National Politics
It’s tedious to follow the debt ceiling/budget deficit wrangling, I know. Around here, we have the ProJo trumpeting tax increases as the “obvious fix” and telling the Republicans “to do what grownups do” while explaining that “the health-care reform law passed last year would have begun to kick in its projected savings for the government”…
Steve Malanga looks at the national problem of cities in over their heads (particularly because of pension promises) and uses Providence (and New Haven, CT) as examples: Cities are also running out of fiscal alternatives to deal with their deficits. Like states…many cities have used one-shot revenue deals, hidden borrowing, and other gimmicks to bolster…
You know they’re trying to hide something when they release a report on the Friday afternoon of a long holiday weekend. [T]he White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama…reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes…
Apparently we’re at the point in Campaign 2012 where we play the game of dissecting political statements for “gotcha moments.” The pols have to be ready for the questions, so they should work to make sure they mitigate damage by reading up beforehand. That being said, of all the things to talk to a Presidential…
At least one motivation offered by local supporters of the the National Popular Vote compact, that NPV would lead to more attention for Rhode Island in Presidential elections, makes no sense at all. George Will explained in a column from about a decade ago how there is no improvement in the relative importance of small…
One late addition (posted Monday for a hearing Wednesday) to this week’s House Judiciary Committee agenda is a bill to have the state legislature disregard the choice made by Rhode Island voters in a Presidential election, and allocate RI’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote instead. In 2009, a similar bill…
Nothing to worry about, though, it’s a loan and not a confiscation. You have no problem lending your retirement to someone who is over fourteen trillion dollars in debt, right …? The Obama administration will begin to tap federal retiree programs to help fund operations after the government loses its ability Monday to borrow more…
So, as Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice headed toward the climactic “you’re fired” of tonight’s episode, NBC periodically killed the sound to play a jingle and run ticker text about a pending important message from President Obama. The actual interruption came right as the show built up to a crest. Apparently, Osama bin Laden has been…
At the end of a long post describing the ease with which President Obama could have ended the birther controversy long ago, Andrew McCarthy concludes as follows: So, assuming as we should the legitimacy of the long-form birth certificate produced yesterday, the only thing that makes sense is that Obama knows the mainstream media is…
Hey, remember when gas was $2.20 a gallon and the unemployment rate was 4.4%? What happened with that? …Oh, right, the Democrats won the 2006 Congressional elections. That observation was made by Moe Lane and picked up by Glenn Reynolds. It’s worth promulgating because it’s a simple way to point out that what we were…