A Stitch in Haste

I'm having trouble coming up with a non-expletive term for our infamous local megalomaniac:
After being dealt a rare public embarrassment by the City Council, which forced his administration to acknowledge on Monday that he was legally required to send out $400 rebate checks promised to hundreds of thousands of New York homeowners, a defiant Mr. [...]

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Mitt Romney, January 14, 2008:
Michigan is enduring a one-state recession, and the problem has only been exacerbated by poor choices made by some of the leaders in Lansing to raise taxes and take that course instead of cutting spending.
…
A lot of Washington politicians are aware of the pain, but they haven't done anything about it. [...]

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Bob Herbert is confused:
The famous Daily News headline, "Ford to City: Drop Dead," ran on Oct. 30, 1975.
New York was on the verge of bankruptcy, and President Ford (who never actually said "drop dead") had made it clear, after listening to conservative hard-liners both inside and outside of his administration, that he planned to veto [...]

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Some hasty stitches regarding calls to use TARP money to bail out the Big Three automakers:

General Motors is not "the U.S. auto industry." The Big Three are not "the U.S. auto industry." There are many different metrics (vehicle production, revenue, employment, etc.) but a good benchmark is that the Big Three represent only about one-half [...]

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Attributed to Scalia in yesterday's oral arguments for Pleasant Grove City v. Summum:
"You can't run a museum if you have to accept everything, right?"
Right — Which is exactly why the government should not be running museums in the first place.
As for the outcome of this bizarre case, I think Chief Corky Roberts summed it [...]

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Consider the following correction in Sunday's Washington Post:
Because of an editing error, the Nov. 7 op-ed column "Vows That Can't Be Voted Down" incorrectly suggested that the Mormon Church had contributed funds to efforts to pass Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in California. The op-ed should have said "members of the [...]

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Or, perhaps better stated: Do the Democrats even understand the implications of their proposals?
Powerful House Democrats are eyeing proposals to overhaul the nation's $3 trillion 401(k) system, including the elimination of most of the $80 billion in annual tax breaks that 401(k) investors receive.
House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-California, and Rep. [...]

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There's nothing particularly noteworthy about the (freshman economics) notion that as fuel costs (or other costs, such as airport delays and security theater) rise, people will increasingly switch to substitute modes of transportation:
The high cost of fuel, along with traffic and airport congestion, is drawing travelers back to trains for commuting and for travel between [...]

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Scientific American recently published a collection of "special report" articles on the general topic of "HIV — 25 Years Later." From the Editor's Introduction:
In 1983 and 1984 scientists established that HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus) causes AIDS, which had recently begun cropping up in gay men in California and New York. The discovery quickly led [...]

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Barack Obama, October 27:
No matter what Senator McCain may claim, here are the facts – if you make under $250,000, you will not see your taxes increase by a single dime – not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes. Nothing. Because the last thing we should do in this [...]

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