Governing on Empty

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.

Battling Messages: Democrats Need to Enter the Fray

New polling with the same results:

China Currency, U.S. Jobs

The decision by China to keep the value of its currency artificially low has a direct impact on jobs in the United States. But that's just one of a host of issues the Obama administration and Congress must address to rebuild America's job base and reestablish its global competitiveness. We're calling on the administration and Congress to call out China on its currency manipulation—and to forge an industrial policy that strengthens our economy.

» Find articles and resources on our China Currency Showdown page

Why We Need To Revive American Manufacturing

For more than three decades, we have been shedding factories and manufacturing jobs—as well as the suppliers, contractors, shippers, trainers, managers and other jobs that go along with them. Here are some basic facts you should know about the state of American manufacturing, as well as the outlines of a progressive approach that will create new jobs for a 21st-century economy.

ALSO Read Scott Paul on the urgent need to revitalize American manufacturing.

Pay Teachers More

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.

The Return of Sanity

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.