In the past couple of weeks, people who care about American politics and about Congress have lost two important figures: Harry McPherson and James Q. Wilson.

This week, America lost the most influential social scientist of the past 100 years. James Q. Wilson died at the age of 80.

George F. Will remembers Jeane J. Kirkpatrick during her memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral on February 6, 2007.

In his speech in Tucson on Wednesday, Barack Obama put to rest the libel that political incivility is responsible for the shooting.

Moynihan seemed to be in the middle of every major political controversy for 40 years. As a result, this new collection of his letters, memoranda, and diary entries, ably edited and annotated by former New York Times reporter Steven Weisman, illuminates not only Moynihan's thought and character, but the age he lived in.

We think 2010 has been a tumultuous political year, but it has been a gentile tea party compared to 1968, the year that brought Richard Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan together.

Democrats in the past twenty months have seen Obama fail to produce the hope and change they expected, so their enthusiasm has waned and Republicans now clearly have a wide advantage in the balance of enthusiasm and a good chance to sweep the 2010 elections.

Warhawks are not the only people saying that a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would be preferable to a nuclear Iran, and President Obama might start backing down on his stance against military intervention.