The anti-Obama forces, it seems clear, are rooted in classic American know-nothing populism–nativist, isolationist, paranoid. Today’s Exhibit A is from the Drudge Report, in which the newly designed $100 bill is slagged for, as the headline has it, “looking European.” Drudge links to this report from Bloomberg, which describes the reasons for the new look: [...]
Before a packed crowd at New York’s Cooper Union, Barack Obama made a forceful appeal for regulation of the financial markets. “The American experiment has worked in large part because we guided the market’s invisible hand with a higher principle,” he said. “A free market was never meant to be a free license to take [...]
For the most part, Americans don’t understand the details of the new health reform law. This is understandable – the law is complicated, it’s not in effect yet and the political noise of the past year obscured a lot of the policy. I took a stab on Time.com yesterday at explaining 5 of the “immediate [...]
Listening to arguements today on The City of Ontario v. Quon — a case about whether police officers sexting each other on city-given pagers had an expectation of privacy — the Supreme were struggling a bit with the technology. You know you’re in trouble when the youngest guy on the court, Chief Justice John Roberts, [...]
The Red Coats are coming to levy a fine* if you don’t buy health insurance. As forays into establishing a national TV presence go, this is, um, a revolution in camp. (h/t Dave Weigel) *Said fine is:
Here’s the latest from me about how British Airways CEO Willie Walsh seems to have played a game of brinksmanship with the British government and won the reopening of UK airspace. But if Walsh is the hero of this debacle, there’s also a villain and that’s looking to be Civil Aviation Authority Chief Executive Andrew [...]
Reuters has a stunner today. The insurance company WellPoint had a policy of targeting its customers with fraud investigations if they were diagnosed with breast cancer, according to federal investigators. The goal: Find a reason to drop their coverage of sick women before big bills started to arrive. The women all paid their premiums on [...]
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thumbed his nose at the United States, and the world, by insisting that Israel would continue to build settlements in Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem. As General David Petraeus and others have said, increased tensions between Israel and the Palestinians are deleterious to U.S. interests in the region. This has [...]
Our dearly departed, Karen Tumulty, makes her debut at the House of Graham with a story in the pole position on A1. The subject–a complex and contentious “endorsement derby” playing itself out in the GOP. She begins: You might think that no sensible Republican with presidential ambitions would wander into a blood feud within the [...]
I am just not sure what it is. Republicans struggling to embrace financial regulatory reform? The Charlie Christ campaign? I will leave it to Swamplanders to solve this riddle. (The video was taken at the Coachella music festival last weekend in California.)
