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Robert Borosage, Campaign for America's Future co-director; William McNary, president of USAction; and Jane Hamsher, editor of FireDogLake, explained in a teleconference with reporters why they have launched an offensive targeting conservative Democrats who have indicated they may block key portions of President Obama's budget priorities.

“We are been pretty unhappy to see many often-conservative Democrats – New Democrats, Blue Dogs, etc. --suggesting that they are beginning to have doubts about the president’s program and are ready to move against it," Borosage said. “We think it is very important that they hear from their constituents and not simply from their contributors.”

McNary said that conservative Democrats can't be allowed to be "the unwitting accomplices of the obstructionists who have only declared that they want the president to fail." Using a football analogy, McNary said that if President Obama is the quarterback, "we need to block" so that he has room to maneuver his agenda through Congress.

"This is primarily an education campaign," said Hamsher, who has been leading an "accountability" project on FireDogLake that tracks how Congress is measuring up to the pledges President Obama and Democrats made during the 2008 campaign. "It is fortunate that several of members are up for re-election, because that is they time when they are listening to their constituents and hearing what they care about. I think if we make people aware of what’s going on, then they can decide for themselves."

The Campaign for America's Future has launched a website that lists conservative Democrats, makes it easy to send members emails or make calls, and contains links to up-to-date information on their actions.

Underneath the comity displayed at the White House health care summit, fault lines between progressives and insurance lobbyists were clear, especially on the issue of whether we provide the choice of a public health insurance plan to compete against private plans. That's what health care blogger Richard "R.J." Eskow (Huffington Post and Sentinel Effect) told listeners of The LiberalOasis Radio Show, heard on WHMP in Western MA.

We won't know until perhaps April what President Barack Obama's budget proposal really means for the military and the possibility of serious savings from scrubbing wasteful spending. That's what National Priorities Project Executive Director and budget expert Jo Comerford tells us on the LiberalOasis Radio Show (airing on WHMP in Western MA.) This week's edition breaks down the budget, with Comerford analyzing the military side, and blogger David Dayen exploring the transformational aspects on the domestic side, particularly regarding health care, energy and education.

For more detail on the military component of the budget, check out Armand Biroonak's post, "Push To Cut Defense Waste."

As the right continues its campaign to slander the Obama administration's efforts to stem the foreclosure crisis, ACORN officials are mounting a vigorous defense.

Austin King, director of the ACORN Financial Justice Center, makes the case for the administration's plan as well as for a House bill that will allow bankruptcy courts to rewrite the principal of mortgages to make them more affordable and keep people in their homes. That bill was scheduled to be voted on February 26, where King said he expected easy passage. The real fight will come up in the Senate, where the battle will be to win the votes of centrist senators in both parties.

"The foreclosure crisis is at the heart of the economic crisis," King says, adding that the key conservative failure of the Bush administration was rushing to aid Wall Street but failing to immediately address the foreclosure crisis. If it had faced the foreclosure crisis first, he said, "I have no doubt we would not be in the broader economic crisis we are in today."

Was Eric Holder, the first African American to serve as Attorney General, guilty of a poor choice of words when he said that America is "a nation of cowards" when it comes to race? Yes, says Roger Wilkins, history professor at George Mason University and the first African American to be appointed to a senior-level position at the Justice Department during the Johnson administration. But Wilkins agrees that Holder is right that the nation has a lot of unfinished work on racial matters—and the controversy surrounding a recent racist cartoon in the New York Post is just the latest proof.

While some people may disagree with how Holder characterized race relations in the United States, Wilkins says in this interview, "we shouldn't be able to walk away from Holder's thing by saying 'Oh, Jesus, that was really stupid; he shouldn't have said that; he didn't have to do that right away.' But that's wrong. He did it because he's observed something in his lifetime as a black man in America, and he said it and that's why we should be doing what we're doing, having a conversation about it, writing about it."

Wilkins explains why that New York Post cartoon must continue to be denounced "in the strongest possible way." He also explains why he feels that the progressive movement is not doing enough to address continuing racism in America. "I think [the progressive movement] feels it is pure, that it has crossed over to the promised land. ...They think it's over. On the other hand, black people want to say, 'It's not over. Are you kidding me? Let me tell you what happened to me last Thursday.'"

Wilkins, who has also been a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a board member of the Campaign for America's Future.

In advance of President Obama’s “fiscal responsibility summit” next week, prominent economists and experts on Social Security and Medicare conducted a news conference call with reporters to discuss a progressive approach to achieving a long-term responsible federal budget. Participating on the call with Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, was James Galbraith, economist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Nancy Altman, former top assistant to Alan Greenspan on the 1983 Social Security Commission; and Dean Baker, co- director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The campaign that the Peterson Foundation has launched around what it calls the $56 trillion "threat" of unfunded health care and Social Security obligations is "misplaced and much too narrow," says Miles Rapoport, the president of Demos. It's imperative that progressives start presenting a different side of the argument, and Rapoport says in this interview that there are good examples beyond our shores of countries that are using the right approach.

Rapoport cites as one example France, which does have higher taxes than the United States but provides a more secure economic foundation in which both workers and businesses can thrive. This, Rapoport explains, is "a high road to fiscal responsibility" in contrast to the road that would invariably lead to greater economic insecurity and less shared prosperity.

As for the United States, Rapoport explains why "we don't need just a stimulus package...we need a fundamental economic restructuring" that enables our economy to evolve into "a public purpose economy."

Rapoport is one of the panel moderators at the "Thinking Big, Thinking Forward" conference in Washington on February 11.

Scott Lilly, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, answers questions about the findings in his report, "Pumping Life Into the U.S. Economy," and explains why an economic recovery package should be much larger than the one being proposed by the Obama administration.

Economic Policy Institute president Lawrence Mishel puts in context the January 9, 2009 unemployment report, which recorded an unemployment rate of 7.2 percent. "We are facing an economic catastrophe," he says in this interview, because of the "anything-goes" economic policies of the Bush administration, which relied on top-end tax cuts that did not succeed in generating job growth or working-class wage growth even in good times. Mishel makes the case against a continuation of tax-cut-oriented conservative economic policies.