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I was born in 1948. When I was a kid, everybody had a mom and a dad, and the dad usually worked at a plant. Some days, friends in school would ask to borrow a dime to buy a snack, and it was often because their dad had been laid off. Then a few months later, the same kid had a new baseball mitt after dad was called back to work. The expectation for dads and kids was that people started a job when they finished school, and there you stayed until retirement, always at age 65. We are well...

Specter wants Wilson censured Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Penn.), who's looked at POTUS from both sides now, was just on the Bill Press radio show suggesting the South Carolina firebrand Joe Wilson be censured for his heckle heard round the world. Said the Republican-turned-Dem: "He apologized immediately afterward but I don't think that’s adequate... If an apology is the consequence of an outburst I think we can expect more – that’s not a sufficient penalty that’s not a sufficient price to pay.. I'm not saying the guy should be kicked out of the House… But there ought to be some rebuke,...

WaPo site WhoRunsGov.com launched today as a moderated wiki, opening it for readers to contribute to the 700-plus in-depth profiles of Washington's most influential people in government. The site today is also debuting two reporting projects on health-care reform and government technology strategy that will be based on community content. WhoRunsGov.com, which was launched in beta form in January, currently includes profiles of Obama administration officials, members of Congress, Capitol Hill staffers, Pentagon officials and heads of think tanks and interest groups that play a critical role in shaping public policy. The moderated wiki platform allows users to both write...

Money and crime intersect in Brazil, where the wealthy are riding a new trend: armored cars. Watch how they produce them and why...

THE ANTI-HUMANS: The Reeducation Experiment of the Communists Between 1944-1945, Communism took over the Christian country of Romania. An experiment of terror was performed on the young generation, on students from the age of eighteen to twenty five. Among those students was a man who is alive today after surviving sixteen years in the anti-human communist prison system. His name is Father George Calciu. After His release from prison, he was exiled to America in 1984. Below follows part of an interview by Nun Nina from this year.(1998) Nun Nina: This may be more difficult for you to talk about...

President Obama took care of the easy tasks Wednesday in his much-anticipated speech to Congress on healthcare reform. He laid out the main provisions he's looking for in a comprehensive bill, and provided a clear and powerful rationale for fundamental change. But the steps he endorsed -- including new regulations on insurers and help for the uninsured to obtain coverage -- already have broad support from industry lobbyists and lawmakers. The hard part, in terms of both policy and politics, is finding a way to pay for the expansion in coverage. And on that most contentious issue, unfortunately, Obama argued...

Republican Rep. Joe Wilson shouted "Lie! You lie," at President Barack Obama during Wednesday's address to a joint session of Congress, earning repudiations from his own party and from Democrats. Wilson took exception to a passage in Obama's speech on health care in which the president said illegal immigrants would not get health insurance coverage under the overhaul. "There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false -- the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally," Obama said. Wilson answered the comment with his outburst, loud...

Glenn Beck wasn't at New York City's Lincoln Center for Thursday morning's farewell salute to Walter Cronkite. Neither was Matt Drudge, Michelle Malkin or any of the other familiar faces of the vast right wing conspiracy." But they were all present in spirit during President Obama's extended lament on the state of journalism.

<p>THERE was a time when the US Treasury secre tary would stand on the steps of the Treasury building and pronounce America's policy of maintaining a strong dollar. No longer -- for two reasons.</p> <p>First, the Obama administration doesn't seem to have any policy concerning the dollar. And, second, the incumbent secretary, Timothy Geithner, would be paid no attention were he to make such a declaration while simultaneously peddling another huge stack of IOUs as the president's deficits rise ever higher. (This year's red ink is set to hit $1.6 trillion -- and Congress will have to raise the legal limit on federal debt beyond $12.1 trillion sometime next month). And while Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke continues to print money.</p>

The Dead Sea is alive with oil, believes Yitzchak Tshuva, who heads the consortium that found billions of dollars of gas in the Mediterranean. Investors' hopes of finding oil in Israel are based on seismic surveys that estimate that Dead Sea oil reserves are worth nearly half a billion dollars.

Wednesday's It's Only Rock & Roll event saw the return of Steve Jobs to the stage, a new version of iTunes with a boatload of features, more-colorful iPod shuffles, faster and higher capacity iPod touches, a video camera-equipped iPod nano, and no Beatles music. In one of our punchier podcast episodes, I discuss these issues and others with editorial director Jason Snell and senior editors Jonathan Seff and Dan Frakes. Show Notes Throughout the podcast we discuss what was announced at the event. Among them: * iTunes 9; * a slightly updated iPod touch; * barely refreshed iPod classics and...

After all the rhetoric is put aside, one principle ran through President Obama’s speech tonight: that increased government involvement in health care can solve its problems. Many Americans fundamentally disagree with this idea. We know from long experience that the creation of a massive new bureaucracy will not provide us with “more stability and security,” but just the opposite. It's hard to believe the President when he says that this time he and his team of bureaucrats have finally figured out how to do things right if only we’ll take them at their word.

Everybody is talking about healthcare. Everybody is talking about healthcare, but few are really articulating the classic economic choices at work in the debate – and by missing this, they tend to devolved into ‘bitch-sessions’ which usually lead nowhere. In reality, despite the complexity of American healthcare, the issues at play in the current discussion circle around the three basic economic choices that are in play with any good or commodity – of which healthcare IS one, by definition.1 Quality, Supply and Cost are the three economic levers at play in managing the healthcare ‘market’, and, not unexpectedly, the misapplication...

Joe Biden can be so much fun. Just when I get tired of fighting the good fight the SHMOTUS (Shmo of The United States) opens his mouth and all is funny with the world. You know what I am describing. Like for example: * When he said that President FDR ‘Got on Television’ to Talk about 1929 Market Crash. Now FDR wasn't president when the market crashed, AND the first televised presidential speech was September 4, 1951 by HARRY TRUMAN. * Or when hes said that the US "along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said, and...

President Obama's speech to Congress last night can be summed up rather easily. It was 40 minutes of boilerplate followed by a socko, emotional finish exploiting the death of Senator Teddy Kennedy. Which leads to this question: was Obama's finishing kick sufficient to achieve his goal of "reframing" the national debate on health care that hasn't been going his way? I don't think so.

Something mighty strange has been going on in the battles over health-care reform. Conservatives have been screaming that a key flaw in President Barack Obama's plan to extend health insurance to all Americans is that government bureaucrats should not be interfering in matters best left to doctors and patients. Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Tea Partyers at town halls and many GOP members of Congress have been frothing over the idea that supposedly under Obama's public plan, government will be mandating decisions about your health care. So why is it that when the subject is abortion and state officials stick their...

A youth minister at a Stafford County church was indicted yesterday on charges that she had sexual relations with a 15-year-old boy. Jennifer Michelle Brennan, 36, of Spotsylvania was charged by a Stafford grand jury with 10 counts of taking indecent liberties with a child and 10 counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. According to court records and sources, Brennan met the boy through her position as youth minister at Saint Matthias United Methodist Church in Stafford. The boy's mother said that among other things, Brennan counseled her son and his girlfriend against premarital sex. An affidavit...

Van Jones’ sins are well known at this point: He called conservatives a vulgar name, to the cheers of his radical audience. He accused white people of deliberately polluting black neighborhoods and he signed on to a movement that accused the US government of being behind the 9-11 attacks, or that at least it knew of them in advance. And, most significantly, he is/was an avowed communist. But what were the “inside baseball” reasons to hire him?

A Senate bill gutted and then amended to require local governments to get state vetting before filing for bankruptcy threatens delivery of basic public services, opponents say. Cities, counties and special districts opposing the bill say the measure would thwart their ability to cope with the fallout from the sour economy and the state budget crisis. "Counties provide state health and human services for entitlement programs," said Jean Hurst of the California State Association of Counties. If the county cannot seek bankruptcy court protection to avert insolvency, she added, "something is going to have to be done. Some level of...

As President Obama addresses the nation on health care reform, a new analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that 6.6 million uninsured illegal immigrants could receive benefits under the House health reform bill (H.R. 3200). While the bill states that illegal immigrants are not eligible for the new taxpayer-funded affordability credits, there is nothing in the bill to enforce this provision. Congress defeated efforts to require the use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program. More than 70 other programs of this kind use SAVE.