white house

This morning at the Newseum House Speaker John Boehner was asked by Politico's more »

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I got a weird little story about my friend Blitz Krieger to bring to you today.

He’s had a crazy car problem, he has, and over the past few months he thought he had found a solution – in fact, he thought he had found the solution of his dreams – but in the end, he’s discovered that the things you dream about often don’t go according to plan. more »

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You know what the problem is with America?
The poor don’t get just how great they have it.

I’ve been hearing this a lot lately; the basic thrust of the discussion is that all those cars, TVs, DVD players, refrigerators, and stoves that have found their way into the homes of the economic underclass are proof there’s really no such thing as “poor” in America.

If they were truly poor more »

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So everybody’s hearing the news, right?

There is a tentative debt ceiling deal, and this Administration and Congressional Democrats seem to have won everything they wanted: Republicans get to have multiple “we don’t approve” votes before 2012 on raising the debt ceiling, there won’t be any new revenue, there’s going to be another “hostage-taking” event around Christmastime, for more »

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When it comes to jobs, sometimes it seems as if the White House is from Mars and the middle class is from Venus. And Republicans act like they're from the Death Star, patrolling the economy in their Imperial Cruisers directing laser blasts at every job initiative they can find.

The resulting political paralysis has left millions of Americans trapped in geographical or demographic pockets of full-blown depression. Unlike Wall Street's America, theirs is a bleak economic landscape from which there seems to be no escape.

The Administration's mishandling of jobs has become a Rorschach test for those who understands that more needs to be done. Is the White House following a misguided political strategy, thinking people want lower deficits more than they want jobs? Has it been "captured" by the conservative thinking of ex-Republican Tim Geithner? Are the President and his advisors too reluctant to propose measures they know will fail in the Republican House because they want success stories?

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In light of today's terrible job numbers, it's a bittersweet experience to re-read a recent report from Wells Fargo Bank which argues that high unemployment is "the new normal." While it's comforting to find Wells Fargo employees who aren't laundering money for the Mexican drug cartels, their report is one more ideologically-driven nail in the coffin of America's jobs agenda.

Ideology's not a bad thing in politics, but it is a bad thing when it's disguised as as a work of unbiased analysis. Despite their mild disclaimers, that's exactly the posture Wells Fargo's economists are adopting.

They may not even realize how biased and ideological their report is, and that's the problem. Almost three years later, people are still hewing to the flawed philosophies that led to the financial crisis. That prevents the country from taking steps to end the permanent recession that enshrouds whole segments of our population. more »

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In a piece called "Wall Street: Not Guilty," financial columnist Roger Lowenstein attempts to defend Wall Street against allegations that it's a viper's nest of rampant criminality. His mischaracterization, mockery, and vague suggestions of McCarthyism are strident, flat, and fail to get the job done. But Lowenstein's piece is well worth reading, if only as a case study in the moral and cognitive blindness that's reached epidemic proportions in influential Washington and Wall Street circles.

Lowenstein shows us how people who are undoubtedly thoughtful and ethically-minded in their personal lives can lose their way when confronted with complex moral and legal issues, especially ones involving people they know personally. And his misdirection and vituperation suggests how unsettled they become when their worldview is challenged.

It's a shame. The analytical and moral flaws in Lowenstein's piece obscure some of the very sound points he makes about the wrongheadedness of our country's financial culture, a topic that deserves more thoughtful discussion. Without a clear rebuttal, this wrongheaded view is likely to become tomorrow's conventional wisdom.

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They tell us we’re dropping about $10 billion a month in Afghanistan so we can catch that Bin Laden guy...but eventually, we’re gonna catch him, and as soon as we do you can imagine that folks will be wondering why we’re still over there – and I gotta tell ya, I’m one of those people.

I mean, we’re over here talking about how we're so broke that we have no choice but to cut a couple more »

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So it’s Day 3 of my fake campaign for Congress, and we’ve run into our first obstacle more »

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