Mori Dinauer

If last year’s CPAC set the defiant tone of the GOP for the first year of the Obama administration, this year’s National Tea Party Convention will, I think, set the tone for 2010. Moreover, this could be the point at which the Republican party either becomes inseparable from the tea partiers or starts the process […]

One regrettable side effect of the mainstreaming of political blogging is that it has amplified the worst tendencies of political journalism, such as writing attention/link-grabbing headlines like “Democrats are dropping like flies” that provide zero contextual analysis and aren’t even factually accurate. Then the pack mentality sets in, and you get nonsense like “Wave of […]

I would definitely categorize behind-the-scenes efforts by congressional Democrats to have a jobs package ready to go as soon as health-care reform is signed into law by President Obama as too little, too late, but at least by agreeing to the details in advance we won’t have to spend months upon months watching the process […]

As 2009 came to a close, it should be apparent to all that there was nothing the GOP wasn’t willing to exploit in order to attack Democrats in general and the president in particular, for whom they have bottomless loathing of. Or as a Republican congressional candidate in Minnesota put it, defeating the “radicals” in […]

With an 8 AM Senate vote scheduled Thursday for health-care reform, the next obstacle is the conference committee, where the House and Senate bills will be merged. But to speed things along and avoid blowing up the various deals that were made to secure 60 cloture votes, there’s word on the Hill that the House […]

President Obama signed the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act into law today, which included Sen. Al Franken‘s amendment barring defense contractors from preventing rape victims from suing their employer in court. Rachel Slajda has the backstory on how the Obama administration, which at one point was bafflingly opposed to the amendment, found a loophole that made […]

The final obstacle to 60 votes for health-care reform, Sen. Ben Nelson, finally fell on Saturday when the Nebraska Democrat accepted compromise legislation from Harry Reid that would allow individual states to choose whether to cover abortion in health care. Rep. Bart Stupak, whose late amendment to the House version of the reform bill is […]

John Judis examines the danger U.S. presidents court when they refer to foreign threats as “evil” and determines that using it as a justification for war unnecessarily raises the stakes in a given conflict. Insofar as the point of referencing evil is to rally people to your crusade, I’m hard-pressed to disagree. But I wonder […]

Ed Kilgore has written a thoughtful meditation on the schism between the activists and the pragmatists in the progressive debate over health-care reform and concludes that neither side seems able or willing to understand the other’s “ideological and strategic underpinnings.” Meanwhile, Nate Silver has posted responses to his 20 questions about killing health-care reform that […]

I guess we’ll never know how many sitting U.S. senators would vote in favor of a single-payer health-care system, because Bernie Sanders is withdrawing his amendment to avoid Tom Coburn‘s credible threat to read the entire text of the amendment into the record as part of an ongoing campaign by the Republican Party to make […]