Man, what a mess those jokers on Wall Street have gotten themselves into, hey?
Now, I know it’s unseemly to gloat. On top of that, columnists are supposed to make like we share the suffering of the “little guy,” put on our Pierre Cardin suit pants one leg at a time, that kind of thing.
The Nevada Democratic Party hopes to re-take control of the Nevada state Senate for the first time in 18 years.
Democrats chose to target two seats — those of state Sens. Bob Beers of Las Vegas and Joe Heck of Henderson.
Huge financial institutions long screened from normal investor skepticism by the assurance that “They can’t fail, they’re federally regulated!” are dropping like dinosaurs in the snow.
In this crisis of consumer confidence, the unreconstructed statists of academia and the Left Coast press finally see their main chance to advance socialism in America by another two or three giant strides.
Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who is apparently still alive, was described this week by Washington Post staff writer Valerie Strauss — by all indications with a straight face — as “a constitutional expert.”
Since the only roads which the Congress is authorized by the Constitution to fund are “post roads,” presumably the good senator has arranged for his home state to get all those “highway demonstration projects” out of nothing more than his deep concern that the mail should always arrive on time.
In recent days, the federal government has stepped in to bail out mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while the Treasury Department took a contrasting decision to stand aside and let the Lehman Brothers investment bank seek bankruptcy protection.
Another longtime Wall Street institution, Merrill Lynch, announced it will accept a discounted buyout from Bank of America.
I was speaking to a close relative the other day. He expressed a suitably cynical opinion about our current crop of politicians and the “energy crisis.”
“What I think is we just don’t have enough energy, we’re never going to have enough energy, so costs are just going to continue going up and up, and they all know this, but they just won’t say so.”
The trouble that Democrats and other “progressives” face in selling their economic theories is that they don’t seem to really believe them, themselves.
Yes, at the federal level, there’s hypocrisy on the topic from both major parties. But grown-ups should have questions when Democrats contend they can vastly expand the welfare state — free universal medical care like that supposedly enjoyed in the worker’s paradise of Cuba, for instance — while “raising taxes only on the rich.”
It’s our own money.
In their magnanimous generosity, our taxmasters in Washington allow Americans to set aside each year some small portion of our earnings in a “tax-free” retirement savings account, called either an IRA or a “401(k),” after the section of the law that sets the rules.
And what rules they are. Apparently nothing terrifies members of Congress more — after the cold-sweat nightmare that the voters or the Supreme Court might someday limit them to the powers actually enumerated in the Constitution — than the idea that an American taxpayer might actually save enough money to leave any to his or her grandkids.
I’m considering voting for a major party’s presidential ticket this year, for the first time in decades. As a matter of fact, it would mark the first time I’ve voted the top of the ticket for this particular party, in my life.
I’ve met the presidential nominee. He’s got character. He’s also a likeable guy — most politicians share that asset — though he’s clearly a creature of the Senate, where respect for freedom and limited government, for any set of philosophical principles that might lead one to refuse to spend tax dollars for purposes not specifically delegated in the Constitution, are laughed at, deemed a handicap in “making the deal.”
Just a year on the job, District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has shuttered 23 schools, fired more than 30 principals and given notice to hundreds of teachers and administrative workers.
She’s “making bold changes as she tries to accomplish what six would-be reformers in the past decade could not,” The Washington Post reported last week: “rescue one of the nation’s most dysfunctional school districts.”
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