Watch any TV these days, and the title of Gallup CEO Jim Clifton's recent book hardly seems prophetic. Companies tout job creation on commercials, news reports obsess over workforce and unemployment statistics, and candidates push tax plans aimed at small business and...
$1.81: The price of gas when Obama took office.In the past few days, I have seen this meme spreading on Facebook — and back in September, Michele Bachmann was saying, "The day that President Obama took office, gasoline was $1.79 a gallon." Many Facebook...
Author Michael Lewis is on tour for his new book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, published on Monday by Simon & Schuster. Above is the extended clip of his appearance last night on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Boomerang is sort of a followup to...
Watching the riots in England these days, one line from the video above keeps echoing in my mind: There's a term for this: "class politics," and it usually ends badly. Speaking about austerity in the video is Mark Blyth, a faculty...
[President Obama’s speech: White House video and text transcript.] Remarks by the President on Fiscal Policy George Washington University Washington, D.C. 1:48 P.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. (Applause.) Please have a seat. Please have a seat, everyone....
Ron Johnson, Senate candidate from Wisconsin, is seen in the clip above, from Countdown with Keith Olbermann, addressing the central issue in this year's election: Jobs, jobs, jobs. What is Ron Johnson's jobs plan? His jobs plan is spending cuts. Which is to say that...
After failing for 2 years to put forth any serious alternatives to the ambitious Democratic agenda they obstruct, Republicans today unveiled "A Pledge to America," aimed at repairing their image as the Party of "No." In their Pledge, Republicans say they plan to cut...
NPR's Planet Money has been conducting an ongoing case study of a toxic asset, and there was an interesting observation in Friday morning's installment examining the origin of this toxic asset, the housing bubble circa 2005: DAVID KESTENBAUM: How weird would it be to,...
When news broke last weekend that President Barack Obama would be holding a town hall meeting here in Racine on June 30, the area media struggled to understand its purpose. On a national level, there is currently no sharper political analyst than MSNBC's Rachel...
Reading an editorial today by Racine's local newspaper, I felt a certain "down the rabbit-hole" sensation that has become increasingly familiar. The Journal Times opinion piece, "State no longer a ‘tax hell’," lauds the news that "Wisconsin's taxation ranking has hit...
God bless Jon Stewart and the Daily Show researchers and editors for putting CNBC's accuracy record under the microscope following Rick Santelli's anti-bailout rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.. I am so sick of...
I was lying in bed here a few minutes ago, and there was darkness on my radio. The latest unemployment report is due out today. It is expected to be very grim, and the news reader said that employers need to see exactly how bad it is before deciding whether to cut...
The Great Recession and its effect on our household budget have started producing some bizarre yearnings in me — especially when combined with the influence of our TV set. This began with a video that arrived here from Netflix. I don't know how it got added to our...
Around 10 o'clock this morning, I got a phone call from Steve Dahl. Since Steve just never calls me, I immediately understood that this was the very bad news he had been foreshadowing for a couple of weeks. He confirmed it. CBS Radio...
I cannot process the economic depression is unfolding here in the U.S.A. over the last few days. A crushing, amorphous weight has me plastered to the sofa in front of the TV. My breathing is labored, and my heart stops beating every now and then for ten or fifteen...
We modern Americans are marvels of indolence. We'll slap magnetic "Support our troops" ribbons on our minivans and surrender our freedoms to telephone companies if that's what it takes to keep from having to protect our freedoms, but let anyone even suggest keeping...
Update, 3/9/2010: Annie Leonard's project has just been published in book form. It is called: The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-and a Vision for Change (Free Press, 352 pages). Here's an infectious...