By John McCormick and Hans Nichols, Bloomberg

 

Mitt Romney's Republican presidential rivals are boosting attacks ahead of Southern primaries this week that could start to winnow the field.

 

The heightened criticism precedes primary voting Tuesday in Alabama and Mississippi. The contests are important for Newt Gingrich as he tries to remain a viable candidate and for Rick Santorum as he works to prove he is building momentum after a weekend win in Kansas.

 

By Edward Morrissey

At the peak of the housing bubble, a number of reality shows appeared on cable television that featured real-estate speculators who bought distressed properties and made enough improvements to sell them quickly at a sharp profit.

Called “flipping,” the entertainment industry glamorized the quick-profit practice that helped fuel a spectacular rise in housing values – and made the crash worse than it otherwise might have been.  Flipping has since become a reviled practice, a symptom of an irrational and irresponsible market, not to mention the negative political connotations of speculators in general as gas prices rise rapidly yet again. 

By Tim Higgins, Bloomberg

Pity the Chevy Volt. Ever since it became known that the plug-in hybrid car's batteries had burst into flames after government crash tests, the car has become the whipping boy of Republican politicians.

 

Conservatives have equated GM's Volt with everything from government bailouts to radical left-wing environmentalism.

 

By Mike Dorning, Bloomberg

 

A surge in new jobs last month that held the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.3 percent highlights a strengthening economy that bolsters President Barack Obama as he approaches re-election.

 

"If this continues, he'll have the edge -- not necessarily a huge edge but an edge," said Christopher Wlezien, a political science professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and co- author with Robert Erikson of the forthcoming book "The Timeline of Presidential Elections."

 

By Eric Pianin

"Hello, North Carolina!” President Obama called out Wednesday at a truck plant in Mount Holly, N.C. where he again tried to bat away GOP complaints about his energy policies and responsibility for soaring gas prices.

“If we are going to control our energy future, then we’ve got to have an all-of-the-above strategy,” Obama explained. ”We’ve got to develop every source of American energy -- not just oil and gas, but wind power and solar power, nuclear power, biofuels.  We need to invest in the technology that will help us use less oil in our cars and our trucks, in our buildings, in our factories.
 

By Clive Crook

The resolution of every economic crisis sows the seeds of the next.

Public pension systems in advanced and emerging economies alike were already under stress before the Great Recession. The past few years' destruction of wealth and the likelihood of slower growth in the future have weakened them further and will put some under intolerable pressure.

 

By Dan Freed

 

Goldman Sachs (GS) donors to the 2012 presidential campaign overwhelmingly favored Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney over President Barack Obama in January, according to data from OpenSecrets.org the website of the Center for Responsive Politics.

 

Romney raised $25,250 from 15 donors at Goldman versus $1,500 from three donors for Obama, according to the nonprofit's website, which does not appear to have any data beyond Jan. 31.

 

By Merrill Goozner

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, whose narrow victory in Ohio late Tuesday night allowed him to cling to his frontrunner status in the race for the Republican nomination, used Super Tuesday to issue a broadside against the Obama administration’s Iran policy. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Romney called the president’s approach to stopping the ayatollahs’ nuclear program “feckless” and vowed to teach the Iranians “the meaning of American resolve.”

Forget for a moment that foreign and military policy analysts immediately dismissed Romney’s specific proposals as nothing more than a rehash of Obama’s approach, which combines escalating economic sanctions and a show of military force in the Persian Gulf with demands that Iran return to negotiating table to bring its nuclear program within the International Atomic Energy Agency’s purview. Those efforts bore fruit yesterday when Iran agreed to talks that will include the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China.