Looks like the game is up.
Remember that story Bobby Jindal told in his big speech Tuesday night — about how during Katrina, he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a local sheriff who was battling government red tape to try to rescue stranded victims?
Turns out it wasn’t actually, you know, true.
“As governors in nine states, mostly in the South, consider rejecting millions of dollars in federal stimulus money for increased unemployment insurance, there is growing anger among the ranks of the jobless in those states that they could be left out of a significant government benefit.
…
For people like Henry Kight, 59, of Austin, Tex., the possibility that the money might be turned down is a deeply personal issue.
Mr. Kight, who worked for more than three decades as an engineering technician, discovered in September that because of complex state rules, he was not eligible for unemployment insurance after losing a job at a major electronics manufacturer he had landed at the beginning of the year.
Unable to draw jobless benefits, he and his wife have taken on thousands of dollars in credit-card debt to help make ends meet.”
From the New York Times:
was sued on Tuesday in a Swiss federal court by wealthy American clients seeking to prevent the disclosure of their identities as part of a tax-evasion investigation by the United States Justice Department.
The lawsuit accuses UBS and Switzerland’s financial regulator, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, or Finma, of violating Swiss bank secrecy laws and of conducting what Swiss law considers illegal activities with foreign authorities. It also named Peter Kurer, the chairman of UBS, and Eugen Haltiner, the chairman of Finma, as defendants.
From Courier-Journal:
Sen. Jim Bunning all but declared war this morning on his own party’s Senate campaign committee chairman and threatened to sue the GOP if committee officials recruited an opponent to run against him in Kentucky’s 2010 Republican primary.
The Kentucky Republican, who has said he is running for re-election next year, made his comments in a conference call with reporters this morning.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, confirmed to The Washington Post Monday that Kentucky Senate President David Williams had met with officials at the committee last week. Cornyn called it “a courtesy visit.”
“Just to clear up any potential confusion, the NRSC supports Sen. Bunning,” Cornyn said.
Asked if he was happy with Cornyn’s comments, Bunning said today: “I don’t believe anything John Cornyn says. I’ve had miscommunications with John Cornyn from, I guess, the first week of this current session of the Senate. He either doesn’t understand English or he doesn’t understand direct: ‘I’m going to run,’ which I said to him in the cloakroom of our chamber.”
Obama agenda is a starter pistol for K Street – The Hill
The Obama Synthesis – Marc Ambinder
A clever speech by Obama – The Economist
Obama: ‘Day of Reckoning’ for U.S. Economy – ABC News
Washington Post:
Obama demanded quick action on several fronts. On finance, he asked Congress to move with dispatch to “reform our outdated regulatory system.” On health care, he said “reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year.” And on education, Obama said his budget would speed the pace of reform and “expand our commitment to charter schools.”
There’s yet more evidence that it makes sense to invest in simple, plain-vanilla index funds, whose low fees often lead to better net returns than hedge funds and actively managed mutual funds with more impressive performance numbers.
Basic stock market index funds generally aspire to nothing more than matching the returns of a market benchmark. So in a miserable year for stocks, index funds may not look very appealing. But it turns out that, after fees and taxes, it is the extremely rare actively managed fund or hedge fund that does better than a simple index fund.
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