State Senator Charlie Albertson has a bill guaranteed to get people talking. It’s simple. Just one page. It prohibits any participation in athletic competition by “schools in which a majority of the students are below the 50th percentile on end-of-course and end-of-grade tests for two or more consecutive years.” In other words, if schools don’t…
Read MoreIt’s right there on the front page of the newspaper: The governor’s got a $3.4 billion hole in the budget to wrestle to the ground and fill – so she’s cut spending $1.3 billion a year. But there are two other numbers in the newspaper that are peculiar. $21.4 billion – which is what the…
Read MoreThe blabbering classes are taking up pitchforks and torches over the AIG bonuses. The AIGate question now becomes: What did the President/Secretary of Treasury/Fed/Congress know and when did they know it? My question: Why didn’t David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs see this coming? Team Obama would not be the first winners to go to the…
Read MoreWell, Obama’s after A.I.G. hammer and tongs. Which is fine. More than fine. But there’re also a couple of overlooked questions worth considering: Like why didn’t the Washington genius (and it’s beginning to look like it was Treasury Secretary Geithner) who poured $170 billion into A.I.G. have the good sense to tell A.I.G. up front,…
Read MoreI give Governor Perdue and her staff an A+ on message management. They pulled off a neat three-step strategy: Spend weeks warning people how awful the budget cuts are going to be. Then devote her State of the State speech – and the next week’s media events – to saying education would get more money.…
Read MoreI could never predict what will happen to the stock market. But I can predict that President Obama’s numbers will go down – soon. It’s inevitable. And it’s no reason for Democrats to panic. They just need to prepare themselves. Here’s why he is headed for a drop – maybe a precipitous one – in…
Read MorePresident Obama says flat out that his stimulus bill is going to create 3.5 million jobs – is that a fact or a political fiction? Can President Obama (or, for that matter, a team of Nobel Prize-winning economists) actually predict precisely that spending two trillion dollars is going to reignite prosperity – or will he…
Read MoreSince the November election, I’ve been telling business people that the election marked a new cycle in politics: from pro-business government to pro-government – and potentially anti-business – government. That cycle has dominated American history since the Civil War. Government was pro-business in the 19th Century, leading to great fortunes and the Industrial Age. Then,…
Read MoreNews coverage of Ned Cline’s new book about Walter Davis – and his “bags of cash” – reminds me of my two encounters with Davis. The first was in the Senate Dining Room in Washington during one of Governor Hunt’s first two administrations. I don’t recall the occasion or anything else about the meeting. But…
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