Daily Kos sent an email on December 6 promoting a strategy  to eliminate the “Bush” tax cuts on the wealthy:

This will really make John Boehner cry

David, please send an email to your member of the House of Representatives, telling him or her to sign the discharge petition that would force an up or down vote on ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%. Click here to send an email.

House Republican leaders are refusing to hold a vote on ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%. However, there is a way we can read more

Will Obama cave? How deeply will Obama cave?  Why did Obama cave again?  Were you hoping Obama would change his caving ways?  President Barack Obama, one begins to understand, must be our spelunker in chief.

But look closely into the darkness of the executive cave and the act of “caving” vanishes.  Obama never did quite swear he wouldn’t keep the “Bush” tax cuts for people with $200,000 incomes.  Obama never exactly promised to protect Medicare read more

How did right-wing politics in the United States survive the 1960s and 1970s and thrive beyond?  Not only did the wealthy invest in the corruption of politics, but the politicians invested in the normalization of treason.

When presidential candidate Richard Nixon sabotaged the peace process in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson privately called it treason and publicly kept his mouth shut. 

By the time Bush the Elder, also involved in that earlier treason, worked with Robert Gates and William read more

Many of us have heard the current period referred to as a second gilded age.  Or we’ve seen the current inequality in wealth in the United States compared to that of 1929.  But we have not all given sufficient thought to what ended the first gilded age, what created greater equality, what created the reality behind that category our politicians now endlessly pretend we are all in: the middle class.  We have a sense of what went wrong at the turn of each century, but what went read more

We’re approaching three years since Howard Zinn left us, and to my ear his voice sounds louder all the time.  I expect that effect to continue for decades and centuries to come, because Zinn spoke to enduring needs.  He taught lessons that must be relearned over and over, as the temptations weighing against them are so strong.  And he taught those lessons better than anybody else.

We like to use the word “we,” and to include in it everything the Constitution pretends read more

Leaving the 41-senator filibuster in place but requiring that they run their mouths (and some of us have to listen) is not exactly the kind of Change most of us Hope for.  Nor is it supported by the Constitution, any other law, any treaty, any rule necessary to the functioning of our government, anything or anyone we just voted for, or any public opinion poll.  The proper thing to do with the filibuster is to eliminate it, which 51 senators can do at the start of the session if they read more

Videos by David Martin.

In an age when the “conservative” political party cracks jokes about the destruction of the only planet we have to live on, and the other party — which actually holds that 90% of governing power that now resides in the White House — gets a free pass on its record of destroying that planet because the other party cracks jokes about it, cool dispassionate political science textbookese is out of place.  I’ll care what Rational Man would do under each of read more