In a speech at the Latino Coalition’s annual economic summit in Washington on Wednesday, May 23, Mitt Romney called the U.S. education system a failure. Every child deserves a quality education, he said, particularly minority students who are consistently underserved. Fixing the system, according to Romney, is the “civil rights issue of our era.”
When President Obama endorsed gay marriage earlier this month, the media grappled with two basic political questions: Was his personal “evolution” a case of a politician transparently following a national trend toward accepting same-sex unions (accelerated, perhaps, by his chatty No. 2), and would it hurt his re-election chances by alienating socially conservative voters like [...]
Alec MacGillis of the NewRepublic has been doing some fine campaign reporting this year and here he offers a smart look at what may be the most important state of all in November–Ohio. The most striking part of the piece for me, one that illuminates an essential conundrum for Barack Obama, occurs when MacGillis goes [...]
A rash of news stories have been published this week examining how the GOP will handle things if the Supreme Court votes next month to overturn the Affordable Care Act. Amazingly, they all leave out the single most important and obvious impact a court rebuke would have. Hint: It’s not about Republicans.
Student debt is completely out of control, right? The more than $1 trillion in outstanding college loans is front-page news and is pretty much the only educational issue the presidential candidates are talking about. Yes, ballooning student debt is causing real hardship for some Americans. But as with many educational flare-ups, the public debate is [...]
The JPMorgan $2-billion-trading-loss story is nearly a week old, and the news has predictably gone through the various spin cycles of the political right and left. Initially, progressives pounced on the loss as reason to strengthen the yet-to-be-fully-implemented Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Conservatives then pushed back on that conclusion arguing that the loss was not [...]
The failed bet that cost JPMorgan Chase $2 billion and plunged the bank’s stock by more than 9% on May 11 has rattled the financial sector. This wasn’t the case of a vigilante trader who struck out on his own. It was a top executive at the shining steel sentinel of the U.S. investment-banking industry, [...]
Over at the conservative American Enterprise Institute blog, James Pethokoukis has an idea that could be a total game-changer for Mitt Romney: he should come out for breaking up the five biggest banks, which control about 70% of all U.S. assets. This would be a move supported by discerning liberals and conservatives–as I wrote yesterday, [...]
Jamie Dimon of JPMorganChase once was Barack Obama’s favorite banker, a big backer of the President’s 2008 campaign. But he’s been blowing hard and often when it turned out that Obama was attempting to–gasp!–regulate the banking industry after its wanton recklessness caused the stock market, and the economy, to crash. Dimon has gone on to [...]
(WASHINGTON) — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he believes marriage should be between a man and a woman but that states should decide whether it’s legal for same-sex couples to marry. The Nevada Democrat says he believes that people should marry whomever they want, and that, in his words, “it’s no business of mine [...]
