Expanding the power of the executive branch is terrible enough by itself. But redesigning the rules to make it easier to advance conservative goals while inhibiting progressive reform is an unbelievably disappointing request by a Democratic President.

Democrats are suffering from a dangerous enthusiasm gap. On the generic ballot, Democrats are currently tied with Republicans for the 2010 midterm election at 44 percent each, according to the new NBC/WSJ poll. That’s bad news for Democrats, given that they are holding several Republican-leaning seats and suffer a built-in disadvantage based on the layout of Congressional districts.

On Monday, I asked whether the White House would put the screws to the Blue Dogs to pass immigration reform the way they did on health care, and the answer appears to be “no.” Rather, they will rely on their tried-and-true game plan for dealing with issues important to “f&%king r#%ard” liberals.

DNC Chair Tim Kaine has announced that Democrats will run on a platform of being the “results party”–a move that leaves me wondering whether it is stupid or simply the only choice for Democrats. . . because they can’t deny the fact that they fully control Washington. One hopes deciding to run as the party of results might encourage Democrats to actually do everything in their power, including using reconciliation, to actually deliver on some real results.

The fate of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) over the course of the past year and a half has been largely determined by the White House. Rahm Emanuel would not let it come up for a vote until after health care was passed, and by that time the Democrats no longer had 60 votes in the Senate. But its evolution is also intimately tied to the electoral prospects of Harry Reid and Arlen Specter, and unless you understand one, you can’t understand the other.

If unions take this deal, it’s a sell-out of epic proportions. I’m hard pressed to think of a deal unions could cut in health care that would cause more long-term damage to not just the credibility of the labor movement, but the middle class.

A corporate front group funded polls in Nevada and Colorado to show opposition to the group’s only issue: the Employee Free Choice Act. And of course, media outlets not only printed the results as unchallenged fact, but failed to do the most basic fact check on the poll’s questions and on their own reports of the poll. It’s so wrong, in fact, I have to break this post into two parts.

Politicians, business executives, labor leaders, none of them seem to get it (or at least want to acknowledge it): Our broken health care system is the 800 pound gorilla sitting on our economy, and every year, the gorilla gains another hundred pounds. Health insurance is a massive piece of overhead cost, killing our competitiveness in the world market. The problem is not only getting worse, it is getting worse at an increasingly rapid rate. This current health care reform bill is good on coverage expansion, but extremely weak on cost control–and that is a very bad news.

After being ridiculed from the left and right for dodging a question, McMahon’s campaign issued a clarifying response, in which she equated her opposition to terror trials to her opposition to “card check,” among other issues.

This is the first day of Firedoglake’s new blog about work, jobs, unions, and the politics involved. In the midst of a floundering economy, it’s the issues that face people who work for a living that deserve the most attention. We’ll look at the goings-on of unions, labor legislation, and organizing drives, and discuss their impact on working people.