Politics
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Someone We Can Count On
The cliché criticisms of Obama are (from the left) that he is a naïve centrist, not the audacious liberal that Democrats thought they were getting, and (from the right) that he is a socialist out to impose government on every corner of American life. But the real problem is that he’s so indistinct no one
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Quote of the Day: John Cole
Not to go all Eeyore on you, but I’ve about abandoned all hope with the news the Democrats are going to cave on taxes. I’m astounded that they are going to fuck this up. Literally, they have to do nothing and the tax cuts expire. It will take actual work to fuck this up, but
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Dems: Party of the Rich
As 2009 passed into 2010 and government deficits ballooned, the worries of corporate America and the rich deepened. They saw unemployment rise and stay around 10% and a flood of foreclosures eject millions from their homes. They saw Obama losing support from his electoral base as economic conditions kept deteriorating. They feared that he might
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Thanksgiving Encounters
One of the commonplaces or cliches about conservatives is their devotion to given-ness, their sense of the "rightness" of the old-fashioned and their resistance to the "new fangled". But there's a truth there, especially when it concerns Sarah Palin conservatives. This "rightness" correlates in their mind as "common sense" because it's time tested and has
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It’s OK to be Tribal . . .
. . . so long as you're willing to work with other tribes on issues of mutual concern. Your tribe is the group with whom you feel comfortable because there is an assumed shared world view. People from different tribes can get along with one another, even be curious about one another, but they live
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Quote of the Day: Robert Kuttner (Updated)
The whole austerity crusade is the work of Wall Street and of politicians who want a high-minded excuse to bash government, or who mistakenly think that the Democrats got their clocks cleaned because voters fretted about deficits. The American Prospect recently published a definitive article by two eminent political scientists, Chris Howard and Richard Valelly,
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Stewart v. Maddow
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we
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Quote of the Day: JIm Webb
Webb has pushed for a onetime windfall profits tax on Wall Street's record bonuses. He talks about the "unusual circumstances of the bailout," that the bonuses wouldn't be there without the bailout. "I couldn't even get a vote," Webb says. "And it wasn't because of the Republicans. I mean they obviously weren't going to vote
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The Rhetorical Strategy of the Power Elites
Lawrence O'Donnell, now a self-proclaimed Socialist, went at it with "mere Progressive" Glenn Greenwald on Morning Joe the other day. At one point O'Donnell said that despite his personal politics, he knows that only 20% of Americans self-identify as Liberal while some 40+% identify as conservatives. So is O'Donnell right? Is America a hopelessly conservative