So, Mr. Obama, does NSA pose a 'false choice' or not?

Thirty-five years ago in United States v. Choate, the courts ruled that the Postal Service may record "mail cover," i.e., what's written on the outside of an envelope - the addresses of sender and receiver.

Obama invited Hezbollah's intervention in Syria

Qusair fell Wednesday to the Bashar Assad regime in Syria. Qusair is a strategic town that connects Damascus with Assad's Alawite heartland on the Mediterranean, with its ports and Russian naval base. It's a major strategic shift. Assad's forces can now advance on rebel-dominated areas in ce…

Dorothy Doctrine: Look for war leadership over the rainbow

"This war, like all wars, must end. That's what history advises."

Mr. President, the IRS has put a fly in my soup

"Horrible customer service." That's what the newly fired IRS commissioner averred was the agency's only sin in singling out conservative political groups for discriminatory treatment.

Damning Benghazi facts need no GOP hype

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US can afford to stay out of Syria and probably will

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After 6 months of setbacks, Obama's Big Mo is gone

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History will judge Bush 43 favorably

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What will Obama say when Boston motive is known?

Terrorism is speech - speech that gathers its audience by killing innocents as theatrically as possible. Nineteenth-century anarchist Paul Brousse called it "propaganda by deed." Accordingly, the Boston Marathon attack, the first successful terror bombing in the U.S. since 9/11, was designed…

With order restored to budget process, sides can deal

Washington has rediscovered the beauty of the boring. It's called "regular order," using the normal, routine, constitutional process to arrive at, for example, a budget.

Charles Krauthammer: Obama subverts already weak immigration trigger

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Obama's view on Israeli settlements unmasks Palestinians

"I honestly believe that if any Israeli parent sat down with those (Palestinian) kids, they'd say I want these kids to succeed."

Dems, GOP should split the difference on tax reform

The proposition that entitlement curbs are the key to maintaining national solvency is widely accepted, though not by many congressional Democrats. President Obama, however, has endorsed it on various occasions. And he could make it happen.

Let's recognize the national consensus on drones

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Aid to Egypt is right, but for the wrong reason

Sequestration is not the best time to be doling out foreign aid, surely the most unpopular item in the federal budget. Especially when the recipient is President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt.

The sky isn't falling! The sky isn't falling! Horrors!

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Rubio's immigration plan is sole hope for enforcement

The president suggested he would hold off introducing his own immigration bill as long as bipartisan Senate negotiations were proceeding apace - until his own immigration bill mysteriously leaked precisely as bipartisan Senate negotiations were proceeding apace.

Obama's drone war is well-founded in law and history

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With sequester looming, GOP finally has leverage

For the first time since Election Day, President Obama is on the defensive. That's because on March 1, automatic spending cuts ("sequestration") go into effect - $1.2 trillion over 10 years, half from domestic programs, half from defense.

Let's not repeat '86 immigration-amnesty blunder

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Obama's hard-left speech should surprise no one

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GOP split is tactical, not basic, and can be fixed

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Choice of Hagel shows Obama's leftward lurch

"This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility."

Obama free to be himself: tax-and-spend leveler

The rout was complete, the retreat disorderly. President Obama got his tax hikes - naked of spending cuts - passed by the ostensibly Republican House of Representatives. After which, you might expect him to pivot to his self-proclaimed "principle" of fiscal "balance" by taking the lead on re…

Everything must be on table to curb gun violence

Every mass shooting has three elements: the killer, the weapon and the cultural climate. As soon as the shooting stops, partisans immediately pick their preferred root cause with corresponding pet panacea. Names are hurled, scapegoats paraded, prejudices vented. The argument goes nowhere.

Obama's negotiation objective: Eviscerate the GOP

Let's understand President Obama's strategy in the "fiscal cliff" negotiations. It has nothing to do with economics or real fiscal reform. This is entirely about politics. It's Phase 2 of the 2012 campaign. The election returned to him to office. The fiscal cliff negotiations are designed to…

GOP mustn't fall for Obama's tax-now-cut-later scam

WASHINGTON - Why are Republicans playing the Democrats' game that the "fiscal cliff" is all about taxation?

GOP's woes are solvable, and its bench is deep

They lose and immediately the chorus begins. Republicans must change or die. A rump party of white America, it must adapt to evolving demographics or forever be the minority.

Romney victory could be a historic tipping point

"Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not." That was Barack Obama in 2008. And he was right. Reagan was an ideological inflection point, ending a 50-year liberal ascendancy and beginning a 30-year conservative …

Romney took the high road in winning third debate

'L'etat, c'est moi."

Romney will be ready after Obama's Libya gaffe

Fight night at Hofstra. The two boxers, confined within a ring of spectators - circling, feinting, taunting, staring each other down - come several times, by my reckoning, no more than one provocation away from actual fisticuffs, of the kind that on occasion so delightfully break out in the …

Romney decisively won debate, proving he's not out of touch

It was the biggest rout since Agincourt. If you insist, since the Carter-Reagan debate. With a remarkable display of confidence, knowledge and nerve, Mitt Romney won the first 2012 debate going away.

So much for Obama's 'new beginning' with Muslims

In the week following 9/11/12 something big happened: the collapse of the Cairo Doctrine, the centerpiece of President Obama's foreign policy. It was to reset the very course of post-9/11 America, creating, after the (allegedly) brutal depredations of the Bush years, a profound rapprochement…

Obama's policy on Iran is incoherent, contradictory

There are two positions one can take regarding the Iranian nuclear program: (a) it doesn't matter, we can deter them, or (b) it does matter, we must stop them.

Why Israel must ponder pre-emptive strike vs. Iran

There are few foreign-policy positions more silly than the assertion without context that "deterrence works." It is like saying air power works. Well, it worked for Kosovo; it didn't work over North Vietnam.

Acting against Iran, however risky, is imperative

Either Israel is engaged in the most elaborate ruse since the Trojan Horse or it is on the cusp of a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Republicans have a golden chance to turn the tables on Obama

Vice presidential picks are always judged by their effect on the coming election. They rarely have any.

Obama's many failures stem from his ideology

There are two ways to run against Barack Obama: stewardship or ideology. You can run against his record or you can run against his ideas.

Media's 'gaffe' obsession smothers triumph of Romney's tour

At the outset of his recent foreign trip, Mitt Romney committed a gaffe. In answer to a question about the Olympics, he expressed skepticism about London's preparations. The response confounded and agitated Romney supporters because it was such an unforced error. The question invited a simpl…

Romney in Europe: His presence sends message

A generation ago, it was the three I's. A presidential challenger's obligatory foreign trip meant Ireland, Italy and Israel. Mitt Romney's itinerary is slightly different: Britain, Poland and Israel.

State is not the font of entrepreneurial success

"If you've got a business - you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

'Arab Spring' actually an Islamist ascendancy

Post-revolutionary Libya appears to have elected a relatively moderate pro-Western government. Good news, but tentative because Libya is less a country than an oil well with a long beach and myriad tribes. Even if the government of Mahmoud Jibril is able to rein in the militias and establish…

Remarkable immigration ruling is overlooked

Though overshadowed by the shocking Supreme Court decision on health care, the court's Arizona immigration decision, issued three days earlier, remains far more significant than appreciated.

Chief justice aimed to protect court's stature

It's the judiciary's Nixon-to-China: Chief Justice John Roberts joins the liberal wing of the Supreme Court and upholds the constitutionality of Obamacare. How? By pulling off one of the great constitutional finesses of all time. He managed to uphold the central conservative argument against…

Obama is a blatant lawbreaker - by his own words

"With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations of immigrants brought here illegally as children through executive order, that's just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed."

It's Barack the Weak vs. Mitt the Feeble

Mitt Romney vs. Barack Obama is not exactly Jefferson-Adams or Lincoln-Douglas. No Harry Truman or Bill Clinton here, let alone FDR or Reagan. Indeed, it's arguable that neither party is fielding its strongest candidate. Hillary Clinton would run far better than Obama.

Walker's win signals public-sector unions' decline

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The moral perversity of Barack the Avenger

A very strange story, a 6,000-word front-page New York Times piece on how, every Tuesday, Barack Obama shuffles "baseball cards" with the pictures and bios of suspected terrorists from around the world and chooses who shall die by drone strike. He even reserves for himself the decision of wh…

I know my weaknesses, and Mudville Nats are No. 1

It was our much-anticipated quarterly lunch with Tim Kurkjian, baseball analyst extraordinaire, wherein George Will and I bathe in a constant flow of obscure statistics, Kurkjian oddities and ribald anecdotes.

Obama's gay-marriage 'evolution' is pure cynicism

There are two ways to defend gay marriage. Argument A is empathy: One is influenced by gay friends in committed relationships yearning for the fulfillment and acceptance that marriage conveys upon heterosexuals. That's essentially the case President Obama made when he first announced his cha…