NewsTrust - Money and Politics - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Frank Rich - Nov. 01 (Opinion) - This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.

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Obama Heads To Dover Air Force Base To Honor Fallen Soldiers

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:28:49 -0700

Associated Press - Oct. 29 -

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Not So Unequal, After All

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Forbes - By Brian S. Wesbury And Robert Stein - Oct. 27 (Opinion) - The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. You've heard it over and over again. Many free-market economists have argued against the conventional wisdom, only to be dismissed as out of touch. But an incredible new paper from Northwestern Professor Robert Gordon, a pillar of the "mainstream" academic establishment, says maybe they are right and have been for a long time.

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Send your medical bills to Max Baucus

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Comedy Central - By Stephen Colbert - Oct. 09 (Comedy News) - Senator Max Baucus will pay for your medical bills from the $3.2 million he's received from the health care industry.

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FEMA should conduct preparedness drill in the Green River Valley

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Dave Reichert, Adam Smith - Oct. 05 (Opinion) - The Federal Emergency Management Agency should augment local efforts to respond to the risks associated with the storm damage to the Green River Valley and Howard Hanson Dam, write U.S. Reps. Dave Reichert and Adam Smith.

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Editorial: If you thought ACORN was bad ...

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Dallas Morning News - Sep. 23 (Editorial) - We've all heard plenty about a private U.S. government contractor whose employees were caught behaving unspeakably and which now faces the swift and brutal withdrawal of taxpayer dollars by a Congress demanding accountability. That was ACORN, of

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Campaign-spending case will be a big test for Chief Justice Roberts

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By E. J. Dionne - Sep. 08 (Opinion) - The full impact of what the U.S. Supreme Court could do in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has only begun to receive the attention it deserves. Will the court use a case originally brought on a narrow issue to bring our politics back to the corruption of the Gilded Age?

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A Threat to Fair Elections

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Sep. 08 (Editorial) - The Supreme Court has upheld the limitations on corporate campaign expenditures in the past. If they open the floodgates now, corporations will have a huge say in who wins federal elections.

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Missing Richard Nixon

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Aug. 31 (Opinion) - In the Nixon era, leaders in both political parties were capable of speaking rationally, and decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now.

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Charlie Rangel Hides Income and Assets

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - Aug. 28 (Opinion) - Charlie Rangel wins the personal lotteryWhen normal people happen to "find" their own money, it might mean a twenty left in a winter coat, or discovering change beneath the sofa cushions. But if you're Charlie Rangel, it means doubling your net worth.

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Night of the living Reaganites: Anti-government zombies refuse to die

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Paul Krugman - Aug. 25 (Opinion) - Washington is still ruled by Reaganism — an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good. The abject failure of Reaganism in practice should have killed it but, like a movie zombie, it keeps on coming back from the dead.

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‘Death Panels’ Aren’t the Half of It, Says Senator Kyl - Prescriptions Blog - NYTimes.com

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Carl Hulse - Aug. 18 (Opinion) - Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Senate Republican, says if the Democratic health care overhaul is ultimately killed, its demise should not be blamed on the overheated talk of government “death panels” for the old and infirm.

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Rethinking the Fed Chairmanship and Weighing Who's Right for the Job

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Steven Pearlstein - Aug. 14 (Opinion) - COLUMN | If there was ever a time to consider what the chairman's role ought to be, now would be it.

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Republican Death Trip

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Aug. 14 (Opinion) - “I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in

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Health Care Hyde Park

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Hendrik Hertzberg - Aug. 13 (Opinion) - Why do interests like the health-care industry have so much money and influence? I am convinced that the underlying cause can be found in the unique hydraulics of our centuries-old political mechanisms.

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A Century-Old Principle - Keep Corporate Money Out of Elections

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Aug. 11 (Editorial) - There are worrying signs that there may well be five votes on the Supreme Court to rule that the ban on corporate contributions violates the First Amendment.

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Health Care Reform and the Unpopular T-Word

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Leonhardt - Jul. 29 (Opinion) - The many-headed Hydra, with breath poisonous enough to kill, is one of the more gruesome beasts in Greek mythology. In Hercules’s great clash with it, he would cut off one of its heads, only to have two more appear. No matter what he did, he couldn’t keep up. You can think of Congress’s efforts to pay for health reform as being a little bit like a battle to slay a many-headed Hydra.

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One Newspaper, Many Checkbooks

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Clark Hoyt - Jul. 19 (Opinion) - Lindsey Hoshan, a freelance journalist in Palo Alto, Calif., hopes to sell a multimedia slide show and maybe an article to The Times about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a mass of floating plastic trash caught in swirling currents in a stretch of ocean twice the size of Texas. But first, she has to get there. To help finance a $10,000 reporting trip aboard a research vessel, Hoshaw has turned to Spot.Us, a Web site where reporters appeal for donations to pay for their projects. If she can raise $6,000 before the September departure date — so far, only about $1,600 has come in — she will take out a loan for the rest, she said. The Times has told Hoshaw that it might pay about $700 for the pictures, more if it also buys a story.

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A Strong Health Reform Bill

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Jul. 16 (Editorial) - Republicans may balk, but a bill proposed by the Democrats could solve the nation’s health care problems without driving up the deficit.

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Chamber of Commerce Urges Lawmakers to Raise the Gas Tax

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Alec MacGillis - Jul. 15 (Opinion) - On the same day as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was attacking President Obama and congressional Democrats over a tax-hiking plan to pay for health care reform, its leader urged the same people to have the courage to raise taxes on another front: the federal gasoline levy that pays for our highways

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Health Care’s Historic Moment - Timothy Egan Blog - NYTimes.com

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Timothy Egan - Jul. 15 (Opinion) - Politics is so often a salon sport, with its up-and-down arrows, weekly winners and losers, and reliable hypocrisies providing sustainable entertainment for the permanent class in Washington. But every now and then elected officials do something that has deep and lasting consequences — a generational life-changer.

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The Stumbles That Led to an Ethics Blunder

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Andrew Alexander - Jul. 12 (Opinion) - The Washington Post's ill-fated plan to sell sponsorships of off-the-record "salons" was an ethical lapse of monumental proportions. Publisher Katharine Weymouth and Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli have now taken full responsibility for what was envisioned as a series of 11 intimate dinners to discuss public policy issues. For a fee of up to $25,000, underwriters were guaranteed a seat at the table with lawmakers, administration officials, think tank experts, business leaders and the heads of associations. Promotional materials said Weymouth, Brauchli and at least one Post reporter would serve as "Hosts and Discussion Leaders" for an evening of spirited but civil dialogue. While Brauchli and Weymouth say they should have realized long ago that the plan was flawed, internal e-mails and interviews show questions about ethics were raised with both of them months ago. They also show that blame runs deeper. Beneath Brauchli and Weymouth, three of the most senior newsroom managers received an e-mail with details of the plan.

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Pay for Play Journalism

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Jack Shafer - Jul. 09 (Opinion) - If paid off-the-record salons are charades, why oppose them? For one thing, I hate to see anybody defrauded, even AstraZeneca. For another, no journalist should serve as an accomplice to fraud. But most important, the off-the-record comfort zones run by Bradley for the benefit of his corporate clients corrupts the business of journalism in deep, fundamental ways. Every new off-the-record venue drives a measurable quantity of political discourse out of the public sphere and into the private. It's in the interests of journalists and the public, as the Omaha press corps demonstrated, to push the powerful onto the record. Establishing safe harbors for them - and charging them for the privilege of anchorage - is not what journalism is about. The erection of such salons says this to corporations and public officials: You owe your candor not to the public but to one another, and journalistic organizations such as the Atlantic and the Washington Post will gladly pocket the cash to help you keep your "secrets."

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Banks Own the US Government

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Dean Baker - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - we are looking at the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. The cumulative lost output over the years 2008-2012 will almost certainly exceed $5tn. That comes to more than $60,000 for an average family of four. This is the price that we are paying for the bankers' greed, coupled with incredible incompetence and/or corruption from our regulators. Under these circumstances, it would be reasonable to think that the bankers would be keeping a low profile for a while.

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Why do we allow the US to act like a failed state on climate change

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By George Monbiot - Jun. 26 (Opinion) - There are mind-boggling concessions to the biofuels industry, including a promise not to investigate its wider environmental impacts. There's a provision to allow industry to use 2bn tonnes of carbon offsets a year, which include highly unstable carbon sinks like crop residues left in the soil (another concession won by the powerful farm lobby). These offsets are so generous that if all of them are used, US industry will have to make no carbon cuts at all until 2026.

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