President Obama’s high-speed rail program has taken a lot of abuse because it isn’t just funding true high-speed rail; it’s also accelerating and improving service on moderate-speed trains. OK, guilty as charged. The program’s actual name is “High-Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail.” And now that Obama has redistributed the …
If you think that Snooki has relationship problems because of overly strict drinking laws, or that the Bernie Madoff story is a cautionary tale about overly intrusive financial regulation, you’re probably a Florida politician. Because the geniuses who run the state have decided that its economic distress is the result of overly strict …
On Monday, I temporarily suspended my longstanding jihad against the Army Corps of Engineers to defend the agency’s controversial decision to blow up a Mississippi River levee and flood 130,000 acres of Missouri farmland. The …
Democrats and Republicans managed to work out a controversial tax-cut deal in December. Then they managed to work out a controversial spending-cut deal in April. Now they just need to work out a deal to raise the debt limit, …
I have an unhealthy obsession with the ecologically destructive boondoggles of the Army Corps of Engineers, the dysfunctional water resources agency that drowned New Orleans. And one of the most ludicrous Corps projects is located in Missouri’s soggy southeastern bootheel, right where the agency dynamited a Mississippi River levee Monday …
This is an exciting day–I can’t remember ever feeling jubilant about someone’s death before–and it’s probably lame to start dissecting the politics. Especially since the basic politics are no-duh obvious: This is a really great day for President Obama. But since this is supposed to be a blog about politics, and the dissections have …
I try not to start arguments with people who are way smarter than me, especially when we’re basically on the same side of an issue, but in my part-time capacity as Ben Bernanke’s English translator, I feel compelled to point out that Ezra Klein’s take on the Fed chairman’s press conference is wrong. Bernanke did not choose sides in the …
In the Federal Reserve’s first press conference in 32 years, Chairman Ben Bernanke today announced…nothing. He didn’t exactly say nothing. But he basically said that despite the weak economy, he’s decided to do nothing. …
Fed-watchers may recall that in my last post, I courageously risked my membership in the Ben Bernanke Fan Club by asking the chairman why he had failed to juice the economy enough to avoid sky-high unemployment. The boring …
Michael Scherer noticed four things in the Obama campaign’s new video about its strategy for getting the President reelected in 2012. Let me add one more: At no point in the six-minute video does campaign manager Jim Messina even hint at a reason why the president ought to be reelected in 2012.
If Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke had a tank, I wouldn’t just be in it; I’d probably be the bouncer checking ID’s at the door. I wrote the 2009 Person of the Year profile that credited him with saving the global …
The Japan nuclear disaster has inspired a lot of speculation about the implications for the American nuclear renaissance. The short answer is that the implications are not very good, especially since, as some of us have been pointing out for quite some time, the American nuclear renaissance is a myth. The math just doesn’t add up, …
Budget issues are complex and confusing, which makes them infinitely spinnable. Officially, the deal House Speaker John Boehner cut with President Obama over the FY11 continuing resolution—which is distinct from the FY12 …
