Carl Bloice

They’ve started sending the pink slips to teachers and other employees in San Francisco. In all, almost 900 of them will get layoff notices over the next couple of weeks because the city can’t come up with the $113 million needed to cover the expense of educating its children and young people. The education workers…

They’re at it again. Who are they? They are called many things: “the Establishment,” the “power elite,” the “central committee of the ruling class,— the “people who really run this country,” the “political leadership,” and so on. What are they up to? Having, through willful greed or gross mismanagement, brought the nation’s economy to a…

First the good stuff. “Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse,” President Obama told the country. “Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations – they’re not standing still. These nations aren’t playing for second…

The reason they’ve taken to the airwaves in January to offer you three suits for the price of one is they couldn’t sell them in December. Before the real statistics were released, the people who predict these things had pointed to an over-the-mouth increase in sales but, when all was said and done, the fall…

It was one of those strange coincidences. First, there are news reports about the involvement of Saudi Arabia in attacking tribal rebels along the Saudi-Yemen border. Then, a young Nigerian somewhat mysteriously eludes security and tries to blow up and airliner heading into Detroit and it is said he was trained and equipped in Yemen.…

Pardon me if I can’t join in the fawning praise for President Obama’s Nobel address. “It was, as ever, a bravura performance,” one newspaper said editorially. That it was, but I can’t agree with those, including some people with whom I’m usually in agreement, that it was a “good” speech. It wasn’t good at all.…

Thanksgiving weekend was an active time for the news junkies and armchair analysts of my acquaintance. First, there was the suggestion that racial profiling works in reverse. The question spread through cyberspace was, imagine what would have happened had the White House party crashers been black ” how far would they have gotten? Then there…

Columnist Paul Krugman has a problem. Well, not really. It’s us who have the problem. He just has a provocative way of highlighting it. He’s said it before and he repeated it again last week: What we ought to do, we probably cannot do because it’s not in the political cards. Why? Because while we…

There are two mantras trotted out frequently when the subject of unemployment comes up that President Obama would best not repeat. The first is that, yea, things are getting worse but not as fast as they were. The second ” one that he seems taken with ” is that joblessness is expected to be a…