David Ignatius has a good column today about the “carried interest” scam that allows hedge fund managers to be taxed at the capital gains rate of 15% rather than the normal top rate. My question is, Why is the President allowing the billionaire bad boys club to win this one? Even if he lost the [...]
Fareed and I have somewhat different responses to Obama’s deficit commission. His. Mine.
By Nov. 2, it seemed clear that a bulging checkbook wasn’t going to be enough to save Meg Whitman’s gubernatorial bid in California. Polls showed her trailing by a half-dozen points during the campaign’s final week. It seems she went down fighting. The Fresno Bee reports: Whitman invested $2.6 million of her own wealth in [...]
Some dramas seem tailor-made for the Internet’s ephemeral obsessions, and the kerfuffle over the Transportation Security Administration’s new airport screening procedures is a perfect example. It’s got all the ingredients to feed a media circus: a whiff of government overreach, children prodded to tears, bold push-back, splashy protests, federal employees apparently frisking nuns–an irresistible recipe [...]
“It’s all bad, as far as I’m concerned,” Michele Bachmann announced in April, in an appearance on Fox Business. “All this pork is bad. The old pork was bad. The new pork is bad.” But she didn’t mean it. In an interview Monday with a homestate newspaper, she said she doesn’t think transportation projects should [...]
The Associated Press just called the last outstanding Senate race for GOP incumbent Lisa Murkowski. Murkowski, who lost her primary to Tea Party favorite Joe Miller, ran an historic write in campaign — the first successful one since Strom Thurmond in 1954. As I’ve written before, Murkowski benefited from a sense of panic in the [...]
This Sunday’s New York Times magazine features a long “is she running?” story about Sarah Palin, by the estimable Robert Draper. I haven’t had a chance read it yet, but here’s a taste: “I am,” Sarah Palin told me the next day when I asked her if she was already weighing a run for president. [...]
Michael Cohen responds to my thoughts about his take on Karzai’s unhappiness with the U.S. war effort in his country: A few people have raised the point that this is not the first time Karzai has complained about the US military and the death of Afghan civilians from American arms. And the cynical might argue, [...]
