All Life Is Problem Solving

President Obama thinks that the best thing to do for an economy that has yet to turn around on jobs is to wait to see how the stimulus bill works, before seeking a second stimulus. This may seem reasonable, especially in the face of the widespread reports about opposition to a second stimulus from Republicans […]

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This talk by Jane Hamsher to Congressional Staffers on July 8th distills what this American fight for health care reform is about, and what is at stake. It also provides a good feel for the hard slogging that is going on to being forth a bill that will introduce real change and begin to break […]

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(From http://www.obamamites.com) At his first 100 days news conference this evening, President Obama received the following question from Jake Tapper of ABC News: “Thank you, Mr. President. You’ve said in the past that waterboarding, in your opinion, is torture. Torture is a violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions. Do you believe that the […]

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President Obama, both in his campaign, and in his Administration, has emphasized the importance of transparency in Government. This very day, as I write, he’s running “a world wide” on-line town hall to give people a chance to answer questions, hear his unrehearsed replies, and understand at least some of the thinking behind his views […]

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I owe the title of this blog to William Greider who, in talking about the present upsurge in populism in the US, said: “At the center of this story is Obama, who inherited the Democratic Party’s awkward straddle between monied interests and working people.”

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As we watch the Obama Administration work through the very real accumulated challenges faced by the United States, it’s becoming more and more apparent that this administration is very consequentialist in its decision making, that its primary current goal is to get us out of the mess the economic system is in, and that it […]

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Why was bipartisanship possible and successful in earlier times, while it’s unlikely to succeed now? In earlier periods of bipartisanship, margins in the Senate were smaller than they are now, and the legislative and executive branches were often divided between the parties. During the period before the Republican electoral takeover of the South; bipartisanship was […]

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