After six months in the Oval Office, President Barack Obama has a lower job-approval rating than ten of the last twelve presidents at the same point in their presidencies.

2010 census reveals Texas' economy has diversified far beyond petroleum, with booming high-tech centers, major corporate headquarters and thriving small businesses. It has attracted hundreds of thousands of Americans and immigrants, high-skill as well as low-skill.

President Obama has kicked off a three-day bus tour of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois, where the corn is high and at least some factories are spewing smoke. He won these Midwestern states handily in 2008, but he's not taking anything for granted these days. To understand the political economy of the region, it helps to put it in historic perspective.

America is still a nation in which a majority of citizens are or have every prospect of becoming property owners, who are less willing to plunder the property of others under the Obama Democrats' programs.

After a century of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, surely we have learned that far from constituting a leap "from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom," as Marx put it, revolution has more often been a leap into a bottomless abyss of human suffering.

There is no more dramatic proof of the death of the Left than the passage of its central vision--global democratic revolution--into the hands of those who call themselves conservatives.

The world has certainly changed since 1989 (and 1848), but Marxism is far from dead.

The attorney general's interpretation of the Voting Rights Act and proposed guidelines to ensure that certain states obtain federal approval for all proposed changes in voting procedure including "redrawing districting maps" will negatively affect the landscape of American politics for decades to come.