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Fed Officials Forecast Economic Growth for 2011
…Fed officials say in an updated forecast that they think the economy will grow between 3.4 percent and 3.9 percent this year. That’s an upward revision from their November forecast, which predicted that gross domestic product will grow 3 percent to 3.6 percent.
More than five months from Election Day, the back-and-forth about Mitt Romney’s record at Bain already feels played out. Unfortunately, there’s good reason to expect the campaign continues in this vein indefinitely. Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney are terribly interested in dwelling on policy platforms. Romney’s plan to slash spending and keep taxes low on the wealthy isn’t especially popular, at least not at any level of detail beyond a blithe promise to shrink the deficit. Meanwhile, Obama’s signature first-term achievements, like health care, the stimulus and Wall Street reform, are all unpopular or tricky to sell. (The Dodd-Frank bill is the most popular of these, but hyping it means offending wealthy donors.) So what we’re getting instead is a superficial duel about character–and, worse, one that’s based on the largely false premise that the better man can better “manage” the economy back to health.
We knew Barack Obama smoked weed in high school because he wrote about it in his books. What we didn’t know until Buzzfeed posted these choice nuggets (I’m so sorry) from David Maraniss’s new book on the President’s younger years, is the giggle-worthy details of his “Choom Gang” lifestyle, which are right out of a buddy stoner flick. Obama and his friends drove around the lush Hawaii countryside, hot-boxing their VW bus and re-upping with a long-haired pizza-tossing dealer named Ray, who Obama thanked in his yearbook “for all the good times.”
