Sure, McCain’s had two primary opponents for months, but this one is so big that one of those original challengers — Minutemen Civil Defense Corps. founder Chris Simcox — actually stepped down and endorsed the new challenger. The newcomer isn’t really all that new, former Arizona Rep. J. D. Hayworth, who lost his seat in [...]
In case anyone was wondering what an earth happened last week with the jobs bill hokey pokey, here’s a time.com story from me looking into what went on behind the scenes. The most troubling aspect of all this? That Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin are apparently further screwing up a screwed up Senate in their [...]
In a high-ceilinged, gilded room at the Mayflower Hotel, renowned economic minds gathered on Tuesday to discuss the problem of fiscal excess — and the ensuing black hole of debt into which America has been sucked. Clarity, not to mention consensus, was in limited supply. Panelists, invited by the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform, disagreed [...]
I got a chuckle out of this line from Howard Fineman’s piece this week on Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. As the GOP leader there, McConnell strands Democrats in snowdrifts of parliamentary procedure and nasty talking points. “We are not just reflexively looking for areas where there will be no progress,” he assured me. Having [...]
Paul Blumenthal, over at the Sunlight Foundation, has done a deep dive into public records detailing the close relationship between the White House and PhRMA, the drug lobby powerhouse that Obama used as Example A of what was wrong with politics in 2008. As is the habit of modern Internet work, he introduces his journalism [...]
This viewer found it tame, charming in an earnest kind of way, and ultimately pro-choice–as in pro-choices about how to deal with a pregnancy, not pro-abortion rights. But a Barna Group poll of 1,000 Super Bowl viewers found that most people didn’t quite know what to make of the ad. Nearly 80% thought it presented [...]
The only real surprise for me in this story was: Mitt Romney flies coach?????
NPR’s Julie Rovner gives us the history of the individual mandate: For Republicans, the idea of requiring every American to have health insurance is one of the most abhorrent provisions of the Democrats’ health overhaul bills. “Congress has never crossed the line between regulating what people choose to do and ordering them to do it,” [...]
