By the time you read this, the Senate may have passed a bill to put a leash on the nastiest credit-card company tactics. Lenders warn that changing the rules would make it harder for people to get credit.
Members of President Obama's Cabinet are three times more likely to have attended law school than boot camp. How things have changed since 2004, when Democrats were outraged that, in time of war, the GOP White House could be run by men with no combat experience.
When will the economy stop dropping because of the recession and start dropping because of the harm Obama's cure to the recession is inflicting?
Last week's briefing brought home to me the difficult challenges faced by the Central Intelligence Agency in the current threat environment.
Step by step, Barack Obama has been reversing himself on antiterrorist policy. Last month, he announced he would not appeal a federal court decision ordering the government to release photographs of terrorist interrogations. This was in line with his decision to release on April 16 four memoranda prepared by the Bush administration Justice Department on that subject.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued at a press conference Thursday that Republicans are focusing on how much she knew about CIA enhanced interrogation techniques in 2002 and 2003 as a "diversionary tactic to take the spotlight off those who conceived, developed and implemented these policies, which all of us long opposed."
In what has become a daily deluge of policy shifts, high-level pronouncements, and mindless personality cult trifles, it is understandable how such a small thing gets overlooked. So, for those who missed it, the Associated Press reported on Monday that the Obama Administration plans on spending another king’s ransom to prod officials to close failing schools and reopen them with new teachers, principals and facilities.
Even when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals does the right thing -- as it did Monday in denying convicted killer Kevin Cooper a hearing on yet another of his dubious appeals -- there is always a judge, or in this case five, on the court with an overly active imagination. And those judges don't help the court's results-oriented reputation.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now claiming that intelligence officials misled her about the use of waterboarding when she was briefed in 2002. Previously, it was reported that she, as the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee at the time, had been told about waterboarding as an interrogation technique and had raised no objections to it -- a claim that obviously called into question the speaker's support for a "truth commission" to find out who (else) took that position.
Does anybody really believe that adding 50 million people to the public health-care rolls will not cost the government more money? About $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion more? At least.
We are barely into the two-year term for the current House of Representatives, but you can be sure that the 2010 contests have already begun. That is especially true for members of the House who are in two-party competitive districts. For them, it is a permanent campaign.
While the recession has rattled every rung of economic ladder, it has ravaged the bottom bars. Unemployment stands at just over 4 percent for college graduates but at nearly 15 percent for those lacking high-school diplomas. In poor black neighborhoods, it's around 30 percent and approaching Great Depression levels.
Uplifting as it was to see insurance executives, pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospital officials and doctors gather at the White House on May 11, pledging cooperation toward health care reform, nothing they said or did was inconsistent with precisely the opposite objective. According to the famed pollster who is helping Republicans in Congress to block reform, in fact, the first critical step toward stopping real change is pretending to support it.
Republicans and conservatives are trying to grapple with the Obama administration's $3,600,000,000,000 federal budget -- let's include the zeroes rather than use the trivializing abbreviation $3.6 trillion -- and the larger-than-previously-projected $1,841,000,000,000 budget deficit.
The president was funny at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Wanda Sykes, the host, was not.
Last Sunday, the British newspaper The Times published an interview with Jordan's King Abdullah II, in which the maturing king demonstrated a deft touch in putting pressure both on the new prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and on President Barack Obama.
Lost in last week’s barrage of Barack Obama “spending reform” coverage was a USA Today story that should send chills down the spine of any state official – or taxpaying citizen, for that matter.
It pains me to take Elizabeth Edwards to task for anything. She is suffering from terminal cancer and from assertions that her cheating husband fathered a child with a party girl. So my first instinct is to totally lay off. The only rap against her, it seems, is that she knew of an affair after John Edwards announced his presidential run and that she kept it secret.
Elizabeth Edwards always seemed like the yin -- a genuine human being -- to her smarmy husband's too-slick yang. No more. With the release of her memoir "Resilience" and self-flagellation book tour about her life with her cheating hubby, Mrs. E now seems about as believable as her husband. That is: Add the prefix "un."
Many years ago, political scientists came up with a theory that elites lead public opinion. And on some issues, they clearly do. But on some issues, they don't.
