The Buffalo News : Opinion

WASHINGTON — Election results in New Jersey, Virginia and New York City last week threaten to turn what Barack Obama hoped would be a new era at the White House into a quirky one-term interlude, like Jimmy Carter’s.

WASHINGTON — A big reason congressional Democrats are so blithely eager to push the 2009 version of President Bill Clinton’s carbon tax is that they never have to pay for gasoline.

WASHINGTON — When President Obama gave his speech on health insurance reform after Labor Day, Catholics and evangelical Christians focused on two promises they view as fundamental.

The Buffalo News, its critics will be quick to tell you, is one of those ultra-liberal newspapers. Its editorial page is way left of center and it hasn’t endorsed a Republican for any office since William Howard Taft.

In an ideal world, every piece of journalism would be based on information from sources that are openly named and fully identified.

Mayor Brown, a simple expectation: Obey the law. Investigative reporter James Heaney filed requests months ago, under the state’s Freedom of Information Law, for city records that are unquestionably the rightful property of the people who elected you.

WASHINGTON—When Nouriel Roubini talks, the world listens. Roubini is, of course, the once-obscure New York University economist whose dire warnings about a financial crisis proved depressingly prophetic. Last week, Roubini was shouting. Writing in The Financial Times, he warned that the Federal Reserve and other government central banks are fueling a massive new asset “bubble” that—while not in imminent danger of bursting—will someday do so with calamitous consequences.

We don’t know why Faleh Hassan Almaleki came to this country in the mid- ’90s, and it’s unlikely he’ll be able to tell us anytime soon. He’s in jail in Maricopa County, Ariz., at this writing, in lieu of a $5 million cash bond. It hardly seems farfetched, however, to suppose he emigrated from his native Iraq for the same reason immigrants typically seek these shores: America promises opportunity and freedom.

WASHINGTON — The Iranians have a word they use to describe a political impasse. They speak of it as a bombast, which means a dead-end street, or a knot that can’t be untied. That’s a good description of the deadlocked debate in Tehran over the nuclear issue.

County Executive Chris Collins, fresh from his flop on the Saturday night comedy circuit, boarded a plane for New York Tuesday afternoon in what appears to be a still active effort to run for governor.

Some thoughts and observations gathered along the short campaign trail to Election Day:

It’s been more than a year since Erie County Democratic Chairman Len Lenihan staved off a challenge from Cheektowaga’s Frank Max for the party helm.