Mori Dinauer

From a new Democracy Corps poll: “Nearly half of voters think the deficit can be reduced without real cost to entitlements, with 48 percent believing there is enough waste and inefficiency in government spending for the deficit to be reduced through spending cuts while keeping health care, Social Security, unemployment benefits and other services from […]

The impulse behind conservatives like Norman Podhoretz preferring obviously unqualified politicians to Barack Obama has several sources. First there’s the deep-seated mistrust, even among conservative intellectuals, of intellectuals in general. Backing candidates like the former governor of Alaska is the manifestation of that distrust in overdrive. Then there’s the need to piss off liberals. As […]

The policy reasons for passing health-care reform are obvious. But as to the political reasons, many of us argued that Democrats would be better off having succeeded in passage, rather than failing to do so. I always understood this not as the legislation suddenly making Democrats more electorally attractive in general — it has not […]

A very strange conversation between four Brookings senior fellows, alluded to yesterday. Jonathan Rauch starts with the observation that despite ideological calcification, the country’s problems are too big for one party to handle alone, and thus what President Obama really needs is “Speaker Boehner.” In response, Thomas Mann and Henry Aaron politely note that this […]

Although there’s every reason to be skeptical, I suspect that Chris Dodd‘s statement that some members of the Republican congressional caucus are tiring of the “Party of No” strategy is probably correct. Particularly with newer members like Bob Corker, you have ask why these guys got into politics, and it’s hard to make the case […]

Like I was saying the other day, the main force driving the hatred of health-care reform seems to be the fear that there’s a shift afoot which will make the rich slightly less rich, and the poor slightly less impoverished. David Leonhardt gets at this in his great article on wealth inequality in today’s Times, […]

In the aftermath of passing health-care reform into law, the Republican Meltdown has become manifest, the essence of which is captured in this Bob Herbert column. His key point is an obvious one: Republicans not only tolerate but encourage the vile hatred and ignorance being fomented by the Tea Partiers and their ilk. When Michael […]

Health care jamboree weekend roundup: Nancy Pelosi deserves the credit for resurrecting health-care reform after Scott Brown was elected; the public option is gone but not forgotten; there were other protests in D.C. this weekend besides the Tea Partiers; and National Review Online is your source for people who believe Western civilization is dying, don’t […]

Last month, Jon Chait predicted a conservative freakout over health-care reform, once they realized that the election of Scott Brown was insufficient to kill the legislation. In the final days leading up to a close vote in the House on Sunday, the freakout has begun. The mood at The Corner is a combination of resignment, […]

If one ever needed a reminder about how national-security paranoia has warped this country, look no further than the McCain/Lieberman-sponsored “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.” This cowardly proposal that they would have Congress preserve in parchment codifies the view, promoted by John Yoo and others, that the president can, at any […]