Is this the worst Congress in our lifetimes?  The public now gives Congress its worst performance rating in the 20 years in which pollsters have been asking the question. From the Wall Street Journal: This particular Congress ranks as one of the worst – ever. In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 42% of [...]

The Obama Administration has finally started to do something relatively serious about the housing crisis by using the tool of executive authority it has over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Unfortunately, the plan seems to depend heavily on enriching large corporate middlemen. The Wall Street Journal explains: One proposal would sell packages of hundreds or [...]

AARP is very much open to supporting cutting Social Security benefits. AARP’s push back and non-denial related to the recent Wall Street Journal article was simply that they didn’t want people to infer that AARP supported Social Security being part of the specific deficit ceiling negotiations going on at this moment. Separate from those exact [...]

I’m beginning to suspect the Republican’s decision to hold the debt ceiling hostage to demand only big cuts in spending and President Obama’s almost enthusiastic desire to play along was a way to deal with the problem of the nonexistent bond vigilantes by actively creating some. Most of the elites in Washington would love to [...]

Given the incredible structural similarity between the Massachusetts health care reform law signed by Mitt Romney and the new national Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama, the release of the annual physician workforce survey (PDF) from the Massachusetts Medical Society has generated a lot of attention. But I would caution everyone involved that on [...]

It is theoretically possible that Obama will only call for applying the payroll tax to incomes above $107,000–that being the only “fix” to Social Security supported by the American people and would give the program near infinite solvency–but I highly doubt it. Most likely, our deficit-hawk-in-chief is going to call for some form of cuts to Social Security benefits.

In an attempt to defend health care reform against this absurd Wall Street Journal op-ed by Sen. Ron Johnson, Ezra Klein decided to use known falsehoods to advance his case. From Ezra Klein: Here’s the odd thing: At no point in his op-ed does Johnson ever argue that the Affordable Care Act would’ve made his [...]

[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, [...]

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.