The New Republic

Earlier this week, the Heritage Foundation released a new report, “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer,” that confounded nearly everyone who read it. READ MORE >>

Like a shark that has to keep swimming lest it suffocate, Rush Limbaugh must pick fights with people to keep his name alive. So demanding is his job that he sometimes resorts to attacking his own species. The target du jour of Limbaugh’s jabs: Marco Rubio. When he had Rubio on his radio show last month, Limbaugh asked the senator whether going through with immigration reform wasn’t “committing suicide” for Republicans. READ MORE >>

After four long years, millions of dollars spent on lobbyists, massive protests in Washington and a dramatic pre-election presidential punt, the campaign to get a pipeline built from the Alberta tar sands to the heart of the Midwest is nearing its end. READ MORE >>

After President Obama’s relatively easy reelection, analysts and commentators wondered whether his young and diverse coalition would outlive his presidency. Many believe, based mainly on their intuition, that 2008 and 2012 were the anomalous results of a historic candidacy. On the other hand, the country is getting more and more diverse with each passing year. Recently, one prominent demographer at the Brookings Institute used the exit polls to argue that Obama would have lost if turnout rates returned to ’04 levels. READ MORE >>

Young Republicans and College Democrats have their perks—the occasional trip to a state party convention, maybe—but they can’t hope to compete with young centrists. When a dozen college students came to St. Louis recently as part of a competition funded by the 85-year-old billionaire deficit hawk Pete Peterson, they were put up in the Ritz-Carlton, while the hundreds of other students attending the same conference stayed in humbler quarters. READ MORE >>

Welcome to a non-presidential election year in the age of Obama. Last week, a new poll showed Democratic Senate candidate Ed Markey ahead of his Republican rival, Gabriel Gomez, by just 4 points in Massachusetts, reviving memories of Scott Brown’s victory in a 2010 special election. READ MORE >>

With the South Carolina special election on Tuesday, all eyes are on Elizabeth Colbert Busch, the 58-year-old political novice who has a coin-toss chance of becoming the first Democrat to represent the state's First Congressional District in more than thirty years, and the second woman ever to do so. It's no surprise, then, that some of her opponents would stoop pretty low to keep her out of office. READ MORE >>

If it wasn’t obvious beforehand, it became clear last week that Ted Cruz is likely to run for president. READ MORE >>

Presidential elections are relatively easy to analyze. The economic fundamentals provide an early handicap of the outcome, and by the end the countless polls are so accurate that you often need to try to get presidential elections wrong, as hopeful partisans do. READ MORE >>

A top United Nations official has declared that Syria is now the worst humanitarian crisis the organization has ever faced. It is no surprise, therefore, that moral interventionists are calling for action. But President Barack Obama has consistently downplayed morality in his foreign policy calculus. He tends towards the realism associated with George H.W. Bush. READ MORE >>