Bill Saporito draws the contrast: …Wall Streeters absolutely love poker. The big tournaments in Vegas are filled with quants, bankers, traders and other Street beasts. Puritan Preet’s raid on Internet poker sites in a country where gambling is legal in all 50 states, where governments are pushing their own lottery games every day, seems a [...]
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner appeared this morning on several shows to spin yesterday’s market-rattling S&P downgrade of the U.S. economic outlook. The causes of the downgrade–the soaring deficit, groaning national debt, and political disagreement over how to tackle both–did not dampen his take on the situation. On the contrary, the fact that everyone’s talking about [...]
Arizona’s Republican Governor Jan Brewer became an unlikely firewall for progressives yesterday, vetoing two controversial pieces of legislation passed by the state’s GOP-controlled Congress.
I bet there won’t be a next time. At the end of this interview with a local Texas correspondent, President Obama all but tells off his interviewer for not respecting White House decorum. “Let me finish my answers the next time we do an interview, all right?” says the clearly piqued president:
Okay, Swamplanders. Who will America choose? First up, Sharron Angle, late from her turn as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Nevada. She will be performing Lee Greenwood’s God Bless The USA.
Last week, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing about lightbulbs. When it was his turn to speak, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul — a fan of both individual choice and, apparently, incandescent light — argued that Congress should spend “more time expanding [its] choices and less time banning lightbulbs.” To make his [...]
A Washington Post/ABC News poll finds President Obama’s disapproval rating back at 50%, seemingly driven by the highest economic pessimism — 44% say things are getting worse — since March, 2009. A likely culprit for that shift is rising food and fuel prices; 78% say inflation is getting worse in their area. Obama still wins [...]
The conventional wisdom inside the Beltway is that Sarah Palin’s relatively low profile means she’s peaked, she’s over, she’s not running for President. I’m not so sure. In fact, I think all signs point to Palin laying the tracks for a run. Here are five reasons not to count out a Palin candidacy:
When political debate grinds to a standstill and all hope for compromise seems lost, there’s nothing quite as cathartic as getting everyone together in a room and… restating irreconcilable differences in front of the cameras. President Obama’s deficit reduction proposal and Paul Ryan’s “Path” are miles apart, and there’s limited enthusiasm on both sides about [...]
This morning the former Massachusetts governor woke up to an unexpected valentine from the main Boston newspaper that once covered him. A Globe editorial defends the 2006 state health care reform law Romney signed as a compromise with a Democratic legislature that “ward[ed] off various schemes favored by business”:
