Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s graceless statement regarding President Barack Obama’s reelection, where he stands by the Republicans’ “our way or the highway” philosophy of governance, proves that he and his fellow travelers remain as ideologically rigid as ever and have no intention of working with the president during the next four years. Despite...
It has become clear by now that the Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, views American society as an aggregate of atomized individuals each seeking to maximize personal gain; these “makers” owe nothing to the rest of humanity and are the true engines of all that is righteous and good in the world. The...
The 29,000 striking Chicago teachers are sending the message to Mayor Rahm Emanuel (and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan) that their teacher bashing and privatization schemes for public education have become so onerous and destructive to the teachers’ mission and profession that they have no choice but to fight back. In this epic struggle...
The measly 69,000 private sector jobs added last month and the shrinking job count over the past few months illustrate our “new normal.” At this snail’s pace it will take a couple of decades (assuming there are no new crises) before we get back to the “good old days” of the 2005-unemployment rate. When...
Nothing better illustrates the core critique of the Occupy Wall Street movement against the financial sector’s dominance of our political institutions than the spectacle of high-profile Democrats, like former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell and Newark Mayor Cory Booker, fretting over the “tone” of the Obama campaign’s advertisements targeting Mitt Romney’s days as a vulture...
New York Representative Anthony Weiner literally got caught with his pants down. The Democrats lost a liberal stalwart who unlike most of the rest of the pusillanimous bunch actually has a pulse (hence his passion for racy photos of himself in cyberspace). And the Republicans won a twofer: 1). The credibility of a loud...
The Republican House members who voted for Paul Ryan’s Ayn Rand wet-dream budget are apparently getting an earful from their constituents. And the earful isn’t coming from people wearing Bradley Manning T-shirts, but from crusty old baby boomers who probably voted for the GOP in the last election. Too bad their angst isn’t being...
The whole tenor of the next two years is going to feel like George W. Bush never left office. The GOP will have de facto control over the nation’s politics and agenda. If President Obama goes down the Clinton path of triangulating against his progressive base (as seems likely) then he deserves to be...
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...
The Reagan Centennial: Celebrating Reaganomics
The overstated celebrations and commemorations of the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth, with their razzle-dazzle of Super Bowl tributes and marathon deifying in Simi Valley, are fitting tributes to a president whose public relations guru, Michael Deaver, was a pioneer of this same kind of flim-flammery. But the Reagan Centennial’s flashy hagiography masks a...
Read more »