Has Jim DeMint, the right-wing senator leading the assault on federal domestic spending, finally gone too far? His corporate executive benefactors may soon come to think so. Even hypocrites can sometimes have a point. Take Jim DeMint, for instance, the U.S. senator — and Tea Party favorite — from South Carolina who may well be [...]
Read Post
The "Celtic Tiger" — the Irish economy — has clawed its way back from near extinction, according to the Heritage Foundation. The irony is that the things that Heritage praises about Ireland’s economy are what drove it to the brink of extinction. The "Celtic Tiger" has been caged, de-clawed and neutered. And it was conservative [...]
Read Post
It probably seems like I’m “a day late and a dollar short,” with a post about Ireland’s economic disaster days after the New York Times story about the high cost of austerity measures in Ireland echoed all over the progressive blogosphere. But I’m not. It just took me a few days to recover from the [...]
Read Post
The Congressional Budget Office today released its preliminary analysis of the Republican health reform repeal bill, and the 10-year increase to the deficit is higher than previously assumed: $230 billion instead of $143 billion. That’s because the 10-year window now ends in 2021 instead of 2019, and health reform’s impact on the deficit increases over [...]
Read Post
On the day before Congress reconvened in Washington, in the middle of a continuing job crisis, Republicans took to the Sunday talk show airwaves and … had no ideas what to do about creating jobs. This is not terribly shocking. There have been no actual job creation proposals from the Republicans since their congressional election [...]
Read Post
I have been writing about the Tea Party, and asking what they will do if/when the DC Republicans betray them. CAF has set up a page for the Tea Party Getting Played series. This is the latest in the series. The Tea Party candidates vowed they would be different, would stick to basic principles and [...]
Read Post
Each morning, Bill Scher and Terrance Heath serve up what progressives need to affect change on the kitchen-table issues families face: jobs, health care, green energy, financial reform, affordable education and retirement security. How Soon Will GOP Try To Shut Down The Government? GOP might try to shut down government next month, speculates Capital Gains [...]
Read Post
Corporate cash does funny things to people. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) got into office by pledging to fight “special interests,” but just a decade or so later, he’s running one of the biggest special interest shows in Washington. It’s easy to see the appeal. As the fancy funding backing the Tea Party demonstrates, big money [...]
Read Post
Over at bloggingheads, my CAF colleague Bill Scher discusses the new international banking standards with Conn Carroll, a conservative blogger for The Heritage Foundation. Carroll actually agrees with a lot of what I have to say about Basel III, but I he draws conclusions from my post that overemphasize the role of regulation and ignore [...]
Read Post
Lots of kids believe in Santa Claus. This is because people repeat the fable to kids over and over, telling them that Santa Claus will deliver presents to them if they’re good. And then there’s the Boogeyman, the “amorphous embodiment of terror.” In some regions stories of the Boogeyman are repeated and repeated, and to [...]
Read Post