Monday, Oct. 7, 2013 | 1:27 a.m.
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Kyle Wingfield
What the Capitol car chase did have in common with recent shootings
When news broke that shots were fired outside the U.S. Capitol, a lot of people jumped to the usual conclusions and made the usual comments about the usual answers. It's beginning to look like this situation was far from ordinary (via the Associated Press): "The mother of a Connecticut woman ...
The day Obama became a Republican
While mocking congressional Republicans about the government shutdown during a speech at an asphalt plant in Maryland today, it seems President Obama inadvertently revealed his plans to reform labor laws to outlaw strikes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEHKBqlpYwM Obama: "Everybody here just does their job, right? If you're working here, and in the middle ...
Poll: GOP, Dems equally obligated to compromise, end shutdown
It is both silly and inescapable to watch the opinion polls regarding the federal government shutdown. Silly, because we all know that's not how lawmakers ought to decide when and how to compromise -- and inescapable, because we all know that's what they're going to do. So it is quite ...
GOP can count on the Obama administration to overplay its hand
If House Republicans sometimes seem remarkably willing, time after time, to step into apparent P.R. disasters, perhaps it's because they can always count on the Obama administration to bail them out by overplaying its own hand. In March, remember, the administration's decision to cancel White House tours as part of ...
Federal government shuts down ... for the 18th time in 37 years
1976 1977 (three times) 1978 1979 1981 1982 (twice) 1983 1984 (twice) 1986 1987 1990 1995 1996 And now 2013 joins the list of years since the mid-1970s in which the federal government has been shut down due to disagreements over funding issues. You probably remember the two shutdowns of ...
Ideas for fiscal compromise do exist, even if incentives don't
It's "Shutdown" Showdown Day in Washington, and we'll be treated to all manner of explanations from each side as to why the other guys are the only ones standing in the way of fiscal sanity and world peace. After all, when one side (GOP) insists on negotiating and the other ...
Those rascally Republicans, doing what Congress has done for 40 years
When President Obama uses words like "never" and "unprecedented," it's often a signal that what he should have said was "routinely" or, er, "precedented." The president this week went with "never" as his hyperbolic-and-false word choice to describe Republican insistence that an increase in the debt ceiling come with some ...
Some Obamacare harm will be unseen, but felt all the same
Here's a snippet from my column in today's print edition of the AJC. The full column, about how the premiums on the Obamacare exchange starting next week will affect Georgians, is available to subscribers on MyAJC.com: *** Statistics tell us overwhelmingly that the surest path to avoiding poverty is to ...
The time a Texas senator tried to block a law and wasn't branded a hero
Ted Cruz's long speech (it's not technically a filibuster) in the Senate, aided by interjections by fellow Republican senators who sympathize with him, has just passed the 19.5-hour mark as I write this post. It's earned plenty of derision from pundits, especially those on the left, but Timothy Carney points ...
A 'shutdown' in which most federal employees would still go to work
Chicken Little, call your office. Once again, Washington is agog about a possible government shutdown, and once again we are hearing dire forecasts of what will happen if that comes to pass. These forecasts are similar to what we heard about sequestration, the automatic budget cuts that took effect earlier ...
Obama's ad-libbed policy and broken promises, health care edition
If you thought President Obama's "red line" in Syria represented his first foray into ad libbing his way through his most important policy decisions, Politico reports that's not the case: "The most important red line of Barack Obama's presidency was scrawled hastily in January 2007, a few weeks before he ...
A big legal win for Atlanta's charter schools
I'm back from vacation and, having just spent a week at the beach with 12 kids under one roof, I am not surprised to be drawn to this AJC education story: "Atlanta charter schools won a victory to preserve their public education funding Monday when the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously ruled ...
Just a few things
I'll be out of the office this week taking in a week at the beach. My family will be there with five others -- 12 adults and 12 children in one big house -- so I'll let you know when I get back if it was more or less relaxing ...
Putin's hollow regard for the U.N. and international law
The New York Times today published an op-ed by Vladimir Putin, and it is an epic example of trolling, with the former KGB officer's lofty language about preserving peace and closing cheap shot about the notion of American exceptionalism. I don't fault the Times at all for publishing it, but ...
Twelve years later, America's as unsure and divided as ever
I said all I had to say about 9/11 on the morning of the anniversary last year. Or so I thought. A year later, the date has taken on additional meaning. By the end of last year's anniversary, or the wee hours of the following day, violent protesters had overrun our ...
MARTA (yes, that MARTA) makes a sound, confidence-building decision
I've had high hopes for MARTA's new CEO, Keith Parker, and today MyAJC.com brings news that my hopes may have been well-founded. After three years of running trains only every 15 minutes due to budget cuts, MARTA plans to decrease headways during the morning and evening rush hours to 10 ...
Obama administration damages its own case on Syria
If you didn't know better, you'd have thought the Obama administration changed tacks over the weekend and decided to make the case against action in Syria. There was the White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, passing up numerous chances during a Sunday interview on CNN to say that even one ...
American jobs machine still stuck in neutral
In case you thought our plans for Syria were the only thing stuck in neutral: The U.S. economy added 169,000 jobs last month and saw almost twice as many people, 312,000, leave the labor force. Meanwhile, estimates for June and July were revised downward by a combined 74,000, putting the ...
The Syrians our intervention would empower, like it or not
These are the people we would empower by intervening in Syria. From a front-page article in today's New York Times: "The Syrian rebels posed casually, standing over their prisoners with firearms pointed down at the shirtless and terrified men. "The prisoners, seven in all, were captured Syrian soldiers. Five were ...
Obama's words, actions fail to make the case for war with Syria
John Kerry spent much of his testimony Tuesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee walking back an earlier remark about how the U.S. could end up deploying soldiers on the ground in Syria. The secretary of state tried to allay the fears of senators who are in favor of only quick, ...
Today on MyAJC.com
Hotoberfest kicks off season of beer festivals
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Today's top news on ajc.com
Man fatally shot at south Fulton gas station
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