Alexandra Gutierrez

Tamara Draut makes the case for a new regulatory agency: As our nation’s economic crisis spreads and trillions of dollars are disbursed to keep the banks afloat, it’s easy to forget that the catastrophe began with the peddling of a toxic retail-credit product: adjustable-rate sub-prime mortgages. Fueled more by demand from Wall Street than by […]

Hey, remember Damon Weaver, the 11-year-old who interviewed Joe Biden back in September? Well, he finally scored a sit-down session with Barack Obama yesterday. Among the topics discussed: ways to improve school systems affected by budget cuts, Obama’s attitude toward his critics, mangoes, basketball. Things not mentioned: the communist end of days, enchantment, swim trunks, […]

District 9, director Neill Blomkamp‘s dystopian action flick about aliens in South Africa, opens today to a good bit of acclaim. Shot mostly in documentary-style, the film follows Wikus van der Merwe — a hapless office drone for a private military company who possesses all the self-awareness of Michael Scott — as he is tasked […]

Mark Schmitt on the engagement of citizens in public debates: The images of 83-year-old Rep. John Dingell, in his sixth decade in Congress, jeered and shouted down at a town meeting on health care last week brought to mind a long-forgotten episode that, when I went to work on Capitol Hill in the summer of […]

Greg Anrig on why some states raised taxes during the recession: In July, Oregon’s Democratic governor, Ted Kulongoski, and the state’s Democratic legislature soaked the rich. They agreed on a budget that includes an income tax hike for married couples earning more than $250,000 a year and individuals making over $125,000. Corporations netting more than […]

Lately, it’s become accepted wisdom that D.C. is a work oasis among the dunes of unemployment. The financial sector is busted; manufacturing is dying; retail is in rough shape; etc. But government! That’s still growing, and thus Washington should be, too. Politico just ran a piece spinning its own version of the Beltway boom story. […]

Today, Wal-Mart introduced its plan for a “sustainability index.” The project’s scale is enormously ambitious: Wal-Mart intends to measure the environmental impact of the products offered by its 60,000 suppliers, and then label their stock with the assessments. Nutrition labeling but for the planet, pretty much. There’s little doubt that a sustainability index has inherent […]

Small issues matter. Dana Milbank has a particularly snarky column today criticizing Rep. Bart Stupak for holding a panel yesterday on regulation of bottled water. He quips: There must be something in the water in this town. The nation is entangled in two wars, a deep recession and a flu pandemic, and the people’s representatives […]

For the second day in a row, drones have killed civilians in a tribal region of South Waziristan, raising questions once again about the role that the remotely controlled aircraft are playing in the region. Supporters of the drone war have touted the accuracy of the attacks: “You want to hit this table,” a recently […]

According to The New York Times, the Vatican is currently conducting two broad investigations of American nuns working within society. While the Catholic Church has not officially provided specific reasons, the rationale behind the inquiries seems to be that sisters in the U.S. are a little too modern, a little too independent, and — just […]