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Posts Tagged ‘Politics’

As I suspected, the Clint Eastwood “Halftime in America” commercial for Chrysler that aired during last night’s Super Bowl turned out to be quite controversial. This AP article discusses some of the reaction to the ad from various points on the political spectrum and quotes Eastwood as saying the ad was not intended to be [...]

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Yesterday’s unemployment report contained some good news, for a change.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics released data stating that 243,000 new jobs were created, and the unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent.  Both results are better than what economists and analysts — who never seem to be right — were expecting. There are some curious [...]

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The big news out of Florida is that Mitt Romney soundly defeated Newt Gingrich in a contest that, by all accounts, featured lots of “negative advertising.”  I think the more interesting story, however, has to do with Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. Santorum and Paul got clobbered in Florida.  Santorum ended up with 13 percent [...]

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About a year ago I wrote a post about whether federal employees are overpaid. It’s a never-ending debate — and now the Congressional Budget Office has weighed in. The CBO conducted a study that compared the wages, benefits, and overall compensation of federal employees and private-sector employees who shared certain comparable observable characteristics.  The study [...]

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When I read the political news, I often feel like I’m in high school again.  That was my reaction when I read the story this week about an apparently testy exchange between President Obama and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer on an airport tarmac. President Obama, fresh from his State of the Union speech, flew to [...]

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I didn’t watch the President’s State of the Union speech earlier this week.  It turns out I’m not alone. According to the New York Times, 37.8 million viewers watched the President’s speech.  That’s down from 42.8 million in 2011, 48 million in 2010, and 52.3 million for the President’s 2009 speech to Congress.  In short, [...]

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It’s amazing that Newt Gingrich has been able to depict himself as a “Reagan conservative” and surge to the top of the Republican field.  After all, soon after he left public office he began to do “consulting” work for Freddie Mac, the mortgage giant at the center of the housing crisis that crippled our economy.  [...]

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Life can be difficult if you approach it with high expectations.  You vote for a new President expecting him to live up to his promises, for example, and inevitably you are disappointed.  That’s not a problem for me, because I grew up with Electric Football. Electric Football was a toy, but its ads portrayed it [...]

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The Chicago Sun-Times has announced that it will no longer endorse particular political candidates for election. The Sun-Times concludes — accurately, in my view — that people don’t pay a lot of attention to newspaper endorsements anymore, that there are lots of other sources of information available to voters now, and that many people just [...]

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The Republican presidential primaries, already seemingly endless, roll on.  With Newt Gingrich’s big win in South Carolina, the race is in disarray.  Gingrich is on the rise, Mitt Romney’s shield of inevitability has been dented, and Ron Paul and Rick Santorum are hanging on. The focus now moves to Florida.  As has come to be [...]

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Last week President Obama went down to Disney World to tout tourism in America and got his picture taken with the Disney castle in the background. The trip was part of the President’s “We Can’t Wait” campaign, in which he does things by himself that are supposed to promote job growth and show that we [...]

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Today South Carolina Republicans vote in their state’s presidential primary.  Polls indicate it is a two-man race between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Gingrich apparently has been given a boost by the most recent Republican candidates debate.  Gingrich was asked about the recent comments of his ex-wife, who said he asked that she agree to [...]

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Mitt Romney’s failure to release his tax returns is a self-inflicted wound — and a missed opportunity. It’s hard to believe that Romney didn’t understand that when you run for President, you check your privacy at the door.  People have come to expect that candidates for office will release their tax returns.  It’s consistent with [...]

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Yesterday Texas Governor Rick Perry ended his race for the Republican nomination for President.  His brief campaign started with a bang and ended with a whimper — his departure wasn’t even the top news story on a day that featured stories about open marriages and another debate — but it’s worth some reflection. When Perry [...]

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There may be no federal program that was begun with better intentions than Head Start.  It was a key part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives and had an ambitious social engineering goal:  to help impoverished kids better prepare themselves for school and a useful life by providing them with preschool. It is now 45 [...]

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