For the short term: Net transit and intercity rail funding survive the conference committee largely intact.
For the long term: Both Obama and Reid went to bat for transit funding. Elections have consequences.
Let’s be blunt: Congressional Republicans have every political incentive to hinder President Obama, no matter what their actual opinions of his policy moves are. Politics ultimately boils down to: the incumbents stay in until they screw up or we get bored with them. So, I fully expect to see lots of knee-jerk reactions and obstruction [...]
12:24pm <harveyj> Obama hasn’t had to say certain things in this address, especially re: civil liberties, nonbelievers, and reaching out to the Muslim world, yet he did anyway. That means a lot.
12:22pm <harveyj> Thank you for referencing Katrina, even if obliquely.
12:17pm <harveyj> “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”
12:12pm <harveyj> [...]
Damaging your enemies, no matter how enjoyable it may be, doesn’t really help you unless you either are able to directly constrain their actions, or demonstrate your capacity for inflicting further harm. Viewed in this context, I don’t see how Blago’s appointment of Burris was the masterstroke the media is making it out to be. [...]
There’s no way Feinstein, after enabling Mukasey, gets away with derailing Panetta.
Just when we all thought we could turn from Illinois to whether Lizard People is going to cost Al Franken his senate seat, the Rod Blagojevich scandal took a turn for the bizarre last week. The comically-corrupt governor of Illinois appointed ethically clean but judgmentally challenged Roland Burris to Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat. For [...]
While traditional economic indicators are grim, there are a few signs that the panic that drove the early stages of this crisis are subsiding. The
TED spread, a normalized measure of how willing banks are to lend to each other, is way off of its mid-October panic highs, and is approaching levels not seen since Lehman [...]
A week or so ago I mentioned that I pay attention to where politicians are willing to spend political capital, not just what their stated policy positions are. By this metric, Jim Webb just jumped a ton of positions in the Senatorial Badass Rankings. To take a pro-prison-reform stance that can be caricatured easily by [...]
In an op-ed for the NYT on Sunday, Bob Inglis (R-SC) and Arthur Laffer (R-Reagan Administration) argue for a large carbon tax offset by equivalent payroll (as in Social Security) or income tax cuts. I think this is an outstanding idea, especially if done via cuts in the payroll tax. The one issue I have [...]
Maybe it was the Chinese who should have been checking what we were exporting to them a bit more stringently.