High, persistent unemployment and a sluggish economy underscore what all but the most-dedicated supporters of Barack Obama know to be true: The president’s 2009 stimulus program was a massively expensive bust.
Understanding why the stimulus failed is an important step in understanding how the government can—and cannot—goose economic recovery. To get a better sense of how and where the stimulus went wrong, Reason.tv focused on Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., that’s home to a large number of government contractors and other recipients of money earmarked for the sorts of “shovel ready” projects that were going to bring the economy back to life.
President Obama’s top economic advisor Larry Summers laid out ground rules for how stimulus dollars should be spent: The funds must be “targeted” at resources idled by the recession, the interventions must be “temporary,” and they needed to “timely,” or injected quickly into the economy.
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Why Obama’s Stimulus Failed: A Case Study of Silver Spring, Maryland”
The Illinois Humanities Council is celebrating its 10th Anniversary with an 
One of the reasons that our economic recovery has been so slow is that the Obama administration has opened a continuous avalanche of regulations affecting jobs, hampering businesses, and costing all of us billions in lost revenue, taxation, and waste. But there is a bill in the House called the REINS Act that could help tamp down this avalanche, save us all money, help bring back the creation of jobs that aren’t being created now. 
Since he ascended from nothing to the office of President of the United States, Obama has shown a disdain for most of our western allies that borders on hatred. But he’s reserved his most backhanded treatment to Israel. It isn’t just what he’s done to show Israel that he has no use for them, but it goes all the way down to his every last appointment and this week we see another reminder of that in the comments belched forth by Obama’s U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, who basically said that anti-Semitism perpetrated by Muslims is really all Israel’s fault.
I meant to get to this last week, but “historian” Douglas Brinkley is so forgettable as a writer that it all slipped my mind. But, it’s a slow news day, so let’s take a look at the 
With this week’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing of American Airlines, we again see the results of unions having a hand in destroying American businesses. We also saw GM laid low by union demands costing Americans billions in bailouts. But despite these lessons of the recalcitrance of Big Labor forcing even worse calamities on our jobs climate in this dismal economy, Obama is about to make matters worse by using his powers to regulate to further harm both our business sector and our economy.
Are you an elderly American? Well get ready to be determined a non-essential medical expenditure if Obamacare has any say in the matter — which it will if its allowed to become fully implemented.
Government Motors has finally found its hottest car and the Chevy Volt is it. Unfortunately for Chevy, it isn’t because it is popular. It’s because the car seems to catch on fire a lot. Industry watchers are preparing for the Volt to undergo a recall to fix whatever problem the car’s lithium-ion battery pack has that seems to be causing the vehicles to spontaneously burst into flames.
Barack Obama is very successful at one thing: the bait and switch. He stands before America presenting a picture of a hard-working moderate and claims that he wants to work with the Republicans to get things done. In reality he won’t even meet with them. He talks about compromise, but never offers any. He mouths kind words abut the business sector but uses his powers to make new regulations to destroy its profitability. In short, he’s a radical even though he doesn’t play one on TV. His modus operandi is to assume most voters are too stupid, lazy, or disinterested to compare his hope-n-change rhetoric with his actions. 
It’s hard to believe but Frank Rich’s latest exercise in the 
This fall, liberals from the president on down have begun to grasp the scope of the political and intellectual disaster that the past three years have been for the Left. Their various responses to the calamity have tended to have one thing in common: immense frustration. But the different expressions of that frustration have been deeply revealing. They should help Americans better understand this complicated moment in our politics, and, in particular, help conservatives frame their responses.