Hold Fast

Glenn Greenwald writes of President Obama’s trend towards caving to conservative fear-mongers who don’t want civil liberties and the rule of law to be preserved whenever terrorism comes:
If, in the face of “GOP demands” that Mohamed be denied a civilian trial, he again reverses himself — this time on the highest-profile civil liberties decision of […]

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Dan Froomkin has a must-read analysis of the recent stories in the DC press about how great Rahm Emanuel is. There’s a lot of good stuff, but this line stood out to me:
The fact is that after a campaign that appealed so successfully to idealism, Obama hired a bunch of saboteurs of hope and change.
Rahm […]

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President Obama’s calculus ”that by listening carefully and appealing to reason he can bring people together to get results” fundamentally fails to understand that Republicans will not do anything that they see politically benefiting Democrats.  The GOP is not a good faith partner. They do not want to pass comprehensive health care reform. Bringing them along for […]

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Duncan Black is 100% right. The White House has lead on health care reform to the place where they want to see the legislation being. That place does not include a public health insurance option because the White House does not want there to be one. They are not currently trying to get one and […]

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This really shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s paying attention, but the New York Times is reporting that the attacks on Google, other American tech and defense companies, and activists working for human rights in China and Tibet have been tied to universities in China that maintain close working relationships with the Chinese military and government.
It’d be […]

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Apparently Dick Blumenthal thinks chickenshittery will save us all. Blumenthal is in line to be the Democratic Senate nominee in Connecticut, in a bid to replace the retiring Senator Chris Dodd. Despite being Connecticut’s Attorney General, Blumenthal has repeatedly made a big deal out of the fact that he thinks all terrorists should be tried […]

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I think Steve Clemons is right about how President Obama should respond to the critique by Edward Luce in the Financial Times of his tight inner circle of Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs. Clemons recommends Obama take Luce’s piece seriously and evaluate how the White House decision making structure is failing, […]

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It’s remarkable: one year ago, when the Obama administration started, Democrats had fifty-nine votes in the Senate (though two were in the hospital (Kennedy & Byrd) and one, Al Franken, would not be seated because of frivolous Republican lawsuits). At the time, we were at an historic moment where big ideas were not only necessary, […]

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While I certainly think having a regular dialogue between President Obama and the opposition would be a good thing, I hope that if he’s going to give time to the GOP, he also gives time to Democrats, particularly progressive Democrats, for public questioning and debate. This can’t be just about engaging his conservative opponents. He […]

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Ending NASA’s control of manned American space flight and moving these responsibilities to private contractors sounds like as bad idea as is possible in the early twenty-first century. NASA has been successfully putting Americans into space for research and exploration for over half a century. Why would companies who are just beginning to experiment with […]

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