I mentioned yesterday that one of the overlooked consequences of this debt deal is the timing. It came one week before recall elections in Wisconsin that actually represent the best of the progressive movement and a backlash against the forces that won a landslide in 2010. Consider what happened there. Republicans, after winning full dominance [...]

Let me call your attention to Ari Berman’s piece in The Nation, which kind of puts to rest all this drama about whether the Boehner plan or the Reid plan will succeed. “Our plan includes more cuts,” Chuck Schumer bragged at a news conference on Capitol Hill yesterday when comparing Harry Reid’s debt plan to [...]

Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair Mike Tate will announce tonight at the annual convention that the party will try to recall Gov. Scott Walker when he becomes eligible for removal early next year. Once January 2012 hits, activists can gather signatures on a Walker recall, and Tate promises official backing from the state party for [...]

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will make a speech today in Washington where he will call for an independent labor movement that protects the interests of the working class and does not look out for one party or the other. In a speech at the National Press Club, the head of the nation’s largest labor federation [...]

Here’s an issue where leading progressive economists and even Third Way agree: spending caps are a miserable policy idea. With respect to the former, MoveOn.org has assembled a list of over 75 economists who have written a letter to Congress detailing why spending caps would be so disastrous. The signatories include such luminaries as Dean [...]

Brad DeLong muses that Ben Bernanke has changed inflation expectations without anybody knowing it: I see no signs anywhere in the marketplace that there is any threat of rising inflation expectations. He stated that he was unwilling to undertake more stimulative policies because “it is not clear we can get substantial improvements in payrolls without [...]

Democrats are in general coming together on their criticism of the Ryan Medicare Phase-Out budget. I heard both Nancy Pelosi and Sherrod Brown on conference calls today, and they were pretty effective. Brown in particular made it clear: every time Republicans get a slice of power since 1964, they try to cut or eliminate the [...]

Not to beat a dead horse over this, but given where we were just a few weeks ago, I’d say the fact that the President won’t endorse benefit cuts to Social Security in the State of the Union is a significant achievement. I don’t think we have a sense of how precarious this all was, [...]

I still maintain that an emphasis on new investments in the State of the Union takes the pressure off the all-austerity-all-the-time agenda. That doesn’t make it the greatest proposal in the world, either. There will still be a nod to deficit reduction in there, even if it’s nonspecific. Overall, the plan comes nowhere near the [...]

The President held an undisclosed meeting with liberal economists before a press conference where he blamed the “sanctimonious” left for their purity in the tax debate. The meeting included Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, Alan Blinder and Robert Reich. It sounds pretty fascinating. In what two participants describe as a somewhat-argumentative one-hour discussion, Obama [...]

I basically knew everything the President said in his press conference today, but let’s parse a bit of it: 1) The tax cut deal is going down in flames specifically because of Democrats. You would think that a Democratic President wouldn’t have to call out his own party if he didn’t need the votes. 2) [...]