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Chris Hedges
$10.20
By Zeev Sternhell
$35
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White House / Pete Souza
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President Obama flew to Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s neck of the woods Monday to rally support for his health care reform package. Kucinich, who has said he would oppose the bill, flew with the president. House Majority Whip James Clyburn said Sunday that Obama didn’t yet have enough votes in his chamber.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — There is a pathetic quality to our discussion of deficits and fiscal responsibility because we never face up to how much we need government to do.
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Is it fair to call this a meltdown? The war in Afghanistan—and the media’s lack of interest in it—is certainly a subject worth losing one’s temper over. Rep. Patrick Kennedy had trouble using his indoor voice during Wednesday’s debate in the House.
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U.S. Air Force
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After decades of second-class treatment, America’s female aviators of the Second World War have been awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Although 38 of their number died in the line of duty, the women fliers received none of the benefits of male pilots and weren’t even recognized as veterans until 1977.
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AP / Ben Margot
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By Chris Hedges — Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying. How do we fight back?
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They may be in the minority, but Republican members of Congress far outnumber Democrats on Twitter. They’re also more active, tweeting about twice as often as Democratic lawmakers. House Republicans alone make up 50 percent of all tweeting members.
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AP
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By Joe Conason — If the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti carry any message for those of us fortunate enough not to live in those places, perhaps it is that government regulation could save your life—while right-wing ideology may kill you someday.
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By Ruth Marcus — Sometimes I think I’ve gotten too cynical after so many years in Washington. Then I remember the House Ethics Committee.
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There’s talk of single-payer in Pennsylvania, Bibles-for-porn in Texas and iPhones everywhere. Plus: the Arab Jew cultural connection, and why Republicans and Greens are so mad at Obama.
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Inside Citibank’s homophobia, how to clean art with tattoo removal lasers, and populism with brains. All this and more after the jump.
Posted on Mar 2, 2010
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White House / Lawrence Jackson
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By Stanley Kutler — Divided government need not mean gridlock. Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan made it work. Obama can, too.
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Why the brain forgets things on purpose, the ugliest fish in the world, and finding out how millennial you are. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Feb 26, 2010
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Why more old people smoke pot than they used to, what to do when your judge and prosecutor are having an affair, and why Obama’s assault on Wall Street is weak sauce. All this and more after the jump.
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Here’s why you should never e-mail your professor after showing up an hour late, give cameras to chimps or put a grouchy Dane in charge of your country’s tourism pitch.
Posted on Feb 24, 2010
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By Ruth Marcus — President Obama’s health care fight is not with the Republicans, but with members of his own party, especially those in the House.
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By Eugene Robinson — Now that Obama has finally put a health care proposal on the table, the Democratic leaders in Congress have only one rational course of action: pass the thing, and quickly, or risk their party becoming the loyal minority.
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AP / Elise Amendola
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By Chris Hedges — Now that unions have been broken, rapacious corporations like FedEx and toadies in Congress and the White House are turning workers into serfs.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — This week will determine the shape of American politics for the next three years. No, that’s not one of those journalistic exaggerations intended to catch your attention, although I hope it did.
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facebook.com
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A British insurance price comparison service is predicting that use of social media could eventually lead to increases in home insurance premiums. Membership on Twitter or Facebook could become just another variable in determining costs, based on fears that such sites let potential criminals know when a user is not at home.
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By Eugene Robinson — We’re the nation that put a man on the moon, so we can’t be stupid. We’re just pretending, right? We’re not really taking seriously the “argument” that the big snowstorms that have hit the Northeast in recent weeks constitute evidence—or even proof—that climate change is some kind of hoax.
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AP / Jack Plunkett
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Authorities continue to investigate why Joe Stack of Texas flew his small airplane into the Austin offices of the IRS, but based on early reports and a tirade the attacker posted on the Internet, it had something to do with taxes, big government, corporate crime and bailouts. (continued)
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pleaserobme.com
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A Dutch developer has created a website called Please Rob Me that takes Twitter data and compiles a list of people who say they are away from home and at a restaurant or movie—with geocoded information and the likelihood of an empty house being broadcast throughout the Internet.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If you want to be honest, face these facts: At this moment, President Obama is losing, Democrats are losing and liberals are losing.
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By Joe Conason — For voters listening to the Republican leadership over the past year, the most startling surprise was the shift in the GOP attitude toward Medicare.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Scott Ritter — Fear of a nuclear Iran has generated irrational policies that will only hasten such an outcome. Instead of listening to his own words, the president fell for that old lure, a great power with great bombs that tells others what to do.
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By David Sirota — For 30 years, Republicans and conservative Democrats have precluded factual debates about spending priorities for fear of antagonizing defense contractors, seniors and the wealthy.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The ferocity of the tea party movement’s opposition to President Obama is mystifying to political progressives. Most of the left simply doesn’t see the current occupant of the White House as especially liberal, let alone “socialist.”
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By Joe Conason — Preparing for what they hope will be their return to power in Washington, Republican congressional leaders have revived the fear-mongering and flag-flapping used by Karl Rove to win the 2002 midterm elections.
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By Ruth Marcus — I’ve been trying, because I’d truly like to see health reform pass, to find something nice to say about President Obama’s plans for a summit. Here’s the best I could come up with: It can’t hurt.
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Flickr / samirluther
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Thanks to the lousy weather pummeling the nation’s capital, Congress is taking some time off. The House canceled all business pending bluer skies, while the Senate convened for a whole five minutes Monday. As of this posting, there is a 100 percent chance of snow in the forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday.
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house.gov
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After serving almost exactly 36 years in the United States Congress, Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania has died. He had been in intensive care following gall bladder surgery. He was the first Vietnam War veteran elected to Congress. (continued)
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Some Senate Democratic moderates are petrified that Republicans will make terrible trouble if health care is passed through the “reconciliation process.” If Democrats are that intimidated by Republicans, they should just give up their majority.
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By Rep. Dennis Kucinich — We can still have health care reform in America. We need to take a short-term and a longer-term view.
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By Marcus Stern, ProPublica —
A transfer of billions of dollars in federal aid from public projects in Puerto Rico to one of the world’s largest liquor conglomerates over the next 30 years continues to move forward without any objection from Congress.
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AP / Charles Krupa
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By Eugene Robinson — When I heard Scott Brown, the newly elected senator from Massachusetts, describe himself as a “Scott Brown Republican,” I groaned. It sounded as if he’s coming to Washington to be part of the problem, not part of the solution.
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AP / Elaine Thompson
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By Chris Hedges — Don’t blame the Internet. The bloodless and soulless journalism of the traditional media left newspapers on the wrong side of the growing class divide and their readers.
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By Ruth Marcus — Chastened is not an adjective normally associated with Barack Obama, but that was the underlying theme of his State of the Union address.
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By Joe Conason — There are many reasons why Barack Obama’s spending freeze, which appears to be nothing more than pandering to the angry right, will not work as policy or politics.
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White House / Pete Souza
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It was his third address to a joint session of Congress in less than a year, and it had all the usual gestures toward bipartisanship, but Barack Obama’s big speech was not without sizzle. The president shamed Republicans for obstructing, Democrats for giving up and the Supreme Court for auctioning off our democracy.
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By Ruth Marcus — This won’t comfort Democrats mourning the loss of their filibuster-proof majority, but the existence of the filibuster is, on balance, a good thing.
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Original: Wikimedia Commons / Scrumshus
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Democratic congressional leaders are hitting the pause button while they figure out how to press ahead—if at all—with comprehensive health care reform. The most conservative Democratic senators have made it clear they oppose budget reconciliation, but then the whole point of reconciliation is to avoid the votes of conservative Democratic senators. (continued)
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s not enough to use variations of the word “fight” more than 20 times in the course of relatively brief remarks, as the president did Friday in Ohio. At some point, he needs to—metaphorically, of course—actually slug somebody.
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White House / Pete Souza
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As part of his State of the Union address Wednesday, the president is expected to call for a three-year freeze on non-military, non-entitlement discretionary spending that amounts to a small fraction of the budget. It’s a stunt, for the most part, aimed at soothing budget-conscious independents. (continued)
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The only proper response to the distortion of our political system by ideologically driven justices is a popular revolt of a sort deeply rooted in the American political tradition.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Eugene Robinson — If President Obama has decided to give up on health care reform, he should just come out and say so. Then we could all get on with our lives—those of us with health insurance, that is.
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Original: Reagan Library
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By David Sirota — In a state where Democrats outnumber the GOP by a 3-to-1 margin, little-known Republican Scott Brown defeated his rival by demonizing the government and taxes.
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By Joe Conason — If scored strictly by his legislative attainments, Obama is a highly effective president. In fact, the scrupulously nonpartisan Congressional Quarterly rated him the most effective president of the past five decades, as measured by congressional votes on which he took a position.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It turns out there were core contradictions in the promises Barack Obama made to the country in 2008. They caught up with his party on Tuesday in Massachusetts.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Eugene Robinson — There are important lessons from the past year that Barack Obama and his team had better learn if he is to achieve his goal of being a “transformational” president.
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