httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htX2usfqMEs&feature=player_embedded * “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. . . . You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.” *...
Levees Not War
The Social Contract, Explained by Elizabeth Warren,
A Cure for “The Silence of the Dems”
What kind of future can there be for a political party that defers all its speaking roles to a conflict-averse President who does not want to be too closely identified with his party? And what future for that party’s legacy of “social contract” programs—and the people...
We’re Not Forgetting
* Except for posting this brief comment, we are among the millions of New Yorkers who are doing anything but “commemorating” the 10th anniversary. We are not reading the magazines’ special commemorative editions or watching the solemn and reverent broadcasts brought...
“Pass This Jobs Bill”
* “I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away. It’s called the American Jobs Act. There should be nothing controversial about this piece of legislation. Everything in here is the kind of proposal that’s been supported by both Democrats and...
Go Big, Obama: Give Us a 10-Year Jobs Plan
* As Long as They’re Calling You a Socialist, Go All the Way What does “Labor Day” mean to the 15+ million unemployed? Below is our Happy Labor Day card to President Obama in advance of his address to the nation Thursday, Sept. 8, about proposals for alleviating the...
Dedra Johnson of ‘The G Bitch Spot’ Wins Rising Tide’s Ashley Award
Each year at the Rising Tide conference on the future of New Orleans the coveted Ashley Award, named in honor of the legendary, larger-than-life Ashley Morris,* is presented to a blogger who has made outstanding contributions to writing about post-Katrina New Orleans....
Live-Blogging from Rising Tide 6
A conference on the future of New Orleans Xavier University, New Orleans Tune in to webcast here. Rising Tide 6 main web site here, and RT6 blog here. Photos here, here, and here. * Usually we worry that Rising Tide might be disrupted by a hurricane—after all, it’s...
Republicans Secretly (Seriously) Like the Stimulus
Begin here, President Obama: Create jobs by approving all G.O.P. requests for stimulus funds. Here’s the best new idea we’ve heard in a long time (h/t to Rachel Maddow): When HuffPo’s Sam Stein reported that “Michele Bachmann Repeatedly Sought Stimulus, EPA, Other...
A Heartland Question for the President
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd quotes a politely phrased but hard-hitting question put to the president last week by an Iowa voter, a mother named Emily who is an Obama supporter, during a town hall meeting with the good folks of Decorah, Iowa. Dowd notes that...
Rising Tide 6 Is August 27, So Register Today
A Conference on the Future of New Orleans After a week of economy-strangling legislation in Congress, Wall Street plunges, and a downgrade of the nation’s credit rating, maybe you’re ready for some positive news? The Best Thing Happening—we’ll be there and we can...
What a Deal
Is This What “Winning the Future” Feels Like? “Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal.” —Joe Nocera, “Tea Party’s War on America” (see below) “With all this incessant emphasis on deficit reduction,...
Memo to White House: Time to Use the Constitutional Option
* 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...
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...