Your customized headlines for Thu, Mar 22, 2012

Developing nations may challenge the United States' historic hold on the presidency of the World Bank and are discussing African and South American candidates to compete with whomever the Obama administration nominates.

The White House has launched a concerted effort to turn political weakness into strength on two critical election-year issues that have become big vulnerabilities for President Obama: rising gas prices and the controversial health-care law.

Deutsche Bank, the German mega-bank, has overhauled its U.S. subsidiary to avoid having to put billions of dollars in new money in reserve as would be required by the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform law.

Sales of previously owned homes in the United States dropped 0.9 percent in February, according to a report released Wednesday, disappointing economists.

The number indicates that roughly five years after the housing bubble burst, the real estate market's road forward remains bumpy. Many economists had thought that with mortgage rates near record lows and the job market improving, existing-home sales would rise.

We have an unfortunate tendency in this country to treat people as either heroes or villains, with no gradations in between.

Take Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. He's being called exceptionally vicious names by right-wing types for supposedly undermining our currency and planting the seeds for inflation — while also being excoriated by liberals for not doing enough to help the economy. Now comes The Atlantic, which calls Bernanke a hero on its cover, touching off yet another debate among the chattering classes, which, I suppose, include me.

Developing nations may challenge the United States' historic hold on the presidency of the World Bank and are discussing African and South American candidates to compete with whomever the Obama administration nominates.

— Teju Cole on the White Savior Industrial Complex.

— "Romney isn't struggling because of his campaign. The campaign is struggling because of Romney."

— Etch A Sketch's national spokesperson has had a busy day.

Ed Kilgore thinks Rep. Paul Ryan's changes to his Medicare plan will make his budget less threatening to seniors. "There is no way, however, to make it less threatening to poorer or younger people—in other words, people more likely not to vote or to vote Democratic," he writes.

Of all the states, Utah may win for most complicated relationship with the federal health reform law. It's one of just two states that now operates a health insurance exchange - the other being Massachusetts. The exchanges are the new insurance markets that are at the heart of the Affordable Care Act, where Americans will compare and purchase insurance plans.

March 24th is a landmark date for Washington, D.C. Thousands will converge on the world's leading capital city to celebrate the crowning human virtue of reason.

How have we come to the point where reason needs a rally to defend it? To base your life on reason means to base it on evidence and logic. Evidence is the only way we know to discover what's true about the real world. Logic is how we deduce the consequences that follow from evidence. Who could be against either? Alas, plenty of people, which is why we need the Reason Rally.

The first presidential election in which I voted was 1976, with Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford running for office. The election arrived on the heels of a tumultuous time in America: Nixon had resigned in disgrace and there was a dark mistrust of politics. Carter came in as the Washington outsider and carried the South (unusual for post civil-rights Democrats) because of his evangelical roots. As it turned out, Jimmy Carter was a big disappointment to the evangelical Christians - he believed he had the duty of upholding the Constitution and the wall of church-state separation. Like Kennedy, he believed his religion was private and not the basis for presidential decisions.