President Obama was finally politically cornered, including by the unscripted remarks of Vice President Biden. Anyone who attributes courage to Obama in making this announcement is in a bemused state of mind. Obama’s calculation was electoral through and through. And the White House was definitely getting the news that major gay donors would not be signing checks until he “evolved” already. Also, millions of ordinary gay voters were finding it harder to suppress mounting moral revulsion at being played like extras in every election.

The Republicans are a sick joke, and their narrow ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming presidential election but Barack Obama. With Ron Paul out of it and warmongering hedge fund hustler Mitt Romney the likely Republican nominee, the GOP has defined itself indelibly as the party of moneyed greed and unfettered imperialism.

Unlike the tea party, the Occupy movement hasn't involved itself much in elections. But that hasn't stopped a slew of progressives and political outsiders from capitalizing on the movement's energy. Here's a rundown of 10 electable House and Senate hopefuls who, one way or another, have made Occupy part of their campaigns:

In the face of an expected recall election targeting Gov. Scott Walker and four Republican state senators, the Wisconsin state Assembly voted Tuesday to amend the state constitution to make it more difficult to toss an official from office.

The measure, which still faces major hurdles before taking effect, would allow officeholders to be recalled only if they have been charged with a serious crime or if there is a finding of probable cause that they violated the state code of ethics.

Under current law, no grounds are needed to seek a recall.

We can laugh all we want to about the Republicans being an insane party, but the truth of the matter is that the GOP is a force for moving the USA to the right while the Democrats won't even defend their own legacy or the base of their party. The Democrats gave up the ghost during the Clinton administration when they started courting the same exact corporate money as the Republicans. Before that, the Democrats were more dependent on people and organizations that did things like get out the vote: labor unions, community organizations, liberal activists. The Democrats have turned their backs on labor. They did nothing for Union Card Check, next to nothing for public workers in Wisconsin and other states where they are under siege, and Obama even signed a new law into the books making it harder for Railroad and Airline workers to unionize and easier to de-unionise them. Obama, the president we all know got his start as a community organizer, didn't bother to say a single kind word in defense of ACORN when it was defunded. Obama and the rest of the Democrats are afraid of their own shadows, lest they get called liberals. Job number one for this feckless bunch of losers is cutting the deficit during a recession and weak recovery. They are hardly a party that seeks power anymore. They are merely a place holder for when the public gets tired and fearful of the GOP.

You don't believe me? Read up on how likely it is that the Democrats will make any headway in congress come November 2012. Most likely, they will lose their thin majority in the Senate and lose additional seats in the House. If Obama gets to appoint anymore justices to the SCOTUS, he will be moving the court further to the right.

Sorry, my fellow liberals, progressives, and democratic socialists but the time for denial is over. We placed our faith in Obama, but he showed up just in time to bury rather than to praise liberalism -and with it - the Democratic party.

Nice looking family, though.

In announcing her plans, Snowe, 65, emphasized that she is in good health and was prepared for the campaign ahead. But she said she was swayed by the increasing polarization in Washington.

“Unfortunately, I do not realistically expect the partisanship of recent years in the Senate to change over the short term,” Snowe said in a statement. “So at this stage of my tenure in public service, I have concluded that I am not prepared to commit myself to an additional six years in the Senate, which is what a fourth term would entail.”

Snowe’s retirement represents a major setback for the GOP’s efforts to regain a majority in the Senate. As a moderate Republican, she may be the party’s only hope to hold a seat in the strongly blue state.

Ten years ago John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, which argued that a variety of demographic trends spelled doom for the Republican Party. Unfortunately for Judis and Teixeira, Republicans ignored their demographic doom and won a convincing victory in 2004. But hey, that was due to 9/11 and Iraq and the war on terror, and who could have predicted that? Then Democrats chalked up big wins in 2006 and 2008 (whew!), but in 2010 Republicans came roaring back. But hey, that was because of an epic recession, and who could have predicted that? Any day now, those demographics are going to kick in and Republicans will be doomed once and for all. Honest

While progressives celebrate Warren for her fight against the big banks and the financial industry's lobbying arm, they have kept silent over the fact that she has enlisted with another powerful lobby that is willing to sabotage America's economic recovery in order to advance its narrow interests. It is AIPAC, the key arm of the Israel lobby; a group that is openly pushing for a US war on Iran that would likely trigger a global recession, as the renowned economist Nouriel Roubini recently warned. The national security/foreign policy position page on Warren's campaign website reads as though it was cobbled together from AIPAC memos and the website of the Israeli Foreign Ministry by the Democratic Party hacks who are advising her. It is pure boilerplate that suggests she knows about as much about the Middle East as Herman "Uzbeki-beki-stan-stan" Cain, and that she doesn't care.

KRUGMAN: It really is catastrophic. If you include people who aren’t actively searching for a job and people who are working part-time even though they want full-time work, we’re up to about one in seven. That means the unemployment rate is 16 percent. I live in a fairly rarefied social class now and so probably hear a lot fewer personal horror stories. But I do hear them: people my age, 58-year-old guys who’ve lost jobs and see no chance of ever getting another one; young people out of college with good qualifications who can’t find anything, who can’t get their lives started. The human damage is enormous.

PLAYBOY: Some of that debate is irrelevant to the average person. All they know is they don’t have a job or they don’t have a job that pays enough.

KRUGMAN: The point is there’s a tremendous amount of suffering. A lot of America is much worse off than it was four years ago. I think the main reason you should be angry about it is that it’s gratuitous. This doesn’t have to be happening. We actually have the tools to make most of this go away. If we could throw aside the political prejudices and bad ideas that are crippling us, in 18 months we could be back to something that feels like a much better economy.

PLAYBOY: So people in America today are suffering when they don’t have to be because of policy makers who won’t do the right thing?

KRUGMAN: That’s right.

On February 14, President Obama quietly signed into law the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, which will provide $63.6 billion for the agency’s programs between 2012-2015. The House had passed the bill on February 3, and three days later the Senate voted for the conference agreement. 157 House Democrats and 18 Senate Democrats opposed the bill, while Hill Republicans supported the bill only after forcing the adoption of controversial provisions that will make it more difficult for airline and railroad workers to form unions.

After 5 years of uncertainty and 23 short-term extensions, there’s no question that a long-term solution to FAA funding was overdue. There’s also no question that the unprecedented inclusion of the anti-union provisions in the legislation demonstrates the GOP’s determination to destroy unions. As its labor critics have stated, the bill is a compromise in name only, and the President should have vetoed it.

On Tuesday President Obama signed a bill that will make it harder for workers to form a union.  This bill, the FAA Reauthorization Act, passed Congress last week despite an outcry from major unions.  Dozens of House Democrats voted for it, as did most Democratic senators.

Another reason why Obama sucks! Would rather shoot myself than vote for that A-hole again. No different than a rightwing reactionary Republican. (Not much difference anyway.) Dems & GOP just different factions of the same bought & paid-for crew  of muleteers  whose only job is hauling water for a corrupt cannibalistic yet ultimately cowardly Masterclass. They all must be replaced. ASAP! BAMN!

Our own elections, the ones our government has modeled for the world, are a hoax. What other word should we use to describe this year's presidential election, whose outcome will turn on which party's super PACs gets the most generous bribes from billionaires? The Republicans, enabled by decisions of a Supreme Court they still control, were the first out of the gate and are far more culpable in destroying our system of popular governance. But the Democrats, no less committed to winning at any cost to political principle, have now jumped in.

The generally reserved New York Times editorial page responded to the Obama campaign's decision to seek Super PAC funding with a scathing editorial headlined "Another Campaign for Sale." The Times reminded that Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech two years ago, called out the Supreme Court justices sitting before him over their decision to free special interests from campaign spending limits.

When the polls closed in South Carolina on Saturday, I happened to be in a Charleston hotel lobby where elegantly dressed couples were filing past on their way to a black-tie event. A woman stopped and asked whether I had heard anything about the results.

“Newt’s winning big,” I said.

The woman’s face fell. “But if Newt wins,” she lamented, “then Obama wins.”

With the caveat that there are no guarantees, she has a point.

WASHINGTON — Baby boomers take note: Medicare as your parents have known it is headed for big changes no matter who wins the White House in 2012. You may not like it, but you might have to accept it.

Dial down the partisan rhetoric and surprising similarities emerge from competing policy prescriptions by President Barack Obama and leading Republicans such as Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.

Limit the overall growth of Medicare spending? It's in both approaches.

Squeeze more money from upper-income retirees and some in the middle-class? Ditto.

Raise the eligibility age? That too, if the deal is right.

Democrats' bet that former consumer finance watchdog Elizabeth Warren could take down Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) appears to be paying off, as a new poll suggests she is pulling ahead.

The survey by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst finds Warren leading Brown 43 percent to 39 percent -- just within the poll's 4.4 percent margin of error.

"These numbers could mean trouble for Scott Brown," said UMass political scientist Brian Schaffner. "The race is a dead heat and his support is well under 50 percent, which usually means difficulty for an incumbent, especially this far out from Election Day."

We’ve been at war for decades now—not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Devastating as it’s been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed—until now.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.

By making Wall Street its symbolic target, and branding itself as a movement of the 99%, OWS has redirected public attention to the issue of extreme inequality, which it has recast as, essentially, a moral problem. Only a short time ago, the “morals” issue in politics meant the propriety of sexual preferences, reproductive behavior, or the personal behavior of presidents. Economic policy, including tax cuts for the rich, subsidies and government protection for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and financial deregulation, was shrouded in clouds of propaganda or simply considered too complex for ordinary Americans to grasp.

ALBANY — The fight over a millionaire’s tax promises to pit Gov. Cuomo against many of his fellow Democrats in what could be the first major spat in his gubernatorial honeymoon.

The popular governor, whose poll numbers are sky-high, is dead-set against the tax, while Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and a majority of surveyed New Yorkers favor the special levy.

“Lots of Democrats feel very strongly about this issue,” said Baruch College’s Doug Muzzio. “Clearly there’s a potential for a rift. It’s already begun to happen. It’s going to be a problem.”

Cuomo yesterday dismissed such dire predictions.

(Reuters) - Democrats are proposing $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion in measures to reduce the budget deficit, including revenue increases and significant cuts to Medicare, congressional aides told Reuters.

Harry Reid has apparently channeled the spirit of Samuel L. Jackson and decided he’s had enough of these motherf%^&ing Republicans and their mother%^&ing filibusters!

In a move that left the Capitol reeling and the GOP absolutely furious, Reid herded the mass of cats that is the Democratic Party and unilaterally changed the rules of the Senate to neuter the GOP’s ability to obstruct every single piece of legislation to death.

What’s been missing in the Obama presidency is the productive interaction with outside groups that Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed with the labor movement and Lyndon B. Johnson with the civil rights movement. Both pushed FDR and LBJ in more progressive directions while also lending them support against their conservative adversaries.

The question for the left now, says Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future, is whether progressives can “establish independence and momentum” while also being able “to make a strategic voting choice.” The idea is not to pretend that Obama is as progressive as his core supporters want him to be, but to rally support to him nonetheless as the man standing between the country and the right wing.

Barack Obama's betrayal will resonate in history long after he has become just another name on the over-priced celebrity speaker circuit. It is a betrayal of far more than the youthful idealists and loyal progressives who put him in the White House. Obama has unmoored the Democratic Party from its foundations -- philosophical and electoral. No longer is it an expression of the persons, programs and ideas that crystallized with the New Deal and which dominated the country's politics for sixty years. Its future is that of ad hoc assemblage of hustlers and special interests whose sole claim to govern will be that it is not the amalgamated Tea/Republican Party. Obama, by this Oedipus-like act of patricide, has also betrayed the country that voted for an enlightened leader with a social conscience -- a country in desperate need of the opposite to the fate he has laid on us.

All cloying appeals to the Obama administration to use stimulus money to build public works such as schools, libraries, roads, clinics, public transit and reclaiming dams, as well as to create jobs, are about as effective as writing heartfelt appeals in the era of the old Soviet Union to Uncle Joe Stalin. The trolls have gamed the system. There is no economic, political or environmental reform, from campaign finance to environmental controls, that can be implemented to impede the march of the corporate state. The rot and corruption at the top levels of our financial and political systems, coupled with the increasing deprivation felt by tens of millions of Americans, are volatile tinder for revolt. And the trolls are prepared for this too. They have put in place draconian state controls, including widespread internal surveillance, to silence our anemic left. They know how to direct the rage of the right wing toward the last pockets of the cultural, social and political establishment that cling to traditional liberal values, as well as toward the most vulnerable among us including Muslims, undocumented workers and homosexuals. They will make sure we consume ourselves.

A society is in serious trouble when its political pariahs have at the core of their demands a return to the rule of law. This inversion, with our political and cultural outcasts demanding a respect for law, highlights the awful fact that the most radical and retrograde forces within the body politic have seized control.

President Obama has only one option as he ponders a world economy teetering on the edge: He needs to go big, go long and go global.

Obama should not be constrained by what the tea party might allow subservient Republican leaders in Congress to do. He should state plainly, eloquently and in detail what he thinks needs to happen. Neither history nor the voters will be kind to him if he lets caution and political calculation get in the way.

Perhaps it would have been inappropriate for the president to involve himself directly in a campaign against state officials. But whether he ought to have spoken out or not, there are still two profound lessons for him in this outcome.

The first lesson is that bipartisanship seems to be encouraged among Republicans these days only when they suspect that voters may be sick of their extremism. Just as Walker is now worried about his future, so is Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has suddenly realized that he prefers cooperation to confrontation over collective bargaining—evidently because he fears the results of a potential repeal referendum on the issue in November.

The second lesson is that there is only one way to instill such fear among Republicans, in Wisconsin or Washington: By demonstrating the will to push back, as hard as necessary, on behalf of the principles Democrats have always promised to uphold.

Barack has always, ALWAYS, put his trust ultimately in the American people. He's trusted us, to step forward, to be vocal - LOUD EVEN - to push forward the change and prosperity we all seek.

Just like John Kerry did when he called to us to Filibuster Alito we rose to that call, flipping an impressive number of votes our way, and nearly shut down his nomination.

That's what we need to do again.  And we need to keep doing it.  In November 2012.  And in 2016.

We need to realize that Obama's vision of a United America,  one that sees it's goals ascommon and is willing to tackle them together, is more importantly to the long term health of the country than implementing any specific partisan progressive agenda item.  If we are to implement progressive goals without bringing the rest of the country into solidarity with those goals - they will fight tooth and nail to undermine and reverse those goals.

That is what we've seeing now with Dodd-Frank.  It's what we've seen with Health Care Reform.  Simply getting agenda items ticked off our "Honey Do" list isn't enough.

We need to stop squabbling, yes even amongst ourselves, and keep focused on continued improvements and progress.  Even if, sometimes, those improvements are small, sometimes they are insufficient.  In the end the policy changes aren't the goal - they're part of the process.  We have yet to reach the goal in almost any area, so we have to Keep Going.

It's not a matter of "Clapping Louder" - which implies a passive state of adoration.  We need to get out of our seats, put our frustrations and disappointments aside - or else use them as fuelto - put our shoulders to the wheel and PUSH HARDER.

And not for Obama.  Not for Nancy Pelosi.  Not for Harry Reid.  And not because we fear what Repubs might do in their place.

We have to do it for America.

 

There will be no magic potion, no instant formula for Democrats and progressives struggling to come back from their disastrous 2010 election losses.

They had hoped that Tuesday’s recall elections in Wisconsin would provide a narrative-changing breakthrough, proof-positive that the overreaching conservatives who now dominate the Republican Party had ignited a middle-of-the-road voter rebellion and inspired a legion of labor and liberal activists who would offer a definitive riposte to the tea party.

What happened instead was not without promise for Democrats, but it was also a sign of the resiliency of conservative activism—and the power of conservative money.

The whole thing is nuts. The economy is a shambles, saved from a free fall only by the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented promise of free money for banks for at least two years. That’s how long a seven-member majority of the Fed’s Open Market Committee expects it to take for significant relief to take hold for the 25 million Americans who can’t find full-time employment.

The so-called analysts at Standard & Poor’s may not be the most reliable bunch, but there was one very good reason for them to downgrade U.S. debt: Republicans in Congress made a credible threat to force a default on our obligations.

This isn’t the rationale that S&P gave, but it’s the only one that makes sense. Like a lucky college student who partied the night before an exam, the ratings agency used flawed logic and faulty arithmetic to somehow come up with the right answer. No, life isn’t always fair.

“It is a common theme” that the United States, which “only a few years ago was hailed to stride the world as a colossus with unparalleled power and unmatched appeal is in decline, ominously facing the prospect of its final decay,” Giacomo Chiozza writes in the current Political Science Quarterly.
The theme is indeed widely believed. And with some reason, though a number of qualifications are in order. To start with, the decline has proceeded since the high point of U.S. power after World War II, and the remarkable triumphalism of the post-Gulf War ’90s was mostly self-delusion.
Another common theme, at least among those who are not willfully blind, is that American decline is in no small measure self-inflicted. The comic opera in Washington this summer, which disgusts the country and bewilders the world, may have no analogue in the annals of parliamentary democracy.
The spectacle is even coming to frighten the sponsors of the charade.

Of all the ways President Barack Obama tried to rationalize his surrender to the Republicans, none was more infuriating than when he said the deficit deal would lead to the “lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was president.”

Since Eisenhower was president? That was half a century ago—before the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and federal aid to education, including Head Start.

“These programs defined America as a decent, yes, a Great Society,” Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa said Monday during the debate on the so-called compromise debt settlement. What President Obama supported, he said, was “tantamount to repeal of the Great Society.”

Worth a thousand words.

The Democrats, despite sitting in the White House, the most awesome repository of political power on the planet, didn't fight at all. They made a show of a tussle for a good long time -- as fixed fights go, you don't see many that last into the 11th and 12th rounds, like this one did -- but at the final hour, they let out a whimper and took a dive.
We probably need to start wondering why this keeps happening. Also, this: if the Democrats suck so bad at political combat, then how come they continue to be rewarded with such massive quantities of campaign contributions? When the final tally comes in for the 2012 presidential race, who among us wouldn't bet that Barack Obama is going to beat his Republican opponent in the fundraising column very handily? At the very least, he won't be out-funded, I can almost guarantee that.
And what does that mean? Who spends hundreds of millions of dollars for what looks, on the outside, like rank incompetence?
It strains the imagination to think that the country's smartest businessmen keep paying top dollar for such lousy performance. Is it possible that by "surrendering" at the 11th hour and signing off on a deal that presages deep cuts in spending for the middle class, but avoids tax increases for the rich, Obama is doing exactly what was expected of him?

Damon also said those making over $250,000 per year are not job creators.

“Nobody went and started a business with their Bush tax cut. You know, I don’t know who would believe something – that just defies common sense so no, that’s – no. I was against those tax cuts. I thought they were ridiculous. So little is asked of the upper class anyway, you know. I mean, what percent of them or their kids are fighting in any of these wars?” he said.

The die has been cast. Obama’s “nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists,” as an editorial in the normally sedate New York Times described the deal to raise the debt ceiling, is a disaster in the making. It rules out a vigorous government response to the persistent economic stagnation in which joblessness, housing foreclosures and an ever-widening gap between the top 2 percent and the rest of Americans have become the norm.

But to use the word “capitulation” is too kind, since this president, as was Bill Clinton before him, is clearly one of those “New Democrats” who welcomes the opportunity to jettison the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as outmoded political baggage. Otherwise, why would Obama have reached for a “grand bargain” in which he even put Social Security and Medicare cuts on the table before the Republicans rolled him?

President Barack Obama touted his debt ceiling deal Tuesday, saying, “We can’t balance the budget on the backs of the very people who have borne the biggest brunt of this recession.” Yet that is what he and his coterie of Wall Street advisers have done.

In the affairs of nations, Alexander Hamilton wrote in January 1790, “loans in times of public danger, especially from foreign war, are found an indispensable resource.” It was his first report as secretary of the treasury to the new Congress of the United States. The country had borrowed to fight the Revolutionary War, and Hamilton proposed a system of public debt to pay those loans.

The history of the U.S. national debt is inexorably tied to its many wars.

Barack Obama should follow LBJ's courageous example and step aside, so that a more able Democrat can lead us forward……….Barack Obama has demonstrated that he either will not or can not actually fight to advance the causes that I and we believe in. He has again caved....

In one of the most inept episodes of Presidential-Congressional relations, Mr. Obama managed to give the Republicans more than they expected and leave the Democrats with less than the Republicans offered. The Republicans never expected Mr. Obama to give in entirely on tax increases on the wealthy, on the reviled oil industry giants and other corporate tax escapees. The Republicans even agreed to $800 billion in new revenue over ten years. Obama fumbled the ball day after day, and with the August 2 debt ceiling deadline looming, he fell to the extortionists. Unlike Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush II, who routinely expected and got debt ceilings raised without conditions.

It’s supremely galling. It’s unbalanced, unfair and mostly unwise. For President Obama and the Democratic Party, it’s a comprehensive defeat. But it’s not the end of the world.

The deal struck Sunday to free the U.S. economy from its Republican hostage-takers is impossible for progressives to love. It gets all the big things wrong, starting with the most fundamental: Obama never should have acquiesced in linking a routine hike in the debt ceiling—necessary to pay bills Congress has already incurred—with all the difficult spending questions that should be dealt with in the budget process.

Obama’s starting point was a demand for a “clean,” unencumbered bill to raise the ceiling; House Speaker John Boehner said no. What would have happened if Obama refused to budge? We don’t know because that’s not his style. It would be nice, someday, to find out.

In other words, a slew of millionaire politicians who spent the last decade exploding the national debt with Endless War, a sprawling Surveillance State, and tax cuts for the rich are now imposing extreme suffering on the already-suffering ordinary citizenry, all at the direction of their plutocratic overlords, who are prospering more than ever and will sacrifice virtually nothing under this deal (despite their responsibility for the 2008 financial collapse that continues to spawn economic misery).  And all of this will be justified by these politicians and their millionaire media mouthpieces with the obscenely deceitful slogans of "shared sacrifice" and "balanced debt reduction" -- two of the most odiously Orwellian phrases since "Look Forward, not Backward" and "2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate" (and anyone claiming that Obama was involuntarily forced by the "crazy" Tea Party into massive budget cuts at a time of almost 10% unemployment: see the actual facts here).

Future Congresses are not bound by the actions of previous Congresses. The more important question is whether you believe that THIS generation of Congressional leadership will work outside the lines of this agreement. Will these Democrats muster the gumption to break the spending caps, to allow all the Bush tax cuts to expire, etc., etc. I just don’t see it. I don’t see these Democrats, who have been parroting the language of austerity so much they have to believe at least some of it, will ever go beyond this agreement. They have made a virtue of paygo and Clinton’s balanced budgets for close to 20 years now. They are fiscal conservatives, the only ones in Washington to be precise. The Progressive Caucus budget reaches a surplus in 2021, albeit in a smarter way. They will live within the constraints of this paralyzing discretionary budget, which puts public investment at an appallingly low level.
The way out of this box is to find different people than the ones currently in office. I don’t see any other way around that. This can start at the state level, actually.

I guess I have to be explicit at this point: yes, I would vote no.What about the catastrophe that would result? Several thoughts.

What we should be talking about when we talk about the debt ceiling is the proper role and size of government. Instead, we are asking whether the government spends too much on programs that alleviate the pain that is the result of government policies in the first place. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and food stamps are all good programs, but all are meant to deal with the consequences of the income inequality that the government makes possible by the laws it passes. Income security programs make up 65 percent of all government expenses, and from this we are asked to conclude that the government is mainly in the business of serving and taking care of common people. But the most profound actions that the government takes, passing laws that make the rich rich, ostensibly cost no money and, because we play along, enforcing them supposedly has no cost.

Any agreement by Congress to cut the income security programs while leaving the main beneficiaries from our government—the rich—untouched, would be unconscionable. If Congress does not reach an agreement, and the deficit remains unfunded, this will give the president an unprecedented opportunity to expose who the government really serves, because it will be up to him alone; no agreement from Congress would be necessary to decide where to cut. Let him first withhold money from the enforcement and the support of laws that enrich the rich. This would lead to higher wages for workers and lower prices for consumers, and it would therefore be a good quid pro quo for the cuts he wants to make in income security programs.

What are the laws that enrich the rich?

To be sure, 30 months after he returned to home cooking, George W. Bush still gets majority blame for the economy.
But here's the breaking news for wishful Democrats: George W. Bush isn't running for anything but exercise.
"More than a third of Americans now believe that President Obama’s policies are hurting the economy, and confidence in his ability to create jobs is sharply eroding among  his base," the Post reports.
Strong support among liberal Democrats for Obama's jobs record has plummeted 22 points from 53% down below a third. African Americans who believe the president's measures helped the economy have plunged from 77% to barely half.
Obama's overall job approval on the economy has slid below 40% for the first time, with 57% disapproving. And strong disapprovers outnumber approvers by better than two-to-one.

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.

The redoubtable Elizabeth Drew has a forthcoming article in the New York Review of Books — not yet online — that confirms all our worst fears. She tells us that past concessions haveestablished in both Democrats’ and Republicans’ minds the thought that Obama was a weak negotiator—a “pushover.” He was more widely seen among Democrats and other close observers as having a strategy of starting near where he thinks the Republicans are—at the fifty-yard line—and then moving closer to their position.Even more alarming, however, is her window on what the White House is thinking:It all goes back to the “shellacking” Obama took in the 2010 elections. The President’s political advisers studied the numbers and concluded that the voters wanted the government to spend less. This was an arguable interpretation. Nevertheless, the political advisers believed that elections are decided by middle-of-the-road independent voters, and this group became the target for determining the policies of the next two years.OK, I’ve never won a tough election. But neither has Obama!

This article was written by an investment manager who works with very wealthy clients. I knew him from decades ago, but he recently e-mailed me with some concerns he had about what was happening with the economy. What he had to say was informative enough that I asked if he might fashion what he had told me into a document for the Who Rules America Web site. He agreed to do so, but only on the condition that the document be anonymous, because he does not want to jeopardize his relationships with his clients or other investment professionals.

So much for the meritocracy. Despite an elite education, effusive charm and brilliant wit, Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, has ended up betraying his humble origins by abjectly serving the most rapacious variant of Wall Street greed. They both talk a good progressive game, but when push comes to shove—meaning when the banking lobby weighs in—big money talks and the best and the brightest fold.

The defining moment of Clinton’s capitulation was his destruction of Brooksley Born, the one member of his administration with the courage and prescience to warn him about the unregulated derivatives trading that ultimately led to the housing collapse. For Obama, it is his decision not to nominate Elizabeth Warren to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she fought so hard to create.

The smoking ruin that is the the Obama White House, and the rotting corpse that is the Democratic Party, have, incredibly, together been boxed into a corner by, of all things, the certifiably insane Republican Party.

This amazing situation has resulted not through any brilliant strategy on the part of the Republicans, but by the self-inflicted wounds of the Democrats.

Faced with a collapsing economy that is at serious risk of performing a reprise of the Great Depression, Congressional Democrats and President Obama were in a perfect position to grab the flag and run home with it by declaring war on unemployment and on the party that has unequivocally declared itself openly to be the standard bearer of the wealthy and powerful.

The bottom line is that most of the considerable economic growth of the last several decades has gone into the pockets of a tiny percent of the population. As a result, wages and consumer buying power have stagnated, and consumers don't have the money to buy the new products and services upon which economic growth depends.

The notion that a Democratic president can win reelection with an unemployment rate that is edging upward and talk of cutting Social Security is beyond unrealistic.

...

No president since Franklin Roosevelt has won reelection when the unemployment rate was over 7 percent. And Roosevelt won because he ran as a candidate who was fully willing to use the power of the federal government to create jobs —and programs like Social Security.

The notion that a Democratic president can win reelection with an unemployment rate that is edging upward—perhaps toward double digits—and talk of cutting Social Security is not merely unrealistic. It is evidence of a disconnect that could devastate not just Obama's reelection campaign in 2012 but Democratic prospects for years to come.

For good reason, there has been serious hand-wringing over what to do about the ethical lapses of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The fact that Supreme Court justices are exempt from the code of ethical conduct which applies to the rest of the federal judiciary; the problem of bringing a sitting justice before the Congress to question the conduct of a constitutional co-equal; the reality that justices cannot easily defend themselves against news media charges; the defiant, in-your-face posture of Thomas—the list goes on but it need not. There is clear precedent for how to deal with the justice. Thomas could be forced off the bench.

Specifically, we were upset that one of the few Democrats in Congress with the nerve to consistently speak out against bad Republican proposals -- and, more importantly, for traditional Democratic ones -- had done something so colossally foolish, reckless and arrogant that he had undercut his position as a champion for good policy. The importance of the role that Weiner played in the political battles of the last several years seems to have been lost in a sea of stories on the more prurient and strategic aspects of the brouhaha.

To me, in the wake of Weiner's foolishness, the big question is: How will the Democrats proceed without one of their most steadfast and articulate spokesmen in Washington?

Rep. Anthony Weiner would be having a much better week if he could establish, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he wears either old-fashioned boxer shorts or classic tighty-whiteys.

In politics, it’s pretty much an immutable rule that if they’re talking about your underwear, you have a problem. Weiner, a liberal Democrat who represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens, surely knows this. But he doesn’t seem to grasp the other rule about how you should at least try to keep a problem from becoming a crisis.

Let me interject that I’m going to try to get through this column with as few juvenile double-entendres as possible. There will be no jokes, for example, about the congressman’s last name.

WASHINGTON -- AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka plans to issue yet another warning to Democrats on Friday, proclaiming that if lawmakers don't push hard enough to stem attacks on labor's interests, workers will abandon the party in the 2012 election.

The union leader, whose perch atop the 11-million-member federation makes him arguably the most powerful labor official in the country, is slated to speak at a National Press Club luncheon. In excerpts from his prepared remarks, obtained in advance by The Huffington Post, Trumka focuses his ire on the widening gulf between U.S. workers and the wealthy -- attaching particular blame to politicians who value ideology over morality.

Gas prices are heading toward $5, single-family home sales are at a low—and with President Obama ignoring his base like Jimmy Carter did, he could end up being another one-term president, Eric Alterman writes. Can You Spell “M-A-L-A-I-S-E?”

President Obama has finally decided to take his own side in the philosophical struggle that is the true engine of this nation's budget debate.

After months of mixed signals about what he was willing to fight for, Obama finally laid out his purposes and his principles. His approach has difficulties of its own, and much will depend on execution. But the president was unequivocal in arguing that the roots of our fiscal problems lie in the tax cuts of the last decade that we could not afford. And he raised the stakes in our politics to something more fundamental than dry numbers on a page or computer screen.

So, yeah, Obama is in. The Pre­sident of the Uni­ted States of­ficial­ly threw his hat into the 2012 elec­tion ring on Mon­day morn­ing, and the na­tion rea­cted with a re­sound­ing, "Oh."

What a mess.

It wasn't even two and a half years ago. Can you be­lieve it? Two and a half years ago, there was a de­tona­tion of opt­im­ism that ec­hoed ac­ross the co­unt­ry once the re­turns were in on that Novemb­er night. Peo­ple took to the streets here in Bos­ton, lit­eral­ly bang­ing pots and pans togeth­er as they dan­ced and shouted in celeb­ra­tion. The scene was re­peated in city after city and town after town, and even the "mainstream" media gus­hed from elec­tion night to In­augura­tion Day about the spec­tacular mo­ment in American his­to­ry we were all wit­ness­ing togeth­er.

Hindsight, howev­er, tells us today that much of that opt­im­ism was wild­ly mis­placed. The long shadow of Geor­ge W. Bush still hung low and dark over the land, as it does even now.

So far, our nation's budget debate has been a desultory affair focused on whether a small slice of the federal government's outlays should be cut by $33 billion or $61 billion, or whatever.

But Americans are about to learn how much is at stake in our larger budget fight, how radical the new conservatives in Washington are, and the extent to which some politicians would transfer even more resources from the have-nots and have-a-littles to the have-a-lots.

And you wonder: Will President Obama welcome the responsibility of engaging the country in this big argument, or will he shrink from it? Will his political advisers remain robotically obsessed with poll results about the 2012 election, or will they embrace Obama's historic obligation—and opportunity—to win the most important struggle over the role of government since the New Deal?

I was tooling around InTrade last night and noticed that the betting markets are giving Democrats much better odds of retaking the House of Representatives in 2012 than of holding the Senate. As they see it, there's about a 60 percent chance that Barack Obama will be reelected as president, a 40 percent chance that Democrats will win the 20-some seats they need to retake the House and only a 25 percent chance that they'll win enough elections to retain control of the Senate.

Organized labor's catastrophic decline has paralleled—and, to a disputed but indisputably substantial degree, precipitated—an equally dramatic rise in economic inequality. In 1980, the best-off tenth of American families collected about a third of the nation's income. Now they're getting close to half. The top one per cent is getting a full fifth, double what it got in 1980. The super-rich—the top one-tenth of the top one per cent, which is to say the top one-thousandth—have been the biggest winners of all. What is always called their "compensation" (wage workers lucky enough to have a job simply get paid) has quadrupled.

Over the same period, the composition of the labor movement, as it still defiantly styles itself, has radically changed. A few weeks ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that, for the first time, more union members are government workers, not private-sector employees. The Times quoted an official of the United States Chamber of Commerce as pronouncing himself "a little bit shocked," and he wasn't the only one. Yet this development has nothing to do with some imagined spike in public-sector unionism. It is entirely a function of the collapse of organized labor in the private sector. For the past four decades, the portion of the public workforce belonging to unions has held remarkably steady, at a little more than one in three. In the private sector, just one worker in fifteen carries a union card.

Will Texas school kids get new texbooks? It could depend on a roll of the dice.

Staring down the barrel of a two-year, $15 billion budget gap, state lawmakers offered up a no frills funding proposal this week. How no frills? Well, it offers no funding for new textbooks—this, in a school system where before 2009 students were using 12 year-old science textbooks. The budget situation has grown so desperate that state Democrats are floating the idea of legalizing casino gambling to address the shortfall.

Today, the raucous labor protests here in Wisconsin will reach their ninth consecutive day. Tens of thousands of firefighters, cops, service employees, pipe fitters, teachers, students, teens, and kids have descended on the ornate Capitol building in frigid Madison. They've marched outside, signs held aloft; they've screamed and chanted and banged on drums and camped out overnight inside the rotunda. Throughout the ruckus, one question has loomed large: How will it all end?

Last week, Lori Montgomery reported in The Washington Post that a bipartisan group of senators think a sensible deficit reduction package would involve raising the Social Security retirement age to 69 and reforming taxes, purportedly to raise revenue, in a way that would cut the top income tax rate for the wealthy from 35 percent to 29 percent.

Only a body dominated by millionaires could define "shared sacrifice" as telling nurses' aides and coal miners they have to work until age 69 while sharply cutting tax rates on wealthy people. I see why conservative Republicans like this. I honestly don't get why Democrats—"the party of the people," I've heard—would come near such an idea.

The media are full of commentary on President Obama's "failure of leadership." There is some truth to the critique but not in the way the charge is typically made.

Obama is not at fault for his budget proposals. But any fair examination of the news suggests that he is in danger of losing control of the national narrative again, just as he did during the stimulus and health care battles.

Dear low-income American,

I know times are tough. I know many of you saw your savings and home values hurt by Wall Street recklessness. I also know that, with official unemployment above 9 percent, it is tough to find a job, and many have been forced to choose part-time employment that lacks benefits. But as a result of extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires, the budget deficit has grown.

In its expensive, high priority campaign to get Congress to approve the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), the AFL-CIO made important strategic blunders that virtually assured that EFCA would end up as still-born legislation.
Its initial mistake was to inform members of Congress that unless it received government assistance by passing EFCA, it could not organize millions of workers who wanted to join unions, but were afraid that their boss would take revenge and probably fire them.
To make their case, union leaders displayed workers who had been fired for trying to join a union. They publicized the many ways that employers could intimidate their workers, from the minute they were hired and throughout their day at the workplace.
The net effect of the campaign was to display unions as weak, and no match for powerful corporate employers without government assistance. Tons of leaflets were distributed and countless rallies were held to convey this twin image of corporate power and labor feebleness. (One wonders what the AFL-CIO's self-abasement had on unorganized workers.)

As we mark the centennial of Ronald Reagan's birth, one of our major political parties has become imbued with the Gipper's political philosophy and governing style. I mean the Democrats, of course.

The Republican Party tries to claim the Reagan mantle but has moved so far to the right that it now inhabits its own parallel universe. On the planet that today's GOP leaders call home, Reagan would qualify as one of those big-government, tax-and-spend liberals who are trying so hard to destroy the American way of life.

The moral outrage of the liberal class, a specialty of MSNBC, groups such as Progressives for Obama and MoveOn.org, is built around the absurd language of personal narrative—as if Barack Obama ever wanted to or could defy the interests of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase or General Electric. The liberal class refuses to directly confront the dead hand of corporate power that is rapidly transforming America into a brutal feudal state. To name this power, to admit that it has a death grip on our political process, our systems of information, our artistic and religious expression, our education, and has successfully emasculated popular movements, including labor, is to admit that the only weapons we have left are acts of civil disobedience. And civil disobedience is difficult, uncomfortable and lonely. It requires us to step outside the formal systems of power and trust in acts that are marginal, often unrecognized and have no hope of immediate success.

The liberal class' solution to the bleak political landscape is the conference. This, along with letters and cries of outrage circulated on the Internet, is its preferred form of expression. Conferences, whether organized by Left Forum, Rabbi Michael Lerner's Tikkun or figures such as Ted Glick—who is touting a plan to lure progressives, including members of the Democratic Party, into something he calls a "third force"—are where liberals go to feel good about themselves again. These conferences are not fundamentally about change. They are designed to elevate self-appointed liberal apologists who seek to become advisers and courtiers within the Democratic Party. The conferences produce resolutions no one reads. They build networks no one uses. But with each conference liberals get to do what they do best—applaud their own moral probity. They make passionate appeals to work within systems, such as electoral politics, that have been gamed by the corporate state. And the result is to spur well-meaning people toward useless and ultimately self-defeating activity.

Jon Chait and Matt Yglesias are kicking around the idea that the passage of the Affordable Care Act fills the final major hole in the American safety net and means, as Matt says, that "the era of big government liberalism" is over and "future public policy has to be about ways to maximize sustainable economic growth, and ways to maximize the efficiency with which services are delivered."

I'd rephrase that slightly: I think the era in which the government's major commitments are the dominant issue is (largely) over. The Affordable Care Act doesn't make the government much larger as a share of GDP. Rather, it commits the government to guaranteeing something close to universal health care, even if the relevant transactions occur between individuals and private insurance companies. The reason the GOP talks about "repeal and replace" is that they don't think they can persuade Americans to undo that underlying commitment. If they did, they'd just go for repeal.

Americans want to know what happened to the economy and how to fix it. At least Republicans have a story -- the same one they've been flogging for 30 years. The bad economy is big government's fault, and the solution is to shrink government.

But what exactly is President Barack Obama's story or the Democrats'?

That Wall Street screwed up big time and the solution is to fix the Street? That Americans have lived beyond our means and now we have to tighten our belts? That our trade imbalance got too big and the Chinese have to spend more and we have to save more? That American companies have been outsourcing jobs abroad and must be deterred?

Without a clear story, there's no competition. Republicans win.

Another section not covered in the NBC poll featuring a surge of support for President Obama is Social Security. We know pretty well that the President is hashing out some kind of response to Republicans on deficit reduction for the State of the Union. Again, with this poll resurgence he probably feels a bit pleased with where things stand at the two-year mark of his Presidency. What's clear in the NBC poll is that the deficit is not nearly as important as job creation. And a separate poll from Celinda Lake shows that Social Security cuts would have a severely bad effect on the President's electoral chances:

The only reason we still have a payroll tax is because it's been specifically used to fund the two most successful and progressive social programs in American history: Social Security and Medicare.

Otherwise, we would have gotten rid of it ages ago. On its own, it's the most regressive tax imaginable: 12.4% of your salary (typically split between you and your employer) no matter how little you make, and capped at an annual salary of $106,800.

So for a millionaire, it's nothing; for the working poor, it's an enormous wallop. And worst of all -- especially in a period of widespread joblessness -- it is literally a tax on employment.

LAS VEGAS -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid branded Chinese President Hu Jintao a "dictator" on a local TV talk show on Tuesday night, a remark likely to make the start of Hu's first state visit to Washington, D.C., awkward for President Obama at a moment when the U.S. is trying to ease tensions with the Asian power.

Reid, Obama's top legislative ally and Congress' most powerful Democrat, was responding to a question from "Face To Face" host Jon Ralston about the December compromise that extended the Bush-era tax cuts. The recently reelected Nevada senator veered off on a tangent intended to compare the American and Chinese systems of government to give a roundabout defense of the importance of legislative compromise.

"Casino Jack," the movie about crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff, portrayed anti-tax demagogue Grover Norquist as just another member of the Washington fixer's club. But the filmmakers greatly underestimated him.

Abramoff went off to prison while Norquist, who heads Americans for Tax Reform, has stayed around to twist the arms of legislators in every state in an effort to make them sign no-tax increase pledges. Those pledges, if honored, would result in reductions in already dwindling appropriations for education and social welfare programs and many other needed services in states with huge deficits. "My goal," Norquist famously said, "is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

Recent decades have seen a massive redistribution of wealth, imposing the cost of successive crises on the poorest. Enough!

The end of 2010 brought renewed Washington rhetoric, media hype and academic me-too declarations about the US economy "recovering". We've heard them before since the crisis hit in 2007. They always proved wrong.

But recovery noises are useful for some. Republicans claim that government should do less since recovery is underway (of course, for them, government action is always counterproductive). Likewise, Republicans and many centrist Democrats claim that income redistribution policies are no longer needed because recovery means growth, which means everyone gets a bigger piece of an expanding economic pie. Recovery hype also helps the Obama administration to claim that its policies succeeded.

Is it a case of murder, or has the Western economy deliberately, if unwittingly, attempted suicide and nearly succeeded?

John Maynard Keynes was not just talking about defunct economists when he wrote that the world is commonly ruled by dead ideas, its leaders the slaves of the past. He said, "Indeed the world is ruled by little else." If he were alive today, he could name management consultants and business gurus among those responsible for the economic crisis of the present day.

As 2011 begins, people still talk about the crisis of the Western economy as though we have been the victims of a blight from nowhere, like Haitians in a hurricane or blackbirds in Arkansas. No individual is held guilty for anything—certainly none of the leaders of finance or business who insisted that markets know best, or the political leaders who empowered them.

Thus my suicide argument.

The junior Democratic senators are fed up, understandably so, with the institution's glacial pace. Liberal activists are demanding filibuster reform—now.

They should be careful what they wish for.

The reforms under discussion make complete sense. But they also wouldn't do much to address the fundamental complaint about the filibuster: that it effectively imposes a supermajority requirement for any Senate action. And as a pure matter of partisan politics, these changes could end up causing more problems for Democrats than they would solve, now and in the future.

Ralph Nader in a CNN poll a few days before the 2008 presidential election had an estimated 3 percent of the electorate, or about 4 million people, behind his candidacy. But once the votes were counted, his support dwindled to a little over 700,000. Nader believes that many of his supporters entered the polling booth and could not bring themselves to challenge the Democrats and Barack Obama. I suspect Nader is right. And this retreat is another example of the lack of nerve we must overcome if we are going to battle back against the corporate state. A vote for Nader or Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney in 2008 was an act of defiance. A vote for Obama and the Democrats was an act of submission. We cannot afford to be submissive anymore.

Here's a few quotes from this article:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called on President Obama and the Senate on Friday to solve what he called "the persistent problem of judicial vacancies."

"We do not comment on the merits of individual nominees," Chief Justice Roberts wrote on Friday. "That is as it should be. The judiciary must respect the constitutional prerogatives of the president and Congress in the same way that the judiciary expects respect for its constitutional role."

But he identified what he called a systemic problem.

"Each political party has found it easy to turn on a dime from decrying to defending the blocking of judicial nominations, depending on their changing political fortunes," he said.

The upshot, he said, was "acute difficulties for some judicial districts."

When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.

How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says "I don't think we need regulators," about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed? How, after the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations — the first raised taxes and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided over anemic growth even before the crisis — did we end up with bipartisan agreement on even more tax cuts?

The answer from the right is that the economic failures of the Obama administration show that big-government policies don't work. But the response should be, what big-government policies?

For the fact is that the Obama stimulus — which itself was almost 40 percent tax cuts — was far too cautious to turn the economy around. And that's not 20-20 hindsight: many economists, myself included, warned from the beginning that the plan was grossly inadequate. Put it this way: A policy under which government employment actually fell, under which government spending on goods and services grew more slowly than during the Bush years, hardly constitutes a test of Keynesian economics.

This is a wonderful narrative in which the bad guys (government) are revealed to be the cause of the crisis that has affect the good banks and the very very good bankers. The fairies, as well as the invisible hand, are all behind the curtain, where they belong.

"It doesn't" create jobs, the president said. No gray area there. The exact opposite of what's being claimed by Markos and other progressives.

Concurrently, the president has obviously been ballyhooing his tax-cut compromise with the Republicans, while commenting that the deal will create jobs -- not the tax cuts part of the deal, specifically, but the overall deal. And he's right. If the CBO numbers indicating $1.61 in stimulus for every dollar spent on unemployment benefits are correct, then extending the benefits will create jobs as the economy grows.

What's so difficult to understand about this?

"Take your bow, Mr. Obama. The top 1 percent of Americans possess better than 90 percent of the nation's assets. More Americans are working longer hours for less pay. When was the last time that the minimum wage was increased?

So you sell out on what you had presented as a stark litmus test during your 2008 run for the presidency. You said then that you would never sell out the interest of Americans on such dangerous policy making as the Bush tax cuts and the harm they visited upon America, beginning with sharply increasing the nation's debt."

...something doesn't compute.

Isn't a nearly $1 trillion bill full of tax cuts and industry giveaways what Republicans do? Isn't a bill with an absurdly generous inheritance tax break what Republicans write? Aren't Democrats the "party of the people?" Aren't they the party that believes government programs and policies have a role to play in leveling the playing field, or at least giving everyone a fair chance? Aren't the Democrats worried that all of this tax cutting now will starve the social programs they supposedly cherish? Do they know that they won't be able to push through a change in taxes in 2012 over GOP objections if the economy in fact improves?

Over the past few hours, the mediasphere has been ablaze with talk that Republicans and their insurance industry backers supposedly won a huge victory with a Virginia court's ruling that the mandate to buy private insurance is unconstitutional. On the policy merits, this seems to make no sense. At all. In fact, the Republicans pushing this court case may have inadvertently helped America take a progressive step on health care, if progressives can actually take advantage of the situation. Hear me out.
The mandate to buy insurance was always a huge giveaway to the private insurers. It guarantees them a pool of customers that will pad their profits for eternity, thus solidifying private insurance as the profit-taking middleman in the American health care system. The Virginia court, however, struck down the mandate but did not strike down the other mandates forcing the insurers to sell you insurance. For instance

In labeling Republicans "deficit hawks," I think the Times probably means to suggest that Republicans are the ones who are rhetorically more committed to reducing the deficit. But if you are going to go on actual policy ideas, it seems germane to note that Obama and Dems -- and not Republicans -- are the party who wants to end the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which would of course be better for the deficit than continuing them.

Yes, I know that Obama's tax deal, which is likely to pass with significant support from Senate Dems, continues the high-end tax cuts. But no matter how many times conservative pundits assert otherwise, the deal does not mean Obama and Dems endorse tax cuts for the wealthy.

The White House is privately circulating a new chart among Congressional Democrats -- sent over by a source -- that is designed to prove to Dems that the tax deal Obama got out of Republicans is really a victory for Democrats.

It's a pretty interesting chart -- a sign that the White House is gearing up for a full court press to sell the deal to angry House Dems who are vowing to block it:

In the short term, Obama did get more than most liberals expected. It is good news that he's focused on the need to give the economy another jolt, even if some of the measures the accord includes are not very stimulative.

The rest of the package delivers tangible benefits to the unemployed and to lower- and middle-income taxpayers. For roughly $100 billion to the rich, Obama got $197 billion in benefits he sought for the non-rich, $146 billion in business tax cuts to push job creation, plus an extension of the $280 billion middle-class tax cut. Many Democrats insist the Republicans would have eventually given in on relief for the middle class; the administration is not so sure.

These substantial concessions have led many liberal policy leaders—among them, Bob Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, John Podesta of the Center for American Progress and Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute—to support the deal, partly on the theory that any next deal would be worse. Other liberals would go along if the estate tax cut could be made less munificent.

And at least these negotiations have had the benefit of proving conclusively that the only people for whom conservative Republicans will go to the mat are the country's best-off citizens—and deficits be damned.

The White House has announced a deal on extending tax cuts for the rich, in exchange for restoring unemployment benefit extensions for those out of work more than 26 weeks. They are also going to cut the Social Security tax and give more tax breaks to businesses. I think this is a mistake.

President Obama's "deficit commission" failed, but it did make some terrible suggestions that would gut the middle class if implemented. Saying that the country is on an unsustainable budget path, the co-chairs suggested cutting Social Security benefits and raising the retirement age, getting rid of home mortgage deductions, higher Medicare premiums, getting rid of the Earned Income Tax Credit and other things. Cuts: $4 trillion. Claim: absolutely necessary to save the country from bankruptcy.

After subjecting the country to a months-long fight over a "deficit crisis" the White House is brokering this deal on cutting taxes --cutting taxes -- which only makes the claimed problems worse!

Bill Scher makes the case that we should embrace Obama's deal on the Bush tax cuts for the following three reasons.

1. The bill's value as economic stimulus
2. The bill bumps deficit hysteria off the stage in favor of the economy
3. The bill's political consequences are unclear, but its consequences for the jobless are not

So is this a good deal? It's a lot better than I would've told you the White House was going to get if you'd asked me a week ago. There's some new stimulus in the form of the payroll-tax cut and the expensing proposals. The older stimulus programs that are getting extended -- notably the unemployment insurance and the tax credits -- probably would've expired outside of this deal. The tax cuts for income over $250,000 are a bad way to spend $100 billion or so, and the estate tax deal is really noxious.

It's bad news for the deficit, though the White House and Congress are right to make the deficit less of a priority than economic recovery. And speaking of that economic recovery? This isn't enough, and it's not well targeted. The deal amounts to the White House throwing some bad money after good. But the end result is between $200 and $300 billion more in tax breaks, tax credits and unemployment insurance than there would've been if not for this deal (I say $200-$300 billion because of the uncertainty over what would've been extended in the absence of this package). That's better than nothing -- or to be more specific, better than backsliding.

Now these same people who have been screaming about the deficit for the past two years are scrambling to add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit to give tax cuts to those making over $250,000 a year -- the very last people who need help in this economy.

If Republicans want tax cuts for the wealthy, we should demand that they explain how to pay for them right now. We know how they will be paid for in the long run -- once Republicans are in the majority and flip-flop back to caring about the deficit, they will insist on "deficit reduction" legislation that slashes important programs that help working families -- all to pay down the deficit that this proposal creates.

Bernie Sanders isn't the only one who is in a fighting spirit after the recent "compromise" on the Bush Tax cuts.

Some progressives got so ticked off when they learned the Obama administration was going to cave on extending the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthiest Americans that they got organized, picked up their phone, and proceeded to tangle up and shut down not one, but two White House phone lines.

Ben Bernanke may or may not succeed in saving the economy, but at least he has the courage to try—and the honesty to tell the truth. The same cannot be said of our elected officials. Congress is buried under a crushing surplus of cynicism, while the White House seems paralyzed by a deficit of courage.

An expert on the Great Depression, Bernanke is determined not to be the Federal Reserve chairman who allows the nation to plummet into Great Depression II. Since our political leaders can't be bothered to do what urgently needs to be done—stimulate the fragile economy before it sputters out—Bernanke is using a rare bit of legerdemain called "quantitative easing" to pump $600 billion into the financial system.

Fed chairmen are usually as silent as the sphinx, except in official testimony. But Bernanke, facing criticism for his action, went on "60 Minutes" to explain why he's prepared to do even more.

Based on what The New York Times describes as President Obama's "substantial concessions to Republicans," Democrats in Congress have reason to fret. Not only did Obama agree to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, but he caved in to Republican demands to neuter the estate tax. 

Harry Truman strongly identified with a New Deal philosophy of government and took the Republicans head on by promoting a vision for the country that became known as the Fair Deal. Bill Clinton campaigned for president in 1992 as a "New Democrat" and sought to govern by pursing a "third way." Americans knew the governing philosophy they were getting.

Barack Obama campaigned as an aspirational candidate, which was enormously successful as a campaign approach but left people with different ideas about the direction he would lead the country and the strategies he would use. As a result, every time he faces a choice that might require a compromise with the opposition, the public doesn't have a sense of why one path is picked over another.

Washington lawmakers and President Obama seem pleased that they are close to reaching an agreement to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for two years and the unemployment benefits for up to 13 additional months. Unfortunately for the country, it was deals like this that got us into the fiscal mess we're in. Neither governments nor individuals can cut revenue and increase outlays without either taking on more debt or going bankrupt.