American Politics

Now that President Obama has unveiled his compromise plan for health care reform, it’s worth turning to Jonathan Cohn for his thoughts on what he describes as “the last, best shot” for health care reform: Obama wants this. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants this. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants this. (And, yes, liberal policy wonks like me want this.) But do the rest of the Democrats in Congress want this? The House, by all accounts, is the chamber that worries reformers the most. Centrists and freshmen are nervous about voting for a bill, given the latest poll numbers and rebuke to Democrats in ... Read Full Story

The Washington Post babbled again today about Obama inheriting a huge deficit from Bush, blah blah blah.  Amazingly enough, a lot of people swallow this nonsense. So once more, I'll try a short civics lesson. Budgets do not come from the White House.  They come from Congress, and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the  Democratic Party .  They controlled the budget process for FY 2008 and FY 2009, as well as FY 2010 and FY 2011.  In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough ... Read Full Story

In 1966, Ronald Reagan won his first political campaign in a landslide victory against the two-term Democratic Governor of California, Edmund Brown. What is sometimes forgotten is that the preceding Republican primary had been a highly contested one. According to Reagan, it was "very bitter at times, largely because of the lingering split between conservatives and moderates in the state party." The intra-party attacks became so heated that state Republican chairman, Gaylord Parkinson, proposed the Eleventh Commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican," a rule that Ronald Reagan obeyed ever since because the intra-party strife he experienced in his first political ... Read Full Story

For weeks, months, or possibly years, the pundits will be analyzing how Scott Brown, a State Senator from Wrentham, bested Martha Coakley, the clear Democrat front-runner, in what has been called one of the 5 greatest upsets in American political history. The blame game had begun well before the election, with both the Coakley campaign and the DNC pointing fingers at one another, with a media that was “shocked” that a Republican could win in Massachusetts. Health care, or health care reform, to be exact, was touted as the pivotal reason for Brown’s election. There are bits of truth to each: Coakley ran a ... Read Full Story

Browse > Home / Breaking news / More Breaking News Items: From The Stirring Trouble Team January 18, 2010 Today we present another selection of breaking news items. From the editorial office of the Stirring Trouble team in the leafy suburb of London. People ask us do the team members have an alcohol dependency problem. Of course they do, we say to that. And many, many more other problems. Breaking News: President Barack Obama says that his priority now is rebuilding Haiti. If I lose the next election I can always move to live there, he says. Breaking News: Vice President Joe Biden threatens ... Read Full Story