A Gilded Planet

There's been some discussion on liberal blogs lately about the true meaning of the recent health care reform victory that has reflected some of my own thoughts. It is a great progressive acheivement, and yet the legislation itself is pointedly centrist, even Republican. This has struck me as quite a contradiction. But over at Jon Chait's blog , a commenter known as 'Virginia Centrist' has articulated an accurate dissection of this idea: I think the answer here is that this isn't really an ideal moderate Republican plan. It's a plan that a few moderate Republicans have proposed before...but they only proposed it as an alternative to an incredibly liberal plan. Very few moderate Republicans have fought for a plan like this or even supported one. Their support was nominal. The exception was Mitt Romney...but even he was working with a huge liberal Democratic majority (8-1 in one legislature). In a vacuum, would any Republican actually seriously push for this pla...

The word out of the developed world's most dysfunctional national legislative body is that there is going to be some kind of grand compromise suckdown on the public option of the health care reform bill next week. Here is my message to every Senate Democrat except Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown and Roland Burris (!), the only three US Senators who so far are actually standing firm with progressives instead of preparing to fellate Joe Lieberman: Don't use the existence of the filibuster as an excuse to dodge responsibility for creating subpar legislation. Everyone knows the Democratic caucus has the power to get around the filibuster or end it , so don't expect progressives to cut you slack when you sell us down the river in deference to minority rule. Progressives worked hard to elect President Obama and the very large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. If we don't feel like we're being represented in Washington, we aren't going to work very hard...

I've long been concerned that Doug Elmendorf has been a less than fair referee on health care reform, but what he said about global warming makes it clear that he's a clown unfit to fill Peter Orszag's shoes: "Most of the economy involves activities that are not likely to be directly affected by changes in climate." Check out this Truthout article for a more complete description of why this claim is bogus, but you don't really need much more than an elementary understanding of the anthropogenic global warming trend to know that it spells doom for the U.S. economy as well as ever other economy on the planet. I understand that Elmendorf is trained in the narrow thinking of short term cost-benefit analyses, but as Congress' accountant he should figure out a way to accurately express the economic conclusions of climate science or he should resign.

This weekend's House vote to pass historic health care reform legislation sends President Obama's central domestic policy priority sailing towards the legislative end zone. In addition, the House passed major energy/environment legislation earlier this year, another major Obama agenda item. Both bills now await consideration on the floor of the United States Senate. As we work to push our Senators to do the right thing on both bills, it would be wise to keep the recent comments offered by Chris Hayes in mind: The filibuster has become a cancer growing inside the world's greatest deliberative body. What was once a rarely invoked procedural mechanism has metastasized and turned into a de facto supermajority requirement for any legislation. In the 103rd Congress (1993-94) there were forty-six votes on "cloture," the motion to override a filibuster and allow something to be considered on the floor. In the last Congress, the 110th, the first one in which Republicans w...

Imagine that politics is baseball. Following from that, political junkies are baseball fans. And elections are the World Series (debates are the play-offs). But here's where the metaphor gets tricky. Baseball fans expect that they will get to watch the World Series every fall. After the mother of all elections last fall which created innumerable new political junkies, we now expect that same kind of annual fix that baseball fans have come to rightly expect. Yesterday was a special election. The political world treated it like it was this year's political World Series. But it wasn't. It had serious consequences for the state of New Jersey and the state of Virginia. It had conventional consequences for New York City. It had minor consequences for the United States House of Representatives, which is now slightly but measurably more progressive than it used to be. The election NY-23 may have affected the internal politics of the Republican Party in a serious way. And of course,...

Last Friday, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize as a call to action rather than a reward for prior accomplishments. If you haven't watched his remarks yet, you should . While he takes some measure of credit for his work towards ending the Iraq War, he appears uncomfortable when speaking about Afghanistan. This is a good thing. He realizes the dissonance of accepting a Peace Prize while conducting a war in Afghanistan that many are urging him to escalate. This call to action should inform his decisions moving forward. It's easy to prattle on about the Nobel Committee's process of selection ( Hendrik Hertzberg and Howard Zinn offer the best attempts). Holding the leader of the most powerful nation on earth accountable for the advancement of the cause of peace is much harder. But it is what we must do if we want peace.

The University of California employs thousands of people to keep the business of educating California's young people running smoothly. These people work every day to keep the ten campuses that make up the UC system clean and safe. They are also responsible for feeding students, faculty, administrators and campus visitors. These people work hard every day as employees of the best public university system in the world. And far too many of them live in poverty. 96% of UC service workers qualify for at least one form of public assistance , whether it's food stamps or public housing subsidies. Wages are so low for these workers that many cannot afford to meet their basic family needs. And so they work two or even three jobs. With wages for middle and low-income workers falling in the past decade (otherwise known as the Bush Years) even as the price of energy, housing, education and health care continued to rise, even with two (or three) jobs, it's very tough to make ends meet. M...