Mark Schmitt

If you’ve been reading The American Prospect or TAP Online, or both, you probably recognize that we offer something a little different from a lot of progressive sites or blogs. I think Adam Serwer captured our attitude well in an aside in a blog post a couple of months ago: “Maybe there’s a political advantage […]

Like Tim Fernholz, I’m at the joint conference on “how progressives should think about the deficit,” put on by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center for American Progress. Tim notes that the presence of Franklin Raines, former president of Fannie Mae, and Bob Rubin, formerly of Treasury and Citigroup might “offend […]

“A Primer on Reconciliation,” put together by Ken Strickland of NBC at First Read does a nice job of explaining the arcane process and some of the limits that will make it both difficult and risky to push health reform through that process, despite the appealing feature that it can bypass Republican obstruction. However, Strickland […]

In the column that Adam and Michael Kazin already demolished, David Brooks quotes the libertarian econo-blogger

As progressives mourn the likely death of a public insurance option in health care reform, it’s worthwhile to trace the history of exactly where this idea — a compromise itself — came from. The public option was part of a carefully thought out and deliberately funded effort to put all the pieces in place for […]