloom stemming from the Obamacare debacle, at least someone's trying to keep hope alive for beleaguered Democrats . . . On today's Morning Joe, the BBC's Katty Kay did her best to paint a scenario in which Dems go into 2014 with Obamacare working, and the election results would not be the "disaster" that Republicans are assuming. View the video here.

In a Quinnipiac poll, just 30% of independents approve of ObamaCare. This problem will get worse and poses a dilemma for Mr. Obama and Democrats. A March analysis by Healthpocket.com estimated that less than 2% of individual plans comply with ObamaCare's mandates. A Nov. 7 study by McClatchy Newspapers suggests as many as 52 million people, including many covered by their employers, could lose their plan. Until now, many people who disagreed with Mr. Obama's agenda still liked him. But a late October Fox poll found his personal favorability at 45% and his unfavorability at 50%. Duplicity will do that....

Democrats have only one goal to accomplish between now and the 2014 elections: To paint Republicans as the bad guys. In doing so, they'll win the 2014 elections, gain control of the House of Representatives, and as President Reagan once said, the rest of us will be spending "our sunset years telling our children...what it once was like in America when men were free." Democrats are off to a good start; great, really. They, along with their willing accomplices in the media, propagated a lie by suggesting Republicans are responsible for the partial government shutdown. So far, it has worked...

The shutdown/debt limit imbroglio wasn’t a defeat. Defeats leave the losers feeling defeated. But the designated losers, the conservative base of the GOP – which, more accurately, now is the GOP – is more eager and excited than it has been in a long time. Why? Someone fought. Finally. Sure, we didn’t win the repeal of Obamacare. The only people talking about actually repealing Obamacare as a direct result of the tactical moves of recent weeks were the doddering dinosaurs and their media accomplices trying to put out the notion that Ted Cruz and his band of merry marauders had...

If a US default on interest and principal payments were to happen, make no mistake it would be a default of choice. Obama’s choice, that is. But he wouldn’t be the only one defaulting. Nor is he the only one to blame here. In order for the United States government to default on paying interest on the debt that we owe, a series of decisions would have to issue from the White House that would prevent those payments in the first place. There is enough money to prevent default, just not enough to keep the rest of the government...

Amidst all the blather about Republicans going over the cliff and taking the world with them, a tantalizing bit of truth was spoken on today's Morning Joe. Doomsaying notwithstanding, the GOP is actually positioned to do OK in 2014. Making the comment particularly surprising was its source: Barack Obama's former senior adviser himself—David Axelrod. View the video here.

What's the outlook for the 2014 Senate elections? The Republicans once again have a chance to overturn the Democrats' majority, as they did in 2010 and 2012. Much attention has been focused on whether Republicans this time will nominate candidates capable of winning key races, as they failed to do in those two elections. But another interesting question is how Democrats will try to hold onto seats in Republican-leaning states even as Barack Obama maintains his strong tilt to the political left. The lineup is certainly favorable to Republicans. Assuming the New Jersey seat now held by Republican appointee Jeff...

The foreign-headquartered company that recently purchased the leading U.S. electronic voting firm is boasting that it was highlighted in a report on how technology is making the election process more efficient, secure, transparent, accessible and reliable. The report, WND has learned, was authored by a firm with links to billionaire activist George Soros. The information comes after WND reported two weeks ago that SCYTL recently acquired the software division of a non-profit election organization tied to Soros’ Open Society Institute. Yesterday, WND reported SCYTL announced its technology will be deployed at more U.S. jurisdictions ahead of the 2014 midterm elections....

What will be the political fallout of the various scandals in which President Obama is ensnared? Chris Matthews thinks it will be huge. Appearing on today's Morning Joe, Matthews mused that the IRS scandal alone would be worth 5-10 points to Republican candidates. He specifically mentioned Mitch McConnell, Tom Corbett and Ken Cuccinelli as Republicans whom the scandal would aid in their 2014 races. View the video here.

Within months of Democrats ramming through Obamacare without a single Republican vote, the American people responded, pummeling the president's party at the polls. Republicans gained 63 seats in the House, six United States Senators, six governorships, and nearly 700 seats in state legislatures nationwide. Conservatives had their temporary political revenge, we were told, but Democrats would get the last laugh because Obamacare was sure to become more popular once Republicans' scurrilous smears against the law were shown to be false. How's that working out? Democratic senators, at a caucus meeting with White House officials, expressed concerns on Thursday about how...

By demanding Senate Democrats act first on major legislation, the House Speaker may help Republicans win back the upper chamber. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is passing the buck to the Senate and, in the process, he's lending a big hand to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) Boehner's move to force the Democratic-led Senate to take the lead on enacting President Obama's agenda puts him squarely in line with a top McConnell priority — wresting control of the upper chamber from Democrats.

He’ll push to loosen marijuana penalties, legalize undocumented immigrants and pursue a less aggressive American foreign policy. Call it the Rand Paul Evolution. In the wake of Barack Obama’s reelection win and ahead of a possible 2016 White House bid of his own, the Kentucky Republican plans to mix his hard-line tea party conservatism with more moderate policies that could woo younger voters and minorities largely absent from the GOP coalition. It’s the latest tactic of the freshman senator to inject the Libertarian-minded views shared by his retiring father into mainstream Republican thinking as the party grapples with its future....

My post of this morning was published with a couple of Senate races not finally decided. But the Republican candidates (Rep. Denny Rehberg in Montana and Rep. Rick Berg of North Dakota) have now conceded to the victorious Dems. (incumbent Sen. Jon Tester in Montana and Sen.-elect Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota). This nets out at a two-seat pickup for the Dems and a 55-45 majority heading into 2013 (assuming that, as expected, the Senate's two independents, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sen.-elect Angus King of Maine will caucus with the Dems). The net gain is especially impressive since the...

The president of local biotechnology firm GenPhar is accused of defrauding the federal government out of at least $3.6 million the company received to research vaccines against deadly diseases. The charges are contained in federal indictments unsealed today that also accuse GenPhar president Jian-Yun Dong and his estranged wife of making at least $31,000 in illegal campaign contributions to U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and his political action committee. Dong, who also is chief executive officer of GenPhar, is accused of submitting false claims to federal agencies, converting grant funds to his own use and committing wire fraud to scam the...