Several House Republicans are embracing Stanford University economist John B. Taylor’s call for the Federal Reserve to adopt a mathematical rule for determining interest rates, stepping into a long-running debate among central bankers about how to set monetary policy.

AFTER nearly a decade in the political wilderness, the neoconservative movement is back, using the turmoil in Iraq and Ukraine to claim that it is President Obama, not the movement’s interventionist foreign policy that dominated early George W. Bush-era Washington, that bears responsibility for the current round of global crises.

You can bet on hand-wringing and outrage about judicial activism and political motives behind the 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case but, in fact, this case was all but decided in 1993 when Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

Well before the votes were counted in Tuesday's Senate runoff in Mississippi, we already knew three things about America's political landscape.