The nation is waiting to hear what President Obama is going to say tomorrow night, when he gives an address to a joint session of Congress on the subject of jobs. Plenty of people have already been offering advice to the White House, but instead we thought it'd be interesting to ask some of the people who are going to be sitting in the audience tomorrow what they'd advise the president to include in his speech.

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Representative Bruce Braley, from Iowa's First District, returned to the House of Representatives this week, after surviving a very brutal re-election campaign in which millions of dollars of outside money from anonymous right-wing donors were spent against him. His campaign was an interesting one, because rather than try to distance himself from his own party or from what Democrats have accomplished in the past few years, Braley instead embraced his own record, and proudly defended it to his voters.

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I have to admit that I still have no answer to the question last week's article asked in its title. At this point, nothing more than sheer speculation can answer how President Obama and the White House would react to Proposition 19 passing.

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The play is unabashedly Leftist, in the classic meaning of the term. It tells two parallel stories of factories facing shutdowns, and the possibilities open to them; one from modern-day San Francisco and one from a few years ago in Argentina, and it manages to link these two stories in a very personal way through the lead female character.

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I would like to hear President Obama outline a clear agenda, like the Populist Caucus' Blueprint for Recovery, to create good-paying jobs that can't be outsourced for America's middle class families. A "jobless recovery" isn't a recovery for middle class families and the President and his Administration need to understand that.

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Some writers love words and language more than others. At one end of this continuum are writers who use language much the way a carpenter uses tools, and don't think about the tools much (would a carpenter say he "loves" his hammer or saw?). At the other end of the scale are writers such as Geoffrey Nunberg, whose love of language is a core part of not just their writing, but their whole being. For instance, his impressive "day job" is researching linguistics at Berkeley's School of Information, meaning that even when he isn't writing, he is still thinking about language.

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OK, with that out of the way, we must (sadly) turn our eyes to the Republican Party. Because they appear to be losing all touch with reality, so it's best to keep an eye on them at this point. For starters, they are calling a special Republican National Committee meeting in the next month to vote on (as if they could) forcing their opposition to change their name to what is variously described as the "Socialist Democratic Party" or the "Democratic Socialist Party" (as well as variations where they intentionally leave out the "-ic" just to twist the knife).

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Representative Bruce Braley recently announced the formation of a new congressional caucus dedicated to the economic concerns of the middle class. The Iowa Democrat (as reported in The Huffington Post) unveiled the new Populist Caucus last month, and as its chair immediately set to work addressing their concerns in the stimulus package in the House. But since the term "populism" has been used for a variety of movements throughout American history, I thought I'd ask Representative Braley himself what the caucus is all about, and what they're trying to achieve. The interview below is a transcript of our conversation.

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You know, I don't necessarily believe so, and that's a sad reflection, isn't it? It's a sad reflection on how little stock we seem to put into character in politics. It's going to be a tight race, but Stevens could still win this thing. Stevens has been around so long, and we do have a very partisan situation up here in Alaska, where evidently some are willing to accept representation irrespective of a conviction. I think some people will se

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For those interested in the backstory of the octopus-like reach of the VECO corruption investigation, there is currently no better inside look at the entire mess than the amazing new book Last Bridge To Nowhere, by author Frank Prewitt. Prewitt has a unique perspective on the entire mess, since he was the F.B.I.'s "Confidential Source #1" throughout the evidence-gathering phase of the long-running investigation. Codenamed "Patient," Prewitt spent countless hours documenting sleazy deals, payoffs, bribes, and other shenanigans; often wearing a wire and taping encounters to provide court evidence.

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