The Washington Post’s Michael Fletcher had a report July 1st on state budgets that reads more like an opinion editorial than a staff report. Fletcher wrote,

Nothing less than the nation’s nascent economic recovery hangs in the balance. States say that if they do not find financial rescue they will have to cut services and workers. That would deliver a potentially crippling blow to the economy, which needs higher employment levels to fatten wallets, promote spending, bolster tax revenue and reduce dependence on expensive social services.

States face a combined deficit of $89 billion in the fiscal year that

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Reporting on President Barack Obama’s damage control meeting with U.S. intelligence agencies, Karen DeYoung and Michael Fletcher write in the January 6th Washington Post:

But [Obama] said he will continue with already delayed plans to close [Guantanamo Bay], which he said “has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.”

“In fact,” he added, “that was an explicit rationale for the formation of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”

The Yemen-based group, known as AQAP, was founded in part by prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay during George W. Bush’s administration.

DeYoung and Fletcher are technically correct that AQAP “was … Continue Reading

Covering Vice President Biden’s “Middle Class Task Force” meeting in the Washington Post, reporter Michael Fletcher rightly points out the problem that ever-rising college costs are creating for middle class families:

Pointing out that the cost of a four-year college education has more than doubled in the same time that middle class incomes have crept up by just 10 percent, Biden said that an unprecedented effort is being mounted to address the growing gap…”This is something we are genuinely, genuinely committed to changing.”

The Post story then reviews the Obama administration’s plans to expand and reform federal subsidy programs for college … Continue Reading