Rich Lowry/King Features Syndicate

China-envying New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman likes to muse about how wonderful it would be if the United States could be like China for a day.
The scandal engulfing former rising star Bo Xilai, the cashiered Communist Party boss of the city of Chongqing, suggests how this magical day might go down.

Archimedes didn’t say, “Give me a bad statistic, and I will move the Earth.” But that was only because the ancient Greek mathematician wasn’t familiar with the ways of Washington.
An entire movement has grown up around the factoid that American women make about 80 percent of the pay of men. It is a reliable talking point of Democrats who insist the country is racked by a “War on Women.” A raft of proposed legislation purports to remedy the discrimination exposed by the damning number.

Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota is the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. That means he’s the Democratic point man for the absolutely essential work of not coming up with a budget.

Delric Miller IV died in a hail of bullets a month ago. When someone fired 37 AK-47 rounds into his Detroit home at 4:30 a.m., he was mortally wounded while dozing on the couch. He was 9 months old. No one made the multicolored teething ring he got for Christmas or his toy hammer into national symbols of random violence.

The shade of James Madison hovers over the ObamaCare argument at the Supreme Court.
It is the system of limited and carefully divided government powers that he had a large hand in crafting -- and defended so ably in The Federalist Papers -- that is at stake in the contest over the constitutionality of the individual mandate. 

President Barack Obama says he wants to buy a Chevy Volt when he’s out of office in five years. If getting into a General Motors electric automobile means so much to him, he’d better hope he loses in November. What the president dubbed the “car of the future” in a visit to a Volt plant may not make it to January 2017.

If anyone does a year-end wrap-up of the worst ideas of 2012, losing the presidential election deserves to be high on the list.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, thinks that Iran is a “rational actor.” He is indisputably correct.
Tehran couldn’t have made itself into the world’s foremost exporter of terror and extended its tentacles throughout the Middle East without resorting to rational calculation. That’s obvious. What Dempsey is implying, though, is that a regime capable of such calculation can necessarily be deterred if it gets a nuclear weapon. That’s an unsupportable leap.

About a month ago, people who thought religious institutions shouldn’t be forced to pay for things they morally oppose were unremarkable, boring even. Now, they are waging a heinous War on Women.

First they come for the alcohol, then for the tobacco, then for your sugar.
When the day arrives when you have to undergo a background check and endure a three-day waiting period to enter a Dunkin’ Donuts, you can trace it back to this moment. Namely the publication in the journal Nature of an article calling for regulating sugar as a health hazard, although stopping “far short of all-out prohibition” (that would be too extreme).