It’s not just an article of faith among many in the Republican Party that the government by some rule of nature/psychology/economics can’t be a solution. This idea has morphed into a commitment to make it impossible for government to properly function, preventing it from ever being a solution. The conservative philosophy about the role of government has transitioned into an active effort to realize a self-fulfilling anti-government prophesy, as the proposal for smaller single-issue bills and the RIENS Act demonstrate.

Wyoming’s two Republican senators, Mike Enzi and John Barrasso, are pushing for a rules change that would only allow an individual bill to deal with a single issue, in order to prevent the current practice of Congress passing massive omnibus bills. From Politico: Enzi, Barrasso and their co-sponsor in the House, freshman Rep. David Schweikert [...]

[ed. note: This is another post in Firedoglake’s semi-regular series exposing and exploring ways in which the federal government spends vast sums or forsakes vital revenue in a perpetual, profligate and pathetic quest to assure corporate America that the elected representatives of we the people are really, truly, madly, deeply “business friendly.” With each story, [...]

In the last few days, several bloggers – among them Jon Cohn and Ezra Klein — have written faulty defenses of the health care bill. They used theoretical, counterfactual alternatives in defense of the health care legislation they’ve supported, calling to mind Voltaire’s classic, Candide. In it, Voltaire heavily mocks the extreme optimism of Pangloss, [...]

The White House obsession with criticizing the “professional left” comes from one harsh truth: that the left has been right on major issues from health care to the stimulus.

I previously wrote about how Olympia Snowe (R-ME) was trying to make health care “affordable” by reducing the minimum definition of what qualifies as “insurance.” Her solution to the fact that real health insurance would still be unaffordable for millions if the nation adopted the bill she wrote: let everyone buy worthless junk insurance. This [...]