Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, Robert Reich and other major economists have pointed out that the deficit is not an urgent economic problem and that, to the contrary, the economy would be helped by an increase in public investment and harmed by drastic cuts. The Sequester would hurt the economy, millions...

Political journalists have a job to do -- to examine the SOTU's long list of proposals. They are doing that job, many are doing it well, and I'll leave it to them. Instead, I want to discuss what in the long run is a deeper question: How did the SOTU...

"Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?" -- Barack Obama, Newtown Address, December 16, 2012

That sentence, uttered by President Obama in his Newtown Address, may turn out to be...

Michigan has just passed a corporate servitude law. It is designed to take away many of the worker rights that unions have conferred throughout their history: the right to a living wage. The right to equal pay for women. The right to deferred payments in the form of pensions. The...

Writers on economics have been talking since the election about why the "fiscal cliff" metaphor is misleading. Alternative metaphors have been offered like the fiscal hill, fiscal curb, and fiscal showdown, as if one metaphor could easily be replaced by another that makes more...

Yes, global warming systemically caused Hurricane Sandy -- and the Midwest droughts and the fires in Colorado and Texas, as well as other extreme weather disasters around the world. Let's say it out loud, it was causation, systemic causation.

Según Nate Silver, experto en encuestas de The New York Times, "las encuestas instantáneas hechas tras el debate sugieren entre un empate y una modesta victoria para el vicepresidente Joseph R. Biden Jr".

Biden aguantó el tipo y quizá incluso más. Y era importante. Pero el presidente Obama...

As Nate Silver, NY Times polling expert put it, "Instant polls conducted after the debate are suggestive of something between a tie and a modest win for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr."

Biden held his own and maybe a bit more. That was important. But President Obama...

Coauthor (with Elisabeth Wehling) of The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic. www.thelittleblueblog.org

You don't win a presidential debate by being a policy wonk. Obama violated all the basics of presidential debating. The best defense is a good offense....

Co-author (with Elisabeth Wehling) of The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic

I've been applying cognitive linguistics and neuroscience to politics in six books over the past two decades. The ideas in those books were on display in many of the...

TheLittleBlueBlog.org

Authors of THE LITTLE BLUE BOOK: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic

Mitt Romney responded to the recent Cairo events with an apology frame. America, he said, must never apologize for its values, and he claimed that the Obama administration was apologizing when it pointed...

America was born with a great soul, a moral view of Democracy in which citizens care about their fellow citizens and join together to take responsibility not just for themselves but for each other, for America as a union, a joint enterprise. The government's job was to carry out...

Do you believe in freedom of religion? President Obama does, and he is defending Americans' freedom of religion against Mitt Romney and Fox News in the administration of his health care bill.

The president allows each woman to decide for herself whether or not to ask her insurance company to...

Authors of The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic

TheLittleBlueBlog.org

America is divided about its future. Should it keep and expand the system that brought past opportunity, prosperity and freedom? Or should it dismantle that system?

President Obama recently reminded us...

The New York Times, on June 5, 2012, reported that so-called "morning-after pills" work by preventing women's eggs from being fertilized, and not by preventing fertilized eggs from being implanted in the womb. The latest scientific findings show that "the pills delay ovulation, the release of eggs from...

Last week on Independence Day, President Obama greeted new US citizens at the White House, taking the opportunity to speak once more about the need for comprehensive immigration reform, "We have to remain a nation of immigrants. And that's why (...) we're lifting the shadow of deportation from deserving young...

Democrats all over America are claiming victory in the Chief Justice Roberts' vote to uphold the constitutionality of the President's health care law. Conservatives all over America are campaigning all the harder for a president and a congress that will overthrow the law in the future.

Thomas Friedman in his...

Perhaps as early as today, the conservative-dominated Roberts Court will choose a metaphor that will affect millions of people and perhaps change the history of our country very much for the worse.

Back in 1978, linguists Michael Reddy and me (George Lakoff), working independently, demonstrated that metaphor is

Framing is (or should be) about moral values, deep truths, and the policies that flow from them.

As of their kickoff speeches in Ohio, Romney and Obama have both chosen economics as their major campaign theme. And thus the question of how they frame the economy will be crucial...

Lakoff and Wehling are authors of The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic, where morally-based framing is discussed in great detail.

In his June 11, 2012 op-ed in the New York Times, Paul Krugman goes beyond economic analysis to bring up the morality...