A Nihilist Ideological Cult That Cannot be Reckoned With
The House GOP has spent most of the day proving my thesis that the modern Republican Party is less a group of hard-nosed brilliant negotiators on behalf of the wealthy than a group of radical...
View ArticleWe're Screwed Through 2022
Many of my friends on the left seem to be hanging their hats on the possibility of overwhelming negative public sentiment against Republicans winning Democrats back the House Majority in 2014. That is,...
View ArticleConservatives refuse to pay their own bills
When conservatives inevitably attempt to extract concessions from Democrats in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, it will almost certainly be portrayed in the traditional press as a case of...
View ArticleDeficits Don't Cause Unemployment: An Economics Lesson for Marco Rubio
It's hard to overestimate just how foolish is Marco Rubio's assertion that the deficit causes higher unemployment. Those with basic macroeconomic literacy already understand this, but it's a pretty...
View ArticleWhose fault is the growing student loan securities bubble?
It's not quite as big as the housing bubble, the causes are somewhat different, and it's less likely to collapse. But still, the parallels between the housing bubble and the growing student loan bubble...
View ArticleThree big problems. One simple solution.
No need to pay attention to this. I'm sure everything will be fine.The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air jumped dramatically in 2012, making it very unlikely that global warming can be...
View ArticleHow to survive the next nine years of hell
It should be obvious by now that the Republican Party and the American conservative movement at large is incapable of introspection. Greg Sargent makes that perfectly clear in his examination of the...
View ArticleMitt Romney, just the latest throwaway politician of the Right
Much has been made of Mitt Romney's cold reception among conservatives just a few months after being their standardbearer for the presidency. The usual reasons given are that Romney was too liberal on...
View ArticleDeficits are the new Iraq
I mentioned a few days ago that the failure to prosecute the crime of the century in defrauding the world to invade Iraq is a moral stain that will never fully wash out of the fabric of society until...
View ArticleWhy the neoliberal consensus doesn't work
There is a comfortable conventional wisdom among elites today, one that exists not only in Washington but seemingly across the developed world. The expected norm for so-called "serious thinkers" is an...
View ArticleClimate activists must become economic activists, and vice versa
President Obama headlined a fundraiser yesterday at the home of billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer, the same person giving heart attacks to corporate Democrats and pliant media across the country....
View ArticleThe Grand Bargain is bad negotiating. It's bad eleventh dimensional chess, too
The two main arguments in defense of the President's new chained CPI Grand Bargain proposal seem to be that:1) the Grand Bargain is dead on arrival, anyway, so it doesn't matter except as a way to make...
View ArticleThe technocrats are incompetent.
Does anyone think this means tested Rube Goldberg Social Security slicing machine is actually supposed to work?The White House, fighting back against liberal critics who say he’s giving away too much,...
View ArticleParody Has Died
Words fail:Obama Called Their Bluff: Republicans Admit They Are Too Scared to Cut Social Security No so-called Democrat should be able to write those words without drowning in unintended self-parodic...
View ArticleWe can choose that workers not die in horrific mass accidents
Matt Yglesias caused a lot of justified moral outrage yesterday when he suggested that weak Bangladeshi regulations leading to mass deaths were economically justifiable in the open labor marketplace....
View ArticleDramatically increase Congressional oversight of NSA
With pundits quickly staking out sides in the "hero or villain" debate over Edward Snowden, it should be clear to all but the most ardent authoritarians or partisan Administration defenders that the...
View ArticleA surprising 1950s PSA about income inequality can teach us a lot
While doing some research on income inequality, I came across this little-noticed 1955 PSA on income inequality in America. It was produced by the "National Education Program," an institution created...
View ArticleDavid Brooks is a racist creep
It's amazing that in July of 2013, the New York Times would allow these words to appear on its public editorial column, courtesy one David Brooks:Islamists might be determined enough to run effective...
View ArticlePassing laws doesn't make a President great. Passing GOOD laws does
When asked why I spend so much time writing on a blog, one of my first responses is that political opinion journalism shouldn't be left to opinion journalists, especially those closest to powerful...
View ArticleThe world has failed Syria
As America stands on the precipice of yet another war, it's worth remembering how we got to this point. The list of imperialist actions and domestic reactions goes back hundreds of years, and many of...
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