It is nice to see both Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias openly admitting that the Affordable Care Act is about as right-wing any insurance coverage expansion “reform” could be. From Yglesias’s The Sensible Conservative Alternative To The Affordable Care Act Is The Affordable Care Act: If you simply do what Ponnuru and Levin propose, every [...]

The notion that Democrats lost the 2010 midterms because liberals weren’t clapping loudly enough isn’t supported by the evidence. Democrats lost because they lost independents by 15 points, and independents don’t care what liberals think.

Not only is Republican Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan using basically the same general premium-supported exchange design that Obama’s health care revision does for the uninsured under 65, but both Ryan’s budget and “Obamacare” are nearly totally reliant on almost the same pathetic accounting trick of using poorly indexed caps on federal health care spending in the distant future to produce the bulk of their supposed deficit reductions.

At a time when we should be reining in the capitalism that failed so badly, we are instead capitulating to it, using the event of the failure of our corporate masters to give them even more. How is that even happening? And to what degree does the blogosphere deserve some of the blame?

The New York Times business section features almost weekly investigative piece on what can only be described as wide-spread corporate crime. But no one’s going to jail. What used to be called criminal fraud is now called a “business plan.”

This passage from August 2009 by Matt Yglesias is long, but please bear with me and give it a read. I think there’s something perverse in the very strong desire I see among liberals to make problems in congress be about anything other than congress. It’s just not in the power of Barack Obama to [...]

The race is on to unload responsibility for the extremely unpopular health care bill. And Axelrod wants to make sure he doesn’t get the blame.

“A new AP poll finds that Americans who think the law should have done more outnumber those who think the government should stay out of health care by 2-to-1.”

Sometime Tuesday the Senate may take up an amendment to the Senate financial reform bill that would require the Government Accounting Office to conduct an audit of the operations of the Federal Reserve. The outcome is much in doubt, but it shouldn’t be.

I’ve said many times that it’s impossible to expect progressive members of Congress to hold together if they don’t have the backing of their natural fiscal constituencies — the liberal interest groups and the unions. Without that support, they’re left to raise money from PACS and other corporate sources to sufficiently fund their campaigns. That’s why they take turns championing progressive bills that ultimately fail so they can pretend they do something, and then voting for bad bills that ultimately pass so someone else can be the failed hero. When Tammy Baldwin votes for one PhRMA-friendly bill after another, progressives can say “hey, but she’s so good on LGBT issues!” Which never actually pass either, but the kabuki keeps activists sufficiently docile and donating to large organizations who fundraise off amping up outrage.

But it’s also worthy to note that it’s hard for them to withstand the assault of liberal “pundits” who sneeringly derided their efforts as naive, futile and “purist.” They should be proudly taking credit for their role in delegitimizing progressive opposition to the bill in liberal intellectual circles, much the same role that the same people played during the Iraq war.