As America approaches the deadline for increasing the statutory national debt -- or risking a catastrophic default on our obligations to creditors and citizens -- there is no shortage of stupid ideas to restore fiscal order.
At one level, it's astoundingly funny: a congressman telling a woman with whom he is flirting that the only picture he has of himself is shirtless. If there is one thing every congressman has, it is pictures of himself in a shirt. Often, stuffed.
Political pundits of a certain stripe have been lamenting the disappearance of Republican moderates for years. It's time now to lament the disappearance of moderate Democrats.
In one of her many iterations, Arianna Huffington targeted "corporate greed" as a force undermining America. That was during one of her populist phases, which frequently are followed by Huffington morphing into what she once scorned.
Last Sunday, the media were reporting that the Muslim Brotherhood was sitting down with Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman, in a completely unrelated story, the BBC reported that British Prime Minster David Cameron announced that "State multiculturalism has failed": "David Cameron has criticized 'state multiculturalism' in his first speech as prime minister on radicalization and the causes of terrorism.
In the first days of the demonstrations in Egypt, almost everyone I know was glued to their television. Many of them were caught up in what they saw as the romanticism of the moment: students and young people in the streets, willing to risk their lives to stand up to a tyrannical regime and replace it with a democracy. Irresistible.
The January employment report was a complete snow job. Abominable winter blizzards across the country caused 886,000 workers to report "not at work due to bad weather," according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is 600,000 more than the normal 300,000 not at work for the average January of the past decade.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- The ice, snow and sleet that paralyzed American aviation last week forced upon me two extra days in tropical Puerto Rico. Somehow I managed. And so did the legions of other Americans and Canadians sharing stories of canceled flights as they contentedly drank cafe con leche in the warm sun of Plaza de Colon.
Most campaign rhetoric and political punditry is underpinned by an assumption that perfect solutions are possible, if only people would have the good sense to adopt the candidate's or the pundit's course of action. Alas, that is not always so.
The January employment report was a complete snow job. Abominable winter blizzards across the country caused 886,000 workers to report “not at work due to bad weather,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is 600,000 more than the normal 300,000 not at work for the average January of the past decade.
One of the more disagreeable traits of many tea party "spokespeople," aside from their loose connection with facts, is their zest for threatening Republicans who don't leap when they say "jump."
I had never seen anything like it. I sat in the movie theater holding my breath as Marlon Brando wielded the stick of butter. For the sake of families who might be reading, I'll say no more, except that "Last Tango in Paris" was, depending on your perspective, either a very sexy movie or a very scary one.
Barack Obama, like all American politicians, likes to portray himself as future-oriented and open to technological progress. Yet the vision he set out in his State of the Union address is oddly antique and disturbingly static.
Thanks to Tim Storey and his colleagues at the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Crystal Ball can share with you the most up-to-date picture of power control in the states. It is summed up nicely in the two maps and one graph, below.
To his fellow Egyptians and to most observers across the world, Mohamed ElBaradei looks like a hero -- an international diplomat who might well have lived out his days in the comforts of Geneva and New York, but returned home to provide leadership despite serious personal peril. But to leading figures on the American right, ElBaradei is a figure to be mocked, scorned and dismissed as a stooge of darker forces in Egyptian politics and the Mideast.
Forget all that talk about bipartisan civility. When some 200 conservatives showed up for a weekend conference hosted by the libertarian-leaning industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch in Rancho Mirage, Calif., there was no welcome wagon. Instead, seminar attendees were met by close to 1,000 activists protesting the meeting and waving banners. News reports showed a swastika and cute slogans like: "Quarantine the Kochs" and "Koch kills."
In his State of the Union address last week, U.S. President Barack Obama acknowledged that America’s “free enterprise system is what drives innovation.” He also said that if America is to “win the future,” then it must first “win the race to educate our kids.”
When it comes to presidents and reelection, two things seem clear. If they appear to be in control of events, they win. If events seem to be controlling them, they lose.
How did Obama ever think that his program would pass constitutional muster? How could he imagine that the Interstate Commerce clause could cover something that wasn't interstate (health insurance cannot be sold over state lines) and wasn't commerce (failure to buy insurance is not commerce) would stand up in court? He was so sure that he would win any constitutional challenge that he arrogantly failed to put a severability clause in the bill so that it would survive even if parts were stricken down.
