So the WaPo did a 1200-word profile on Eric Cantor’s central role in debt ceiling negotiations. And somehow they never get around to mentioning that Cantor has a bet placed against US Treasuries. Eric Cantor, the Republican Whip in the House of Representatives, bought up to $15,000 in shares of ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year [...]

Greg Sargent has a post arguing that complaints about David Plouffe’s comments about unemployment are being distorted. It seems Plouffe was actually asked a question about whether and how the unemployment rate would impact the Presidential race. He replied by claiming that the number itself wouldn’t impact people’s votes. In other words, Plouffe himself didn’t [...]

At today’s press conference responding to the lousy jobs report, Obama offered a few suggestions for how to create jobs: patent reform, infrastructure investment, confidence fairies and … “free trade.” But as the Economic Policy Institute has shown, these trade deals would actually cost jobs, particularly in the manufacturing sector, which has finally begun to [...]

BLS: Total nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged in June (+18,000). Following gains averaging 215,000 per month from February through April, employment has been essentially flat for the past 2 months. Employment in most major private-sector industries changed little in June, while government employment continued to trend down. [snip] Employment in government continued to trend [...]

Scarecrow, Digby, and Jon Walker rightly took David Plouffe’s promises that a 9% unemployment rate won’t hurt Obama’s reelection chances to task. But I’m at least as appalled by this part of Plouffe’s statement: The White House’s top political adviser, downplaying the significance of the unemployment rate in the 2012 election, said the Republican candidates [...]

The criminal case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is over, at least in anything but the most technical of senses; now the focus shifts to the underlying dynamics and lawyering on the case.

The case against DSK, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is disintegrating at the seams. It never seemed to be quite the closed case it was portrayed as, and now we are left to ask what lies beneath the messy and complicated incident.

Apparently, Timmeh Geithner has told Obama that he may leave after a budget deal, citing family considerations. I’d be singing “ding dong the wicked witch” if I didn’t know that his replacement will almost certainly be even worse. But while we wait on his departure, I thought I’d offer the following two betting pools: 1) [...]

Remember that swipe fee measure that passed the Senate twice? It lowered the amount credit card companies can charge merchants to $.12 a transaction. It was a stunning victory that retailers (which admittedly includes WalMart but also includes your locally owned business struggling to stay in business) won that battle twice. Well, lucky for the [...]

I wasn’t entirely fair when I quipped on Twitter that, if Obama asserts that “as a general proposition, companies need to have the freedom to relocate,” then shouldn’t people, too, be able to flout laws–like mortgage contract laws or immigration laws–to assert their “freedom to relocate.” Obama does say that Boeing has to follow the [...]