Having failed to block Obamacare in Congress in 2010, or to get the Supreme Court to throw it out in 2012, or to beat Obama himself last November, conservative groups have hit upon two last-ditch methods of preventing a large new entitlement program from becoming an entrenched fact of American life. One is Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s pledge to refuse to fund the discretionary functions of the federal government unless the law is repealed. The other is an effort to bring the law down at the grassroots by encouraging citizen nonparticipation. Or as Dean Clancy of Freedomworks put it: “BURN YOUR OBAMACARE CARD.”

American Airlines is a much larger company than US Airways, yet it’s in effect being acquired by the...]]> Sun, 27 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600 Republicans have been complaining for years that Senate Democrats aren’t writing and voting on formal budget plans. Democrats’ stated reasoning for this has been that there’s no point in passing a budget resolution that’s dead on arrival in the House of Representatives, especially when budget policy is actually made in high-stakes negotiations between House leaders and the Obama administration.

But their real reason for the budget negligence was more political. Democrats have shied away from voting for budgets that either contain large tax increases or large budget deficits and have been divided among themselves over how best to proceed. The GOP believes...]]> Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0500 Mitt Romney’s campaign is taking heat for declining to disclose more than the two most recent years’ worth of his tax information. Even conservative commentators such as The Washington Post’s George Will and the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol are saying it’s past time to come clean. Of course, members of Romney’s team, unlike their friends on the outside, presumably know what the documents would reveal, so we should probably assume that they have fairly good reason not to release...]]> Sun, 27 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0600 The full details of the NBA labor agreement still aren't in, but it's difficult to read the basic terms as anything less than a huge victory for management. The most fundamental issue at stake is that under the old labor agreement, owners committed to paying out 57 percent of Basketball-Related Income in the form of player salaries. Under the new deal, the owners will only pay 50 percent out. There are lots of other balls in the air, but there's no other topic that divides the interests of players and owners in such a stark and fundamental way.

On war powers, the administration's theory (generated over the objection of...]]> Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0600 Richard Holbrooke, who died unexpectedly this week after suffering a tear in his aorta, was a celebrity diplomat whose name was known to everyone who followed politics and foreign policy. He was unique. Not only in the sense that "celebrity" and "diplomat" rarely go together but that he managed to attain such prominence in American foreign policy without ever reaching the rank of secretary of state or national security adviser. He was deeply involved with every Democratic president and in every presidential campaign since Jimmy Carter's, a fixture to such an extent that his involvement in Barack Obama's administration was taken as a given, the only question being the exact nature of the...]]> Sat, 25 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0500 Thursday's New York Times features a story about a Kansas couple, Joe and Mary Thompson, who agreed to adopt a girl named Emily before she was born and without knowing that she suffered from an illness called spina bifida. Then the very same year they took her in, their business went under, leaving them unemployed for a spell. They got new jobs, eventually, but the quirk of timing meant that when it came time to obtain a new family insurance policy, their daughter was uninsurable. She had a "pre-existing condition," you see, that made it inevitable that her health-care costs would be above average. Nobody wants to sell an insurance policy to someone under those circumstances, so she had...]]> Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0500 But it's also been a time when, to a much greater extent than on domestic policy, liberalism has shown a tendency to flail ineptly and to have real trouble articulating where we have to take the country. Huge progress has been made on this in recent years. But a fundamental gap between hawks and doves remains, and the problematic situation in Afghanistan threatens to throw liberal foreign policy back into chaos.

Liberals disagree vigorously, of course, about everything from financial regulation to health care. But on most of those subjects, the disagreements are about politics or tactics or policy details. Even on fraught and much-debated topics such as charter schools or...]]> Sun, 08 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0500 Politics always seems to get a bit off-kilter when the temperature goes up. But instead of the familiar silly-season stuff of years past -- made-up scandals and who-cares gossip -- the past two summers have been filled with vitriol. Last year we had town halls gone wild, fueled by the threat of death panels pulling the plug on Grandma. This year, us-vs.-them controversies are proliferating, linked by a surge in xenophobia. This is our summer of fear.

So far, the summer of fear has featured a charge, led by Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and former New York congressman Rick Lazio, to block the construction of the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center (which is to include a mosque) a few...]]> Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0500 The new unemployment report highlights the fact that the economy remains lousy and John Boehner is going to be the next Speaker of the House of Representatives. Ironically, it also demonstrates the bankruptcy of Boehner’s way of thinking. The new conservative orthodoxy has been that somehow teachers, police officers, guys who repair street signs, bus drivers, librarians, etc. don’t have “real jobs” and that police departments, roads, trains, buses, libraries, etc. don’t contribute to economic growth. In those terms, the unemployment report was actually fine"”the private sector added 71,000 jobs, which isn’t the greatest number in human history...]]> Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0500 Incidentally, if there’s anything that makes me want to lock every MSM political journalist in a small barn which I then light on fire* it’s the persistent refusal of the journalistic class to internalize the fact that the conservative movement in America doesn’t care about the budget deficit. It’s not that they sometimes care more about other things. Or that they care less than the should. Or that they’re hypocrites on occasion. It’s that they don’t care about it at all. Not even a little. Indeed, they’re opposed in principle to deficit reduction. The conservative movement has more record of boosting foreign aid to sub-Saharan...]]> Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0500 Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea how to shut down the massive oil leak currently taking place in the Gulf of Mexico. Nor do I have any ideas about how to clean it up or to mitigate the harm done by the oil already in the water. What's really needed are specifics, and political pundits are ill-positioned to offer them (my colleagues have suggested military expertise should be brought to bear). What I can say is that the politics of this disaster reflect, in part, a series of short-sighted decisions on the part of key progressive leaders.

In principle, after all, a disaster of this magnitude should be a boon to progressives and progressive policy. Think back...]]> Sat, 15 May 2010 00:00:00 -0500 Enter your email address:

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Aude Guerrucci / Getty Images The GOP rushed to brand the Gulf Coast disaster "Obama's Katrina." But new reports make clear the Bush administration's lax attitude toward regulation deserves much of the blame.

Ever since the great oil price spike of 2008, conservatives have been riding a tide of pro-drilling sentiment to shore up their message on energy issues. Environmentalists had done a decent job in earlier years of framing their concerns about fossil-fuel use in...]]> Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500 Enter your email address:

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Lauren Victoria Burke / AP Photo Amid the 11th-hour frenzy to line up the votes on health care, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave Matthew Yglesias her best argument: This may be members’ only shot at leaving a meaningful legacy.

Comprehensive reform of the American health-care system passed the House of Representatives last summer. Then in December, a health-reform bill overcame massive Republican obstructionism and repeated filibusters and passed the U.S. Senate....]]> Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600 Enter your email address:

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Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images As Obama's new budget threatens record debt levels, Matthew Yglesias says the only real solution is to crack down on defense, deductions—and yes, Medicare.

The release of today’s budget by Barack Obama is a reminder that though everyone likes to complain about the budget deficit, few really want to do much of anything about it. In fact, though the administration is already being hit for proposing the biggest...]]> Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0600

I keep meaning to comment on this Rasmussen poll about how Americans love torture:

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 30% oppose the use of such techniques, and another 12% are not sure.

Predictably enough, I disagree. But agree or disagree, what I really wanted to draw attention to was how different this discussion is from the debater’s gambit arguments we’re used to having about ticking time bombs and...]]> Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0600 Enter your email address:

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Khaled Abdullah Ali Al Mahdi / Reuters Amid new calls from hawks to ramp up military efforts in Yemen, Matthew Yglesias on how to solve one of the War on Terror’s thorniest problems.

Throughout the debate over sending additional troops to Afghanistan, skeptics of this course of action have been making the point that it’s hardly the only country in which al Qaeda could find safe haven. What about Yemen, we asked. What of Somalia? And what might happen down the...]]> Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Ezra Klein hails the people he regards as the heroes of health reform:

So let this serve as an encomium to Ron Wyden, Tom Harkin, Chuck Schumer, Sherrod Brown, Chris Dodd and Jay Rockefeller, among many others. All of these senators could have been the 60th vote. All of them had issues they believe in and worked for. Chris Dodd built and passed a bill. Sherrod Brown whipped up liberal support for the public option. Chuck Schumer spent countless hours devising compromises and searching for new paths forward. Ron Wyden spent years crafting the Healthy Americans Act, getting a CBO score, pulling together co-sponsors, speaking to activists and industry groups and other...]]> Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Looks like Joe Lieberman decided to try for the old double-cross and say he now opposes the Medicare expansion compromise he’d hinted he would support. Lieberman wants no public option, no trigger that might create a public option, and no expansion of existing programs as a substitute for a public option. And he doesn’t care about expressing that view in misleading ways, timed to cause embarrassment to the Democratic leadership. And, frankly, unlike some other troublesome Democratic Senators one can hardly be all that surprised that he’s making problems for the Obama administration’s #1 domestic priority. After all, Lieberman took the view that John McCain...]]> Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0600 What other explanation could there be for deciding that he wants to run an op-ed by Sarah Palin about how Obama should “boycott” the Copenhagen conference?

And, no, that’s not a link to the op-ed. That’s a link to a post at The Awl excerpting an email about the op-ed that the Post’s PR team sent out. Strangely it doesn’t read “we don’t consider ourselves to be in the business of providing reliable information to our readers.”

By contrast, the Financial Times, has an interesting op-ed about what Copenhagen negotiators could learn from the Montreal Protocol that reduced use of CFCs to prevent the opening of a dangerous hole...]]>