If California didn’t pass the bonds for the first stage of its high speed rail project last Friday, I don’t think this happens. Amtrak has unveiled their new vision for the Northeast Corridor, the most-used rail lines in the country, with a 42-page report outlining the future of high speed rail in the Northeast. Idealab [...]

Texas Governor Rick Perry’s vow to not implement the Affordable Care Act, in particular the Medicaid expansion, makes him at least the sixth state governor to refuse, joining Wisconsin, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. Even if it were only limited to these six states, this would make 3.89 million low-income Americans ineligible for Medicaid [...]

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is far more admired by national Republicans wanting a tough guy to yell at liberals than by his own constituents in his state. And a new report goes a long way to explaining why. Because Christie is the latest in a long line of conservative liars who will tailor their [...]

With the commencement of crackdowns on Occupy movement protest sites, the assumption was that the movement faced a fatal blow from which they would not recover. The physical occupation kept the protests at top of mind and in the news, the theory goes, and without the reclaiming of public space the movement would just fade [...]

The Republican Presidential nomination has been wide open for months. Mitt Romney has a smallish base of primary election support that cannot crack the low-20s. Extremist Texas politician Rick Perry has become the liberal in the race, aided along by a kneecapping from Wall Street. The Republican establishment believes that economic circumstances dictate a real [...]

The fight over whether to offset emergency spending on disaster relief, as Eric Cantor wants, could end up being the most interesting upcoming battle in Congress. The lines aren’t drawn in an entirely partisan way on this one. In particular, Republican Governors in the states affected want to see that disaster relief, and don’t care [...]

The New Jersey state Assembly, with a large Democratic majority, gave final approval yesterday to a bill that eliminates collective bargaining rights for public employee health care benefits and imposes the equivalent of a pay cut by increasing health and pension contributions. Unions in New Jersey actually have no collective bargaining guarantee other than health [...]

Public workers have become the new demons ruining America, with their greedy pay and pension benefits. As this video from Brave New Films makes clear, that notion is just a load of crap. Pension benefits are not all that generous for the vast majority of workers; the average benefit for the workers in Prichard, Alabama [...]

My favorite cabinet secretary is the one who knows how to play hardball with Republican obstructionists, who knows the leverage he holds and is not afraid to use it. I guess that’s because he’s the only Republican in the cabinet*. In some post-election hardball between the Obama administration and newly-elected Republicans, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood [...]

Paul Krugman rightly gives Chris Christie hell for dropping out of the Hudson River rail tunnel project, the largest infrastructure project in the country. He explains that this is probably the worst possible time to cancel infrastructure projects, with unemployment in crisis and job growth stagnant. From not only a jobs standpoint but an economic [...]

Chris Christie just put thousands of construction workers out of work for the next several years, in addition to lowering economic productivity permanently, by stopping funding for a rail tunnel project in New Jersey. Two senior officials say Gov. Chris Christie today will kill the controversial $8.7 billion Hudson River rail tunnel project, which he [...]