One of the challenges to economic recovery in the U.S. has been the glut of houses on the market as a result of the burst housing bubble that caused the great recession in the first place. A robust, job-creating recovery typically relies heavily on the construction sector for a substantial portion of the jobs created–I’ve seen numbers …
Facing the potentially insurmountable challenge of a slow economic recovery in an election year, Democrats have looked for little ways to gain political advantage over Republicans in 2012. Some of their efforts have bombed, like …
Just as the GOP was struggling to recover from Rick Santorum’s self-declared crusade against the “dangers of contraception” in this country, along comes Rush Limbaugh with an offensive and ignorant series of attacks on Sandra Fluke, a young woman who testified recently regarding the financial cost of birth control for female students at …
An accounting firm called Baker Tilly (“Candor. Insight. Results.”) sent me an e-mail last Thursday with the following subject line:
Waste to Energy at International Cheese Technology Expo
It took me a little while to get …
In the early summer of 2006, then-Senator Rick Santorum was facing a tough reelection challenge, trailing Pennsylvania’s Treasurer Bob Casey by 9 points and struggling to shed his image as a Washington insider. So Santorum …
President Barack Obama upped the ante in his vocal contest with Mitt Romney last night during a taping of the PBS show, “In Performance at the White House.”
The show featured some huge names, including Buddy Guy, B. B. King, Mick Jagger and Jeff Beck. As Obama prepared to leave the concert, the assembled stars played the first bars
…
The Wall Street Journal has a thoroughly reported story today on the rise in regulatory secrecy at the Federal Reserve. On 45 of 47 of the draft or final regulatory measures voted on by members since the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in July 2010, the Fed’s five voting members have e-mailed their votes in, rather than …
After the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in January that a Texas court had gone too far in overriding the State legislature’s plan for redestricting, it seemed likely the state’s important primary would be pushed back, further elongating the protracted GOP presidential nomination contest. Today comes the news that, indeed, the primary …
Mitt Romney’s making an interesting play in the firewall contest in Michigan, finessing his stand that the car companies would have been better off without President Barack Obama’s bailout to keep them afloat. He’s also made much of the dangers of government “picking winners and losers” when they give subsidies to companies. But the …
For this week’s cover story, Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York who has been making high-profile busts on Wall Street, gave TIME a rare and extensive on-the-record interview at his Manhattan …
Some Obama opponents are struggling to find a cloud in the silver lining of January’s jobs numbers, which estimated that there was a 243,000-job boost and a big drop in the unemployment rate, from 8.5% to 8.3%, last month. …
