(This is the first of a series of blogs/articles that will try to put the growing disappointment of many progressives at President Obama's policies into a wider political and theoretical perspective about the divide in the Democratic Party between progressives and corporatists.)

If Barack Obama and today's Congressional Democrats were...

Either Presidential Press Secretary Robert Gibbs went off the reservation and was not speaking for President Obama when he attacked Howard Dean's character and sanity for daring to criticize the Senate health "reform" bill which Obama wants passed; or more frighteningly, Gibbs was speaking for President Obama.

If Gibbs wasn't...

For 60 years, progressives, liberals, and most Democrats have stood for universal health care, paid for by progressive taxes, and available to all Americans from birth 'till death. The Obama administration and Congressional Democrats have now stood that goal on its head with a bill that purports to provide health...

After watching Secretary of Defense Gates and Secretary of State Clinton on Meet The Press on Sunday, and parsing the words of Obama's own speech at West Point, it unfortunately seems that the answer is "yes".

Obama was faced with a political dilemma. He had decided to give the Generals...

(With a tip of the hat to Texas populist Jim Hightower for his book entitled "There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos".)

No matter what the issue, Barack Obama seems genetically programmed to split the difference and seek the exact middle of the...

President Obama is preparing to travel to West Pont to announce a revised strategy to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, which is reported to include a substantial military escalation. Meanwhile, disturbing news reports continue to leak out about how American financial aid ends up in the hands of the Taliban...

As President Obama contemplates perhaps the most fateful decision of his young presidency -- whether to commit tens of thousands of additional American soldiers and most likely hundreds of billions of additional funds to a civil war in central Asia that could well last for the rest of his presidency...

It's truly depressing to watch how quickly so-called progressive leaders in Congress, and many of their supporters in the so-called progressive movement, are abandoning all of their key promises on health care reform in the name of a health care bill that will provide massive government subsidies to private insurance...

Yeah, that means you Weiner, and you Grayson, and you Schakowsky, and you Grijalva and you Woolsey, and all the rest of you in the House Progressive Caucus (I think there were at least 60) who signed a letter to Speaker Pelosi last summer promising to vote against any health...

The so-called "public option" -- as it remains in the bills being proposed in the House and Senate -- is a fraud and a sham. It bears no resemblance to the "robust" public option originally sold by its supporters as the most pragmatic, "uniquely American" multipayer way of achieving affordable...

Sometimes, if you follow the evidence, you find that the perp is hiding in plain sight. When it comes to repeated attempts to kill off the public option, you'll find that the person most responsible isn't Olympia Snowe or Max Baucus or any of the other the usual suspects. It's...

Whatever their differences on comprehensive health care reform or regulation of Wall Street, here's something that progressives, liberals, centrists, and even free-market conservatives and some tea-baggers should be able to agree on: The insurance industry should not be virtually the only business in America -- other than professional baseball --...

It's starting to amaze me how far some so-called "progressives" are willing to bend over to get something called "health care reform" passed, no matter how compromised and feeble.

Here's how they've proceeded:

First, take the progressive goal for the past 70 years--universal single payer for all--off the table from...

Article II, Section I of the United States Constitution states "The president shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States". Civilian control of the military is one of the cornerstones of American democracy.

But with the growth of the national...

The hard truth is that a robust public option is already dead. Dedicated activists like Jane Hamsher and conscientious public servants like Rep. Anthony Weiner deserve props for continuing to fight the good fight for a robust public option (particularly since in their heart of hearts they really support Medicare-For-All),...

So many words have already been written about Ted Kennedy in the few days since his death -- some profound, many filled with cliché -- that despite my sadness at his passing, I initially saw no need to add my own.

But as I've watched and read, one observation crystallized...

The news media -- particularly 24-hour cable -- has focused its health care coverage on the raucous demonstrations by tea-baggers and other middle aged and elderly white fringe elements who are being ginned up by the right-wing of the Republican party.

It makes for good television, but it's a...

Today's NY Times front page reconfirmed the news that President Obama has made a back-room deal with the pharmaceutical industry to block any Congressional health care legislation that would allow Medicare or most other parts of the federal government to negotiate lower drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry or...

Barack Obama promised an "Audacity of Hope." I worked for him, blogged for him, contributed to him, and cried for joy when he was elected, even as I reminded people in these pages that that his success in bringing transformative change would depend as much on organized popular movements...

Senate confirmation hearings on judicial nominations have devolved into almost total bullshit. They're a form of Kabuki Theater in which everyone plays their assigned roles and no one tells the whole truth.

A bunch of middle aged white Republican men try to depict Judge Sonia Sotomayor as...