Politics and other nightmares

This is some shock, huh?

The Washington region is well off financially.

The D.C. metro area sits atop The Wall Street Journal’s list of America’s richest cities.

Empathy:

A man who lost a son to the war in Afghanistan is disappointed in the condolence letter he received from President Barack Obama.

Tom Logan, a Willis resident, calls the note late, impersonal, disrespectful and essentially a form letter.

[. . .]

Going down to the wire, huh?

A new independent poll confirms that the U.S. Senate race in Indiana is a tossup, the latest case of Republicans having to fight for a seat in a conservative state they’d been expected to win easily.

How bad can a city get? This bad:

I agree with just about everybody else in the free world that Mitt Romney won the first debate against President Obama, but I don't think it was quite the beatdown some think it was. Yes, Romney was good, but sometimes the other team helps you win, and Obama was just awful. Republicans in danger of becoming overconfident should remember that the next debate is a town hall format in which the questions will be asked by "undecided voters selected by the Gallup Organization."

This is how bad it is:

On the first day of fiscal year 2013, the federal government added more debt than was accumulated between the nation’s founding and sometime in October 1942, about ten months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, a span of about 166 years. 

Not sure this is such a good idea:

Indiana's lottery commission voted Wednesday to hire a private company to take over its marketing and other services in the hopes that it will boost the lottery's profits.

An essay in the Wall Street Journal explores "Why We Are So Rude Online":

Why are we so nasty to each other online? Whether on Facebook, Twitter, message boards or websites, we say things to each other that we would never say face to face. Shouldn't we know better by now?

If this is accurate, it's pretty encouraging:

Hours before the first debate between President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney, a showdown that will focus on domestic issues, a new national survey indicates that Americans have undergone some major changes on the basic questions concerning the size and role of the federal government.

[. . .]

Thank you, Evan Bayh, and good riddance:

One of the tragedies of the Obama Administration is the historic political accident that it had 60 Senate Democratic votes in 2009. The ability to break a filibuster without Republican votes empowered the left to think it could pass anything, and so it steamrolled ahead with ObamaCare, which needed every one of those 60 votes to pass.