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 [...]
It is only fitting on the morning of the debut of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland that we visit the world of the Mad Hatter (personified by RNC Chair Michael Steele) and where “up is down”.
Steele’s Mad Hatter has of course been attending a lot of tea parties recently because he believes he can convince [...]
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 [...]
According to the Wall Street Journal President Obama’s Stimulus Bill is only just now kicking into gear.
Proponents of the stimulus program focused attention on infrastructure projects during the fight to win approval for it last year. But the bulk of the money proposed for projects like new rail lines and water projects—about $180 billion in [...]
I usually teach for about five hours on Mondays (an undergraduate lecture and a graduate seminar), so today is a true holiday for me. Some here are some random thoughts over morning coffee.
This community rocks! As both rhbee and Amber commented, the discussion on copyright over the last three days was one of the most [...]
A couple of months ago, I went out on a limb and predicted that a 2010 Republican election victory was a mirage. The New York Times/CBS News Poll this morning reinforces my confidence that President Obama and the Democrats can keep their majorities in November.
Americans blame former President George W. Bush, Wall Street and Congress much [...]
As I’ve said before the right wing of American Politics is a pretty fractious bunch. It now appears that the Pro-business wing is getting pretty worried about the anti-business rhetoric of the Tea Party Populists. Conventional wisdom is that Republican gridlock is good for big business but in the Wall Street Journal it was [...]
This chart shows that the number of working males has dropped back to 1996 levels when there were 30 million less citizens in the U.S. A lot of angry unemployed men in an interregnum is a recipe for social unrest and fascism. Any student of the rise of Hitler to power in 1933 understands that [...]
There is a movement afoot to demand that Congress and the President engage in a regular “Question Time”, borrowed from the British Parliamentary system where the Prime Minister takes questions in Parliament from the opposition and his own party.
I think the President was very effective at the House Republican retreat and he should have no [...]
I am serious about reimagining America After Empire. Whether we embrace the mission of converting our economy and our government spending from military to more peaceful pursuits, or that mission is forced on us by the reality of the fiscal straits we find ourselves in;make no mistake–America in 2020 will look very different. Dwight Eisenhower [...]