NewsTrust - Democrats - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

President Obama Should Seize the High Ground

Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Thomas Friedman - May. 27 (Opinion) - President Obama has quite a record of accomplishment to run on for re-election if he would only run on it. During a recent discussion in Seattle with a group of educators, one of them surprised me when she pointed out that even though their state did not win President Obama’s education “Race to the Top,” that program was critical in spurring education reform in Washington State. As I listened to her analysis, the thought occurred to me: I wonder how Barack Obama would do if he ran for president as himself. ... How he would do if he ran for re-election on all the things he’s accomplished but rarely speaks about.

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Hillary Clinton, barefaced and bespectacled, is a refreshing image in politics

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Suzi Parker - May. 08 (Opinion) - The caption read “Hillary Au Naturale,” and the photo showed the Secretary of state without makeup except lipstick, wearing black-framed glasses.

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Focus on Social Issues Could Shape Battle for Women

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Richard W. Stevenson - Feb. 24 (Opinion) - There are any number of ways in which the politics of culture wars might play out, but perhaps the biggest question is the degree to which the new attention on social issues might shape the battle for one of the most important electoral swing groups: moderate and independent women voters.

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Fixing America's jobless problem

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Peter Dreier - Dec. 07 (Opinion) - Thousands of long-term unemployed Americans from across the country have converged on Washington this week to dramatize their plight and to urge Congress to extend federal unemployment insurance benefits and the payroll tax cut, and to pass President Obama's jobs bill.

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Barney the bully: Congressman Frank’s other legacy

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Dana Milbank - Nov. 30 (Opinion) - The morning after his retirement announcement, Rep. Barney Frank scored an interview on NBC’s “Today” show, gaining the opportunity to act as an elder statesman in front of a TV audience of millions. Instead, the Massachusetts Democrat chose to quarrel with the interviewer.

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The American Autumn: An Accurate Protest Movement Scares The Pants Off Conservatives In Both Parties | adn.com

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Anchorage Daily News - By Rudy_Wittshirk - Oct. 16 (Opinion) - Now there is another precisely-aimed protest movement in America. “Occupy Wall Street” looks like it has “legs”---and if those legs don’t freeze off this Winter, watch out!

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Obama Rejects Obamaism

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Brooks - Sep. 20 (Opinion) - He claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)

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In money race, it'€™s advantage Democrats

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Politico - By Kenneth P. Vogel - Aug. 24 (Opinion) - Republicans seem positively gleeful these days about their prospects headed into 2012, buoyed by a new Gallup Poll showing a handful of Republican presidential hopefuls within striking distance of President Barack Obama as well as some recent predictions that the GOP will hold the House and could take the Senate. Yet despite all the apparent momentum, the three national party committees tasked with ushering Republicans to victory trail their Democratic counterparts in raising money for 2012, and the disparity is causing some Republicans to fret privately about whether their party committees could dim an otherwise bright outlook.

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Of Dystopias and Alphas

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Maureen Dowd - Aug. 21 (Opinion) - Why can’t the president who promised revolution set the Washington schedule rather than bow to it?

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Fight for a Jobs Agenda

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Aug. 18 (Editorial) - Come September, President Obama’s aides say he will roll out more programs to put Americans back to work. What we are hearing so far doesn’t go nearly far enough. The gist: Continue the payroll tax cut for employees into next year. Reform the patent system. Pass trade legislation. At a stop in Decorah, Iowa, on Monday, he called for employing jobless construction workers to rebuild roads, bridges and schools across America. Those are all sensible ideas, but most are not up to the urgency or scale of the problem: 25 million Americans — 16.1 percent of the work force — are out of work or working part time, and the economy is weakening anew.

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Defending Obama's pragmatism

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

CNN - By Fareed Zakaria - Aug. 15 (Opinion) - Over the last week, liberal politicians and commentators took to the airwaves and op-ed pages to criticize the debt deal that Congress reached. But their ire was directed not at the Tea Party or even the Republicans but rather at Barack Obama, who they concluded had failed as a President because of his persistent tendency to compromise. This has been a running theme ever since Obama took office. I think that liberals need to grow up. As the New Republic's Jonathan Chait brilliantly points out, there is a recurring liberal fantasy that if only the President would give a stirring speech, he would sweep the country along with the sheer power of his poetry. In this view, writes Chait, "Every known impediment to the legislative process - special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion-are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech."

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Party Line

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 11:13:52 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Charlotte Allen - Aug. 12 (Review) - Those liberal leanings distort the news in subtle but telling ways. Groseclose dissects a 2006 story in the Los Angeles Times that linked a record low number of black freshmen at UCLA to the passage 10 years earlier of Proposition 209, a ballot initiative that forbids public institutions from considering race in admissions and hiring. The reporter, Rebecca Trounson, had quoted six sources, not for factual information but for their opinions. Five of those sources expressed conventional left-of-center views, complaining, for example, that the campus was insufficiently “diverse” and accusing UCLA of practicing racism. Only one source, former University of California regent Ward Connerly, architect of Proposition 209, suggested that fewer black high school graduates might be academically competitive, or that some blacks might have chosen to attend historically black colleges instead of UCLA. Not only did Trounson not examine the tortuous routes that UCLA’s admissions committee (on which Groseclose served at the time) followed to get around Proposition 209 so as to maximize black enrollment, but she failed to report a record number of black transfer students to UCLA that fall so that the black student population actually increased slightly. She also failed to notice what might have been the real story: the huge increases in Asian enrollments at UCLA, to the point that white people, once the overwhelming majority, now constituted only about a third of the overall student population.

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DNC chair blames Tea Party ‘tyrants’ for S&P credit rating downgrade

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Hill - By Alicia M. Cohn - Aug. 08 (Opinion) - Alicia M. Cohn / The Hill: DNC chair blames Tea Party ‘tyrants’ for S&P credit rating downgrade — The head of the Democratic National Committee joined Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) on Monday in casting blame for the U.S. credit downgrade on the Tea Party movement. — Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) …

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What Happened to Obama?

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Drew Westen - Aug. 07 (Opinion) - The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.

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Why Obama won’t face a primary challenge

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Harold Meyerson - Aug. 04 (Opinion) - President Obama is faring poorly these days, but he can console himself with the fact that he’ll probably be spared the fate of previous presidents who fell on hard times: a primary challenge. Those groups within the Democratic Party that might otherwise be shopping around for a more forthrightly progressive alternative are deterred by two factors: the likelihood that any challenge will end up helping a radicalized Republican Party and the fact that Obama is black.

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How the GOP lost on the debt deal

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Daniel Markovits - Aug. 03 (Opinion) - The deal reached by Congress eliminates the leverage that would have been created by another imminent default until after the next election, where it will be exercised by new and possibly differently constituted players.

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For lesson in shared sacrifice, send Congress to boot camp

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

CNN - By Russel L Honore - Aug. 02 (Editorial) - Like most veterans, the men and women who have worn our nation's uniform to defend this country, I am furious with and disappointed in the state of indecision that plagued Washington these past few weeks. Whether or not to raise the debt ceiling so our country can continue to pay our bills and maintain our global credit rating didn't seem like such a difficult decision.

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Obvious compromise between Reid and Boehner debt plans

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Ezra Klein - Jul. 26 (Opinion) - When it comes to cutting the national deficit, the plans proposed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner are much more similar than they are different. It’s on the issue of raising the debt ceiling that the consensus cracks.

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The Chart That Should Accompany All Discussions of the Debt Ceiling

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By James Fallows - Jul. 25 (Opinion) - You can be against deficits. You can be for preserving tax cuts. You cannot be for both -- logically, that is.

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I'm starting to think that the Left might actually be right

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Telegraph - By Charles Moore. - Jul. 24 (Opinion) - What with the phone-hacking scandal, the eurozone crisis and the US economic woes, the corrupt few have left people disillusioned with our debased democracies, says Charles Moore.

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Men of a Certain Rage

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Show - By Jon Stewart - Jul. 15 (Opinion) - If Obama and Congressional Republicans don't settle their heated argument by raising the debt ceiling, man will be sentenced to an eternity of licking his own pets' genitals.

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The Mother of All No-Brainers

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Brooks - Jul. 05 (Opinion) - If the debt ceiling talks fail, independents voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.

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Learning from honest cynic Mitch McConnell

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Ezra Klein - Jun. 29 (Opinion) - McConnell doesn’t need to be inspiring or jocular. Shouldn’t be, in fact. What he’s saying isn’t inspirational or funny. It’s grim and divisive. And that’s why it’s so important. In a city split between liars and idealists, McConnell is the rarest of all things: an honest cynic.

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TV review: Keith Olbermann comes out swinging on Current's new ‘Countdown'

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Mary McNamara - Jun. 21 (Review) - "In the briefest of special comments ... this is a newscast of contextualization, it is to be presented with a viewpoint, that the weakest citizen of this country is more important than the strongest corporation, that the nation is losing its independence through the malfeasance of one political party and the timidity of another and that even though you and I should not have to be the last line of defense, apparently we are so we damn well better start being it."

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Where Wisdom Lives

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Brooks - Jun. 07 (Opinion) - The Medicare debate reveals the philosophical chasm between Republicans and Democrats. How each party lands will define their respective identities for decades.

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