The New Republic

In proposing to increase state government workers’ payments for their pensions and health insurance (read: cut their pay) and gut their collective bargaining rights, Wisconsin Gov. READ MORE >>

In a critically and commercially disappointing year for the film industry, one of the few highlights has been the reception given to The King’s Speech. The movie has been nominated for just about every existing award, and a bevy of Oscar nominations are forthcoming. The period drama is also on its way to financial success. READ MORE >>

Apparently, it’s never too late to scare away voters. This evening, just before the polls closed in Maryland, voters in Baltimore and Prince George’s county reported to Election Protection that they had received robocalls advising them to relax, stay home, and watch the election on television. READ MORE >>

Which way are housing markets going? The recent national-level indicators have looked pretty bleak for housing bulls. Sales of new homes hit a record low in July. House prices in June topped their levels of a year ago but only, it seems, because of the now-expired federal homebuyer tax credits.  READ MORE >>

For a brief season, Henry Hopkinson was a Tory politician of the second rank, who might have risen higher if he hadn’t famously misspoken in 1954. As a junior minister at the Colonial Office, he said in the House of Commons that Cyprus would never be granted independence. This dogged him for the rest of his life. “Never say never,” Churchill supposedly said, and Hopkinson was dropped from the government not long afterwards, quite soon departing for the House of Lords under the disguise of Lord Colyton, just before, as it happened, Cyprus became independent. READ MORE >>

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The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century By Alan Brinkley (Knopf, 531 pp., $35) I. READ MORE >>

You may recall that, during the Bush presidency, Dubai World, a flagship corporate asset of the emir and his kin, had been discovered servicing and actually owning some U.S. ports on the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. You will not be surprised that I wrote against this. READ MORE >>

Last week Paul Krugman had a nice blogpost comparing income growth in the stagflation-ridden “old economy” of the 1970s and the bubbly “new economy” of the last decade. For the entire United States, it seems, inflation-adjusted median family income fell at a slightly slower rate between 1973 and 1981 than between 2000 and 2008. The old economy was better for the nation as a whole, at least as far as income growth goes. But what about metropolitan areas? In which places was income growth more rapid in what READ MORE >>