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Category Archives: Politics

Comfort Zone

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

When I was in college I used to amuse myself by reading the John Birch magazine, which was available in the school library. Even then it struck me that the extreme right had a pronounced paranoid streak. Nothing makes them happier than portraying themselves as beleaguered, under attack, or victims. If possible, all three. They […]

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Leave Tom Paine alone

Monday, April 13, 2009

Some people can never rest easy. Consider Poor Tom Paine. During the latter years of his life he was hounded, even on his deathbed, by what passed at the time as the American right-both secular and religious. His name was mud from the early nineteenth century until the mid twentieth, despite all he had done […]

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Tit for tat, not for the Democrats

Thursday, April 2, 2009

26 Democrats have gone on record opposed to using the reconciliation process to pass climate change legislation, thus handing the Republicans a victory without cost to them. Most of those Democrats will most likely take the same position on health care, thus dooming the American people to a broken health care system, and thus a […]

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Reagan Legacy

Sunday, March 29, 2009

One of the most irritating things that Democrats do is concede to the far right’s claim that Reagan was a great president. He was half senile even then. He catered to racists, and made war on the environment and the middle class. It’s good to see a little pushback.

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John Larson on cramdowns

Monday, March 9, 2009

A while back I mentioned that, according to Firedoglake, John Larson had lined up behind a “New Democrat” push to water down Obama’s bankruptcy cramdown proposal. I got an email from one his staff people, and we had a brief email exchange. According to the staffer: I wanted to inform you that Congressman Larson is […]

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Earmarks

Sunday, March 8, 2009

The earmark debate is a distraction of major proportions. It is also an example of hypocrisy of major proportions, as Taxpayer for Common Sense documents. You can download there data at this location. The data demonstrate quite conclusively that earmarks are largely, though not solely, the domain of those states and of that party that […]

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Larson pushes for carbon tax

Saturday, March 7, 2009

John Larson is fighting a lonely, apparently hopeless fight to do something that is extremely sensible: Representative John B. Larson embarked again this week on his lonely quest to enact a national tax on carbon dioxide emissions. His idea is to set a modest price on a ton of emissions, gradually increasing it each year […]

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Obama 1, Jindal 0

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Wasn’t it refreshing to hear a politician advocate for the progressive philosophy in an assertive and unapologetic fashion? The Democrats have been in a defensive crouch for 29 years, and have essentially ceded the terms of the national debate to the right. For a time there it became terribly un-hip to advocate for a governmental […]

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60 votes

Monday, February 23, 2009

One disadvantage to being a reality based type of blog, is that you are under a certain obligation to admit that you are wrong. So today, I must admit that I have been wrong on a regular basis about something. I have, on a number of occasions, bemoaned the fact that Harry Reid has passively […]

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Partisanship

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Sunday is becoming prime rant day. Today, as so often in the past, I must take exception to a “balanced, pox on both their houses” article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg of New York Times. The current trope is that Washington has become more partisan in the past 20 years. It may very well be true […]

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