Obama’s Big Spending Ways Will Mean More Tax Hikes
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on February 6th, 2013 12:08 am by HL
Obama’s Big Spending Ways Will Mean More Tax Hikes
Why No Liberal Outrage on Drone Assassinations?
Joan Walsh, Salon
Last year Brown University’s Michael Tesler released a fascinating study showing that Americans inclined to racially blinkered views wound up opposing policies they would otherwise support, once they learned those policies were endorsed by President Obama. Their prejudice extended to the breed of the president’s dog, Bo: They were much more likely to say they liked Portuguese water dogs when told Ted Kennedy owned one than when they learned Obama did. But Tesler found that the Obama effect worked the opposite way, too: African-Americans and white liberals who supported…
Democrats Eye Unlikely Georgia as Senate Pickup
Scott Conroy, RCP
Even before Saxby Chambliss announced last month that he would not seek a third term, the 2014 Senate race in Georgia was shaping up to be one of the more intriguing midterm contests.Republican Congressmen Tom Price and Paul Broun had been mulling primary challenges to Chambliss, who recently broke with GOP orthodoxy in seeking bipartisan compromise on fiscal issues. And now that the incumbent has bowed out, the prospect of a particularly messy Republican primary fight has national Democrats taking a second look — albeit with a healthy dose of realism — at a race they had considered an…
There Will Be No Budget Deal
Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
We’re less than a month away now from the sequester, the beginning of the deep budget cuts that will kick in automatically if President Obama and Congress don’t come to a budget deal. I have a news flash for you: There is not going to be any deal in the next 25 days. And here’s another news flash: In the Republican tug-of-war between those who want to protect the Pentagon and those who want to cut spending and damn the consequences, it’s looking like the latter are winning. If they get their way, it’s also almost certain that the austerity the…
Permanent Democratic Majority Is Not Inevitable
Rick Perlstein, Nation
Following Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney a certain argument became ubiquitous: the argument from demographic inevitability. That the Republican Party, absent deep-seated changes that are all but unimaginable, is in for a generation or more of electoral doom. Indeed the argument was being made long before the votes were even cast. Here was Jonathan Chait in New York magazine, etching the argument sharply almost a year ago:The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of…