Clarence the angel has a tough job in "It's a Wonderful Life." He must show the suicidal George Bailey what terrible things would have happened had he not been born. Two prominent economists are playing Clarence to the multitudes who believe that forceful government intervention during the financial meltdown should never have been.
When I drive from downtown Washington to Reagan National Airport, I often encounter delays on the George Washington Parkway due to construction of a small bridge over an inlet of the Potomac.
Nothing tests a president like standing up against a wave of fear and prejudice, even at potentially great cost to his own party and prospects. That is what Lyndon Baines Johnson did when he signed the civil rights acts he knew would forfeit the South to the Republicans for a generation or more.
The Drudge Report headline declaring that "Murdoch Gives $1 Million to Haley Barbour" is not technically accurate.
With apologies to George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward and their 1935 classic song, "Summertime" (and the living is easy):
When 52 percent of California voters passed Proposition 8 in November 2008, Attorney General Jerry Brown said he would defend the measure during the inevitable appeals. Then, as is his fashion, Brown changed his mind. Ditto Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who twice vetoed same-sex marriage bills passed by the Legislature in deference to California voters who passed an earlier same-sex marriage statute in 2000.
The economy is suffering from something like a summer swoon. In the words of business columnist Jimmy Pethokoukis, the recovery summer has gone bust. We all know this from the sloppy statistics coming in for jobs, retail sales and, most recently, manufacturing. But market-based indicators are telling the same story.
The JetBlue flight attendant who theatrically quit his job by cursing out a "rude" passenger and exiting via an emergency slide has become a working-class hero to many. But Steven Slater's story didn't hold up for long. It now appears that the gash allegedly caused by someone slamming an overhead bin into his head was there before the flight. Slater was acting like a jerk long before takeoff, according to recent reports.
The deaths this week of two political Old Bulls has inspired some harsh commentary.
Taxpayers don't look at taxes the way the people who spend the tax money do. Take the battle over the extension of the "Bush tax cuts." Americans to Washington: They were tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. If Washington allows all or parts of the "Bush tax cuts" to expire at the end of the year, the result won't be to not cut taxes, as Beltway lingo and President Obama suggest, but to raise taxes.
My friend Kath would have turned 60 this week.
The more things “change,” the more they stay the same in Barack Obama’s Washington, D.C. – especially when it comes to government transparency.
Prosecutors at the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone at The Hague interrupted the trial of former Liberian leader Charles Taylor last week with some comic relief. They put supermodel Naomi Campbell on the stand to tie Taylor to the trade of "blood diamonds."
Among the most revealing aspects of life during the Obama presidency is the panoply of responses to a black family in the White House. What made so many of us proud of our country on Jan. 20, 2009, has increasingly provoked expressions of hatred from the far right. That is troubling, but not nearly as troubling as the behavior of conservatives who excuse, embolden or simply pretend to ignore the bigots surrounding them.
"The pace of economic recovery is likely to be more modest in the near term than had been anticipated." Those were the carefully chosen words of the Federal Reserve Board after its meeting Tuesday. Translation into English: We wuz wrong.
Suppose the U.S. government had posted a budget surplus in 12 of the past 13 years. Suppose not a single major American financial institution had failed or needed a government bailout. Suppose the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 6.1 percent in the first quarter of this year, rather than at 2.7 percent.
That's what the ads used to say, back in the day when air travel was considered glamorous, stewardesses were required to be young, slim and beautiful, and people actually "dressed" to take a plane. As for me, I thought it was glamorous just to go to the airport, much less get on a plane.
The cheerful, jaded, sneering question de jour from liberal journalists and Democratic Party commentators (I know, there's a pretty fine distinction) is, "What will the Republican Party do if it gets back the House?" The question is phrased along the line of what a car-chasing dog would do if it caught the car.
Trust Republicans to go too far. They take a good idea -- such as the notion that the federal government should enforce immigration laws, and states should be able to help -- and then drive it into the fringes. Witness a Fox News interview in which Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., declared, "We should change our Constitution and say if you come here illegally, and you have a child, that child is automatically not a citizen."
Republicans are starting to think about how to answer the Robert Redford question.
