An article in Politico about President Obama’s deficit speech, by Carrie Budoff Brown and Ben Smith, starts with the line, “President Barack Obama finally gave his liberal critics exactly what they wanted.” I want to make it clear that in no way was this deficit speech what I wanted. With unemployment over 9 percent and [...]

Over at Politico Byron Tau and Ben Smith are raising the red flag about the possibility of Republicans using the expiration of the 18.4 cent per gallon gas tax on September 30th as their new hostage in the next stage of disaster legislating. The anti-tax Republicans are already making noises about not extending this tax. [...]

The fact is, the people who did the work to uncover the Gruber story were liberals. Neither Fox News nor the right-wing noise machine did that kind of in-depth accountability reporting on George Bush. Stealing our research now and presenting it as their own obscures the fact that there is a profound difference in the way that many liberals respond when “our team” is in office, as compared to the slavish propaganda that Fox offered up in honor of George Bush.

One is demanding accountability. The other is just engaging in demagoguery.

If the Senate bill ends up like I fear: no public option, no serious regulation on insurance, no real medical loss ratio, very low insurance standards, and an individual mandate the private insurance companies will have truly won (via Ben Smith): With the Senate shifting sharply away from a “pure public option,” an insurance industry [...]