All Life Is Problem Solving

He’ll deserve the credit, he’ll deserve the blame, and Harry Mason Reid, not Nikolai Ivanovitch Lubachevski, is his name. And don’t let him try to tell you any differently, because it’s just not so. Here’s the way things can play out now. Harry Reid, under cover of merging the Senate HELP and Finance Committee bills, […]

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ralphbon asks: ”In the days and weeks following 9/11 did any legislator insist that we bring the perpetrators of that slaughter to justice, but only if we do it in a deficit-neutral fashion?” I thought this was a great question and merited creating lots of variations and also some statements about “deficit neutrality.” So, here […]

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When the Democrats, at the start of the present session, organized the Senate without changing the procedural rule allowing for the filibuster, and requiring a cloture vote of 60 members to end one, they took on responsibility for giving Republicans and blue dogs inordinate influence over the legislative process. The filibuster is a long-standing tradition […]

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Olympia Snowe, our modern-day Hamlet, decided to vote in favor of getting the Baucus bill out of committee. This insignificant action in itself (if she had voted against the bill it still would have passed in committee 13-10), was celebrated by the MSM all day long today, as the coming of at least a bit […]

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How many times do they have to prove it? These health insurance companies are just no good. You can’t negotiate with them. They have to get everything they want, or they’ll take their marbles and go home. After all, they’re the princes of the earth. They’re entitled! Today, the health insurance companies, through AHIP, released […]

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Cenk Uygur writes about the importance of questions, rather than answers, in changing the conversation in a way that is favorable to Democratic ideas, and also praises Alan Grayson and Michael Moore for bringing up two questions that have changed the political conversation in ways that put the Republicans on the defensive. In saying that […]

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Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy Alan Grayson’s been making waves lately. His calling out members of the Republican Party as “foot-dragging, knuckle-dragging neanderthals,” was good for a laugh. And then, when they howled and demanded an apology, he refused to apologize to them, but, instead, said that he […]

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Over the past few days, there’s been a great deal of moral protest, outrage, and even fury expressed at Firedog Lake and The Seminal about the “opt-out” compromise. The basis of the outrage is the idea that we all ought to stand together in health care reform, and insist on the idea of “everybody in, […]

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The Federal Government has three independent and theoretically co-equal branches. But presently it is unbalanced, and the chief source of the imbalance is the US Congress. Congress is either a very weak, or a very strong institution, depending on one’s perspective. If you’re opposed to the status quo, and interested in blocking legislation changing things, […]

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When I listen to various learned men talk about what we ought to do in Afghanistan, I get really bugged. Everybody takes a position about what we ought to do and bases it on their expectations about what will happen if we do what they want us to, versus what will happen if we do […]

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