Broadcast

washingtonindependent.com — Amid the clamor over the crisis on Wall Street, the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Rescue Program, or “TARP,” bill and the evolving collapse of the global banking system, little attention has been paid to the extraordinary credit extensions at the Federal Reserve. But these are now without parallel in Fed history, including during the Great Depression.

more »

thenation.com — The most important glue binding conservatism together is a shared sense that someone, somewhere is looking down their noses at them with a condescending sneer. And to conservatives, McCain has been too often one of the sneerers. That helps explain the strange McCain contortions Republicans have been forcing themselves into in recent weeks.

more »

truthdig.com — The leadership of the Catholic Church has launched what amounts to a holy war against President Barack Obama. Archbishop Timothy Dolan appealed to church members, “Let your elected leaders know that you want religious liberty and rights of conscience restored and that you want the administration’s contraceptive mandate rescinded,” he said. Obama is now under pressure to reverse a health-care regulation that requires Catholic hospitals and universities, like all employers, to provide contraception to insured women covered by their health plans. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League said, “This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets.” In the wake of the successful pushback against the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood, the Obama administration should listen to the majority of Americans: The United States, including Catholics, is strongly pro-choice.

more »

digbysblog.blogspot.com — It's a well-documented fact of history that for the past half-century at least, conservatives have used race resentment as a way of cutting the safety net in order to further enrich the already well-to-do. It's been a remarkably successful tactic, and one that is still being used with frequency to this day. One of the keys to the race-baiting attack has been to take the social malaise that develops in economically depressed communities and attribute that malaise to some in-born defect of the people of the communities themselves. But that program is now becoming a victim of its own success. As economic libertarianism has dragged down middle-class wages and benefits, suddenly the social malaise that has long gripped minority communities is starting to make itself felt across the entirety of America, including among working-class whites.

more »

washingtonpost.com — Republicans couldn’t stop President Obama from installing Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But they hope they can rein the bureau in by passing legislation. The House GOP is now moving forward with bills that would remove the CFPB director from overseeing the Federal Deposit Insurance Company and allow Congress to directly control its funding every year. The bills are DOA in the Democrat-controlled Senate. But the GOP’s new bills provide a clear guide to what is likely to happen to the CFPB if Republicans take full control of Congress and/or the White House.

more »

washingtonpost.com — What do Rick Santorum and Clint Eastwood have in common? Sorry, Rick, you haven’t made it yet as an Eastwood-style make-my-day cultural icon. But in different ways, Santorum and Eastwood have demonstrated the limits of both an entirely negative slant on politics and a pessimistic take on America’s future.

more »

huffingtonpost.com — Joe Nocera's op-ed in the New York Times yesterday deserves a response and a reiteration of the facts surrounding the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. President Obama rejected the pipeline's permit last month when the GOP, in a political stunt, forced his hand to approve it without even the final route evident. Let's put the rhetoric aside, and simply focus on the facts. Nocera wants us to believe that approving this pipeline is a matter of national security. He also seems to think that we should all be kicking ourselves because the Canadians are flaunting a tar sands sale trip to China. Nocera might ask himself how likely this oil is really to go to China from Canada if Keystone XL is not built. He might ask why the oil companies are looking to bring tar sands almost 2000 miles south rather than just send it across British Columbia for export to Asia.

more »

progressive.org — What a weird Tuesday it was, with Rick Santorum winning three contests on the same day that California’s Prop 8 was overturned. Santorum’s politics are yesterday. Gay marriage is today and tomorrow. But don’t tell the Republicans that. Santorum now seems to be the last hope of the anti-Romney crowd, and what an unlikely candidate he is. After all, he got trounced when he ran for reelection as a Pennsylvania Senator back in 2006. And for years, he’s been an object of ridicule for his primitive beliefs on sex and privacy. If Republicans want to lurch this far to the right, they can have him, but I’ve got to believe that a majority of voters will reject Santorum’s backwardness.

more »

prospect.org — The GOP presidential primary has offered some odd debates on who cares about the "very poor" and whether there should be a "safety net" or a "trampoline" to help people get out of poverty. Meanwhile, in Kansas, it seems Governor Sam Brownback is hoping to dig a bigger hole for the poor fall into. Between his tax plans and his approaches to school funding, Brownback's agenda overtly boosts the wealthy and makes things harder for the poor. While many liberals speculate this to be a secret goal, Brownback is hardly making a secret of his agenda.

more »

blog.prospect.org — The Senate, having struck its compromise, has gone home. The House, controlled by delusional Republicans, has gone home. Payroll taxes are slated to rise, and unemployment insurance is set to expire before they return in January. The compromise wasn’t just between the two parties in the Senate, apparently. According to Wednesday’s Washington Post, House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor met with Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell on Friday and told him they’d get the votes to pass the two-month extension deal he’d worked out with Harry Reid. But Boehner, who is turning out to be the weakest speaker since the House was first gaveled to order in 1789, couldn’t hold his troops, whose caucus meetings, by numerous accounts, increasingly resemble the pep rallies of cults that have lost all feel for how other humans think.

more »

blog.prospect.org — The common thread in yesterday’s unbroken string of Democratic and progressive victories was the popular rejection of right-wing overreach. The series of elections held across the country yesterday weren’t supposed to yield a coherent narrative. Yet a common theme emerged: Radical-right Republicans hit a wall last night all over the country, even on a conservative social issue in what may be the most socially conservative state in the nation. So can Democrats take some hope from last night’s results? Provisionally; sort of. If Barack Obama can make next year’s election a choice between his ineffectual moderation and the Republicans’ wacked-out lunacy, the Democrats should do well. If next year’s election is a referendum on his stewardship of the economy the Democrats will likely get clobbered. It’s clear that Americans have had it with Republican extremism. Whether that will be a decisive issue in 2012 is not yet apparent.

more »

grist.org — House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) recently announced his legislative priorities for the upcoming months, and they consist of the same old reckless attacks on health and environmental safeguards for all Americans. Creating an apocalyptically titled hit list of his "Top 10 Job-Destroying Regulations," Cantor takes aim at an astonishing 12 clean air safeguards, and five other labor, environmental, and health care standards. But problems with basic arithmetic are the least of the concerns with this "top 10" list. The House Republican dirty air hit list reflects a baseless and ideological tirade against clean air protections that would put Americans' lives at risk, while doing nothing to create jobs. American families cannot afford to see these clean air standards rolled back.

more »

nytimes.com — From the debates in Wisconsin and elsewhere about public sector unions, you might get the impression that we’re going bust because teachers are overpaid. That’s a pernicious fallacy. A basic educational challenge is not that teachers are raking it in, but that they are underpaid. If we want to compete with other countries, and chip away at poverty across America, then we need to pay teachers more so as to attract better people into the profession.

more »

nytimes.com — It’s beyond astonishing to me that John Boehner has a real chance to be speaker of the House of Representatives. I’ve always thought of Mr. Boehner as one of the especially sleazy figures in a capital seething with sleaze. I remember writing about that day back in the mid-’90s when this quintessential influence-peddler handed out checks from tobacco lobbyists to fellow Congressional sleazes right on the floor of the House. Mr. Boehner is the minority leader in the House and would most likely become speaker if the Republicans win control in next month’s elections. He has stopped funneling corporate money to his colleagues on the House floor. But nothing else has changed, except that his already outsized influence-peddling has grown. The amount of democracy-destroying money that manages to make its way into Boehner Land has increased to a staggering degree.The hack who once handed out checks on the House floor is now a coddled, gilded flunky of the nation’s big-time corporate elite.

more »

washingtonpost.com — Health-care reform is historic, surely the most significant social legislation passed since Medicare. But it is a flawed and conservative bill, akin to the reforms Mitt Romney championed as the Republican governor of Massachusetts. It gives the insurance companies millions of new customers with no public option or Medicare buy-in to help put a lid on costs. It sustains the outrageous law that prohibits Medicare from negotiating bulk discounts for prescription drugs. It sustains the exemption of insurance companies from antitrust laws. This reality — a historic reform that isn't strong enough to get the job done — is characteristic of the Obama administration, a progressive-centrist government in a moment that demands fundamental reform.

more »

washingtonpost.com — How historic is the health-care reform bill that President Obama signed into law? The bill only begins the long task of taking back control of the health-care system from rapacious insurance and drug companies. We must work to include a real public option and to eliminate the insurance industry's antitrust exemption. Leaders, activist groups and citizens must continue the fight to improve the health-care legislation's protections and fix its flaws.

more »

huffingtonpost.com — At long last, we saw this president leading, as only a president can. And we saw him leading as a progressive Democrat, finally admitting that no common ground with today's Republicans is possible, narrating stories we all can recognize about the human tragedy that is our current health care system. We watched Obama master the mechanics of legislative politics, cobbling together a majority one vote at a time. And we observed the Republican right reduced to sputtering frustration. What a splendid shift from the Obama who less than a month ago went imploringly to reason with the House Republican Caucus.

more »

truthdig.com — On Saturday, the vile epithet that is euphemistically called “the N-word” had been hurled at Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement, as he walked past the tea party crowd. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., who is also black, was spat upon. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who is gay, was insulted with the epithet that I guess should be called “the F-word.” Most Republican opponents of health care reform had the decency — and the political sense — to disavow the racist and homophobic attacks. Incredibly, some did not. If the attempt at intimidation had any effect, apparently it was to stiffen Democrats’ resolve.

more »

truthout.org — Yes, we did. Finally, President Obama can use those words. The passage of health care reform provided the first piece of incontestable evidence that Washington has changed. Congress is, indeed, capable of carrying through fundamental social reform. No longer will the United States be the outlier among wealthy nations in leaving so many of its citizens without basic health coverage. In approving the most sweeping piece of social legislation since the mid-1960s, Democrats proved that they can govern, even under challenging circumstances and in the face of significant internal divisions.

more »

robertreich.org — Any day now, the Obama administration will announce $4.35 billion in extra federal funds for under-performing public schools. That’s fine, but relative to the financial squeeze all the nation’s public schools now face it’s a cruel joke. The recession has ravaged state and local budgets, most of which aren’t allowed to run deficits. That’s meant major cuts in public schools and universities, and a giant future deficit in the education of our people.

more »

truthdig.com — Richard Holbrooke's comments on reconciliation with the Taliban in Afghanistan, made during the recent Munich Security Conference, echoed earlier remarks by U.N. officials and American military commanders in Kabul that suggest that diplomacy might be coming alive on the Afghan front. This could be true despite, or in coordination with, a new NATO offensive in southern Afghanistan. For it to succeed, however, it has three enormous obstacles to overcome.

more »

tomdispatch.com — The tea-party crews don’t rail against Pentagon giveaways, nor do Massachusetts voters grumble about them. Unfettered Pentagon budgets pass in the tick-tock of a Washington clock and no one seems fazed when the Wall Street Journal reveals that military aides accompanying globe-hopping parties of congressional representatives regularly spend thousands of taxpayer dollars on snacks, drinks, and other “amenities” for them, even while, like some K Street lobbying outfit, promoting their newest weaponry. Think of it, in financial terms, as Pentagon peanuts shelled out for actual peanuts, and no one gives a damn.

more »

latimes.com — Since President Reagan began an era of tax-cutting in the 1980s, lower-class incomes have stagnated and middle-class incomes have increased only slightly, but the incomes of the richest Americans have skyrocketed. If the country is going to recover from today's economic crisis, Obama argues, that is going to have to change.

more »