Hold Fast

I think David Dayen is spot-on with his prediction here. We are coming out of three straight wave elections and I predict we’ll see a fourth in 2012. People don’t know which side to blame but they sure know that this group of elites has failed completely. This episode over the debt limit only confirms [...]

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Over at ThinkProgress, Brad Johnson has a good post about the deficit reduction debate that’s been tied to the debt ceiling. He puts the political positions of progressives, President Obama, and the Tea Party side by side to draw out a continuum of recommended actions (or non-action). Johnson writes, “As of this moment, the president’s [...]

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Matt Yglesias writes in response to a broken water main in New York City: Are we suffering from a metal shortage of some kind that makes it impossible to take advantage of cheap lending to hire construction workers to fix broken pipes? If so, I haven’t heard about it. Instead, we seem to be suffering [...]

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Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field The Washington Post reports today in 2008 Michele Bachmann and her husband took out a $417,000 loan from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac only days before she called for the end of Fannie and Freddie. Just a few weeks before Bachmann called for dismantling the programs during [...]

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At Crooked Timber, Joe Quiggin thinks it’s time for the policy debate to do like Willie Sutton and go where the money is: the wealthiest 1% in the US. Quiggin writes, “The wealth that has accrued to those in the top 1 per cent of the US income distribution is so massive that any serious [...]

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Writing about specific proposals being floated about how to get Congress to address the looming debt ceiling is a bit crazy. There’s a new band of pols, a new gang or a new Grand Bargain (none of which are ever grand or bargains) every 36 hours. But the latest one is pretty remarkable, in that [...]

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In the midst of a very solid recap of what’s gone on with the debt ceiling and deficit reduction debates, Elizabeth Drew at the New York Review of Books addresses the key flaw of Republican attacks on plans which increase taxes on the rich as socialism: Finally, the antitax position of many conservatives would seem [...]

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New Deal 2.0, the Roosevelt Institute’s blog, had a series of posts up yesterday marking the one year anniversary of Dodd-Frank, legislation that was in response to the 2008 financial collapse and ostensibly sought regulatory reforms to minimize the ongoing consequences of the financial collapse and prevent such a collapse from happening again. Except it [...]

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Cenk Uygur of MSNBC does his best Howard Beale impersonation, explaining to his audience why he turned down an offer from MSNBC that would have paid him more money to have a smaller role that prevented him from being as hard on the Obama administration and other Democrats as he currently is. As Cenk puts [...]

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Great video of a speech by Senator Bernie Sanders on the class war being waged by elites on the middle class overlayed on a temporary art piece by artists Ligorano/Reese that was on display last month. The actual structure took 8 hours to fall apart, which is substantially longer than the current class war has [...]

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