I'm a well-trained child of the human-less world of customer "support." I don't ask for much. When I need an answer, I first check the FAQs (frequently asked questions). I visit forums to find others discussing similar problems and sometimes offering good advice.
This is a tale of two cities. No, not Dickens' phlegmatic London and passionate Paris. Nor the two neighborhoods Charles Murray contrasted in his recent bestseller "Coming Apart" -- prosperous but isolated Belmont (actually, Mitt Romney's home for decades) and needy and disorganized Fishtown.
As the Obama years unfold, observers who lived through the Clinton era sometimes have the eerie feeling that they have been here before -- particularly when directing their gaze toward the far right. The roiling paranoia and hatred that marred American politics when Bill and Hillary Clinton were in the White House has resurfaced in attacks on Barack and Michelle Obama, who like the Clintons have been maligned repeatedly as communist, subversive, Satanic and, above all, illegitimate.
Over the past few weeks, President Obama and his campaign team have launched a furious attack on Mitt Romney's record as head of Bain Capital, a highly successful venture capital firm.
A rebounding economy will not be enough to pull state governments out of their fiscal mess, says a new report from the State Budget Crisis Task Force. While health and other costs continue to grow, important sources of revenues are shrinking, the group led by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and former New York Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch noted. One of those sources is sales taxes. Some states rely on them heavily for revenues. (Only four don't have sales taxes -- Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon.)
Perhaps the rain made the teleprompter unreadable. That's one thought I had on pondering Barack Obama's comments to a rain-soaked rally in Roanoke, Va., last Friday.
What was your first job? I stuck pieces of plastic and metal together at an Evanston, Ill., assembly line. We produced photocopiers for a company called American Photocopy.
Nowadays, few politicians will stray from party orthodoxy without also taking unfair whacks at the opposition. Sen. Tom Coburn, Republican from Oklahoma, is braver and more principled than most. But even he felt obliged to take partisan cover in his most recent blast at activist Grover Norquist, enforcer of the absurd pledge never to let anyone's taxes rise ever.
1776 is a number with great resonance for Americans, but not one you expect to be featured on a British government website.
When Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters on Tuesday that Mitt Romney's foreign investment accounts don't trouble him because "it's really American to avoid paying taxes," he must not have realized that he was calling his party's nominee-to-be a liar.
In sports betting parlance, an “over/under” is a bet on whether there will be more or less of a given statistic in a certain game. So, in a football game, say the over/under is 50; gamblers would bet whether the total points scored would be more or less than 50. We include this reference just to make sure readers know what we’re talking about here, and also to include a regular Crystal Ball disclaimer: It’s our policy to never bet money on elections because we do not want to compromise our ratings.
There are plenty of reasons that the economy is the most important issue of Election 2012. Unemployment has remained high for a long time, and even 27 percent of those who have a job are worried about losing it.
If only one in four American adults can name his or her U.S. senators, we can assume that even fewer know what Libor is. Libor (pronounced lie-bor) is at the center of another major financial scandal, but that may not improve its name recognition much. This is summer, after all, and making sense of financial manipulation requires effort.
The best view of London's Olympic Park is from the picture windows at the top floor of the John Lewis department store in the vast Westfield Stratford mall five miles east of the Tower of London.
Last year, Congress agreed to $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts, unless politicians find other things to cut. They didn't, of course. So now, with so-called sequestration looming in January, panic has set in. Even the new "fiscally responsible" Republicans vote against cutting Energy Department handouts to companies like Solyndra and subsidies to sugar producers. Many claim that any cut in military spending will weaken America and increase unemployment.
The weekend's memorable photo is of Mitt Romney driving his massive powerboat past a privately built castle, not unlike his own, on New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee. On Sunday, he moseyed across the Long Island Sound to the beachy pleasure dome of billionaire conservative David Koch, in Southampton, N.Y. -- for a $75,000-a-couple dinner to raise money from like-minded Republicans. Not far away, Koch's brother Bill, a fellow funder of conservative causes, holds court in the exclusive waterfront enclave of Osterville, on Cape Cod.
"A step in the right direction." That's what Barack Obama said in Poland, Ohio, about Friday's Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report, which showed only 80,000 net new jobs and unemployment remaining at 8.2 percent.
Democrats were riding high in the polls in 2006 and 2008, and one of their big issues was health care. Then, after passing the president's health care law, the politics shifted, and the issue helped sweep the GOP to victory in the 2010 midterm elections. A few months later, Republicans had a 14-point advantage in terms of voter trust on the health care issue.
Two cultural events have caught our attention this season. One is the stern graduation speech at Wellesley (Mass.) High School in which teacher David McCullough Jr. told pampered students, "Do not get the idea you're anything special." The other was an article in The Atlantic magazine by Anne-Marie Slaughter titled, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."
That's more or less what happened last Sunday in Mexico, at least as far as most American journalists (including me) are concerned.
