"[Obama is] not about to try building consensus on gun policy among people of good faith. He'll take the same approach he's taken throughout his presidency: He'll delegitimize opponents of his sweeping agenda as irrational, self-interested enemies of decency and progress.

"As the Washington Examiner's Byron York recently noted, Obama has a long history of trying to shut down disagreement by accusing his critics of politicization. He accused Republicans of trying to politicize abortion, the U.S. relationship with Israel, the Iran deal, Benghazi, and the scandals at the IRS and the VA. Just last week he insinuated that Hillary Rodham Clinton's disagreements with his Syria policy (or lack thereof) are influenced by the fact that she's running for office.

"The common denominator in all of these cases is Obama's unimpeachable certainty that he has a monopoly on all the good arguments and all the best motives. Now he even claims the exclusive right to politicize issues when it suits him."

"Each time there's a shooting like the one that took place in Oregon on Thursday, a choir of politicians and pundits rises up to pretend they have known all along how to stop such incidents from happening. If only people had listened to them in advance!

"What they wanted to tell everyone all along was that one or another gun control proposal would have solved the problem.

"They are not only wrong, but they are also fueling the dumbest kind of policy discussion possible, the demand that lawmakers do something, anything, even if all of the solutions under discussion are proven failures."

"Pollsters surveyed by POLITICO have a unanimous warning for the Republican National Committee and the TV networks who are using public-opinion surveys to exclude presidential candidates from debates: Don't trust polls to detect often-tiny grades of opinion in a giant field.

"Indeed, the unprecedented reliance on polls to winnow the Republican field is coming at a time when many pollsters feel they're blinder than ever to trends in public thinking -- and that using polls to keep out candidates who are otherwise well qualified could seriously alter the race.

"'Polls are being used to do a job that they're really not intended for -- and they're not as qualified for as they used to be,' said Cliff Zukin, a professor at Rutgers University and past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research."

"Why is Putin moving so quickly and so brazenly? Because he's got only 16 more months to push on the open door that is Obama. He knows he'll never again see an American president such as this -- one who once told the General Assembly that 'no one nation can or should try to dominate another nation' and told it again Monday of 'believing in my core that we, the nations of the world, cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion.'

"They cannot? Has he looked at the world around him -- from Homs to Kunduz, from Sanaa to Donetsk -- ablaze with conflict and coercion?

"Wouldn't you take advantage of these last 16 months if you were Putin, facing a man living in a faculty-lounge fantasy world? Where was Obama when Putin began bombing Syria? Leading a U.N. meeting on countering violent extremism.

"Seminar to follow."

"The first thing to understand about Vladimir Putin is that he's not content just to win. He has to destroy his opponents, foreign or domestic.

"His deeds may be despicable and his manners far too crude for the Upper West Side, but the guy is a force of nature, a man who -- by sheer strength of will -- has used a broken country and its rusting military to change the world. Meanwhile, our astonished president sulks like a high-school girl stood up by her boyfriend ('But Vladimir ... you promised!'). ...

"Never before has a US presidential administration combined such naked cowardice, intellectual arrogance and willful blindness. We don't have a president -- we have a scared child covering his eyes at a horror movie.

"And Putin knows it."

"The so-called 'progressives' love to talk about how their policies will create a worker's paradise, but then why is it that day after day, month after month, year after year, people are fleeing liberal blue states for conservative red states? ...

"The latest Rich States, Poor States document (which I co-author) published by ALEC, the state legislative organization, finds that nearly 1,000 people each day on net are leaving blue states and entering red states. This migration is changing the economic center of gravity in America -- moving it relentlessly to the South and West. ...

"Data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) show a similar trend. Each year the IRS issues a migration data report which examines how many tax filers (and dependents) in the year changed their residency and how much income was transported from one state to another. The numbers for the most recent year (tax filing year 2013) are gigantic and put the lie to the claim that interstate migration is too small to matter in terms of the wealth and economic opportunity in one state versus another."

"As the curtain falls on Fiscal Year 2015, Congress should send Obama a new spending bill that gives him all the funding he wants, with one exception: no $150 billion bailout to Iran's al-Qaeda-coddling ayatollahs.

"After such a measure has passed the House and Senate, departing Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Kentucky) should not rely on anonymous aides to transmit this measure to Obama. Instead, the entire GOP congressional leadership physically should travel to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with scores of journalists in tow, and hand deliver the enrolled bill to the West Gate of the White House. American news viewers will see this dramatic proof that Congress did its job and provided the funds to keep the government running. This evidence will remain on videotape for constant TV replay in the weeks ahead."

"Speaker Boehner's successor inherits a diminished role in a diminished institution, and it isn't clear that there is much of anything he will be able to do to help the national legislature recover its self-respect, which lags so far behind its self-importance. Congress no longer has the power to return the president -- and the presidency -- to its proper role. That power, too, is now in the hands of the president, which is why it is unlikely that our national slide into autocracy will be reversed until the current political equilibrium is disturbed, which is to say until certain danger encounters uncertain danger."

"All told, there are at least 35 FOIA lawsuits pending for Clinton-related email. Nearly everything important we've learned has come from those suits. They are why the State Department is releasing emails; why we know they contained classified information; why we know Mrs. Clinton's aides also used unsanctioned email accounts; why we know that the State Department is covering for Mrs. Clinton.

"Which explains why the Justice Department wants the judiciary to 'consolidate' the lawsuits, claiming that the State Department is overwhelmed. The real goal is to shut down the process. Consolidation will slow discovery, and the chances of stopping the information flow is better if all the suits come before one judge, who might be friendly, rather than six unpredictable ones. But each organization bringing a suit deserves a separate hearing. It isn't these groups' fault that the State Department allowed Mrs. Clinton to go email rogue and now has a mess.

"What Democrats are only beginning to understand is that 35 FOIA lawsuits is a guarantee of weekly Clinton email-news bombs. This isn't ending. The polls keep measuring Mrs. Clinton in theoretical matchups. The only matchup that matters is this one: Clinton vs. FOIA. And FOIA is crushing it."

"If the Democratic Party cares to salvage a sliver of moral authority, its leaders and early state voters need to send Hillary Rodham Clinton an urgent message: Come clean or get out. Stop lying and deflecting about how and why you stashed State Department email server - or stop running."