It was never a question whether or not President Obama can make a stirring speech. We’ve heard them before and I’ve tapped my foot to them. His failure lies in the delivery of those great-sounding items he outlines with inspiring rhetoric. We all know that in the Republican House of Representatives John Boehner, Eric...
Lost in the din of the triumphal declarations of the nation “speaking with one voice” calling for a Restoration of the Reign of George W. Bush, is the fact that on key policies — tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, privatizing Social Security and Medicare, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the...
Last March, when President Obama announced he was fast-tracking a bunch of deepwater oil leases, mainstream media commentators told us what a politically sophisticated move it was. He was showing the “courage” to defy his base among the anti-drilling crowd and when those dolphin-huggers screamed foul, he stood his ground. A few weeks later,...
The National Bureau of Economic Research tells us the Great Recession is “over.” In fact, it ended in June 2009! Hip, hip, hooray! The only thing this announcement reveals is just how out of touch, cruel, and compassionless those who view human society through the lens of quantitative measurements can be. Numbers don’t begin...
President Barack Obama appears to want all of his decisions to be 100 percent politically safe. The trouble is there are few meaningful decisions a president can make, especially on matters vital to the country, that are 100 percent politically safe. Take, for instance, how President John F. Kennedy got the U.S. Senate to...
“Of course people are frustrated,” President Obama told the Democratic National Committee over the weekend, “they have every right to be.” But I don’t know if he really understands the level of “frustration” out there. Democrats who believe that they can just give voters a laundry list of modest “accomplishments” going into 2010 are...
D-Day in the Class War
After a decade of stagnant or declining real wages, “bipartisan” schemes are proliferating to shift the burden of Washington policymakers’ own catastrophic mismanagement of the nation’s fiscal policies right onto the shoulders of working people. The press commentary has been abysmal. All “serious” thinkers out there on television or in print are in full...
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