GOP Refuses to Consider Obama Nominees
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on September 3rd, 2011 4:31 am by HL
GOP Refuses to Consider Obama Nominees
Rep. Barney Frank, Wash Post
Once upon a time, we could have expected the following sequence: After considerable debate, Congress would have passed a bill creating an agency. The president would then nominate someone to head that agency. That nomination would be considered on its merits by the Senate.But this is now. The president has nominated Richard Cordray, an able, experienced and thoughtful former state attorney general who has a record of achievement in protecting individuals against financial abuse, to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And the Republican minority in the Senate has announced that it…
No Sunshine for Obama in OMB’s Forecast
Alexis Simendinger, RCP
Nine is a lonely number.The Obama administration anticipates voters could face a 9 percent unemployment rate when they go to the polls next year, according to a federal report Thursday that assessed where things stand with the budget and the economy.Nine percent.That would mean nearly one in every 10 Americans would be out of work 3 ½ years after the recession officially ended in June 2009. Today's unemployment rate is 9.1 percent. How will Obama respond when the GOP revives Ronald Reagan's classic 1980 campaign question: "Are you better off than you were four years…
The TV Is No Longer Loving Obama Back
David Zurawik, Baltimore Sun
75° F President Obama in TV address 10:57 a.m. EDT, September 1, 2011With this week's skirmish over whether President Obama or a debate among the GOP presidential candidates would dominate prime time Wednesday night, a couple of observations seem impossible to ignore.The first is yet another reminder of how wrong conventional wisdom can be especially when it involves major media change, such as the generally unexamined bromide that TV is a…
The Vigorous Virtues
David Brooks, New York Times
There’s a specter haunting American politics: national decline. Is America on the way down, and, if so, what can be done about it?The Republicans, and Rick Perry in particular, have a reasonably strong story to tell about decline. America became great, they explain, because its citizens possessed certain vigorous virtues: self-reliance, personal responsibility, industriousness and a passion for freedom.
Cheney: I Welcome Their Hatred
Paul Waldman, American Prospect
Dick Cheney's In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir is a book as dull and unimaginative as its title. Readers wouldn't have expected the former vice president and his daughter Liz (his co-author) to be a pair of subtle prose stylists, and they won't be disappointed. Slog through the early chapters on Cheney's life growing up in Wyoming (he fished, he played football), and you'll eventually reach more momentous events, which Cheney is able to render equally lifeless. That's in part because of the way Cheney confronts the controversies that have attended…
