James Carville’s old mantra rings as true now as it did when he tacked it to the wall of the Clinton war room in 1992. The results of last week’s gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey can be largely explained by three words: jobs, jobs and jobs. Exit polls from both contests show that voters rated the economy as their top concern.

Health care reform is a vital issue, as is climate change. (Carville’s sign also had a third bullet point: “Don’t forget health care.”) President Obama was right to press ahead with legislation to improve the dysfunctional health care system and regulate carbon emissions.

But nothing is more central to the immediate anxieties of voters than the economy, which is still raining pink slips. Job-seekers outnumber job openings six to one, and the official unemployment rate now stands at 10.2 percent. According to some economists, the government jobless rate minimizes actual unemployment, which may be closer to 15 or …

I wasn’t crazy about the idea of a tax credit for first-time homebuyers, but in this wretched economy, it wasn’t the worst idea to come down the pike. But Isakson, who used to head a large real estate agency, talked his colleagues into expanding the tax credit to people who already own a home.

To qualify, the home must be no more than $800,000. The program also restricts eligibility to individuals who make no more than $125,000 annually and couples who make more no more than $225,000. Anyone who collects the tax credit but sells the home within three years of buying it must return the refund.

Folks in that income bracket don’t need the help! As the conservative Heritage Foundation put it:

As the United States Senate recently surveyed the wreckage of the economy in …

When soldiers return from the battlefield — more or less in one piece — they should be able to expect that home territory is a refuge, a place of calm, order and safety. That’s the least they deserve. Hasan’s rampage was a betrayal of the highest order.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, Hasan, according to published reports, is a devout Muslim. That slice of biography  will certainly permeate reporting and commentary and influence broader perceptions of the mass murder at Ft. Hood.

Let’s not get carried away by that news. There are many devout Muslims in the U.S. Armed Forces who have served …

It’s an amalgam of GOP talking points — allowing insurers to sell insurance across state lines, capping noneconomic malpractice awards and expands the use of tax-sheltered medical savings accounts. The Republican bill does not include a mandate for all Americans to buy insurance — a requirement that most experts agree is necessary to contain costs. (If healthy younger Americans are in the insurance-buying pool, insurers are better able to spread the costs of insuring the sick.)

Nor does the GOP proposal prohibit insurers from denying people coverage with pre-existing conditions. It doesn’t contain subsidies to help working class Americans purchase insurance, though high cost is the main reason people don’t have it.

“What we’ve learned over many, many years is that …

Yesterday’s elections were no such thing. According to exit polls, President Obama still has approval ratings in the high 50s in New Jersey, where voters nevertheless threw out the Democratic incumbent, Jon Corzine. In Virginia, the Democrat Creigh Deeds, a very weak candidate, had run away from Obama himself — a stance that made the White House less than enthusiastic in its support of him.

If Republicans want to fool themselves into thinking their troubles are over, they should pay more attention to the upstate Congressional race in New York, where Democrat Bill …

To the credit of all the candidates, the mayor’s race hasn’t sunk, so far, into blatant racial appeals. Yes, there was the infamous memo, written by two Clark Atlanta professors, which declared an urgent need to keep a black person in the mayor’s office. But, to their credit, the top candidates all disavowed it.

Now, however, the race could get sharper and meaner. Both Mary Norwood and Kasim Reed will need to whip up supporters to energize them to return to the polls. Since whites are still a minority in the city, Norwood cannot afford to alienate black voters with appeals to whites.

But what about Reed? He’s not been the kind of legislator who resorted to racially-coded tactics, but the stakes are higher for him now. Will he or his surrogates be tempted to run, say, radio commercials on urban music stations that appeal to racial pride?

Perhaps Reed can prove that both he and the city are more mature than …

But what if you don’t have paid sick leave? What if you’re behind on your bills, afraid of foreclosure and can’t afford to miss a day of work? What if you’re afraid your boss is just looking for an excuse to lay off more workers, and you don’t want to give him/her that excuse? You go to work sick.

Tens of millions of people, or about 40 percent of all private-sector workers, do not receive paid sick days, and as a result many of them cannot afford to stay home when they are ill. Even some companies that provide paid sick days have policies that make it difficult to call in …

Ms. Scozzafava, a state assemblywoman and former small-town mayor, was nominated to run in District 23 by Republican county leaders who quickly found their choice second-guessed by the party’s conservative wing. Many officials in the district, a vast expanse from the Vermont border through the Adirondacks to Lake Ontario, deeply resented the outside involvement.

Conservatives deemed Scozzafava unacceptable because she supports reproductive rights and gay rights, two positions deemed heresy among GOP …

There’s an old saying about seeing the opportunity in a crisis. Perhaps the multiple crises caused by the Great Recession — which has bled state and local treasuries and swelled the federal deficit — will prompt lawmakers to end this futile era of prohibition, which has been costly far beyond the money spent.

Much of the social cost has been borne by black men, who use illegal drugs at rates about equal to whites but are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men, according to a Human Rights Watch report released last year. That’s because …

It was enough to lead some analysts to declare that the Great Recession has ended.

“Better than expected GDP is confirming that the Great Recession has ended,” said Kevin Flanagan, fixed-income strategist for Global Wealth Management at Morgan Stanley in Purchase, New York. “The question going forward is, is this more of a statistical recovery or are we going to get some meaningful momentum on a sustained basis.”

Most of those analysts also say that the growth in GDP is largely attributable to actions taken by the federal government, including passing the stimulus package and the Fed’s dropping the interest …