Word: barack
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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President Barack Obama did warn in his speech to Wall Street on Monday that "normalcy cannot breed complacency." But normalcy is breeding complacency - perhaps because complacency is normal. Consider the financial reforms that the Obama Administration wants to push through Congress before year-end - creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, giving the Federal Reserve the job of systemic risk regulator, and establishing a "resolution regime" to wind down troubled nonbank financial institutions (like Lehman) and complex bank holding companies in an orderly fashion. Steps in the right direction? Probably. Truly major reforms? Not so much...
Duncan's choices could have a transformative impact on America's beleaguered public-education system. On July 24, he stood beside President Barack Obama and announced the guidelines for states to compete for most of that cash. The $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT) fund lets states apply for grants that focus on a short list of reforms guaranteed to anger one of the Democratic Party's core constituencies, the teachers' unions. (The remaining $650 million will go to innovative local school districts and nonprofits.) With Duncan handling the ball, the Obama Administration is about to square off with...
...rhetoric with political flexibility, today's dominant conservatives are little more than "inverse Marxists," clenching an outdated dogma that would sooner see government destroyed than saved. The result is a shrinking movement inhabiting a "fringe orbit" irrelevant to the needs of today's America, an intellectual flatlining confirmed by Barack Obama's victory. Tanenhaus traces conservatism's history with respect and likens its crisis to the funk that bedeviled liberalism after the failures of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs (though he glosses over modern-day extremism on the left). His essay is ultimately an elegy: with the atrophy...
Disillusioned liberals, take heart. On Labor Day, President Barack Obama appointed Ron Bloom—former United Steel Workers executive who has devoted much of his career to promoting worker ownership of the means of production—as his manufacturing czar. Then again, this is the same Ron Bloom who holds a Harvard MBA and once served as an executive vice president of the investment bank Lazard Freres & Co. And no, he sees no contradiction between his business career and his pro-worker activism...
...were to pick the least likely Senator to help Barack Obama win a major legislative victory, Alabama's Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, would be a fine choice. Once a "boll weevil" Democratic opponent of Bill Clinton, Shelby became a Republican in November 1994, helping the GOP cement its hold on the Senate at a crucial moment. He has had a near perfect record of conservatism on social and foreign-policy issues since then. The tall, drawling former prosecutor questioned Obama's citizenship this past February, and when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner first unveiled...