Hold Fast

Dan Froomkin does a very good job explaining all the ways that last night’s speech on BP by President Obama failed to be the turning point the White House claimed it would be. Froomkin concludes: As for inflection points, there may have been one on Tuesday night after all, just not the one the White [...]

[Read more →]

The New York Times editorial board captures the main question that I have which speaks to why I and many others are upset with the response to the BP spill by both the administration and BP. Fifty-six days into the spill and it is not clear who is responsible — BP, federal, state or local [...]

[Read more →]

Uttam Kumar Sinha has an op-ed in the Washington Post today about Tibet and its importance has the watershed for most of Asia. Sinha makes the case that the Chinese government should not be the only stakeholder deciding policies that determine what happens to water originating in Tibet. Sinha writes: China’s moves to encroach on [...]

[Read more →]

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has a really good post on how, finally, Obama is getting tough on BP and more importantly, how absurd BP’s assumption that they would not be held fully accountable by the US government for this spill has been. The upcoming meeting between Obama and BP executives seems to have them [...]

[Read more →]

What Glenn Greenwald said: What’s going on here couldn’t be clearer if the DNC produced neon signs explaining it. Blanche Lincoln and her corporatist/centrist Senate-friends aren’t some unfortunate outliers in the Democratic Party. They are the Democratic Party. The outliers are the progressives. The reason the Obama White House did nothing when Lincoln sabotaged the [...]

[Read more →]

What Markos said: The GOP establishment tries to nominate electable candidates, and gets sabotaged by the teabaggers. We’re trying to nominate electable candidates, and we get sabotaged by the Democratic Party establishment. We won in Pennsylvania, lost in Arkansas. You can’t win them all. But make no mistake — we made the politically smart move. [...]

[Read more →]

There are much more appalling examples of wasteful military spending, but I have to imagine $300,000 for a go-kart racing track in Guantanamo Bay is going to be held up as an example akin to thousand dollar wrenches for some time. I don’t expect anyone to be asking members of the military to practice austerity [...]

[Read more →]

On TPM, Theda Skocpol is given space to respond to Robert Reich’s case for President Obama putting BP America in receivership so the company would be forced “to use all its available resources and submit itself to full federal oversight and control.” Skocpol’s response is purely taken from a political standpoint: When a huge private [...]

[Read more →]

Chris Bowers: The lesson for the White House here should be to stay out of primaries. These stories are costing them a lot of news cycles, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars they sunk into Arlen Specter’s campaign.  Further, these primary challenges are actually helpful to the administration’s legislative agenda, as they [...]

[Read more →]

Sam Seder has a great video, calling bullshit on the conservative fears that the US is going to be the next Greece to leverage reduction of deficit spending. In the economy we are in, with 10% unemployment, the best way to get things on track is with a steady diet of stimulating federal dollars. But [...]

[Read more →]