August 2010 Archives

We all know that BP and the US government have been doing everything they can to get the blowout well off of the television news.  We've been talking for weeks how it was also to BP's advantage to not measure the flow from the well before killing it so they can argue lower fines.  Since Adm Allen ordered BP to set the "capping stack" on July 8th, they have gone through one machination to another...

This seems like a stupid question to ask. Of course extremism is a bad thing. Fox News has been making their living off of making the extreme seem palatable. E.J. Dionne wrote about that this week in the Washington Post. You can read the article in its entirety above, but there were a couple of excerpts I found very telling. He is right of course and I could just reprint his article and save a...

I was on BNN last night talking about the latest attempt by BP to kill their blowout well.  BNN won't allow embedding, so here's the link....

The focus of the hate-stirrers and Obama Derangement Syndrome sufferers on the right for the better part of this week has been on Michelle Obama's vacation trip to Spain. It started with this hit-piece by Andrea Tantaros in the New York Daily News in which the First Lady is referred to as "Material girl Michelle Obama" and compared to "Marie Antoinette." Tantaros whined about the "millionaires playground" at which the First Lady and her daughter...

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly quoting Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, after today's jobs report which showed a gain of 71,000 jobs in the private sector but a loss of 202,000 (143,000 of those census workers) in the public sector: "The economic case for more government action to create jobs is about as clear as they come." It's crystal clear. What is needed is government spending to create jobs, the much-maligned (by the...

My wife had the honor of jury duty this week and became one of the many people that get turned away because they don't match the thinking of the prosecution or defense. Of course, she has gotten further in the process than I ever have. Given that, the case she might have sat on is one of the many that cause of us to rethink the ways our laws and punishments work. I know many...

Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, is supposedly a rising star in the GOP largely due to his "Roadmap for America's Future." Ryan's Roadmap is billed as "an elaborate...plan that aims to erase the federal debt by 2063, simplify the tax code and significantly alter...Medicare and Social Security" and "an answer to those who have accused Republicans of saying no, while having no ideas of their own."Fred Barnes...

Attention teachers, police officers, and firefighters: Remember this when you go to the polls in November. John Boehner, the man who would be Speaker if Republicans take control of the House, considers you to be "liberal special interests" and funds to save your jobs a "special interest bailout." He also seems to think that his time would be much better spent on the golf course than in Washington voting on a bill to save your...

If you can't win a case based on the merits of the law, then the next logical step is to publicly discredit those we trust to uphold it, right?  That seems to be the Rovian strategy coming from Fox News - who preemptively published a bash piece by Gerard Bradley about U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker - alleging that his ruling was possibly biased because he is openly gay. I'm sure that most people would question...

Not that we needed any further proof of Republican hypocrisy when it comes to jobs and deficits, but there it was again yesterday in the cloture vote on a bill to provide $26 billion in aid to states and school districts.Here is a bill that keeps 140,000 teachers in the classroom instead of standing in line at the unemployment office (which is where Republicans actually want them to be, along with everyone else), doesn't add...