Washington Liberals

From Rolling Stone’s Secret and Lies of the Bailout: Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, remembers a call with Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. “We need $700 billion,” they told Brown, “and we need it in three days.” What’s more, the plan stipulated, Paulson could spend the money however he pleased, without…

Winds sweeping through the Great Plains once robbed the Farm Belt of its future, stripping away overworked topsoil and creating the dreaded Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Today, those winds are bringing new hope to declining rural communities across the American heartland—and nowhere is wind’s promise more palpable than in Cloud County, Kansas, where soaring…

Whereas Senator Rodney Tom ran as a Democrat in 2010 in the 48th Legislative District; and Whereas Senator Tom received over $25,000 from the State Democratic Party and $44,000 in in-kind donations from the Senate Democratic Caucus in 2010, and additional support and resources from the 48th District Democrats; and Whereas Senator Tim Sheldon ran…

Rep. Adam Smith voted against the budget deal, saying, it make “getting to a reasonable ten-year plan far more difficult by making permanent 90 percent of the Bush Tax Cuts. By not allowing those tax cuts to expire, and then making them permanent, we took $3.5 Trillion of revenue off the table. This will lead…

So that fiscal cliff wasn’t much of a ride, was it? We went over that cliff for a day and a half, and nothing much happened. Then Obama signed the “American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012,” and we are off and running to the next artificial crisis with even more escalating rhetoric, brought to us…

The Wall Street Journal points out that by retaining tax cuts for incomes up to $400,000, “Democrats aren’t just accepting, but embracing and extending, at least 98% of the 2001 Bush tax cuts.” Throughout the run-up to the budget deal, I received emails from the White House emphasizing the reasons why the President would have…

Hurray for the Republicans! They saved us from defeat by defeating themselves. Now President Obama holds all the cards. He should just hold onto them. What about the fiscal cliff? Indeed, what about it? It is a fiction of rhetoric, foisted on the American people by Wall Street and inside-the-beltway elites. Sort of like the…

I’m reading Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, by Dana Priest and William R. Arkin. The book catalogs the mind-boggling number of secret and semi-secret government agencies and programs that have proliferated since the 9/11 attacks.  (“Code names linked companies and agencies and activities, and the number of locations doubled…