Want to hear a real laugher? Despite the current disharmony in politics, there's one policy on which all of Washington agrees. Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, president and Congress all agree that after last fall's financial crisis, the federal government has to regulate the financial industry more closely to protect our economy from risk of systemic financial collapse.
OK, so President Barack Obama hasn't accomplished enough to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize under the conventional approach.
President Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize, but nobody thinks he deserves the Nobel in economics. Despite $800 billion of economic stimulus and the accumulation of a $1.4 trillion deficit, he has been unable to lower the unemployment rate below 9.8%.
I must be the only "foodie" who didn't love "Julie & Julia," the movie about Julia Child and the office worker she inspired, Julie Powell. Am I allowed?
"What happened to global warming?" read the headline -- on BBC News on Oct. 9, no less. Consider it a cataclysmic event: Mainstream news organizations have begun reporting on scientific research that suggests that global warming may not be caused by man and may not be as dire and eminent as alarmists suggest.
Some of the headlines in recent days are not worthy of belief. No, I'm not referring to the headlines that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, however odd that many seem to many (including, it seems, Obama himself). I'm referring to the headlines earlier in the week to the effect that the health care bill sponsored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus will cut the federal deficit by $81 billion over the next 10 years.
Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker opened the gates to hell this month when he ruled that strategists for Proposition 8 -- the 2008 ballot measure, passed by 52 percent of California voters, that limited marriage to a man and a woman -- must release internal campaign documents to measure opponents.
In trying to understand what is happening in the nation and world, we all employ narratives -- story lines that indicate where things are going and what is likely to happen next. We can check the validity of these narratives by observing whether events move in the indicated direction. If so, the narrative is confirmed. But if things seem to be moving in an entirely different direction, it's time to discard the narrative and look for another.
At the Democratic National Convention in Denver last summer, then-Sen. Barack Obama pledged to "finish the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan."
Afghanistan used to be a great issue for Barack Obama. As a candidate, he repeatedly argued that George W. Bush and his Defense Department had lost their way, focusing too much attention (and troops and resources) on Iraq while shortchanging the more important mission in Afghanistan.
DELAWARE- SENATE: Republicans got just the break they were hoping for in the Delaware Senate race. Republican Rep. Mike Castle will run, challenging the Vice President's son, Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden (D). Biden would have defeated any other Republican, but Castle is leading Biden in early polls. The Vice President has great sway, but the dynasty issue helps Castle.
Team Obama is in economic trouble on two fronts right now: The dollar could be headed toward its demise, while the jobs and unemployment numbers have gotten worse. (The unemployment rate is up to 9.8 percent as of the September report released last week.) And there's a simple policy mix the White House could adopt to fix this. It could enact the Mundell-Laffer supply-side approach of a steady King Dollar for price stability and low marginal tax rates to spur jobs and economic growth.
With the off-year midterms just a year away, the Crystal Ball will focus on the statehouses. It gets us out of Washington and away from Congress--and that is refreshing in itself.
The latest signals from the White House suggest that President Obama now realizes he must do more -- and quickly -- to ease the economic suffering of working families. He knows that most Americans believe his administration and Congress have so far provided more help to major banks and Wall Street investment firms than to workers and small companies, as a survey released by pollster Peter Hart reported recently.
In terms of health coverage, one date separates the most secure Americans from the least secure: a person's 65th birthday. Age 65 is when one qualifies for Medicare, the government insurance program for the elderly and disabled. It's become a source of intergenerational strife -- not so much between the old and young as between the old and the nearly old.
Al-Qaida is becoming the weapons of mass destruction of the Obama administration's war in Afghanistan. Or, to be more precise, it is a reverse WMD. For the George W. Bush administration, the likely presence of WMD in Iraq was a major justification for going to war. For Vice President Joe Biden and some senior Obama White House staff members (we do not know the position of the president yet), the alleged weakness and ineffectiveness of al-Qaida is sufficient justification for ending our major ground troop presence in Afghanistan.
On my way to work this morning, I heard not one but two advertisements urging me to vote for former eBay CEO Meg Whitman as the next governor of California. The ads touted her decades of experience working for such companies as Disney and Hasbro before taking the helm at eBay in 1998 as its first CEO. The pitch was that California needs someone who understands business and job creation as its next chief executive.
On Tuesday, Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Afghan immigrant who was a teenager in Queens during the Sept. 11 attacks, pleaded not guilty to federal terrorism conspiracy charges in New York.
As Sen. Max Baucus tries to squeeze a health care bill out of the Senate Finance Committee, and as Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry race to meet their latest deadline to introduce a bill to reduce carbon dioxide, some Democrats wonder whether their congressional leaders and the president who has deferred to them have sought only limited changes rather than more fundamental reform on both health insurance and carbon emissions.
Listening closely to the politicians with the most clout in the debate over health care, it is startling to discover how little they actually seem to know about the subject.
