Yesterday, I noted that now that Rand Paul has gone from a primary race to the general election that:  “Paul is now facing a very different kind of campaign” because he is now going to be scrutinized in new ways and will have to explain himself to a different kind of electorate if he is [...]

If you’re still around in 2020, the Census Bureau hopes to be able to give you the option of responding electronically: Happy Tuesday! How will Americans use the Internet in 2020? Will we all use cell phones? Will we still have snail mail? A team of experts at the U.S. Census Bureau is asking those [...]

Last month, French President Nicolas Sarkozy became the latest European leader to take the lead in an ongoing fight against Muslim women wearing Islamic garb, specifically the full-face veil, or niqba, and the burqa, in public when he promised to introduce a bill that would ban both items in France. But, it’s not just France [...]

Cass Sunstein, head of something called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the White House, wants to improve America through subtle manipulation.  A recent NYT accounting: The office, known in Washington as OIRA, reviews major regulations written by federal agencies (on matters like the environment, the financial system, Medicare and Medicaid and public [...]

The salt Nazis have claimed another victim. For the first time in 40 years, Heinz ketchup is changing its famous recipe — by lowering the salt content in an effort to appeal to more health-conscious consumers, the company said yesterday. Company officials have taste tested the new blend and believe it will be as popular [...]

Continuing a trend that stretches back nearly two years, the monthly federal budget deficit hit another record in April: The Treasury Department said Wednesday that the federal deficit for April soared to $82.7 billion, the largest imbalance for that month on record. That was significantly higher than last year’s April deficit of $20 billion and [...]

When I saw the Gallup headline  “‘Jobs’ Drops to No. 2 on Americans’ List of Top Problems,” I was skeptical. What could have topped Jobs with unemployment hovering at 10 percent and no real prospect in site for improvement? Lydia Saad (a family friend) answers: After two months as the clear No. 1 perceived problem [...]

AP’s Martin Merzer notes that it seems that Jeb Bush, who left Florida’s governorship four years ago, still seems to be running the show. Ease class-size limits — check. Cut corporate income taxes — check. End tenure for new teachers and link teacher raises to student performance — check (for now). All of those measures, [...]

According to two new surveys, the Tea Party movement is supported by 28% of Americans, half of its members are non-Republicans, and, aside from skewing slightly white and male, remarkably similar to the country as a whole demographically. A poll of registered voters by the Winston Group, The Hill reports, finds that the “national breakdown [...]

Reagan apostles Craig Shirley and Donald Devine take to the WaPo editorial page to argue that Karl Rove is not a conservative. From William F. Buckley Jr. to Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan, the creators of the modern conservative movement always taught that excessive concentration of power in government leads inevitably to corruption and the [...]

Glenn Reynolds has been pushing an interesting meme: that somehow the United States should be a direct democracy. This seems to be the direct implication of his Sunday Examiner column and this morning’s  link teased with “If members of Congress won’t come to their constituents, their constituents will come to them,” but it’s also endemic [...]

NYT economic columnist David Leonhardt argues that the Obama economic stimulus package has “had a huge impact on jobs — employing something like two million people who would otherwise be unemployed right now.”  Kevin Drum agrees and presents a chart by Organizing for America (aka, Obama’s campaign PAC) to argue that “We still have a [...]

Earlier this week, Warner Todd Huston called attention to a sequence in the current issue of Captain America in which the title hero and his on-again, off-again sidekick, The Falcon, lament the racist yahoos of the Tea Party movement.  Here’s the strip in question: Huston’s description: In issue number 602 of Captain America, a new [...]

In a shocking new development, Americans are unhappy with the Federal government. Two-thirds of Americans are “dissatisfied” or downright “angry” about the way the federal government is working, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. On average, the public estimates that 53 cents of every tax dollar they send to Washington is “wasted.” Man, [...]

The DC region will likely reach record levels of snow over the next 24-36 hours, With the impending storm for [today] and Wednesday, we have a legitimate chance for an all-time (since records have been kept in the late 1800s) seasonal snow record. Our big weekend storm surged Reagan National Airport’s seasonal total to 45″ [...]

Shocking no one who lives in the area, OPM Director John Berry announced late yesterday afternoon that the Federal government would close its offices in the National Capitol Region today because the fallout from the weekend blizzard would make travel unsafe.   Given that this is the area’s worst snowfall in recorded history and that a [...]

A senior Canadian politician is heading to the USA for heart surgery. Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams is set to undergo heart surgery this week in the United States. CBC News confirmed Monday that Williams, 60, left the province earlier in the day and will have surgery later in the week. The premier’s office [...]

A recent Gallup poll shows that the American public agrees with the Supreme Court that campaign contributions are free speech but that most nonetheless want to limit said speech. Fifty-seven percent of Americans consider campaign donations to be a protected form of free speech, and 55% say corporate and union donations should be treated the [...]

Good micro-level news on the housing front from Matt Yglesias, who notes the revitalization of his Northwest DC neighborhood: Nowadays we have a few more buildings, including the large complex I live in, but it’s still mostly vacant lots and parking. But as of, say, 18 months ago there were high hopes and big plans [...]

NRO’s Jonah Goldberg thinks the Republican Party should take a lesson from Domino’s Pizza, which has apparently admitted that their product is awful and is working to fix itself. You may have seen the commercials or the YouTube video touting the iconic pizza-delivery chain’s reinvention. But if you haven’t, Domino’s new campaign can be summed [...]

In a rather bizarre case, the District of Columbia is suing AT&T for the value of unused money on calling cards owned by someone else. The attorney general for Washington D.C. has filed a lawsuit against an AT&T Inc (T.N) unit, seeking to recover consumers’ unused balances on prepaid calling cards.  The suit claims that [...]

An air strike in Yemen may have killed the top leaders of al Qaead’s branch in that country, along with an American-born cleric linked to the Fort Hood massacre. A Yemeni air raid may have killed the top two leaders of al Qaeda’s regional branch on Thursday, and an American Muslim preacher linked to the [...]

Ezra Klein surveys the political landscape and offers a bold assessment: At this point, structural reform of the legislative system should, I think, be the main priority for people left, right, and center who want to see action on the problems facing the country. It’s all well and good to try to get the best [...]

Columnist Gail Colllins asks “When did we decide that letting private contractors stand in for our military in sensitive and dangerous situations was a good plan?”: When did we decide this was a good plan? Let’s pretend for a minute that it is not stupendously irresponsible to let private contractors stand in for our military [...]

Progressives are increasingly frustrated that, despite having won the presidency by a comfortable margin and having solid majorities in the House and Senate — where they have a “filibuster-proof” 60 votes — they still can’t enact the policies they want.   Matt Yglesias says “smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the [...]

The Obama administration is fighting to dismiss Jose Padilla’s lawsuit against John Yoo, citing executive privilege. The Obama administration has asked an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing former Bush administration attorney John Yoo of authorizing the torture of a terrorism suspect, saying federal law does not allow damage claims against lawyers who advise [...]

One of my commenters brought to my attention an issue that’s not receiving much attention:  Residents of several U.S. states could have to show their passports for domestic travel — or to enter a federal government building — starting January 1 because of the REAL ID Act.  Chris Strohm for Congress Daily: More than half [...]

Reuters blogger Felix Salmon contends that our tax system encourages income inequality because it generates more revenue for the treasury. [W]hen you have a progressive tax system, especially when there are surcharges on people making seven-figure incomes, you also have a system where for any given level of national income, the greater the inequality, the [...]

In a front piece story in today’s NYT, Edmund Andrews warns that the bill is about to come due on the massive borrowing the federal government has engaged in. Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and [...]

Barack Obama has been president for just under 10 months but he’s added two trillion to the national debt and will double it by the end of the decade.  CBS’ Mark Knoller: This latest milestone in the ever-rising journey of the National Debt comes less than eight months after it hit $11 trillion for the [...]

The House passed a trillion dollar bill that will force Americans to buy health insurance, force even small businesses to provide health coverage, and require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions.  (The last, as I have previously argued, makes it something other than “insurance.”) Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray for WaPo: Hours after President Obama [...]

A USA Today report that “Nearly a year after he was elected on a pledge to change business-as-usual in Washington, Obama also has taken a cue from his predecessors and appointed fundraisers to coveted ambassadorships” and in fact has done so at “a rate higher than any president in more than four decades” combined with  [...]

IOZ (whose identity is apparently a mystery) sums up a recent debate that’s been brewing on several of the blogs I frequent: When Kerry Howley made the irrefutable and yet quixotic point that any proper concern with liberty, whether practical or, ahem, merely philosophical, must grapple with the strictures of cultural mores and social conventions, [...]

Remember that plan by Obama’s pay czar to radically limit executive pay at bailed out banks? And how some of us were predicting that they’d just go to companies whose pay was not limited?  Well, it didn’t take long. Even before the Obama administration formally tightened executive compensation at bailed-out companies, the prospect of pay [...]

Ezra Klein points to a new ABC/WaPo poll showing a solid majority support “a law that requires all Americans to have health insurance, either getting it from work, buying it on their own, or through eligibility for Medicare or Medicaid.” Further, the same poll finds a third of those who oppose would switch sides “if [...]

Stephen Coll, president of the New America Foundation, has an article in Foreign Policy making the case for more humble objectives in Afghanistan. In the article he criticizes both the counter-insurgency strategy advocated by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U. S. forces in Afghanistan: To succeed, counterinsurgency approaches require deep, supple, and adaptive understanding [...]

Greece’s Socialist Party has defeated the New Democracy Party in the country’s national elections with enough seats to form a government: ATHENS (Reuters) – Greece’s Socialists, who campaigned on a promise to inject a 3 billion euro ($4.36 billion) stimulus package into the economy, have won Sunday’s national election with enough seats to form a [...]

Via Jonathan Adler, I see that world-renowned economist Robert Barro and his student, Charles Redlick, takes to WSJ to summarize their research report showing that stimulus spending doesn’t work. Oddly, take cuts do. The bottom line is this: The available empirical evidence does not support the idea that spending multipliers typically exceed one, and thus [...]

A census worker was found hanged in Kentucky in a bizarre and grisly case. When Bill Sparkman told retired trooper Gilbert Acciardo that he was going door-to-door collecting census data in rural Kentucky, the former cop drew on years of experience for a warning: “Be careful.”  The 51-year-old Sparkman was found this month hanged from [...]

A recent survey of Oklahoma public high school students found that the overwhelming majority can’t answer even simple questions about U.S. government and history. A thousand students were given 10 questions drawn from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services item bank. Candidates for U.S. citizenship must answer six questions correctly in order to become citizens. [...]

A new Investor’s Business Daily poll contends that nearly half the nation’s doctors would “Consider leaving [their] practice or taking an early retirement” if “Congress passes its health care plan.” Two of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington, and hundreds of thousands would think about shutting down their [...]

Yesterday, somewhere between “tens of thousands” and “two million” people flooded the nation’s capital to protest somethingoranother. Thousands Rally in Capital to Protest Big Government (Jeff Zeleny, NYT) A sea of protesters filled the west lawn of the Capitol and spilled onto the National Mall on Saturday in the largest rally against President Obama since [...]

In his Daily Beast debut, Alex Massie rises in defense of Joe Wilson’s outburst. No, not so much whether Obama was lying in this particular instance but rather the very notion that it’s “inappropriate” to heckle the president.  The whole piece is worth a read but here’s a taste: Trivial though it may seem, this [...]

Charles Krauthammer proclaims “Obamacare Version 1.0 is dead” and helpfully proposes a version 2.0.  Basically:  No public option, no death panels end-of-life counseling, softpeddle government “best practices,” abandon cost-cutting, and guaranteeing universal coverage. What’s not to like? If you have insurance, you’ll never lose it. Nor will your children ever be denied coverage for preexisting [...]

The British government has devised a novel solution to dealing with online piracy: Disable the Internet accounts of violators. Broadband providers could be forced to suspend their customers’ accounts under proposals announced on Tuesday by the UK government to tackle internet file-sharing. The proposals mark a hardening of the government’s stance against piracy since the [...]

Seven months into his administration, President Obama has only 43 percent of his top appointees in place. Which, while shocking, isn’t at all unusual  Peter Baker for NYT: Of more than 500 senior policymaking positions requiring Senate confirmation, just 43 percent have been filled — a reflection of a White House that grew more cautious [...]

“Is is possible to make a coherent argument that government-provided healthcare is a moral obligation but that our obligation doesn’t extend to people in Zambia? I don’t think it is but I’m willing to listen to the arguments.” – Dave Schuler It’s possible to make a practical argument along those lines, as well as to [...]

Kevin Drum seconds Alex Massie that a British-style nationalized health system is not a politically feasible option in the United States.  Indeed, even Democrats don’t want that: [W]ith the exception of a few outliers, the liberal community really, truly doesn’t want a fully government owned and operated healthcare system like the NHS.  We want a [...]

Steve Benen heaps praise on ABC News‘ new Fact Check segment for “actually informing the public about a controversy in a fair and accurate way.” Kate Snow tackled the vile right-wing demagoguery on end-of-life care, and while she refrained from calling Palin and her ilk “liars,” she made it very clear that the accusations about [...]

Bill Maher has a piece at HuffPo arguing that Americans are a bunch of idiots who should just shut up and let people who know what they’re talking about make decisions on tough issues like health care reform. [T]ake the health care debate we’re presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can [...]