Tag Archive
There’s No Good News for Democrats Because There’s No Good News
“All politics are local,” Tip O’Neill famously said, and the political smoke signals being sent up locally going into the 2010 midterms all point to systematic failure on the part of the governing party. Democratic constituencies have been forced to sit back while the politicians they elected are helpless in the face of an unprecedented… »
Robert Gibbs Blew It
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs showed poor press management skills in handling the whole Shirley Sherrod saga. He allowed the media frame to shift quickly to the missteps of the administration rather than emphasizing the underhanded, contrived, and racist actions of Andrew Breitbart and his fellow travelers at Fox News.
Instead of explaining to the… »
Afghanistan Again
After nine years of war the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan lacks support at home and is widely recognized as a drain on the domestic economy in a time of severe economic contraction. The billions of dollars in U.S. economic assistance to the Hamid Karzai government has created an unsustainable class of Afghans who are dependent… »
Michael Tomasky’s Despairing Take on American History
In a recent piece in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, titled “Against Despair: How Our Misreading of History Harms Progressivism Today,” Michael Tomasky notes how The Huffington Post sometimes evokes Franklin D. Roosevelt in its assessment of President Barack Obama, which tells him something about “the way liberals interpret and talk about history.” (3) Tomasky… »
Obama’s “Fireside Chat” (FDR or Jimmy Carter?)
For well over a year now I’ve been wondering why President Barack Obama, (who is a talented communicator and a student of history), failed to recognize Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s example of the necessity of speaking directly to the American people. Tonight, at long last, Obama gave his first “fireside chat.” He should have done so… »
Financial Reform: “Too Small to Succeed”
The financial reform legislation currently winding its way through the Congress is a step in the right direction but it retains too much of the status quo that brought down the economy in the first place. The key problem, as many economists have been telling us, is that the top financial institutions remain “too big… »
And Carter Though HE Faced National Malaise
The spectacle of British Petroleum literally killing off the Gulf of Mexico before our eyes while the Obama Administration apparently believes that BP is honorable enough to be trusted to dutifully clean it up is depressing beyond belief. Hearing Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal complain about the lagging federal response after he built his political career… »
Lloyd Blankfein: Still “Doing God’s Work?”
I don’t expect Lloyd Blankfein to say anything this Tuesday before the Senate’s Permanent Investigations Subcommittee that we haven’t already heard from Tobacco, Enron, and Blackwater executives. They always claim to be as pure as the driven snow, and to be just as “frustrated” by the situation as the public, and if we just weed… »
Peter Baker and David Herszenhorn: Wall Street Reform Reporting Lacking
The massive trading and swapping of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and other abstractions cooked up by the fertile minds of sociopathic Wall Street “traders” not only did nothing to lubricate the real economy through financial intermediation, but they helped bring down the entire system and cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
The role of the… »
The Rahmifications of the Obama Presidency
Peter Baker’s profile of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in the New York Times Magazine raises some interesting questions about President Barack Obama’s top aide. For Emanuel, it seems that all politics are electoral politics. He wouldn’t know a social movement if he saw one. Widely considered a wizard inside the Beltway, Emanuel… »