Dick Morris: Liberals Picking on Michelle Bachmann because she is a conservative woman

Via Dick Morris.com
Listen to all 4 minutes; it is great comedy:

This is the “knowledgeable Michelle Bachmann”:

See: in Ms. Bachmann’s world:
1. The 1920′s were just great (the stock market crash occurred in 1929)
2. President Roosevelt signed the Smoot-Hawley act into law (psst: Smoot and Hawley were Republican Senators and President Hoover signed this into law)
3. President Roosevelt turned a recession into the depression (the depression was in full force when he won the election in 1932).

Remember, this wasn’t an off-the-cuff slip of the tongue (which EVERYONE makes from time to time); this was a prepared floor speech.

What a strange world we live in; these-a-days it is the Republicans who play the “victim” card! Does anyone remember the days when the Republicans were the rough-tough, “quit whining” party?

Debt Limit Ceiling talks: Republicans lost a chance

On July 4′th David Brooks wrote:

Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators. They have been tough and inflexible and forced the Democrats to come to them. The Democrats have agreed to tie budget cuts to the debt ceiling bill. They have agreed not to raise tax rates. They have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.

Moreover, many important Democrats are open to a truly large budget deal. President Obama has a strong incentive to reach a deal so he can campaign in 2012 as a moderate. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, has talked about supporting a debt reduction measure of $3 trillion or even $4 trillion if the Republicans meet him part way. There are Democrats in the White House and elsewhere who would be willing to accept Medicare cuts if the Republicans would be willing to increase revenues.

If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases.

A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government. It would seize the opportunity to put the country on a sound fiscal footing. It would seize the opportunity to do these things without putting any real crimp in economic growth.

The party is not being asked to raise marginal tax rates in a way that might pervert incentives. On the contrary, Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.

This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative. [...]

TAKE THE DEAL, Republicans! That is, they’d get much of what they wanted and they’d turn many Democrats against themselves. What is not to like?

But….well, it looks as if they are getting nothing.

Of course, the Tea Party types are furious.
Our tea party neighbors are learning an important lesson: the Republican leadership are about Big Money, and Big Money doesn’t want the U. S. to default on our debts. It is bad for business. This sentiment is well expressed here.

I suppose the the Republicans can draft a resolution saying that they don’t like President Obama. THAT is really going to help them.

Come on Republicans: work with us. You aren’t going to get 100 percent of what you want. Accept that and work together for the country’s good.

msnbc video: GOP surrenders to economic reality

msnbc video: GOP surrenders to economic reality, posted with vodpod

12 July 2011

Workout notes
First a hour walk (1:03) and it covered about 4.34 miles. It mostly went well though my butt did NOT like the big uphill. Posture and keeping the glutes engaged is the key.

Then I lifted:
Incline press: 10 x 115, 6 x 135, 6 x 135, 8 x 130
Pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 140
curls: 3 sets of 10 x 25 dumbbells
rows (Hammer): 3 sets of 10 x 200
sit ups: 4 sets of 25 (decreasing incline) then 1 set of 10 at the highest very strict
lunges: 3 sets of 10 with each leg
adductors: 2 sets of 10 with 170
abductors: 2 sets of 10 with 170
push-backs: 2 sets of 10 with 110
Also: stretches, light yoga, hip hikes, rotator cuff.

Later I walked around at the Peoria Zoo with Olivia and my butt, while it tingled just a tiny bit, didn’t kill me.
I AM getting better.

Science

A small percentage of a certain type of snail actually survives being eaten by birds and then excreted. This is one way it spreads; given that only 15 percent of the snails survive this process, you can almost see natural selection in action!

Butterflies: there is a type that has a tiny percentage born as half-male, half-female (split right down the middle…even up to outer markings.

Science and Obesity I used to be morbidly obese. I’ve been “normal sized” for about 16 years. But there are some foods I NEVER eat because, for me, they are like heroin. Evidently, this isn’t just my imagination:

“Bet you can’t eat just one” (as the old potato-chip commercials had it) is, of course, a bet most of us end up losing. But why? Is it simple lack of willpower that makes fatty snacks irresistible, or are deeper biological forces at work?

Some intriguing new research suggests the latter. Scientists in California and Italy reported last week that in rats given fatty foods, the body immediately began to release natural marijuanalike chemicals in the gut that kept them craving more.

The findings are among several recent studies that add new complexity to the obesity debate, suggesting that certain foods set off powerful chemical reactions in the body and the brain. Yes, it’s still true that people gain weight because they eat more calories than they burn. But those compulsions may stem from biological systems over which the individual has no control.

“I do think some people come into the world, and they are more responsive to food,” said Susan Carnell, a research associate at the Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition. “I think there are many different routes to obesity.”[...]

There is much more in this article; if you ever wondered why you can’t stop eating certain foods…well, just read.

General Social
This Mother Jones article about Indian call centers is interesting. Here is one short excerpt:

During our second day of culture training, Lekha dissected the Australian psyche. It took about 20 minutes.

“Just stating facts, guys,” Lekha began, as we scribbled notes, “Australia is known as the dumbest continent. Literally, college was unknown there until recently. So speak slowly.” Next to me, a young man in a turban wrote No college in his notebook.

“Technologically speaking, they’re somewhat backward, as well. The average person’s mobile would be no better than, say, a Nokia 3110 classic.” This drew scoffs from around the room.

“Australians drink constantly,” Lekha continued. “If you call on a Friday night, they’ll be smashed—every time. Oh, and don’t attempt to make small talk with them about their pets, okay? They can be quite touchy about animals.”

“What kind of people are there in Australia?” a trainee asked. “What are their traits?”

“Well, for one thing,” Lekha said, “let’s admit: They are quite racist. They do not like Indians. Their preferred term for us is—please don’t mind, ladies—’brown bastards.’ So if you hear that kind of language, you can just hang up the call.”[...]

Rohan and Sube, who hailed from neighboring villages in Madhya Pradesh, told me that “fake process” (a.k.a. phishing) was their favorite. “All it is,” Rohan explained, “is you call American clients. Tell them, ‘US government is giving away free money!’”

“You say that—’free money’—and just watch how people respond,” Sube agreed.

Rohan continued, “You tell them, ‘Just provide me your information and don’t worry, I’ll fill the forms, you sit back. You just pay us for our services.’”

“Really there are no forms and no services,” Sube said, his eyes sparkling. “They tell their information over the phone and you don’t even write it, you just write the credit card. We take our commission. Next week, the company disconnects the phone.”

My coworkers were happy to give me a rundown of the different nationalities they’d encountered. “Britishers get angry,” said Nidhi. “Still, they are subtle—they’ll say something sarcastic under the breath.”

“Americans will just shout at you,” Sube said. Mittu agreed: “I have only been cursed by Americans. They are sharp-witted and very articulated and yet very free with their anger.”

The whole article is entertaining.

Politics
General
Mano Singham: “flip flopping” sometimes means “changing one’s mind”. Of course, there is the old “saying what you think your target audience wants to hear regardless of what you will actually do. Yes, I am thinking about YOU, Mitt Romney.

Politics: 2012 election
Here is an interesting post by Nate Silver that says most of the new Republicans are more conservative than the districts that they represent. What does that mean for 2012? We shall see…sometimes “easy gained” means “easily lost”.
But…if the representative develops a good reputation for constituent service, they can stay in the district even though they might not match it on ideology. For example, the current US. Representative Aaron Schock (IL-18) previously held a long time Democratic state house seat (Illinois House 92)…and after he left to run for the U. S. House seat, the seat reverted back to Democratic control and has stayed there.

Debt Limit Fight and Economic Issues
Economic Issues: the conservative economists are desperately trying to come up with a model that matches their prejudices:

If you come at the current Lesser Depression from my angle, there’s no great mystery. Consistency in modeling isn’t always a virtue, but still, it’s striking how much continuity there is in the analysis of slumps: there’s a clear line of descent with only moderate modification running from Hicks 1937 to liquidity-trap models of Japan (pdf) to models that add in debt/deleveraging. The situation we’re in seems fully comprehensible.

But at Chicago and elsewhere in the freshwater universe they’re playing Calvinball (and what a good coinage that was from Mike Konczal). All kinds of novel and implausible effects — effects that weren’t in any of the models they were using before the crisis — are invoked to explain why we’re in a sustained slump; strange to say, all of these newly invented models just happen to imply the need for tax cuts and a shrunken welfare state.

But I don’t think it’s just political bias: part of what’s happening, I’m sure, is intellectual embarrassment. [...]

Remember this isn’t coming from some nobody with a blog (e. g. me) but rather from a Nobel Laureate in economics. OUCH!

Krugman isn’t through with conservatives though.

David Brooks (who is reasonably smart and means well) writes the old “the truth is somewhere in between”:

These three groups — bankers, Democratic Keynesians and staunch Republicans — have one thing in common: They all believe they have identified the magic lever. They believe they can control their economic fate.

Some of us do not believe there is a magic lever. Deficit spending stimulates growth, but not by that much. Tax increases are bad, but they are not disastrous. We believe that there are a thousand factors that go into economic growth, and no single one is dispositive.

We look at the tax cuts of 2001 and do not see tremendous gains. We look at the tax increase of 1982 and do not see a ruinous disaster. We look at high deficit eras and low deficit eras and do not see an easy correlation between deficit spending and growth. On the contrary, if you look around the world there’s a slight negative correlation between government size and prosperity.

We believe that if you rest everything on a single lever (Increase deficits! Cut taxes!), you give people a permission slip to be self-indulgent. They will spend or cut to their hearts’ content and soon you’ll be facing national bankruptcy. We believe that even if you are theoretically right, your policies will be distorted by human frailties and special interests.

The people in my group (you might call us conservatives) are more likely to embrace a low and steady approach to fiscal policy. Control debt. Control entitlements. Keep tax levels reasonable and the tax code simple. Work on the economic fundamentals: human capital, productivity, labor market flexibility, open trade, saving and investment. Don’t believe you can use magic levers to manipulate growth month to month. [...]

Yes, this will sound sensible to the polyester pants set. The basic idea: economics is complicated and making an economy work is hard. But this doesn’t mean that there are sometimes relative quick and simple fixes to a “local problem” that is making the economy sick at the moment. Paul Krugman explains:

OK, David Brooks has what amounts to a reply. I don’t want to get into a tit for tat. But I do want to take on the claim that believing that simple actions can bring big improvements in the economy amounts to belief in magic.

The key point here is the difference between raising the economy’s long-run growth rate, which is very hard, and increasing demand when the economy is operating below potential, which isn’t hard at all.

Look: under normal conditions, when interest rates are well above zero and there’s room for conventional monetary policy to operate, we actually take it for granted that the Fed can produce dramatic acceleration of short-run growth. When Paul Volcker decided in 1982 that the economy had suffered enough, he loosened the reins — and it was Morning in America.

Now, of course,the Fed funds rate is already zero, so Bernanke can’t just slash the rate. But the same logic through which looser monetary policy can produce a rapid economic turnaround now applies to fiscal expansion.

Stroking your chin and saying, well, I don’t believe in magical solutions because experience shows that raising growth is hard sounds serious, but it’s actually silly. It’s like saying that it’s really hard to extend the human lifespan, so it’s foolish to believe that an infection can be quickly cured with a dose of antibiotics.[...]

THUMP!!!! But yes, Krugman is punching way below his weight class here.

What does a Keynesian plan look like? Well, something like this (Robert Reich presents what he wishes that the President would have said):

My first priority is to get Americans back to work. I’m proposing a jobs plan that will do that.

First, we’ll exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes for the next two years. This will put cash directly into American’s pockets and boost consumer spending. We’ll make up the revenue shortfall by applying Social Security taxes to incomes over $500,000.

Second, we’ll recreate the WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps — two of the most successful job innovations of the New Deal – and put people back to work directly. The long-term unemployed will help rebuild our roads and bridges, ports and levees, and provide needed services in our schools and hospitals. Young people who can’t find jobs will reclaim and improve our national parklands, restore urban parks and public spaces, recycle products and materials, and insulate public buildings and homes.

Third, we’ll enlarge the Earned Income Tax Credit so lower-income Americans have more purchasing power.

Fourth, we’ll lend money to cash-strapped state and local governments so they can rehire teachers, fire fighters, police officers, and others who provide needed public services. This isn’t a bailout. When the economy improves, scheduled federal outlays to these states and locales will drop by an amount necessary to recover the loans.

Fifth, we’ll amend the bankruptcy laws so struggling homeowners can declare bankruptcy on their primary residence. This will give them more bargaining leverage with their lenders to reorganize their mortgage loans. Why should the owners of commercial property and second homes be allowed to include these assets in bankruptcy but not regular home owners?

Sixth, we’ll extend unemployment benefits to millions of Americans who have lost part-time jobs. They’ll get partial benefits proportional to the time they put in on the job.

Yes, most of these measures will require more public spending in the short term. But unless we get this economy moving now, the long-term deficit problem will only grow worse.

So, what about the actual negotiations?

Here is a take by Ross Douthat:

But there is a method to the Republicans’ madness, and it rests on four things they know (or at least sense) about the deficit debate that the rest of the political class often ignores.

Barack Obama wants a right-leaning deficit deal.

Reason: makes him appear to be the “grown up” in the room; after all he took heat from his own party

Tax increases are lurking just over the horizon. The White House hasn’t made spending concessions just because the president wants to campaign as a deficit cutter next year. It has made concessions because it knows that taxes are already scheduled to go up when the Bush-era tax rates expire at the end of 2012.

That is, if President Obama wins reelection, Congress has to pass something that the President signs.

Bipartisan budget deals usually deliver fewer spending cuts than they promise.

and

The long-term deck is stacked in favor of tax increases. For decades, the tug-of-war between left and right has kept government’s share of the economy nearly constant, around 19 percent of G.D.P. But in what you might call the revenge of Lyndon Johnson, the ballooning cost of Medicare is poised to tilt the debate decisively toward liberalism.

But the window of opportunity for conservatives is, well, narrow. We’ll see.

But it appears as if the Republicans will give in:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has proposed creating an escape hatch for Congressional Republicans, who have put themselves in a box by threatening not to raise the national debt limit if Democrats don’t agree to trillions of dollars in cuts to popular social programs.

The plan is designed to give President Obama the power to raise the debt limit on his own through the end of his first term, but to force Democrats to take a series of votes on the debt limit in the months leading up to the election. This would stave off the threat of defaulting on national obligations, but keep the charged issues of debt and spending at the center of political debate for months.

The development confirms suspicions that the GOP was unwilling to truly use the looming debt ceiling as leverage to force conservative-friendly changes to popular entitlement programs, but suggests strongly that Republicans plan to continue politicking on fiscal issues through the 2012 elections.

In what he described as a “last-choice option,” McConnell proposed a method by which the country could avoid default if debt negotiations led by President Obama fail to produce a grand bargain on debt reduction in the days ahead.

“If we’re unable to come together, we think it’s extremely important that the country reassure the markets that default is not an option, and reassure Social Security recipients and families of military veterans that default is not an option,” McConnell said.[...]

This will probably infuriate the tea party, but here is probably why he went in this direction:

That is something the Tea Party is going to have to learn: ultimately, Big Money controls the Republicans (ok, and has all but a stranglehold on the Democrats too. )

The Last Word – Breakdown of Obama’s strategy

Step-by-step, Lawrence explains President Obama’s approach to the debt negotiations and why he’s masterfully winning the fight.

The Last Word – Breakdown of Obama’s strategy, posted with vodpod

Obama Press Conference on the Budget Negotiations

Obama Press Conference on the Budget Negotiations, posted with vodpod

Of course, much of the Republican caucus won’t give an inch and even some conservatives are sick of it:

But far from declaring victory and then doing the right thing for the country, the Republicans are continuing to behave like dogmatic lunatics — insisting that, no matter what, no deficit reduction plan include any tax increases.

This, the Economist rightly observes, is “economically illiterate and disgracefully cynical.”

It is also a departure from the Republican Party of old, which was actually economically responsible and was therefore willing to raise taxes if and when it needed to. Any intelligent plan to get the US’s house in order must involve both spending cuts and tax increases: We just can’t do it with spending cuts alone. The Great Republican Hero that today’s Republicans often invoke, Ronald Reagan, raised taxes when he needed to. And America’s current tax burden, the Economist observes, is as low as it has been for decades.

It’s time for the Republican Party to grow up and start acting on behalf of the country. Specifically, it’s time for the Republicans to end their reckless, cynical game with respect to the debt ceiling and compromise on a long-term debt-and-deficit reduction plan.

The editorial in the Economist:

[...]There is no good economic reason why this should be happening. America’s net indebtedness is a perfectly affordable 65% of GDP, and throughout the past three years of recession and tepid recovery investors have been more than happy to go on lending to the federal government. The current problems, rather, are political. Under America’s elaborate separation of powers, Congress must authorise any extension of the debt ceiling, which now stands at $14.3 trillion. Back in May the government bumped up against that limit, but various accounting dodges have been used to keep funds flowing. It is now reckoned that these wheezes will be exhausted by August 2nd.

The House of Representatives, under Republican control as a result of last November’s mid-term elections, has balked at passing the necessary bill. That is perfectly reasonable: until recently the Republicans had been exercising their clear electoral mandate to hold the government of Barack Obama to account, insisting that they will not permit a higher debt ceiling until agreement is reached on wrenching cuts to public spending. Until they started to play hardball in this way, Mr Obama had been deplorably insouciant about the medium-term picture, repeatedly failing in his budgets and his state-of-the-union speeches to offer any path to a sustainable deficit. Under heavy Republican pressure, he has been forced to rethink.

Now, however, the Republicans are pushing things too far. Talks with the administration ground to a halt last month, despite an offer from the Democrats to cut at least $2 trillion and possibly much more out of the budget over the next ten years. Assuming that the recovery continues, that would be enough to get the deficit back to a prudent level. As The Economist went to press, Mr Obama seemed set to restart the talks.

The sticking-point is not on the spending side. It is because the vast majority of Republicans, driven on by the wilder-eyed members of their party and the cacophony of conservative media, are clinging to the position that not a single cent of deficit reduction must come from a higher tax take. This is economically illiterate and disgracefully cynical.[...]

11 July 2011 workout notes

Workout notes Easy day today as the shoulder was slightly achy yesterday afternoon.
Run: 2 miles on the treadmill (10:40, 8:58 for 19:38), swim: 2200 yards
On the run, I started at 10:54 mpm for the first .25 then started to increase the speed gradually.
Swim: 5 x (25 3g, 25 swim, 25 fist, 25 swim) on the 2:15
10 x (25 kick, 25 swim with fins). First 6 were front, last 4 were side/side
10 x 50 “golf” on the 1: 93 (worst), 91, 90, 89….
the rest were 89′s and 90′s. Strokes were mostly 40 (43 worst), times were mostly 49 (50 slowest)
5 x 100 (100 pull, free, pull, free, pull) 8:48 total.
200 of alternating back/free.

This was at the University; all went well.

News of the Weird

Hmmm, is this one of the tea-baggers that are going to use “Second Amendment remedies” against us?

Sarah Palin’s Newsweek photo spread: see them here.

Quit Listening to Them, Mr. President…

From the New York Times:

The Labor Department report showed virtually no job growth in June, with the unemployment level edging up to 9.2 percent from 9.1 percent the month before. It seemed to confirm last month’s indication that the economy had stalled. After the report came out, the president went to the Rose Garden and said he hoped that a conclusion to the current debt-ceiling talks would give businesses “certainty” that the government had its debt and deficit under control, allowing them to start hiring again.

Certainty? That sounds like Mitt Romney, or any of the other Republicans who have concocted a phony connection between hiring and government borrowing.

There has never been any evidence that the federal debt is primarily responsible for the persistent joblessness that began with the 2008 recession. The numbers have remained high because of weak consumer demand and stagnant wage growth, along with an imbalance between jobs and job skills. Republicans have long tried to link unemployment and debt so that they can blame Mr. Obama for the poor economy, and build support for their ideological goal of cutting spending.

There is plenty of evidence, in fact, that the spending cuts already imposed by Republican intransigence are responsible for a great deal of joblessness. Although the private sector added 57,000 jobs in June, that tiny progress was reduced by the 39,000 jobs shed by federal, state and local governments, much of which came from education. As David Leonhardt noted in The Times on Friday, cutbacks in state and local spending have cost the economy about a million public-sector jobs over the last two years, in part because the federal stimulus program, bitterly opposed by Republicans, ended too soon. [...]

The president may have a nebulous approach to unemployment, but he is hardly indifferent to it. His re-election hinges on reducing it. It is hard to understand, though, why Mr. Obama has adopted the language of his opponents in connecting the economy to the debt. To his credit, he talked about the one step that would work — investing money in rebuilding the country. But the debt-ceiling ideas he is now considering would make that investment much less likely by pulling hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy at precisely the moment when the spending is needed most.

Yes, I understand that we have to negotiate with the Republicans and with the blue-dogs. Nothing can get through Congress without that. And yes, Democrats are different from Republicans in one fundamental way:

Nevertheless, it is one thing to make a compromise. It is another thing to “concede” the oppositions (false) points. Austerity should go on the back burner. Jobs are what we need now, and jobs will not come unless there is demand; we are in a liquidity trap (where more money in corporations will NOT lead to more job creation).

Part of me is getting to this point:

We have to become more unreasonable.

It’s hard for many of us progressives to do, but: it’s the pragmatic choice.

There are lots of reasonable compromises we could reach on Social Security and Medicare. To hell with them. To hell with them until Republicans and Democrats score roughly the same on that poll. Then I will once again be relatively nicely behaved.

We Democrats are compromise-valuing adults arguing with mewling, screaming, selfish children. They way things work, they will get their lollipops — and we will get played for suckers. You give me any negotiation and show me that the two sides hold these discrepant opinions shown in that chart and I will tell you who is going to win the fight. Hint: not the adults.[...]

This is not about my thinking that the President is a bad man. This is about him thinking that he is out of touch, badly advised, reconciled to progressive decline, and stuck thinking that the Republican Party is still like it was in 1996 — which is isn’t.

David Plouffe says that liberal Democrats have nowhere else to go. Well, Mr. Plouffe, here is where I will go if need be:

I will tell people that the President is seriously out of touch when it comes to these issues, deluded by bad advisors and the belief that he is up against reasonable opponents. I will tell people that he is harming the country by compromising and that we have to stop his foolish choices, if he makes them, even if it means staring him down or pulling him down.

I don’t threaten to vote against the President. I threaten to tell the truth about the President.[...]

So that, David Plouffe, is where I have to go. I can call you an idiot and call the President your dupe — while I tell people that they still gotta vote for him. It’s a hard sell, but you don’t leave me a lot of choice.

Get used to it, Mr. President. You respond well to threats. Here comes ours:

Be a President who won’t be rolled or be ready to have lots of your supporters say “vote for the weakling who gets rolled because at least he isn’t completely nuts.”

I’ll make that “vote for the weakling” case for the next 16 months, if need be — because it’s easier than trying to make the case that accepting reduced benefits in these programs is inevitable because we’re trying to be adults and we have to give into Republican tantrums. It at least gives us something to fight for.

Harsh? Well…

But no, you won’t see me jumping on the anti-Obama bandwagon.

Here is why: all too often we hear: “President Obama should be more like President X” where, if the criticism is coming from liberals, “X” is Lincoln, F. D. Roosevelt, Truman or even L. B. Johnson.

President Lincoln: didn’t free the slaves that he had the power to free (those in the Union) and openly said that he would have freed ZERO slaves if that is what it took to preserve the union.

President F. D. Roosevelt: put Americans of Japanese descent in concentration camps; the economy really didn’t come around until after he was dead (WWII !) and he was first elected in 1932. Yes, he made “balance the budget” mistakes along the way.

President Truman: went along with the anti-communist hysteria; got us mired in Korea.

President Johnson: Vietnam (and all that); grew impatient with what he saw as Martin Luther King’s increasing demands for racial equality (though he did pass the Civil Rights Act).

All of these were great Presidents and all of them would have been (correctly) blistered by the liberal community while in office.

What President Obama is being asked to do is very difficult and even the great ones that came before him made mistakes along the way.

It is unfair to compare President Obama to the mythological figures that exist in our brains.

But it is entirely fair for us to pressure President Obama from the left. If he doesn’t hear from us, he hears only from the right wing.

Science in an equal time classroom

Why Democrats Almost Always Lose