For years and years a minority of savvy people would ask themselves, “Just how long can this go on?” The “this” was lending people money that they were not earning enough to repay. Now we know. Now the question is not how long can this go on but how come it went on so long.

Lending money to dubious risks is hardly something invented in the past 10 or 15 years. Until recently, however, the rule was that high risks paid high interest rates. The payday loan industry operates on that basis, as do the gangsters who lend to people gambling on sporting events.  read more »

While cam-paigning, Barack Obama is often heard to quote his wife, Michelle, saying, “We are not that far away from being normal.” He then goes on to explain that it was only five years ago that he and his wife were still struggling to pay off their student loans and were wondering how they could get together enough money to move out of their condo, which wasn’t big enough to hold them and their two little girls.  read more »

As the bromides and bunkum of primary season lurch into caucus-eve overdrive in Iowa, the rest of the world has upstaged the election-addled news cycle. A new Osama bin Laden video, a Colombian hostage crisis and—most of all—the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto have made weary onlookers newly aware that there will be a long, grave to-do list awaiting whichever candidate prevails in the cartoonish 2008 presidential race.

Bhutto’s death marks the most sobering setback for the U.S.  read more »

Gullible voters keen to treat the onset of the 2008 primary season as a hale sign of life in the American democratic system had best avert their gaze from Capitol Hill this week. For as Congress winds down the year’s business with earmark-laden appropriations bills and unsightly cave-ins to Bush prerogative after Bush prerogative, the governing metaphor is not the campaign scene’s notorious horse race—something that, for all its by-the-numbers familiarity, at least connotes forward motion.  read more »

This is no time for trade union idiocy, but we’ve got it anyway. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees are back at work, but employers succeeded in making the case that this union struck for what used to be called featherbedding. Featherbedding is a union contract that includes paying workers for not working. In the overworked and perpetually exhausted society that is our current-day America, news of such goings-on confirms the idea in many a head that unions have little to offer.  read more »

It used to be such a simple thing for Republican candidates to position themselves as modern conservative leaders of the faith.

You’d make coy campaign overtures to religious denominations that couldn’t officially endorse you. Point at the lurid God-baiting work of a liberal pop culture, a liberal media and a liberal university scene. Hotly denounce the activist courts, and their bids to treat abortion and euthanasia as counterculture party favors, while de-Christianizing the schools and the public square. Introduce symbolic variations as needed: NEA-funded blasphemies in the museums, gay marriage as mortal threat to civilization, secular tolerance as coddling of “Islamofascists,” the special Congressional session on the Terri Schiavo case, the “war on Christmas,” etc.  read more »

Mr. Russert has found a safe way to be a bully and to embarrass those who do not have the protection afforded by the role of journalist.  read more »

The Democratic primary field seems to operate under a hidden dictum of reverse momentum: Anytime the battle for early advantage in the race tightens, the actual content of the struggle goes slack.  read more »

The underlying economic system that has brought us to this loan crisis grows crazier by the year.  read more »

Mr. Obama is obviously up to mounting a much more content-driven appeal to voters—and has indeed been admirably direct in developing one in the “retail politics” forums of Iowa and New Hampshire.  read more »