President Joe Biden announced his bid for re-election today, releasing a three-minute video in which he explains why he's running. As the ad makes clear, Biden will be running on one basic concept: freedom. He's in favor of it, and in favor of Americans having more of it. The Republican Party countered with a 30-second ad of their own, in which they present an apocalyptic vision of what a second Biden term would be like. No, that is not hyperbole or an exaggeration. The only other possible word to use is "dystopian." They have outdone themselves in the fearmongering department (where they regularly excel). Since the GOP doesn't have a nominee yet, they are restricted only to offering up criticism of Biden (whether real or, in this case, entirely imagined), perhaps hoping that their eventual nominee will offer up some sort of positive vision of their own (which doesn't exactly seem likely, but hey, it could happen, I suppose). Since Biden is almost certainly going to skate to the Democratic nomination unopposed (or "unopposed by any Democrat the voters would actually nominate," to be technically accurate), this means that for at least the rest of this calendar year, it may stay a contest between: "Freedom," and: "Be afraid, be very afraid!"

Read Complete Article »

After their first 100 days in power, the cracks are beginning to show in the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Speaker Kevin McCarthy is going to try to pass a bill with a bare-bones summary of a budget within the next few weeks, but at this point no bill has actually been written and no GOP consensus has emerged about what that bill should (or shouldn't) contain. It is still unclear whether any plan is going to get the 218 votes to pass. Factionalism within the Republican conference is a tough hurdle to get over, what with the razor-thin majority McCarthy has to work with. But the debt ceiling looms, so it is now "put up or shut up" time for McCarthy's Republicans.

Read Complete Article »

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy just made his opening bid in the high-stakes poker game he wants to play with President Joe Biden over raising the debt ceiling. Biden's position from the start has been that America can't afford playing games with the full faith and credit of the United States on the table, and he has called on McCarthy to play exactly the same game of poker that gets played every year, but with only the usual stakes -- which, at worse, might lead to a temporary government shutdown. Biden wants a clean bill to raise the debt ceiling from Congress and then he will be open to holding negotiations for the annual federal budget (which is an entirely separate matter).

Read Complete Article »

President Joe Biden achieved -- in public and on national television -- a seemingly-impossible feat this week, as he vocally unified all of Congress in support of the long-held Democratic goal of protecting Social Security and Medicare from having their budget slashed by Republicans. That was pretty astonishing to see, you have to admit, since Republicans have been attacking Social Security since before Joe Biden was born (which is really saying something, considering he's about as far from a spring chicken as you can get). But suddenly they decided en masse to take exception with this fact, and loudly protested when Biden pointed out what they've essentially been saying for decades and decades. So Biden welcomed them into the fold of politicians who do fight to preserve the safety net, gleefully proclaiming he had achieved "unanimity." This was a warning to the Republicans that the subject of cuts to Social Security and Medicare were now officially off the table. Rarely has so major a bit of political bargaining worked so effectively during a State Of The Union speech. Which is why it was all so astonishing to watch.

Read Complete Article »

Last night, President Biden gave (depending on how you look at it) a rousing State Of The Union speech or perhaps the first speech of his re-election campaign. Throughout it all, by my count, he uttered the phrase "Let's finish the job" a whopping 10 times (at the very least... I know I must have missed a few...). That sounds an awful lot like a new campaign slogan to me....

Read Complete Article »

Next Tuesday night, President Joe Biden will deliver his State Of The Union speech to a joint session of Congress. Today, he got some good news he will without doubt be touting in this speech -- the unemployment rate is not just low, not just "lower than it ever hit under Donald Trump," but historically low. The last time the unemployment rate was a mere 3.4 percent was in 1969, before we sent any men to the moon. If it falls any further, we'll have to go back to 1953 to find a similar number. So we certainly expect this to be prominently featured next Tuesday night.

Read Complete Article »

Remember the midterm election campaign last year? Remember what Republicans ran on? Apparently they're counting on everyone just conveniently forgetting, and pulling their usual "bait and switch" trick by loudly proclaiming they have a sweeping "mandate" on all sorts of stuff they barely (if ever) mentioned while running for office while largely ignoring the things they did actually run on. With the House of Representatives in Republican hands now, we will all get to see their real agenda, as opposed to the agenda they sold to the voters last year. The open question is what the public will think of it all.

Read Complete Article »

President Joe Biden gave a speech this week on the state of the American economy. On his watch, the economy has greatly improved as we all dug ourselves out of the pandemic recession together. So Biden deserves a victory lap. He also used the speech to draw a stark comparison between Democrats responsibly steering the economy and Republicans who apparently are salivating at the prospect of blowing it all up.

Read Complete Article »

The moral divide between the two major American political parties has become pretty stark. On the one hand, you have a party which stands for respect, inclusiveness, diversity, and multiculturalism; and on the other you have a party which no longer even feels the necessity to cloak its racist language in "dog whistles" anymore. Dog whistles are so passé, at least over on the Republican side of the aisle today. All manner of bigotry (including racism) is now not something for the GOP to condemn or punish or even be ashamed about, instead it is to be either enabled (by saying nothing) or actually celebrated in front of throngs of cheering crowds.

Read Complete Article »

Even though it is a Monday, I find myself in an optimistic mood. Maybe it's just the end of the political Silly Season, but I found myself wondering what would happen if the Democrats truly ran the tables in the midterms and wound up still in control of the House of Representatives and with at least 52 senators in the Senate (so Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin could be politely told to go fly a kite by Chuck Schumer and the rest of the Democrats). What could they get done? What would their agenda look like, with a Democrat in the White House ready to sign whatever passed? I know, I know, it is still the longest of longshots -- Democrats will likely still lose the House even if they manage to expand their majority in the Senate -- but like I said, I'm feeling optimistic, so let's just assume it does somehow come to pass.

Read Complete Article »