Is it possible for an American president to carry out accidentally an isolationist foreign policy? That odd question crossed my mind last week as I talked with various foreign-policy experts about the Middle East, Russia and Afghanistan. There can be no doubt that by his words and his travels, President Obama intends to be anything but an isolationist president.
Here are some thoughts on a few recent and important money-politics headlines.
My magic wand is on the fritz, otherwise we'd have a big, new federal program to free America from its dependence on oil. Like other environmentalists, I'm sad that the calamity in the Gulf of Mexico hasn't spurred Washington to more vigorously promote America's exit from this curse.
"If you can't budget, you can't govern," Rep. John Spratt Jr., D-S.C., proclaimed in 2006 when the House GOP leadership chose to dispense with passing a budget resolution.
Thuggery is unattractive. Ineffective thuggery even more so. Which may be one reason so many Americans have been reacting negatively to the response of Barack Obama and his administration to BP's gulf oil spill.
Amidst all the political jockeying over the BP catastrophe, the main players are missing what is really uppermost on America's mind: It's the spill rate, stupid. It's jobs, stupid. It's the economy, stupid. And none of it is happening.
When activists (who are not necessarily students) were able to delay construction of a UC Berkeley sports center by living in trees for 21 months, there was no review of what went wrong.
When BP CEO Tony Hayward went to Capitol Hill this week, he got beat up on by all sides.
In its latest attempt to mitigate public outrage over out-of-control government growth, the administration of President Barack Obama has instructed a handful of federal agencies to cut their budgets by five percent.
If the right-wing chorus insists that the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is "Obama's Katrina," then let us hope the president will make the most of that slogan. The comparison between the utter failure of the Bush administration and the missteps and errors of the Obama White House is fundamentally false. Yet there is nevertheless a crucial parallel to be drawn as the fifth anniversary of the hurricane approaches.
Note to President Obama: The catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill did not happen because Americans -- actually, the industrialized world -- have an "addiction to fossil fuels," as you suggested in Tuesday's Oval Office address.
"Government in New York is too big, ineffective and expensive," the candidate's website proclaims. "We must get our state's fiscal house in order by immediately imposing a cap on state spending and freezing salaries of state public employees as part of a one-year emergency financial plan, committing to no increase in personal or corporate income taxes of sales taxes and imposing a local property tax cap."
A modest proposal: The federal government should take over Louisiana. Might as well, at this point.
One problem with President Obama’s Oval Office speech was his declaration that 90 percent of the oil spill would be captured in “coming days and weeks.” Ah, if only government were that strong and powerful. Trouble is, the spill rate late yesterday afternoon was again revised upward toward 60,000 barrels per day from the prior estimate of 25,000.
Since last summer, President Obama has publicly doubted whether Afghan President Hamid Karzai's corruption and incompetence make him a fit partner for our policy goals in Afghanistan.
"I'm definitely going to sail around the world again, or at least give it another try," teen sailor Abby Sunderland told the Australian press after her rescue last week.
You've seen the zombie parents on the streets and at the mall. Off in some cell-phone cloud, they pay no attention to what's in the stroller.
It could be a sack of potatoes. It could be a cocker spaniel. More often than not, it's a baby staring blankly ahead or crying to no avail.
How bad a defeat did labor unions suffer when Sen. Blanche Lincoln defeated their candidate and won the Arkansas Democratic runoff last week?
As part of a union-backed "independent" expenditure campaign in support of Attorney General Jerry Brown's gubernatorial effort, the California Nurses Association has formed a retinue that trails GOP gubernatorial hopeful Meg Whitman with a cartoonish figure named "Queen Meg." Have these true believers never noticed that the attorney general is the real thing when it comes to political royalty?
Of all the myths helping to sustain the unsustainable status quo in Washington, D.C., among the most widely accepted is the belief that a politician’s seniority translates into tangible economic benefits for his or her district. In fact, this perception works hand-in-glove with another central government myth – the one about politicians being able to create private sector jobs with your tax dollars in the first place.
