While the recession has rattled every rung of economic ladder, it has ravaged the bottom bars. Unemployment stands at just over 4 percent for college graduates but at nearly 15 percent for those lacking high-school diplomas. In poor black neighborhoods, it's around 30 percent and approaching Great Depression levels.
It pains me to take Elizabeth Edwards to task for anything. She is suffering from terminal cancer and from assertions that her cheating husband fathered a child with a party girl. So my first instinct is to totally lay off. The only rap against her, it seems, is that she knew of an affair after John Edwards announced his presidential run and that she kept it secret.
A camel, the old saying goes, is a horse made by committee. We don't want camel health reform. We don't want Washington lawmakers debating whether it should have one hump or two. We want a horse -- a sleek machine that performs with efficiency.
As tornadoes, thunder and lightning rampaged across the Heartland last week, the crowds piled up at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Every bar stool had someone on it, and restaurant lines stretched down the corridors.
In a Q&A last year with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, former Pennsylvania Rep. Pat Toomey was asked what book he wanted Barack Obama to read. The Republican quickly recommended the work of Adam Smith, the 18th century economist and philosopher who held that individuals promote the good of society when they pursue their self-interest.
SALT LAKE CITY -- American flags and lush spring grass lined the long drive of a Mormon meetinghouse here in the desert capital of Utah. Television trucks parking outside. Utahans were gathering last week for the funeral of Bill Orton, a Democrat who had represented an especially conservative congressional district in this most Republican state for three terms.
Consider Cary Grant in "North by Northwest." Sinister forces may be chasing him for reasons he can't comprehend, but this is 1959, and neither the BlackBerry nor the Global Positioning System chip that goes inside it has been invented. And so the mysterious crop-duster has no way to pinpoint which cornstalks he's hiding under. The truck Grant steals also lacks a GPS that could help enemies foil his getaway.
The hardest group to sell on national health reform is those who don't desperately need it.
This has been a month of forward leaps in the campaign for gay-marriage -- or so it is said. The Iowa Supreme Court struck down a ban on same-sex marriage, providing a toehold in the heartland.
One day last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up 246 points. On CNBC, Jim Cramer punched the Sousa March button. NPR's "Marketplace" boomed, "We're in the Money."
Seems a lifetime ago that the price of crude approached $150 a barrel, but it was only last summer. Remember how people went nuts? Santa Barbara County voted for oil drilling off California's spectacular coast. Santa Barbara of all places, epicenter of the 1969 oil spill that ravaged beaches from Pismo to Oxnard -- and launched the modern environmental movement.
A neighbor in her 30s, a very fine woman, recently had a child with her boyfriend. They live together.
There's trouble around the Democratic campfire. The party has the White House and solid congressional majorities. But what it doesn't have is everyone on the same page, strumming the same chords, singing the same tune.
Many conservatives think they've found a winner in tarring President Obama and his allies as "socialists." Earnest attempts to explain why "it isn't so" are futile, as is asking people what the heck they mean when they say raising taxes is "socialism."
There was a time when New England sent lots of Republicans to Washington. These were fiscally conservative but socially liberal "Rockefeller Republicans," also found in the Northwest, Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states. As the party turned socially conservative and fiscally reckless, many Yankees departed.
The Duke basketball coach and most other Americans believe that President Obama is unwisely diverting his attention from the sick economy.
Anyone who has watched "Law & Order" over the years, as I have, knows that the ending must feel right. The circumstances of the crime may be complex and the legal issues muddy, but in the end, most viewers are left feeling that some justice has been served.
In his essay "Why the GOP Can't Win With Minorities," conservative scholar Shelby Steele almost nails the half-question in the title. An African-American, Steele contrasts the "moral activism" of liberals with conservative calls for personal discipline.
President Obama has vowed to curb the number of earmarks, also known as pork, in future spending bills.
Do recessions make people sicker? Some studies say yes, some say no. The better question might be, "How is this recession affecting health?" Not in a good way, comes the answer. This recession -- depression? -- seems different. This recession is messing with our heads.
