Official White House Photo by Pete Souza –Obama heads to lower Manhattan on Thursday to push for financial regulatory reform. Expect a confrontational tone and a call for quick action in the Senate. –Hill aides are saying a motion to proceed could come as early as this week. – Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein and Ryan [...]
Jonathan Cohn’s blog, The Treatment, has been–along with Ezra Klein’s blog and Karen Tumulty’s work here (I’m still pissed at her for leaving)–an absolutely essential source of information about health care reform. Now Cohn is closing down shop. He’ll remain at the New Republic, writing about health and other topics–and I”ll be interested in reading [...]
Good news about the Pir Mohammed School operation–the subject of my Time Magazine cover story this week–from the front in Zhari district, courtesy of our distinguished guest blogger, Captain Jeremiah Ellis: Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats: FOUO Joe and Adam [Ferguson, our photographer], Sorry, I haven’t had time to write, for the last 72hrs I have been [...]
This week’s podcast features TIME Senior Correspondent Michael Grunwald and Washington Correspondent Alex Altman. Enjoy:
With the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing approaching on Monday, former president Bill Clinton gave an eloquent speech this morning at the Center for American Progress. Clinton compares the poisonous political climate that sent Timothy McVeigh to the Murrah building and the debates raging today. He warned political protesters that overheated language could [...]
I wasn’t planning to write any more about Bill O’Reilly, but it seems I have to do one more round of fact checking about The Factor. After I pointed out that O’Reilly had erroneously said Fox News never told viewers they could be jailed for failure to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, O’Reilly [...]
The Democratic National Committee has already pledged to spend $50 million on congressional elections this year. And now Ben Smith gets word that the White House will devote a senior aide to selling health care full time. Which senior aide will take up this responsibility isn’t yet known, but presumably they will do some of [...]
I mentioned earlier that the Goldman fraud allegations would likely be wielded by Democrats as an exemplar in the financial reform fight. Yup. (Emphasis mine): Washington, DC—Nevada Senator Harry Reid released the following statement today in response to SEC charges against Goldman Sachs regarding mortgage investments: “Millions of Nevadans and Americans are struggling every day [...]
This morning Washington woke up to reports on how the White House was going to go after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s opposition to the financial reregulation bill. “McConnell’s arguments that the Democrat’s plan for Wall Street reform will perpetuate bailouts is pure fantasy cooked up by Frank Luntz in a right wing focus group [...]
Stephen Gandel over at the Curious Capitalist has some more context and analysis on the SEC action against Goldman. Of political import: The first question was who was damaged here. The answer is all of us. First of all, the investors who bought the securities lost about $50 billion on them. Those investors were mostly [...]
