Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke Tuesday told an audience of teachers in Washington that both individuals and the larger economy could benefit from more and better financial education. I never agreed more than when I learned that hedge fund leader Louis Bacon announced he'd return $2 billion to investors in Moore Capital, an $8 billion fund, …
Continue reading Time to get smart, not scared, about the economy
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's most recent foray into presidential politics - claiming someone had told him that Mitt Romney had paid no taxes for ten years but refusing to corroborate the accuser's name or the charge has the stench of McCarthyism. During the Cold War, the late Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy held hearings to rout out Communists …
Continue reading Are Harry Reid’s questionable tactics working?
Governor Patrick's decision to sign the crime bill, the passage of a health cost containment bill, and a renewable energy boost are three healthy signs that the legislative process works. Never mind that they waited till the eleventh hour to get it done. They did what they were elected to do. The crime bill prevents habitual …
Continue reading Three strikes to improve public policy: the legislative process works
Shouting fire in a crowded theater is a terrible thing to do. Opening fire is a horror of a whole order of magnitude. Most of America is struggling to make sense out of 24-year-old neuroscience student James Holmes' rampage, which so far has resulted in the deaths of 12 people and injured 59 others, some of whom may …
Continue reading Colorado shooting scares, saddens and stymies us
What is Deval Patrick is thinking these days? Other than his campaigning for President Obama, of course. At issue are the Governor's support of loosening a ban on gifts to doctors from pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers and his move to veto legislative reforms of the use of welfare debit cards. Big pharma has long plied …
Last Tuesday, Congressman John Tierney did what he should have done many months ago. He held a press conference and faced questions about what he knew and when he knew it regarding his brother-in-laws' illegal activities. For Tierney, there were no new revelations. Too bad he waited until he was backed against a wall by the two …
Continue reading Tierney v. Tisei: Time to focus on the issues
As Syria goes deeper into civil war (and may draw in Turkey) and Egypt's first civilian president, Mohamed Morsi, calls for the release of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plotter, "blind sheik" Omar Abdel-Rahman, here's a small story that could be even more dispiriting when thinking about the future of the region. Well-known Algerian author Boualem Sansel was …
Continue reading Hatred trumps culture with Algerian novelist’s trip to Jerusalem
Thanks to CNN and Fox, Thursday's SCOTUS announcement was an emotional roller coaster. Like the Dewey-beats-Truman headlines, they both were so eager to be first that they were wrong. Shame on them. This time, print media at least made a stab at reading the Supreme Court decision before pronouncing the individual mandate dead. And, of course, it wasn't. …
Continue reading Health care – the end of the beginning and the beginning of hard work
That whoosh you hear is the sound of money, gobs of it, flying from wellheeled donors to political candidates and "independent" committees on behalf of candidates. The roar is increasingly deafening especially when the money is coming from corporations and superPAC's (and, to a lesser extent, labor unions. Corporations, Mitt Romney explains to us, are …
Mitt Romney says that President Obama's recent move not to deport illegal immigrants brought here as children was motivated by politics. Now there's a surprise! That's a little bit like Captain Renault in Casablanca saying "I'm shocked, shocked to find that there is gambling is going on in here." Of course it was political, shrewdly political. And it …
Continue reading Obama’s executive order: the Dream Act lives on
Marjorie Arons-Barron 