President Obama came into office promising a new age of cooperation and an end to partisan division. That promise has been an absolute and complete failure. According to Gallup Obama has been a historically polarizing figure in his three years in office, with a massive gap between his support from Republican and Democrats. By a [...]

Andrew Sullivan attempts to mount a defense of President Obama’s record from the standpoint of achieving liberal objectives.   But on some key items, he gets the President’s record and positions wrong, even backwards. Sullivan starts by declaring that Obama’s critics from both the left and right are unhinged from reality.  He then goes on [...]

That giant sucking sound you hear today is the sound of jobs being outsourced as President Obama signs into law three free trade deals; South Korea, Colombia and Panama. According to the Economic Policy Institute, passing the Korea Free Trade deal will likely cost this country 159,000 jobs. The three trade deals remain basically unchanged [...]

It sounds like Robert Gates thinks American foreign policy strategists need to watch the classic movie The Princess Bride. From the New York Times: Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq [...]

President Obama seems remarkably proud of himself for the many “concessions” he won from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as part of their deal to extend all the Bush tax cuts for two years. The administration has really tried to spin the “success” of this deal by claiming Obama got $238 billion in spending while the [...]

Now that President Obama has reach a “compromise” with the Republicans on tax cuts for the rich — which are even more generous to the ultra-wealthy than any George W. Bush passed — it’s time for predictions.

When President Obama ran for office, I was foolish enough to believe he would end the extremely low tax rates on the rich, given that it was one of his most-repeated campaign promises, and one of the four points of his campaign’s fiscal plan. I had hoped he would begin to make our tax code [...]

Michael Bennet gets caught in a moment of rare honesty with an open mike in the Senate: “It’s all rigged. The whole conversation is rigged. The fact that we don’t get to a discussion before the break about what we’re going to do in the lame duck. It’s just rigged.” Of course it is.  They [...]

I don’t know about you, but I am just tickled pink that Nancy Pelosi punted on passing a budget and handed responsibility for cutting the deficit by 3% of GDP to the fucking Republican CEO of Honeywell. Jamie Dimon as unaccountable oligarch whipping boy was getting old. Watching one of the world’s biggest defense contractors [...]

The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation was a political party in Canada that formed during the Great Depression. Most of its support came from the rural cooperative movement among farmers. Cooperative members made up a large part of its voters, and many of its leaders had held elected posts in cooperatives. Organized labor was another important part [...]