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Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman
By Mary Tillman with Narda Zacchino
Hardcover $17.13
$35
$23
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By Joe Conason — Listening to the president’s critics, it would be easy to believe that Obama is responsible for the deficits, bailouts, bonuses, nationalized institutions and careening markets. It would be easy to believe but it’s entirely false.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The most significant moment of Obama’s news conference concerned taxes: his defense of proposed limits on the benefits that the well-off get for their charitable contributions and mortgage payments.
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By Amy Goodman — Twenty years ago, the Exxon Valdez supertanker spilled at least 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s pristine Prince William Sound. The consequences of the spill were epic and continue to this day, impacting the environment and the economy.
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By Marie Cocco — Obama needs to stop straddling and to threaten to veto any cockamamie tax scheme that emerges from Congress as retribution for the repulsive bonuses handed out at American International Group.
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visitbulgaria.info
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Having succeeded in dispensing tens of millions of dollars to company executives last week as the country—and Congress—cried foul, the insurance titan is now suing the government to reclaim millions in taxes. Apparently AIG officials believe they paid the IRS too much and now are demanding a huge tax rebate.
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By Eugene Robinson — The treasury secretary may indeed be the hardest-working man in Washington. But in order to survive, let alone succeed, he’s going to have to make a more convincing case that he’s part of the solution and not part of the problem.
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By Amy Goodman — Taxpayers’ bailout money for AIG bonuses has rightfully provoked a massive backlash against AIG, Wall Street, President Barack Obama and his economic advisers, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers.
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By Eugene Robinson — The last thing the surgeon said to me before they rolled me into the operating room was, “You know, if you and Obama had your way with health care, it wouldn’t be me doing this operation. It would just be some guy.”
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By Marie Cocco — An idea that has been around for years now has reached that rarest of moments: There is a political environment that should, if reason prevails, produce legislation to require the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The House this week is expected to vote to expand civilian service, and the Senate will soon take up a similar bill. This issue holds the promise of producing that much prized but elusive Washington commodity: a large bipartisan majority.
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By Joe Conason — Things are bad, and very likely to get worse—but the Republicans seem determined to plunge us into a real depression, gambling that catastrophe would return them to power.
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By Eugene Robinson — Advice to solve the financial crisis before even thinking about health care, energy or education is either misguided or disingenuous. Fortunately, Obama seems to be ignoring all the chatter.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama speaks disdainfully of “ideology,” but there comes a time when first principles need to be articulated. Conservatives have entered this fight with guns blazing while progressives have hidden behind a Maginot Line armed only with the word pragmatism.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — While conservatives cry socialism, the president is trying to steer a moderate course. Moderation, however, may be the wrong recipe. There is something deeply disturbing about the drip, drip, drip of billions into the banking system with no apparent impact.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If President Obama’s primary task is to restore economic growth, he has also been waging a quiet, long-term campaign to ease the nation’s divisions around religious and moral questions.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Eugene Robinson — Just six weeks into his term, Obama has opened his bid to redraw the boundaries of our politics and expand the realm of the possible.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The well-off will pay more in taxes. And before the howling on the right gets too loud, consider that we have just gone through a long era involving a far less frank form of redistribution—upward.
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By Marie Cocco — For someone who spent much of the Democratic primary season running against the Clinton era, Obama sounds an awful lot like President Clinton.
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White House
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In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Obama acknowledged the dire state of the economy, but struck a hopeful tone as he expanded on his vision for recovery. Investments in energy, education and health care will be key, he said, as will an expanded bailout of the financial sector. (Summary, video and full text after the jump)
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Flickr/dsb nola
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Perhaps keeping an eye on the 2012 election, Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal has gone public with his critique of President Barack Obama’s proposed solutions to the country’s economic woes. ThreatDown!
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Flickr / geerlingguy
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While just about every state in the Union is starving for funds, a small band of Republican governors is debating whether or not to reject the stimulus bill’s cash infusion, citing concerns over future taxes. This California editor says good. Give their stimulus money to my state. It’s broke.
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In his weekly address, President Barack Obama hailed the stimulus bill he recently signed, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as “the most sweeping economic recovery plan in history.” Here’s what he had to say to back up this big claim.
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AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Bill Boyarsky — The national health care crisis, intensified by the recession, is so bad that nothing can be permitted to stop reform of the system, not even the implosion of the president’s health czar.
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Flickr / Jeffrey Beall
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President Obama on Tuesday will sign the stimulus bill, which passed without the support of a single House Republican and with only three votes from the GOP in the Senate. With battle lines that stark, lawmakers have tied their fates to that of the bill.
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At last, a revisionist takedown of our 40th president, portrayed as an empty suit too often lauded by the common people he betrayed.
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State Dept. / Michael Gross, cropped
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With his party holding 15 seats in the Knesset, Avigdor Lieberman of the ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu is poised to pick Israel’s next government. Lieberman would like a choice cabinet post in exchange for anointing the next premier, but he’s under investigation for allegedly laundering millions of overseas dollars.
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By Joe Conason — Having allowed his Republican opponents to dominate the economic debate, Obama used his first news conference to rebut them—coolly and civilly, yet without leaving any doubt that he can strike back harder if necessary.
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RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post Dispatch —
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What exactly was the point of that endless questionnaire Team Obama famously had prospective worker bees fill out? A fifth Obama nominee has run into some controversy, the fourth due to a failure to pay taxes, although in the case of Labor Secretary-designate Hilda Solis, her husband is to blame.
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By William Pfaff — Barack Obama in Washington reminds one of Diogenes in Athens, with his lantern in search of an honest man.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Republicans have been winning the media wars over Obama’s central initiative. They have done so largely by defining the proposal by its least significant parts.
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By Joe Conason — Mythology is overshadowing history in the debate over Obama’s plan to stimulate the depressed economy. Excessive airtime is devoted to the prejudices of cable hosts and radio personalities who regurgitate ideas they barely understand.
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Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant —
Posted on Feb 4, 2009
READ MORE 
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By Marie Cocco — The reason you are such a big story is that you’ve stolen our money. Or at least that’s how most of the country sees it. You think those auto executives looked bad when they flew into Washington on their private jets? Just you wait.
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Flickr / Obama-Biden Transition Project
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President Obama blitzed the networks Tuesday to say “I screwed up.” Three of Obama’s high-profile nominees had failed to pay all the taxes they owed. Two were forced to withdraw from consideration earlier Tuesday. The president said he wanted to “send a message that there aren’t two sets of rules—you know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes.”
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By Marie Cocco — No need to fumble for words that sum up the stew of hypocrisy, arrogance and insiderism that is the unfolding saga of Tom Daschle. This is the audacity of audacity.
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By David Sirota — Intragovernmental squabbling probably makes the conflict-averse Obama uncomfortable. But the “make him do it” dynamic could finally bring the center of Washington’s political debate closer to the progressive center of American public opinion.
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By Eugene Robinson — Unbeknown to the House Republicans who voted unanimously against President Obama’s stimulus package, we are in the midst of a rare fundamental shift in American politics.
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By Marie Cocco — After eight years of trickle-down tax cuts that pushed the prosperous up and left most everyday Americans sliding further down, the stimulus bill now moving swiftly through Congress is more than a reversal of political course. Let’s hope it’s not too late.
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Wikimedia Commons / Presidencia de la Nación Argentina
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Timothy Geithner may be a tax dodger who helped funnel taxpayer funds to his banking buddies, but we need that kind of cunning right now. That’s the thinking on Capitol Hill, anyway. The Senate confirmed President Obama’s pick to head Treasury on Monday, over the grumbles of 34 senators.
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nation.co.ke
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Without skipping a beat, once-troubled financial entities are continuing to spend big to lobby Congress as they pocket billions in TARP bailout money. The lobbying is defended by the bail-outted firms as a “transparent and effective way” to be heard on policy issues.
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By Marie Cocco — Remember this, President Obama: There are few Washington traditions as annoying as the cultish worship of bipartisanship, for it ignores the simple fact that sometimes one party gets things disastrously wrong.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The Bush administration’s specific failures—in foreign and domestic policy and on matters related to civil liberties—are clear enough. Yet the deeper cause of the public’s disaffection goes beyond these specifics.
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Flickr / jphilipg
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There will be negotiation, revision and capitulation, but the basic guts of the Democrats’ $825 billion stimulus package are out in the open. There’s billions for infrastructure, billions for schools and billions for you and me. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) responded by saying “Oh. My. God,” which we’ll take to mean, “Praise Jesus! The Democrats have done it again.”
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Flickr / exfordy
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By Joe Conason — Would it be rude to ask whether the Republicans have any new proposals to save the country from this worsening recession? If not, they should halt their reactionary opposition to Barack Obama’s stimulus plan.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama has made it hard for anyone to pin him down philosophically. So when he raises his hand on Tuesday, exactly what can the American people expect?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The substantive issues surrounding an economic stimulus are clearer than the politics of getting it passed fast. Here’s how Obama is trying to weave the politics and the substance together.
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By Marie Cocco — Much of the business-tax package Obama contemplates fails his own test of cutting business taxes “where it makes sense and is going to work.”
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — While Republicans are looking inward and focusing on appeals to the party’s activist base, Obama wants Democrats to concentrate their energies on recently acquired political terrain and the new converts who were central to his party’s sweep last year.
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Dead Man Walking, 20 Years On
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