Thugs Snatchings iphones on the Green Line

Obamacare does almost nothing to control costs or fundamentally reform the government’s massive Medicare and Medicaid entitlements.

But even if you think that extraordinary government action was the key here, it was President Bush who began to halt the meltdown by putting government guarantees behind the financial industry. President Obama has shown no financial-policy change from his predecessor; he’s retained the people who devised the Bush bailouts, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner

And the question is, what are taxpayers getting in return for all that money—a finite amount of borrowed money? A futile attempt to recreate the past, what Spitzer derisively called “continuity you can believe in.

To lock in low interest rates in the years ahead, Treasury officials are trying to replace one-month and three-month bills with 10-year and 30-year Treasury securities. That strategy will save taxpayers money in the long run. But it pushes up costs drastically in the short run, because interest rates are higher for long-term debt.

the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.

an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater.

the Jet Stream was partly responsible for this drought.

We’re born into history that is well under way. We’re born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn’t choose. On top of that, we’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control

unlike the other animals, people do have a drive to seek coherence and meaning.

Bach, writes Mr. Maute in the program notes, walked great distances through northeastern Germany as a young man and might have been exposed to Gypsy music. Telemann’s encounters with the genre are better documented: he wrote of his appreciation of the “barbaric beauty” of Gypsy music in what is now Poland.

Responsible Travel became one of the first travel companies to offer customers the option of buying so-called carbon offsets to counter the planet-warming emissions generated by their airline flights.

canceled the program, saying that while it might help travelers feel virtuous, it was not helping to reduce global emissions. In fact, company officials said, it might even encourage some people to travel or consume more.