I was bouncing back and forth between worrying about my daughter flying to Ukraine (very far away, 4 connections, 1 airline I'd never heard of, very far away) and worrying about what I was going to say to a very smart, tough federal judge who was about to keep me on my feet for hours arguing on behalf of my client.
On the prowl for a good dinner in a Florida town we didn't know well, I went on Yelp. Yelp is a social networking website that lets anyone review a business. One Italian restaurant looked promising, with mostly positive reviews and few grumbles. We went there, had a fine meal and told the chef-owner so. But on mentioning that we had seen the reviews on Yelp, a cloud crossed his face.
Right now, first-term Rep. Rick Berg (R-ND) looks likely to be elected to the Senate seat left open by the retirement of Kent Conrad (D) in November 2012. The Crystal Ball wondered: How rare is it for someone to get such a fast elevation from the House to the Senate? (We realize some House members will insist it is a demotion.) We've scoured the records and identified nine members of the Senate in this category. Only senators in office sometime in the previous 50 years were included.
One of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals. Since Watergate, presidential and executive branch scandal has been an inescapable feature of the American presidency, but the current administration has not yet suffered a major scandal, which I define as a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing. What happened, and what are the odds that the administration's streak will continue?
Take a poll of political pundits about next year's presidential election, and most at this point would probably predict that President Barack Obama would win reelection, but with a reduced margin from 2008 in both the popular and electoral vote. Yet if that actually happens, it would be an historical rarity of the first order.
Do Americans have the will to cut government spending in order to curb the rampant growth in government debt and liabilities? Not if the politicians they send to Washington have anything to do with it.
In 1954, E.B. White wrote a piece in The New Yorker about a hurricane hitting his part of Maine. The moment it left Boston, he notes in "The Eye of Edna," the radio voices declared the violent storm over -- even as it continued barreling toward the coast of Maine. When the wind "began to tear everything to pieces, what we got on the radio was a man doing a whistling act and somebody playing the glockenspiel."
Question: What do the following have in common? Eckert Cold Storage Co., Kerly Homes of Yuma, Classic Party Rentals, West Coast Turf Inc., Ellenbecker Investment Group Inc., Only in San Francisco, Hotel Nikko, International Pacific Halibut Commission, City of Puyallup, Local 485 Health and Welfare Fund, Chicago Plastering Institute Health & Welfare Fund, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, Teamsters Local 522 Fund Welfare Fund Roofers Division, StayWell Saipan Basic Plan, CIGNA, Caribbean Workers' Voluntary Employees' Beneficiary Health and Welfare Plan.
The president's speech last week, which was described by the White House in advance as a speech intended to reach out to the Muslim world, will probably go down as one of the least well-understood major presidential speeches in modern memory.
The U.S. Supreme Court effectively ordered California on Monday to release 33,000 inmates over two years from an in-state prison population that numbers about 143,000.
New polling by Rasmussen shows voters highly conflicted over which party to blame for our economic troubles and which is best able to end them. But Americans agree on one thing: The economy is lousy. And from that, we can reasonably deduce that they don't want a lousier economy.
"The State Department is a fitting venue," declared Barack Obama at the beginning of his speech on the Middle East last Thursday.
Shame on The New York Times. A housekeeper gets pregnant by the famous and powerful man for whom she works. For 10 years, she continues to work in the home and never says a word. After 20 years of service, she retires and buys a house 100 miles away to raise her son.
The nation got a preview of the Democrats' sweeping congressional election victories in 2010 when Democratic candidates pulled off victories in three close special House elections. The results were just the first of many for Democrats in the last cycle, when…
It is hard to see why anyone was surprised by Newt Gingrich's self-ignited implosion in the earliest hours of his presidential candidacy. The career of the former House speaker and Georgia congressman is practically bursting with proof that he suffers from chronic paranoid hysteria -- a condition that has done more to advance than diminish his status among conservatives.
As the International Monetary Fund gets ready to choose a successor to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who resigned following his arrest on charges that he sexually assaulted and raped a hotel housekeeper, it would be a good thing to step back for a moment and ask: What should the IMF do? More specifically, can the IMF possibly morph itself into a worldwide force for economic growth instead of Bailout Nation?
After two strong congressional cycles in 2006 and 2008, the Democrats were "shellacked" by Republicans in 2010. As the 2012 cycle approaches, uncertainty prevails for both parties: Each is trying to hold or expand its majority in one chamber while attempting to weaken and maybe topple the opposition in the other.
Just as busts follow booms, booms are supposed to follow busts. But there has been no boom, not even a boomlet, to light a candle in the gloom of the housing collapse. Many economists thought that a recovery from the real-estate meltdown that started in 2007 would be well on its way by 2011.
Exit Mike Huckabee. Enter Newt Gingrich. Exit Donald Trump. It's been a busy week in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.
"I didn't wish to be the girl who had a problem with a politician for the rest of my life." So said Tristane Banon, in explaining why she didn't file charges nine years ago against Socialist politician and current International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
