Imagine that you have a product whose price tag for decades rises faster than inflation. But people keep buying it because they're told that it will make them wealthier in the long run. Then, suddenly, they find it doesn't. Prices fall sharply, bankruptcies ensue, great institutions disappear.
At the end of Obamaland's Recovery Summer, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer is betting that Californians want the federal government to keep growing.
That was the headline on Thursday's Drudge Report. And it is as good a summary as any of what happened Wednesday night when incumbent California Sen. Barbara Boxer met her challenger, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, in their first debate.
Over a century ago, William Jennings Bryan presided over mass rallies of mostly middle-class Americans angry about economic inequities.
Corporate profits are at all-time highs, and bond rates in the Treasury market are virtually at record lows. That's a good combination for stocks, and it helped trigger a 255 point rally in Wednesday's trading. What's more, a surprisingly positive read on the ISM August manufacturing report delivered a strong blow to the double-dip recession pessimism that has plagued investors for many months.
Some of the most important things in history are things that didn't happen -- even though just about everyone thought they would.
When then-Sen. Barack Obama visited the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board in 2008, I had one question for him: Which Democratic candidate for president would be best at keeping Iraq from imploding?
For decades I’ve advised students to let the facts speak for themselves, while avoiding the indulgence of shouting at the facts. In other words, we should take in all the available, reliable information; process it; and let the emerging mosaic tell its story—whether the picture pleases or not. The human (and partisan) tendency to twist facts into pretzels in order to produce a desired result must be avoided at all costs.
Gallup is out this week with a new poll showing the generic Republican beating the generic Democrat in House contests by 10 points.
"Mad Men" just won its third Emmy for "outstanding drama." If there were a gold statue for "best nostalgic portrayal," the AMC series would have walked off with that one, too. The allure and success of "Mad Men" is its stylish evocation of a lost era that many older Americans miss and younger ones envy.
The latest CBS poll found that 59 percent of Americans view Arizona's SB1070, the immigration bill that allows Arizona to prosecute immigration violations, as "just right," while another 14 percent think the bill doesn't go far enough. So why does President Obama continue to hammer Arizona's law? And why did the State Department include a reference to the Arizona law in a report for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights on America's human rights record?
It's a bit too early for House Republican leader John Boehner to measure the drapes and pick out new wallpaper.
House Minority Leader John Boehner has a brilliant idea.
At the Crystal Ball we receive many requests for information about the history of congressional elections, and there are many ways to look at this topic. In the two simple bar graphs below, we present one way to conceptualize a key part of the contests for Congress. How many incumbents lose for the House and the Senate?
The circus around the mosque should start to lose audience. New York officials have the authority to decide whether an Islamic center may be built near the tragic site of the attacks on the Twin Towers.
Every 10 years, it's time for reapportionment and redistricting. The framers of the Constitution created the first regularly scheduled national census and required, for the first time that I am aware, that representation in a legislature be apportioned according to population.
Neoconservatives, Reaganites and other militarily assertive factions in the United States are sometimes accused of thinking it is always 1938 (Britain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich) -- that there is always a Hitler-like aggressor being appeased and about to drag the world into conflict.
For the past two weeks, I've been traveling across the country interviewing law students who have applied for jobs at my law firm.
Like many Democrats over the past 40 years, Barack Obama has hoped that his association with unpopular liberal positions on cultural issues would be outweighed by pushing economic policies intended to benefit the ordinary person.
In 2005, Rep. John Salazar, D-Colo., sponsored the Stolen Valor Act that made it a federal crime to lie about receiving military medals or honors from the military.
