Tim Fernholz

One thing to pull out of Adam’s post below: the quick response of Congress to the Obama administration’s invocation of the state secrets privilege. While I’m not too angry about Obama’s decision — the new administration wants to have a systematic approach to releasing national security information and they’re not going to act until they’ve […]

The other day I was trying to come up with an incentive for Republicans to work with the Obama administration in the face of a lot of strong evidence that doing so isn’t in their interest. This was what I suggested: [T]here will be political hay to be made as the results of that agenda […]

So a compromise has been reached between the House and the Senate on the economic stimulus legislation. Details remain sketchy, but the bill is less expensive than both previous versions, thanks to cuts in some regressive tax rebates (seems they took my suggestion) and small restorations to the certain state and education funding that was […]

Paul Krugman delivers our keynote speech, running through his views on the current economic situation — no surprise if you’ve been keeping up with his work at the New York Times. The Nobel Prize-winning economist touched on a number of points, but the most important was his focus on the need for public investment. “We […]

During a panel on “Investing in People,” Karen Kornbluh, who was then-Senator Barack Obama’s policy director, the author of the Democratic platform and sometimes called “Obama’s brain,”* made an important distinction between acute and chronic crises. Obviously the financial crisis and recession demand immediate attention from the new administration, but the new president made clear […]

I haven’t written anything yet about the proposal that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner delivered yesterday because it’s very hard to find someone who actually understands it, both because it is vague and because the probems and their solutions are equally complex. (Work your way through the fact sheet [PDF].) Paul Krugman — who I’ll try […]

At today’s Thinking Big conference, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell spoke briefly about federal priorities for energy and infrastructure programs before leaving to accompany Vice President Joe Biden to an event in Pennsylvania in support of the stimulus legislation. Rendell laid out a bold agenda for a ten year, 2.2 trillion dollar infrastructure program and the […]

It’s news to no one that the stimulus passed by the exact same vote as last night’s cloture. Ezra notes that Senator Johnny Isakson’s silly house-flipping tax rebate is still part of the bill even though Isakson didn’t vote to support the bill or even to end cloture; of the other three sponsors, Senators Joe […]

Ezra says we need a working theory of bipartisanship. True! But what form does it take? Right now, we’ve got a situation where the president is actively reaching out to and courting Republicans, but on the policy-making front bipartisanship is of the Nelson-Collins variety: moderates getting together to lessen proposals not based on any alternate […]

I’ve been reading Martin Indyk’s memoir of the Middle East peace process in the 1990s, and at one point he cites Henry Kissinger to the effect that Israel doesn’t have a foreign policy; it has domestic politics. It rings true, certainly, for the last few months, and today’s election will likely turn on the Israeli […]