All Life Is Problem Solving

Deficit Hawkism is the ideology that prioritizes bringing tax revenues and Government expenditures into balance ahead of other far more essential national needs and priorities. This “old time religion” used to be the exclusive province of Republicans, and was particularly important in hindering America’s recovery from the great depression of the 1930s and particularly for […]

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Matt Taibbi calls for a run by Elizabeth Warren for the Presidency in 2012. Why? For these reasons. 1) Obama, who ran a wonderful campaign for the presidency isn’t doing well. He hasn’t closed Guantanamo, or stopped incursions of the Government into civil liberties. He’s done a terrible job with the banking bailout, and hasn’t […]

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I think “groupthink” is a general pattern in this Administration. Not the simple groupthink that considers only one alternative and never discusses anything else, but a more complex sort of groupthink about frames. Obama looks at alternatives in deciding on policy, alright. And he appears to be rational in his consideration of them. So far, […]

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The intensity of debate on health insurance reform is building towards a climax as public and blogosphere pressure increases rapidly on the President and both Houses of Congress. In particular, Harry Reid is facing intense pressure, reportedly from the Administration, Nevada Democrats spurred on by blogosphere-generated telephone campaigns, progressive interest groups, and both progressive and […]

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A few months ago, Kip Sullivan wrote a terrific piece in which he called out the leaders of the public option community for not informing the public that the public option provisions appearing in the HR 3200 and Senate HELP bills were vastly different from Jacob Hacker’s public option proposal that PO leadership had been […]

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In my last post, I railed against the 60 vote frame and outlined the “nuclear option” procedure which allows escape from that requirement for passing reform and also makes clear that the frame that 60 votes are necessary is at best a half-truth, and at worst a lie. Of course, I didn’t expect that post […]

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A number of diaries at Firedog Lake today, frame the coming phase of the legislative process in terms of the need for 60 votes to get cloture and pass the PO. For example here’s a quote from one of today’s diaries by David Dayen: “Left out of this story is the fact that any amendment […]

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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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