Dow Jones 10,000 arrived on Wall Street Wednesday for the first time in a year. It's a milestone of sorts, and it certainly represents a vote for investor confidence in economic recovery. Blowout profit reports from Intel and JPMorgan helped fuel the day's 145-point gain. So did a retail sales report that excluding Cash for Clunkers was actually quite strong.
Despite months of haggling over health care reform, voters continue to view leaders in Congress in the same light. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remains the most well known – and most disliked – of the legislature’s top leaders.
State Attorney General Tom Corbett has a commanding lead over Congressman Jim Gerlach in the first Rasmussen Reports Election 2010 survey of Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial primary.
Forty-six percent (46%) of U.S. voters have a favorable opinion of Vice President Joseph Biden, even as left-wing doyenne Arianna Huffington suggests he resign if President Obama ignores his advice and sends more troops to Afghanistan.
The recent award of Nobel Prizes in biology and chemistry to three women dredges up Larry Summers' suggestion in 2005 that differences in the female brain may account for the dearth of top women scientists. Now President Obama's economic adviser, Summers was then speechifying as president of Harvard.
Most Americans like state lotteries and think they’re one thing that state governments should run them rather than the private sector.
The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in New Jersey shows Republican challenger Chris Christie clinging to the lead in a fluid and volatile race that may come down to how many votes independent candidate Chris Daggett gets. Incumbent Democratic Governor Jon Corzine has closed the gap to make the race competitive but still attracts very low levels of support.
So much for Arlen Specter’s party switch to avoid a risky primary. The incumbent Pennsylvania senator’s 2010 Democratic Primary race against challenger Joe Sestak is now a toss-up.
Outraged babble and sanctimonious tut-tutting over President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize will pour forth until the very evening he accepts the prize in Oslo, and then for years afterward. His critics are infuriated, they say, because he didn't earn the prestigious award, or because he didn't refuse it -- or just because those left-wing Norwegians have a lot of nerve. How dare they insult us by bestowing their highest honor on the president of the United States and inviting him to deliver a lecture?
The legislative process can also be a learning process, and as Congress considers health care legislation -- the latest act being the Senate Finance Committee's vote in favor of Chairman Max Baucus' bill, or "conceptual language" -- we have been learning something useful. It's that legislators would like to provide generous, even gold-plated health insurance coverage to almost all Americans, but that no one wants to pay for it.
Voter perception of the nation's current course holds steady this week, with 34% saying the United States is heading in the right direction, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Some experts have argued during the current health care reform debate that behavioral changes are needed before costs will come down in America.
The British government is selling a number of things it owns to pay off its growing debt, but voters have mixed feelings about the U.S. government doing the same thing. Amtrak and the ownership stakes in General Motors and Chrysler can go, as far as voters are concerned, but don’t touch the government’s land and the U.S. Postal Service.
As much as the Beltway chattering class refuses to admit it, Barack Obama's electoral victory last year had nothing to do with his oft-repeated, generic pledge to bring "hope and change" to Washington, D.C.
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.
Republican-turned-Democratic Senator Arlen Specter trails potential GOP challenger Pat Toomey by five points in an early look at Pennsylvania's 2010 Senate race. But another Democrat, Joe Sestak, runs dead-even with the likely Republican candidate.
OK, so President Barack Obama hasn't accomplished enough to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize under the conventional approach.
North Carolina is about to become the second state to penalize its employees for being obese, but just 30% of Americans favor making government workers who are overweight pay more for their health insurance.
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%.
Support for Republican congressional candidates dipped slightly this week in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.
