* It’s Time to End This Hostage Crisis This has gone far enough. Whereas Speaker John Boehner has failed to persuade his own party in the House to support his proposed bill to lift the debt ceiling short-term—which the Senate and the President would have rejected...
Month: July 2011
Wake Up to the National Security Threat
From Our Own Domestic Extremists
“Just supposing our national government . . . had fallen into the hands of men loyal to an alien power, then would the people yank the usurpers out of office at once?” * In 2007 we asked, “Is the U.S. an Occupied Nation?” With the country exhausted by war and the Gulf...
NObama! No Cuts to Social Security, Medicare;
WPA-, CCC-style Jobs Programs Now
“We put those pay roll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.” —FDR,...
“Arguing about How to Defuse a Huge Ticking Bomb”
Burn-it-Down Nihilism Spreads Among Tea-Infused House Republicans [ cross-posted at Daily Kos ] * “From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.” —Diderot House Republicans laughed a former George H. W. Bush economist out of the room on Monday when he tried to warn...
2001 Bush Tax Cuts: Where the Deficit Began
Those intrepid researchers at Think Progress have dug up a headline from Aug. 1, 2001—almost exactly 10 years ago—that shows the long-bleeding fiscal damage done by the Bush tax cuts. Only six months into his first term, after George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus...
“High Popalorum” and “Low Popahirum”: Huey P. Long on the Difference between Democrats and Republicans
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MKb35NK0F0&feature=related * While we’re either gnawing our knuckles or blissfully unaware there’s a debt ceiling hostage crisis now in its —th week . . . While the putatively Democratic President again invites the Republican House...
Disaster Capitalism Will Solve U.S. Budget Deficit?
Ask New Orleans and Wisconsin
David in our Berkeley bureau, whose last dispatch was about global warming and extreme weather (May 24), observes that the G.O.P. hard-liners insisting on reducing the deficit only by cutting Medicare and privatizing other “common good” safety net programs are simply...
On Independence Day, with Help from a Founding Mother
“In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would...
“They Need to Do Their Job.”
Obama Bitch-Slaps G.O.P. Deficit Hardliners, Hell-Bent Extremists “Before we ask our seniors to pay more for health care, before we cut our children’s education, before we sacrifice our commitment to the research and innovation that will help create more jobs in the...