The 20-or-so of the hard-right faction in the House of Representatives refuse to raise the debt ceiling without significant cutbacks to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The White House refuses to 
negotiate. They are "fiscally demented", said President Biden in a Martin Luther…
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We like to boast that we are a free people, and for the most part we are. But the pithy warning that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" may not have been passed on to new generations all that successfully because they don't seem to notice the many ways congress, the courts, the president are finding ways to put the cuffs on individual freedom and hand the keys to corporations.
Donald Trump won the presidency with pledges to help working-class… Read More »
They were tearful, they were angry, they demanded action and an end to the epidemic of death killing our youngest. It was commendable and cathartic that Donald Trump brought together those suffering from the Parkland shooting to listen to their… Read More »
Just moments ago the media universe was forecasting the demise of the Republican party, riven as it was by dissension between the moderate and the extreme, and split in third by a rogue independent who had rented the Party name to catapult himself into the presidency.
Instead, suddenly finding themselves victors, Republicans of all stripes are scrambling to fall in line, seeing their chance to enact every reform in their 
wish list. Winning the trifecta of the presidency and control of both Senate and House has given Republicans a nearly clear path to overturning just about everything Obama accomplished in the last eight years.
Just before the election, confident that Democrats would upend the… Read More »
It's all so confusing. To most of us the Internet may seem to be a Utopian phenomenon existing somewhere in cyberspace and belonging to the people of the world but the governments of that world have a different view. They want to claim it for their own.
In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission appointed itself as custodian, even though there is nothing on the books — no act of Congress, say — that confers this privilege. The FCC has been grappling interminably with just what to do with the beast.
The commission had set rules that the public likes, rules that are a light touch and primarily support “net neutrality”, which could be defined as requiring… Read More »
No sooner had the votes been counted in the 2012 election than immigration reform became a top priority. After doing nothing to fulfill a 2008 campaign pledge, after instead 
deporting more undocumented immigrants than any president before him, Barack Obama owed reform to the Latino population, 71% of whom voted for him.
For that same reason, Republicans realized that they had better spearhead reform, because if they failed to attract the growing Hispanic voting bloc, the party’s gradual extinction was a possibility. Mitt Romney’s vow… Read More »
There's a theory that Americans are savvy enough about government that they vote for a legislature in opposition to the president, a kind of populist check and balance scheme to make sure that no one side runs away with the country. And so we have a Democratic president; a Democratic majority in the Senate, hemmed in by the strange filibuster rule that now requires 60% to pass anything; and a… Read More »
[Updated November 20]: That President Joe Biden's progressive social and climate legislation has been sharply cut back and reconfigured from the $3.5 trillion that was originally proposed comes as no surprise. That he and Democrats in Congress embarked on so… Read More »
As the weeks passed this spring, two ostensibly Democratic senators discovered the thrill of power. They realized they have Joe Biden's presidency in their hands. They are not about to… Read More »
In a singularly cruel act that so befits this cold-hearted man, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the end of DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, giving some 800,000 young people notice that they must leave the country beginning six months from now unless Congress passes a law allowing them to stay.
Speaking at the Justice Department, Sessions made the announcement, Breakthrough Broken: Oct 11: This update space earlier reported that the President had reached a deal… Read More »
Senate Republicans repeatedly rebuke President Obama for what they claim is his unconstitutional abuse of executive power, but they have no qualms about themselves violating the Constitution by ignoring its mandate to provide "Advice and Consent" for Obama's choice of Judge Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court. This inaction both blocks the Executive branch, preventing the President from exercising his Constitutional responsibility to nominate and appoint justices, and hobbles the Judicial branch's ability to decide what the law is. It "erodes the rule of law and leaves major issues in limbo", writes Obama in The Wall Street Journal.
Obama has usurped the Legislative branch, it would argue, by deciding on a three-year moratorium halting deportation of some… Read More »
The Senate has spent five years and an estimated $40 million to lay bare the true extent of the Bush administration’s policies of rendition, detention and interrogation conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The Senate's probe is a vital process of confronting our own history that should not be impeded or abridged, yet this president has appointed himself as the supreme arbiter of what truths may be told us. Not only is the White House tampering with the work product of the legislative branch, but it is doing so in collaboration with the… Read More »
While arguments for and against an increase in the minimum wage rage back and forth — a debate “dumb as rocks”, Bloomberg/BusinessWeek calls it — President Obama's offense turned to a different page in his playbook, directing the Labor Department to revise rules on overtime pay. The move would tighten who in the workforce can be called supervisory and therefore ineligible for overtime pay as well obstruct businesses who falsely classify workers to avoid paying them for added hours of work.
As for the minimum wage. the Republican rebuff of Obama’s call to “Give America a raise!”, by their refusing to consider an increase, hands Democrats a popular cause (73% percent of Americans, including 53% of registered Republicans, favored… Read More »
Every five years or so Congress passes the bill that has paid scores of billions to farmers ever since the Depression. The second half of the bill has always funded food stamps.
This time though, the House passed a bill in July that lavished more than it ever
had on farmers and froze out food stamps with nary a cent. Food assistance for the American poor was dropped from the bill, with Speaker John Boehner saying, “We’ll get to that later”. Off went Congress on a five-week vacation for all of August and…
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Democrats and their progressive wing don't think President Biden's infrastructure plan has gone a bridge too far, but Republicans think it has strayed too far from bridges and what is commonly thought of as infrastructure. His plan doubles as a program to combat climate change such as electric vehicle subsidies, clean energy manufacturing, and what appear to be social programs, such as $400 billion for care of the disabled and elderly. Even if pared back, Republicans refuse to raise taxes… Read More »
On the first day of 2018, China announced that it would no longer accept "loathsome foreign garbage". The world’s largest importer of trash had decided to deal instead with its own "towering mountains of waste”. Beginning in the 1990s, as it grew into an industrial behemoth, China would ultimately take in 40% of America’s plastic, glass, metals and waste paper to feed its insatiable demand for raw materials. It was cheap to ship in otherwise empty container 
Trash-pickers in Turkey. An industry elsewhere, we don't want
that here, but waste is going out of control.
ships, returning to China after unloading the products into which the trash had been converted, and low-cost labor made it economical to sort the imperfectly separated shiploads coming from the U.S. into clean stocks. The U.S. and other countries shipped 106 million tons of…
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Donald Trump @realDonaldTrump
Contributions from the NRA:…
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“We've got to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around”, President Obama has said. He was referring to the practice of gerrymandering, of political parties rigging districts so as to assure the election of their candidates. It has been with us for two centuries, is manifestly undemocratic, yet the Supreme Court avoids confronting it, and Congress likes things just as they are.
Once every ten years, based on the population census, each state usually must reconfigure its voting districts, first to conform to the number of congressional representatives that its newly-counted population permits, and then to arrive at approximately equal numbers of voters in each district. That… Read More »
The contorted shapes that gerrymandering produces are grotesque reminders that our democracy needs an asterisk. The word derives from 1812’s governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, who rearranged election districts to his liking. The shape of one of them 
The 1812 cartoon in the Boston Gazette mocking the shape of one of Gov. Gerry's contrivances.
reminded people of a salamander. Hence Gerrymander.
Here is a selection of the most notoriously contrived to make an election outcome a certainty for the party controlling the process.
Maryland's 3rd District: As your eye will bear witness, this bug splat is 
considered the most gerrymandered district in the country. Connected by tiny threads and leaping…
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Congress lost no time when threatened by refugees. It rushed to pass a law to hobble their admittance, hastily throwing aside Paul Ryan's promise that the House would return to the orderly process of developing legislation in committees.
The President called them out: "Now suddenly they're able to rush in, in a day or two [after the Paris attacks], to solve the threat of widows and orphans and others who are fleeing a war-torn land and that's their most constructive contribution to the effort against ISIL?"
Obama was undoubtedly referring as well to the avoidance by Congress to authorize force in Syria. With much the same motivation for speedily acting against… Read More »
In the wake of the government shutdown and the threat of the U.S. defaulting on its debt, a report on the Obama administration’s hostility toward the press and its 
reporters went by hardly noticed. The report is a formal statement in support of what the media have contended all along — that the Obama regime’s aggressive actions against press freedom has introduced a climate of fear that inhibits both journalists and sources alike. ”The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration”, says the author, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr.…
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As a candidate he had called warrantless surveillance “unconstitutional and illegal”.
In his first inaugural address he said, “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration”.
On his first day in the Oval Office he commented, “For a long time now, there's been too much secrecy in this city", as he signed executive orders to reverse some of the Bush Administration policies.
And just days ago President Obama said, “…a free press is also essential for our democracy. I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism… Read More »