In Which I Compare our Political System and Centrist Third Party Wankers to a Ridiculously Oversimplified Cola War

In Social Security’s 76 year history, it has always been dealt with independent of the general budget, through the normal legislative process. Rather than enact major changes in haste and, we believe, repent at leisure after the damage has been done, we urge policymakers to focus on Social Security after the debt limit has been raised, in its own legislative vehicle, through the normal legislative process with full hearings and open debate. Let’s go with the old-fashioned way, rather than some new, untested third way.

In reality, Ryan’s plan doesn’t actually protect current seniors Medicare. With no new people joining traditional Medicare, its pool would steadily shrink, making doctors less willing to accept it.

It’s very easy for the Third Way to congratulate itself that it got a bunch of people “from Middle America” to complain that gay men and women deprived of civil rights “don’t get it,” it’s a fundamentally dishonest project. But the people who “don’t get it” are those who pretend they can separate the institution of marriage from society’s full recognition of that institution, legally, through the rights it conveys.

In our civil society, if something is legal for one, it just has to be legal for all. The bottom line is, everyone is equal under the law.

At least that’s how I see it.

Not so, it seems, for Lanae Erickson and Jon Cowan, two Third Way muckety-mucks who recently penned a piece for the Baltimore Sun in which they argued that if LGBT Americans want to see marriage equality become a reality, they need to make it less about equality and more about embracing what the authors see as traditional values.

We humans find ourselves in an awkward – perhaps fatally awkward – circumstance. We seem unable to safely and morally manage the technologies and systems we are clever enough to invent. From Bhopal to Chernobyl, from Three Mile Island to the Gulf Oil spill, from New Orleans levee failures to the Japan nuclear crisis, we [...]

You do not have to weigh the costs of nuclear power against the health and environmental impact of fossil fuels. You have to weigh it against the costs of all other energy alternatives. And given that, it comes up well short.

I’ve been going to conventions for years where “DLC!” was used as a pejorative. Now it doesn’t exist. Its ideas are featured, however, in like-minded think tanks and organizations, and throughout the Congress and the White House at the highest levels. The conservative wing of the Democratic Party managed to shed its skin without altering its policy a whit.

As God is my witness, if I read one more headline like this, I swear — I’m going to lose it.

At a press event in North Portland in front of the home of a family struggling to avoid foreclosure, Senator Jeff Merkley unveiled a six-part plan to fix the housing market and rebalance the relationship between borrower and lender. The plan includes what Merkley calls “lifeline bankruptcy,” which is basically the cramdown proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of primary residence loans.