And they certainly have one: “He's got to continue to concentrate on jobs,” Rep. Bill Pascrell said last week as the House was leaving town for a long, pre-election recess. “I'm hoping he'll do immigration reform,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas). “We should get back to an energy policy – one that acknowledges that climate …
Prolonged Detention, and the Way of All Revolutions
Of all people, Rachel Maddow, on of all networks, MSNBC, calls this one-speech volte-face by Barack Obama for what it is: This country is, in many ways, in the course of a long revolution that started with the 1960's. (For a country always in a hurry, we can't even get a revolution resolved in 40-50 …
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Small Business: To Tell the Truth, I Wouldn't Start One
And neither would most people who are already there: Fifty-five percent of small business owners and manufacturers would not have started their businesses in today’s economy, according to a new poll that also reports 69 percent say President Obama’s regulatory policies have hurt their businesses. Much of the blame is heaped on Barack Obama, but …
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Public vs. Private Colleges and Salaries: Of Course You Can't be President, But…
At last, someone compares the investment to the salary received, and... With help from PayScale, a Seattle-based compensation-data company that maintains 35 million salary profiles, we collected median pay figures for two pools of each school’s alums: recent grads (out of school for an average of three years) and midcareer types (an average of 15 …
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Now He Tells Us: Mike Oxley "Fesses Up" on Sarbox
It's not easy to get a legislator to admit that he or she made a mistake, but former Ohio Rep. Mike Oxley finally gets around to it: "No law is perfect." True words. But not exactly what I expected to hear from Mike Oxley, the former Republican congressman who penned the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation with former …
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Voting for Ourselves: The Reality of the 2012 Election
Maureen Dowd, like many on the left, isn't really happy with the outcome of the DNC: In his renomination acceptance speech here on Thursday night, he told us that America’s problems were tougher to solve than he had originally thought. And that’s why he has kindly agreed to give us more time. Because, after all, …
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No Dogs or…: Honduras Brings Back the Concession Areas
That, basically, is what the Hondurans are doing: The government of Honduras has signed a deal with private investors for the construction of three privately run cities with their own legal and tax systems. The memorandum of agreement signed Tuesday is part of a controversial experiment meant to bring badly needed economic growth to this …
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Affordability and Morality in our Social Welfare System
Janet Daley in the Telegraph lays out the stark choices we face: What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth …
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Mitt Romney and the Religion of the Middle Class
So we now have Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee for President. It's an odd thing in many ways, not because the party grandees threw their lot in with him--that's par for the course. It's odd because they were able to get it past the people who supposedly dominate the party--the "Religious Right", those dreadful …
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Same-Sex Civil Marriage: Not Quite Ready to Go for Broke
The famous (if unlikely) team of Boies and Olsen are backpedaling on their case to overturn Proposition 8--and establish same-sex civil marriage by national default: The two high-profile lawyers who started the nation’s most significant lawsuit attempting to gain marriage rights for same-sex couples told the Supreme Court on Friday that it might find it very interesting …
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Positive Infinity 