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Michael Medved
Michael Medved is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host and bestselling author. His daily three hour show reaches 200 stations across the country and an audience of 4.7 million placing him, for ten years in a row, on the Talkers Magazine list of the top ten political talks shows in the United States. Michael’s columns on politics and media appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast and USA Today, where he is a member of the Board of Contributors.
Writer's WebsiteThe “Estrogen Advantage” Is No Cure for Gridlock
With more women elected to the Senate and House, giddy commentators have begun suggesting that more feminine perspectives could cure Washington gridlock.
As Senator Dianne Feinstein of California argued, the new women Senators aren’t driven by “testosterone” and “ego” and so can work more cooperatively with their colleagues.
But when in history...
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Irrational Reliance on Higher Powers
It’s Liberals, Not Conservatives, Who Are Crippled by Blind Faith
As Washington staggers into a new year, one side of the political spectrum polarizes and paralyzes all ongoing debates due to its irrational reliance on a higher power.
The problem isn’t religious conservatives and their abiding faith in God; it’s mainstream liberals and their blind...
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Liberal Hypocrisy on Guns, Suicide
In pushing for dramatic new federal action, gun control advocates often mislead the public with the term “gun deaths.” They do so by citing statistics including not only murders committed with firearms, but also including the much greater number of suicides.
Actually, the great majority of more than 30,000 annual gun deaths – nearly two thirds of...
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Les Miz: Mizleading on History of Change
Revolutionary fervor in seizing the barricades for change makes for great theater and grand cinema, but seldom produces the positive results that young idealists desire. Those constructive consequences come much more reliably from middle-aged, middle-class virtues, patience, planning, deferred gratification, hard work, incremental improvement—with far less...
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Santa Is a Conservative
Battered by electoral disaster and a withering budget fight, Republicans should rally their disheartened troops by reclaiming the most beloved figure in American life as one of their own: yes, Santa is a conservative!
In the past, right-wingers made a big mistake by letting their opponents seize on Kris Kringle as a symbol of kind-hearted liberalism. On too...
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This Is (Futile) 40?
One of Hollywood’s big offerings for the holiday season is a raunchy comedy about midlife crisis, THIS IS 40. Writer-director Judd Apatow, best known for hits like KNOCKED UP, uses his real-life wife, Leslie Mann, and their two young daughters to star in a story of an LA record executive suddenly worried about Viagra, hemorrhoids, and overdue bills.
Despite...
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A Kinder, Gentler Era Didn’t Have All the Advantages
The sad passing of an early star of right wing talk radio highlights some of the profound changes in news broadcasting and the conservative movement in general. Those transformations may seem lamentable in this season of Republican self-flagellation but actually demonstrate an improved ability for right-of-center arguments to play a significant role in the...
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How to Run Ahead of the Ticket
If Republicans hope to break their wretched streak of disappointing presidential campaigns – losing the popular vote in five of the last six White House contests – they should learn crucial lessons from the only candidate in that dismal span who proved notably more popular than his party’s national brand: John McCain.
Indignant conservatives may...
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Delivering Real Help, Not Hurt, for the Holidays
As this joyous holiday season builds toward its annual climax, nearly all decent people feel a powerful urge to serve the hopeless and the homeless who huddle in the shadows of every major city. But what if our instinct to demonstrate compassion results in more harm than help?
That question arises with special force this year after international publicity for...
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The Tax-the-Rich Fairy Tale
The Obama administration and its allies are so eager to portray tax hikes on the rich as the solution to all our problems that they desperately desire to persuade the public that tax cuts for the rich caused all those problems in the first place.
Perhaps the most outrageous expression of this argument comes in a controversial new video from the California...
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The Conservative Losing Streak: In Perspective
Conservatives feel understandably discouraged by the dismal results of November’s elections, but we ought to put our recent presidential losing streak in perspective.
It’s true that Republicans lost the popular vote in five of the last six contests for the White House, but in the previous six elections – 1968 through 1988 –they won five out of six....
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The Taxman Meets the Taxidermist
Only once in a great while will a single story simultaneously illuminate the embarrassing excesses of both low politics and high culture, but the troubling true tale of the tax man and the taxidermist, the stuffed bird and the feathered federal nest, nicely captures the demented nature of recent trends in both Washington and Manhattan.
The New York...
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The Many Loves of FDR
The new movie HYDE PARK ON HUDSON, with Bill Murray playing Franklin Roosevelt, is a flawed, frustrating melodrama but it raises important questions about historical perspective.
The movie dramatizes a 1939 visit by Britain’s King and Queen to FDR’s country estate while the wheelchair-bound president juggled demands of his wife, mother, and two adoring...
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Attack Policies, Not Intentions
After stinging electoral defeat and in the midst of stalled budget negotiations, some leading conservatives impute dark motives to Barack Obama. According to these arguments, the president will go over the fiscal cliff to wreck the economy, destroy capitalism, and transform America.
This notion ignores the fact that economic catastrophe undermines a...
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No Denying the GOP’s Aging Edge
Does ideology shape life experience, or does life experience determine ideology? The future direction of American politics depends on our response.
In response to the disappointing results of November’s elections, I have argued that conservatives should take heart from the undeniable aging of the electorate, which will tilt future contests toward...
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Agree on Goals, Guys
The biggest obstacle to a bi-partisan deal for avoiding the fiscal cliff involves an inability to agree on specific, common goals. The underlying aim for Democrats is to close gaps between rich and poor by raising taxes on the wealthy; the deepest goal for Republicans is to slow the growth of government by cutting spending.
Both sides, however, already...
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