In a Letter to the Editor of the New York Times, replying to an Oct. 22 front-page article titled “Wall St. Protest Isn’t Like Ours, Tea Party Says,” Oberlin College professor of politics Stephen Crowley points out an essential distinction: There is another crucial...
Politics/Economy
“Romney is improbable, but his rivals are impossible”
Credit Where Credit Is Due Dept. It is rare to the point of Almost Never that NYT columnist Ross Douthat writes something not annoying, so when he says something we find intelligent and worth quoting, we want to be nice and share. Likewise, the so-called candidates*...
Occupying the Street Is Not Enough
“Occupy” Dialogue Continues “[S]imply being in a public place and voicing your opinion in and of itself doesn’t do anything politically. It is the prerequisite, I hope, for people getting together and voting and engaging things. . . . I welcome the [Occupy] Wall...
Ten Years of U.S. War in Afghanistan
“While post-9/11 veterans are more supportive than the general public, just one-third (34%) say that, given the costs and benefits to the U.S., the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have both been worth fighting.” —Pew Research Center, “War and Sacrifice in the Post-9/11...
Occupying Wall Street with Nurses, Teachers, Transit Workers, and the Rest of America’s Middle Class
“We are the 99% . . . You are the 99%.” “Banks got bailed out / We got sold out!” “Whose street? Our street!” * This Is Not the Fringe. This Is the Middle Class. Yesterday into last night we gathered near New York’s City Hall and marched with what looked and felt...
Conservatives, Please Help Conserve Louisiana’s Coast
“What is a conservative after all but one who conserves, one who is committed to protecting and holding close the things by which we live?” —Ronald Reagan, 1984 “Louisiana’s voters must find, nominate and elect conservatives (aka, Republicans) who understand there’s...
Talk of the Social Contract Should Not Make Rightists Reach for Their Guns
Daily Kos reports: After a video of [Elizabeth] Warren talking about the deficit and the social contract went viral last week (see above), Rush Limbaugh, the Fiscal Times and Rich Lowrey all spent time attacking her. Now, Lowrey has decided to spend another column...
The Social Contract, Explained by Elizabeth Warren,
Paul Krugman, and Robert Kuttner
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.” *...
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...
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...
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...