Finance

This may come as a shock to many pollsters and much of the press corps, but public opinion is a little more complicated than randomly calling 1,000 Americans, asking them a dubiously worded question about a complex political issue, and reporting the aggregate results.

President Obama’s budget for 2013 is pure Obama. How do we know? Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, was once asked how to become a budget expert. “You have to read the budget,” he said. To know Obama, it’s similar. You have to read the speeches and look over the budgets. 

Christmas is nigh, and so are the nonstop showings of Frank Capra’s beloved 1946 classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. As they do every year, millions of Americans will take in the tale of small-town mortgagee George Bailey—who, with a little help from his guardian angel, reminds us that true success is measured by the love of family and friends.

The Wall Street Journal interviewed hedge-fund manager Paul Singer over the weekend:

Fred Barnes writes in the Wall Street Journal today:

The 9/11 Commission castigated the CIA for neglecting to collect and analyze intelligence about terrorist financing. It noted that “information about terrorist money helps us to understand [al-Qaeda] networks, search them out, and disrupt their operations.”

Nafplio, Greece

It’s afternoon and the Greeks are having one of their lately quite regular national strikes. From behind the register at his parents’ souvenir shop, Vassili Thomas is assigning blame for the country’s economic problems.

“We are all balloons dancing in a world of pins,” noted Sir Anthony Montague Browne, one of Winston Churchill’s private secretaries. That seems to describe our economic condition.

The Turkish organizers of the Gaza Strip-bound flotilla that was boarded this morning by Israeli commandos knew well in advance that their vessels would never reach Israeli waters. That's because the organizers belong to a nonprofit that was banned by the Israeli government in July 2008 for its ties to terrorism finance.

A few weeks ago, Palle Christiansen, Greenland’s minister of finance warned that his country was facing an existential threat from immigration. Yet unlike the far-right politicians of Europe who take up this theme, Christiansen was not fretting over foreigners coming to his country’s shores, but about fellow citizens leaving.