For me, the next three days are going to be like jumping in a time machine and returning to 1957 as Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson muscles through the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. In book Three of Robert Caro’s masterful biography of LBJ, entitled Master of the Senate, we find Johnson ruling over [...]
Ever since Barack Obama’s election in 2008 there has been an ongoing discussion of where the political center is in America. Conservatives and Republican leaders have made the contention that this is a Center-Right country and that the Reagan Revolution of the 1980’s permanently shifted the political center of gravity to the right. I think [...]
I’ve been writing for the last two years on the stranglehold of Monopoly Capitalism on Washington’s policy agenda. But in reality it is more like “Duopoly Capitalism” because we make sure that there are always two potential providers like Boeing and Northrup Grumman to feed at the troth. Duopolies are easy to manage because price [...]
In 1985, Grover Norquist formed a group called Americans for Tax Reform. His goal was simple: “”I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” So the fear of new taxes has prevented us as [...]
Obviously some in Washington still long for the days of the old-fashioned arm-twisting that Lyndon Johnson was so good at. Here he is while still Majority leader with the hapless Senator Green of Rhode Island.
I mention this because the Times ran a piece this morning about the Obama persuasion style in the lead up to [...]
When ever I raise the issue of the Cost of Empire, our conservative correspondents always respond that the real economic crisis facing America comes not from Imperial Overstretch, but from our profligate system of social insurance–Social Security and Medicare. But last week Bill Gross, our country’s leading bond manager, published a chart he called The [...]
I still have the Obama sticker I put on my Prius in March of 2007, but this healthcare cave-in, run by Rahm Emanuel, has got me fit to be tied. A few weeks ago I wrote about how I was coming to feel that Obama was a tragic prisoner of conventional “establishment” thinking. Democrats since [...]
I’m afraid Dr. Dean may be right.
If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill. Any measure that expands private insurers’ monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform. Real reform would insert competition into insurance markets, force insurers to [...]
I must say I’m worried that the Democrats are setting a trap for themselves on Health Care Reform by not really confronting the issue of cost inflation. Why does a CT Scan in America cost so much more than any other country. And it’s not just scans, it’s the whole range of services. Although it’s [...]
When ideology trumps reality, political parties enter a dead zone where no facts can be marshalled and politicians seem to live in a truth-free world. Take Mitt Romney this morning.
Romney said on CBS’s “The Early Show” that the administration’s stimulus plan “didn’t work” and he said the reason things seem to be ticking up in [...]