David Leonhardt of the New York Times continues his excellent work with this look at the car rental business. He concludes that while the credit crunch is real for some firms (especially those, like Avis, that were traded about by investment bankers for huge fees, which saddled them with inordinate debt), the more pressing problem [...]

Internet politics geeks, myself included, were dazzled by all the innovative stuff that the Obama transition team did on their website Change.gov–posting raw documents, allowing people to comment on raw documents, opening comment threads, allowing people to ask and vote on questions for transition officials, etc. The first 64 days of the Obama Administration have [...]

As President Obama himself just said in his closing remarks at his press conference: “You know, it was just a few days ago or weeks ago where people were certain that Secretary Geithner couldn’t deliver a plan. Today, the headlines all look like, well, all right, there’s a plan. And I’m sure there’ll be more [...]

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, the only Republican to vote for cloture the last time the Employee Free Choice Act came up, today dealt a blow to union supporters. Specter announced that after much consideration — and after being the subject of months of intense lobbying from both sides — that he would not support a [...]

In today’s installment, Michele Bachmann saves us from a sneaky Chinese and Russian plot to achieve world domination through a global currency, but reveals that she was not at school the day they studied this in sixth grade:

Ehud Barak has just led the formerly formidable Israeli Labor Party into Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition. This means that Netanyahu will have the votes in the Knesset to form a government and also some centrist cover for his bull-necked project. The decision removes the last wisps of credibility that the Labor Party–the party of Ben [...]

I don’t regularly post White House pool reports, but this one, by Salon’s Mike Madden, just has too many zingers to pass by. POTUS was on a phone handset linked up with the space station. He first tried to greet the astronauts without talking into the phone: “Hello, commander, can you hear us?” An aide [...]

The White House should be sending New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo a big bouquet of flowers this morning, in thanks for how much he has done to make this political problem go away. It turns out that shame still works. But that raises a question: Given this President’s powers of communication, why didn’t the [...]

Spring is here and that means the sex education wars are about to flare up once again when Congress decides whether to eliminate–or let expire–about $170M in annual funding for abstinence-only programs. For our current print issue, I took a look at what kinds of sex education programs actually work. I also found that the [...]