All Life Is Problem Solving

Chris Matthews’s Hardball featured a segment where Willie Brown, Joan Walsh, and Chris commented on the Brown/Whitman and Blumenthal/McMahon contests for the US Senate in CA and CT. After watching an exchange between the two CT candidates. Chris shook his head in wonderment and in the midst of some contemptuous chuckles said:

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Mike Konczal is writing a terrific series on the foreclosure crisis. The other day I read Parts 1-3 of it at New Deal 2.0. I recommend it as providing a very clear explanation with some diagrams about what’s behind the crisis, and a discussion of some possible ways in which could represent big trouble for […]

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Last Sunday, my son asked me what I thought about the WaPo article “Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tackles five myths about TARP.” Here’s my reply. There’s a lot of truth to the specifics, but his overall evaluation is way off because he looks at it by cherry-picking specific points, and also restricting his evaluation to […]

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A little while ago I did a piece on tweeting the fear card, and the attempts of certain supporters of the Democrats in this year’s elections to persuade dissatisfied and angry progressives that severe damage will be done to the country if the Republicans take over the House, the implication being that severe damage will […]

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Nobel prize winner Joe Stieglitz recently called for a second stimulus to reduce unemployment and get the economy working well again. But the Administration seems uninterested in pushing the idea or making it an issue in the election, because it has been unsuccessful in setting the necessary frame for persuading the public that its first […]

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The AP recently released poll results on how people feel about the health care reform bill. Commenting on it, Kevin Drum says: Atrios links to a Dave Dayen post that links to a report that says, “A new AP poll finds that Americans who think the law should have done more outnumber those who think […]

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We Americans have a problem. We’re supposed to be a democracy responsive to the people. But polls show that policies favored by heavy majorities of Americans don’t get legislated by either or both parties in Congress. Instead, bills are passed that a majority of people either don’t care about, or view as a betrayal of […]

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It’s been nearly 35 years since we’ve had a “tax and spend” political party. During the 1970s, the Democrats gave up fighting the Republicans about the “tax and spend” label, and the Carter Administration tried to escape from that charge by making very serious attempts to balance the budget. During the 1980s, more and more […]

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Earlier this month, Thomas Geoghegan wrote a piece for The Nation telling the Democrats the ten things they could do to really get the base excited, and at the same time do good things for the country. Here’s his list. 1. Raise Social Security to 50 percent of working income. 2. Let’s extend Medicare to […]

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This is Part Two of a critical review of The National Journal’s Debate on “Our Fiscal Future” between John Podesta and Douglas Holtz-Eakin with Jim Tankersley moderating, at The George Washington University’s Jack Morton Auditorium. This part provides more observations and evaluation on some of the propositions offered by Holtz-Eakin and Podesta. H-E: Eliminating tax […]

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