Robert Borosage

The president rightly calls it a "no brainer." Direct lending to college students that saves $90 billion in excess subsidies to big banks and uses it to pay for college grants for poor kids and tax breaks for working families to help pay for tuition. This isn't complicated. The House passed it overwhelmingly last year.

The GOP: Grand, Old and Preposterous

The GOP is unable and unwilling to have a serious conversation with Americans about the fix we are in. Instead the party's leaders posture and pose, as practiced as a Gregorian chorus in chanting their poll tested messaging that makes utterly no sense.

Click here to tell your Senators: Pass a Real Jobs Bill Now.

Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mi) and chair of the House Judiciary Committee today introduced an amendment to the Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in Citizen's United that gave corporations the right to spend unlimited funds in election campaigns as a matter of free speech.

Edwards, a brilliant first term legislator with a long commitment to free elections, quoted Justice Lewis Brandeis: 'We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.' It is time we remove corporate influence from our policies and our politics. We cannot allow corporations to dominate our elections, to do so would be both undemocratic and unfair to ordinary citizens."

Amid the blizzard of statistics, trillion-dollar deficits, howls about impending bankruptcy, and Republican stupocrisy that surround the budget, it is worth repeating a little common sense.

To be thrown out of work is a crushing blow. Homes are lost. Families split. Children are terrified. Hopes are dashed. Today, nearly one in five American workers is without a job or scraping by on whatever part-time, short-term work there is.

We need a real jobs bill now, and a strategy that commits our government to revitalizing America's economic foundation, built around a commitment to full employment.

Tell the Senate: We need action on jobs NOW!

Last night, in his State of the Union address, President Obama pressed the Senate to act boldly on jobs. Now it's up to us to keep the pressure on, by making sure the voices of the jobless are heard.

Campaign for America's Future is sending out this call to every American who needs a job, and to every American who has a friend or relative suffering in this Great Recession.

Last month, the House passed a jobs bill that was a first step towards what is needed. Now the Senate is reportedly cutting that in half, and weakening it further. This makes no sense.

But last night, President Obama demanded the Senate pass the House bill now.

On the pending vote to confirm Fed Chair Ben Bernanke to a second term, a senior administration official is quoted as complaining about the lack of support from Republicans. "Someone's learned the wrong lesson from the Massachusetts race and it's not President Obama," he says. Oh, really?

"Our government," wrote Justice Lewis Brandeis, "is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example." And also by what its leaders frame as important. No one has greater ability to teach than the president with what Teddy Roosevelt called his "bully pulpit." This is President Obama's great strength. His is the voice of reason. Amid the noisy clamor of politicians, he is the adult in the room. His clarity and vision can embolden the meek, calm the flighty, and inspire the young.

Yet now, with his young administration facing its first significant political challenge, the president apparently plans in his State of the Union address to offer not vision but distraction. Instead of taking off the gloves and challenging the lies and distortions of his opponents, he is choosing to duck and cover -- which will only add to the public's confusion and his party's disarray.