Back in February, Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan defended his "Roadmap for America's Future," which among other things would privatize - and inevitably ration - Medicare. "Rationing happens today!" Ryan revealingly protested, "The question is who will do it? The government? Or you, your doctor and your family?" Of course, he omitted the real culprit, private […]

One day before Friday's dismal jobs report confirmed the pace of the U.S. recovery has slowed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for the extension of unemployment benefits to "injects demand into the economy." But while the Republicans who have blocked the $112 billion package including the jobless benefits mocked her for it, Americans don't have […]

Refusing to extend unemployment benefits to 1.2 million Americans by adding to the deficit, Senate Republicans by a 41 to 57 margin on Thursday again filibustered the Democratic $112 billion jobs bill. As it turns out, most of the roughly $35 billion still needed to pay for it could largely come from a single source: […]

On Friday, Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan penned dueling op-eds on the federal budget deficit. While Greenspan warned that the "urgency to rein in budget deficits" is "none too soon," Krugman countered "many self-described deficit hawks are hypocrites, pure and simple." Which is exactly right. Only now, nine years […]

Over just the past few months, Republicans on Capitol Hill have defended predatory health insurers, corrupt Wall Street bankers and criminal coal mining companies. Now with word that President Obama has secured a $20 billion, independently administered escrow fund from BP to help pay for its devastating oil spill in the Gulf, leading lights of […]

Over the weekend, President Obama wrote Congressional leaders urging action on a $50 billion aid package for the states designed in part to avert "massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters." Which is exactly right. Because while the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has worked as intended to boost employment and GDP, the dire […]

"Reagan," Dick Cheney famously said in 2002, "proved deficits don't matter." Until, that is, a Democrat is in the White House. And it so was on Friday, when House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) insisted the Bush tax cuts did not help produce a hemorrhage of red ink from the U.S. Treasury. Of course, the […]

From almost the moment he was elected, Barack Obama has been counseled to channel the spirit of FDR in confronting both war and economic calamity. But with for the still unfolding oil spill disaster, President Obama needs a different role model. When CEO Tony Hayward and other BP executives come to the White House next […]

Somewhere in a gated community in Dallas, a former President of the United States is laughing very hard right now. A new ABC/Washington Post poll gives the Obama administration even lower marks for its response to the BP oil spill than to George W. Bush's calamitous bungling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. And so it […]

On May 7, 2001, press secretary Ari Fleischer uttered the four words that came to define the Bush administration's approach to the U.S. addiction to oil. Asked if Americans needed to "correct their lifestyles" to address the nation's energy vulnerability, Fleischer snapped, "That's a big no." And so, a government of the oil men, by […]