Mori Dinauer

Perhaps I’m unable to step outside my cosmopolitan liberal elitist bubble, but I find this need among some Americans to bash Europe inexplicable. Apparently “Obama‘s” new $100 bill “looks European” in the esteemed opinion of the Drudge Report. Never mind that the new currency design was adopted during the notoriously defeatist regime of George W. […]

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the reaction from the Tea Partiers to financial regulation legislation has largely been “no comment.” The glue of the Tea Party movement is protest against redistributionist government that unfairly taxes the hard-working and then gives handouts to the undeserving. The only relationship in this model is a single powerful institution, […]

According to reporting from Christina Bellantoni, the White House has concluded that Senate Republicans will work to block any Supreme Court nominee Barack Obama names, regardless of their actual judicial philosophy, and this realization has had a “liberating” effect on the president. Another possibility, floated by Peter Baker, is that Obama actually does view himself […]

I don’t think there’s any mystery about how Republicans are going to handle President Obama‘s nominee to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stephens. Here are some revealing quotes from a short Wall Street Journal post on the retirement announcement (all emphasis mine). Mitch McConnell: “Americans can expect Senate Republicans to make a sustained and vigorous […]

There is not enough space here to properly discuss the fascinating conversation between Sanchez, Yglesias, Millman, and Larison on the closing of the conservative mind, but here’s an illustrative example of the phenomenon. David Frum goes on Larry Kudlow‘s show and Kudlow argues that a mere 5 percent to 10 percent cut in federal payrolls […]

The significance of the Obama administration removing the designation “Islamic radicalism” from the current National Security Strategy is readily apparent when one reads the 2002-era proclamation: “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.” The obvious question is “what ideological conflict?” Does this suggest […]

There’s hardly any need to link to the very predictable conservative response to the Obama administration’s new policy concerning the use of nuclear weapons, but needless to say there’s nothing any U.S. president can do to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and wiping Persia off the face of the Earth is just not a […]

Paul Krugman makes a simple yet fundamentally important observation about ideological perception: “On the right, people are for smaller government as a matter of principle — smaller government for its own sake. And so they naturally imagine that their opponents must be their mirror image, wanting bigger government as a goal in itself.” Incidentally, this […]

To follow up on yesterday’s question of why Mitt Romney thinks states are better than the federal government as agents of implementing health care, it’s worth noting that under the Affordable Care Act, states will be overseeing a lot of the nuts and bolts of setting up the exchanges and regulating insurers. What the federal […]

FactCheck.org has a useful chronology and correction of the right-wing meme that one consequence of passing the Affordable Care Act will be the hiring an additional 16,000+ IRS agents to enforce the individual mandate. And it’s not as though this fiction is confined to Glenn Beck‘s chalkboard, it’s been repeated by figures as prominent as […]