Mori Dinauer

The socialist Obama administration, in its authoritarian quest to control every aspect of our lives, has proposed spending $400 million to develop healthy food outlets in urban communities to increase livability. Doesn’t he realize that the free market works best when it’s free? For example, Dollar General (the Dollar Store) saw that there were more […]

Obviously, “centrist” Democratic senators like Blanche Lincoln and Evan Bayh provided crucial filibuster-breaking votes last year on progressive legislation, but their support came at the cost of hefty compromises to appease conservative constituencies. With this in mind I’m pretty indifferent to the fate of Bayh, Lincoln, or any of the usual Democratic bed-wetters in November. […]

Given that current polling is an electoral wash for Democrats regardless of whether they pass health-care reform, the question comes back to how Democrats want to go into the midterm elections: with their failure to pass reform with large congressional majorities thrown back in their face by Republicans eager to exploit vulnerability, or with a […]

One of the consequences of having an enormous defense budget, as the United States does, is that a host of programs related to defense but less tangible (and less expensive) than fighter jets and aircraft carriers get funded, even though they would ordinarily be axed by Congress’ deficit hawks. But if you want to get […]

It’s probably a fool’s hope that the public will ever care about the details of public policy, but perhaps all that’s needed is to demonstrate that in our current political moment only one of the two major political parties cares at all about crafting sensible public policy. It seems to me that Barack Obama demonstrated […]

Both Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias have some thoughts on Lawrence Lessig‘s latest efforts to get money out of politics. What I find lacking in these discussions, what I found lacking in the launch of Lessig’s Change Congress campaign two years ago, is an admission that it’s not so much the amount of money in […]

On the eve of the State of the Union address the public is pissed off, no doubt, but now we have some polling data that clarifies that anger. In short, Americans hate Congress, hate both parties, think the federal government is broken, that we’re on the “wrong track” as a country, and don’t think Barack […]

Some takes on the spending freeze, reproduced without comment. John Judis: “Obama turns out to be a wonderful orator, but, to date, a lousy professor.” Chris Hayes: “I wish there was a way to sue for political malpractice, because what we’re seeing from the White House and congressional Democrats these last two weeks would make […]

I’m highly wary of ideological purity tests as a means of maintaining partisan loyalty. But perhaps Democrats might want to consider some minimum policy comprehension threshold for politicians who wish to claim to be Democrats. Take Evan Bayh, for instance. Here’s someone whose big idea for economic recovery is a spending freeze — much as […]

I’m aware that it’s not his style, but Barack Obama needs to move past the unity rhetoric and start playing some hardball politics. At a town hall in Ohio today, the president sounded a bit harsher and more defiant than usual but failed to specify what he feels Congress should do on health care, and […]