What the President isn’t telling people is that he offered an alteration to that automatic COLA process, by going to chained CPI, that would result in a slower increase in benefits, and a de facto cut. So at the same time the President is explaining that the COLA is not in his control, he is hiding the fact that he wants to change the metric upon which it is based. In fact, he slipped and actually did mention chained CPI, in a roundabout way, at a second town hall in Alpha, Illinois. (cont.)

What do the media have in common with Barack Obama and the Democrats?

[Welcome author William Kleinknecht, and Host Rick Perlstein] [As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book.  Please take other conversations to a previous thread.  - bev] The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America I’ll never forget my own trip to Dixon, Illinois, Ronald [...]

Blind Ambition is—if you haven’t read it already—a great book for any member of the Firedoglake community to read. The entire complex of events that ended up with the shorthand name “Watergate” is incredibly convoluted; think of the Plame affair, multiply it by twenty, and extend the drama over twenty-six months—or twenty-six years, because really, the story did not end with Richard Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974, and it hasn’t even ended yet, as John’s splendid afterward (which offers the most convincing explanation in print of what the Watergate burglars were looking for in DNC headquarters) makes perfectly clear. And Blind Ambition, John Dean’s memoir of his participation in the events, is the best single volume Watergate book, out of the literally hundreds of them, to get a full and three-dimensional understanding of the whole thing from start to finish, from the warped executive psychology that produced it (in one of the books funnier scenes young Dean is tasked with screening the avant-garde omnisexual drag queen extravaganza Tricia’s Wedding to see if a case can be made to clamp the filmmakers in leg irons, or something) to the most gripping mystery story history has ever given us.