The higher the stock market goes, the more the bears argue that it’s all about easy money from the Federal Reserve. The “QE-xcuse” – says Wall Street is flying high on a wave of new money from Quantitative Easing. But, this explanation is getting long in the tooth. The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average both reached all-time record highs last Friday, up 161% and 156%, respectively, from their lows of four years ago.   The last time stocks had such sharp and sustained gains...

Read the full story »

Thanks to House Republicans, Americans finally got to hear from the State Department officials the Obama administration never wanted to testify. They are now called “whistleblowers,” but that’s only because their accounts of what really happened in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, were buried by the administration, apparently in the furtherance of Democrats’ election-year imperatives. Soon after the testimony, Democratic office-holders took to the airwaves and the internet to assure liberal loyalists...

Read the full story »

Woods, whose son Tyrone died in the attacks, also urged political leaders to be more truthful about the issue, comparing that with what he’d heard from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. “When I was approached by Hillary Clinton at the coming-home ceremony of the bodies at Andrews Air Force Base, and she said, ‘We’re going to go out and we’re going to prosecute that person that made the video,’ I knew that she wasn’t telling the truth, and I think the whole world knows that...

Read the full story »

From the Nation Did you know that in the early 1970s, the Internal Revenue Service investigated the Pritzker family, whose scion Penny Pritzker has just been tapped by President Obama to become Secretary of Commerce, because their Hyatt Corporation was paying no taxes? And that in the course of the inquiry, an IRS statement quoted an informant with access to the records of the offshore bank where they hid their assets that the family, “through their Hyatt Corporation, received their initial backing...

Read the full story »

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice is under fire for going on several Sunday talk shows five days after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and providing apparently erroneous information to the public. But President Obama’s own public statements about Benghazi, made in three separate nationally televised interviews in the days after Rice’s appearances, were equally misleading and have received scarcely any attention.     In defending Rice from criticism from an array of Republicans,...

Read the full story »

It’s a very long shot, but one aspect of a federal lawsuit filed by Tom Geoghegan challenging the Chicago City Council’s 2012 ward remap, could have revolutionary implications, potentially outlawing political gerrymandering. Geoghegan, one of our most creative constitutional lawyers, filed it a few weeks ago on behalf of the League of Women Voters and other individuals affected by the remap. It alleges the map violates the Supreme Court’s “one-person, one-vote” ruling and denies citizens...

Read the full story »