Sometimes at Thanksgiving it's not so obvious what goes on the "I-am-thankful-for" list. For me, this year there was no question. This year I am thankful for the life of my late son-in-law Michael McLaughlin. Michael had an enormous impact on everyone whose lives he touched. He left us...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's announcement that he will send health insurance reform to the floor of the Senate this week signals that the long march to change America, that began with Barack Obama's announcement for president three years ago, has arrived at the gates of what is most certainly...

Even if you completely ignore how critical it is to reform the broken American health care system, most of the 39 Democrats who voted against health care reform in the House last week made a political mistake. Here's why:

1). The most basic reason is that the major...

Memo: 11/6/09
To: Democratic Members of Congress
Re: Your Vote on Health Insurance Reform

When you cast your vote this weekend on the historic health care reform bill, you will be faced with a simple, clear choice: cast a vote for average Americans, or for...

Our ability to discern trends in off-year elections is always limited by the influence of local factors -- especially when strong personalities are involved. But there are four lessons that emerged from yesterday's results that are extremely important for Democrats as we prepare for next year's midterms.

1). First and...

As I watched Barack Obama's victory speech, I thought that America was on the brink of a new progressive era. I believe that just as strongly one year later.

I know there are many Progressives who are disappointed at the pace of change, or who believe that there...

The recent controversy over the huge bonuses at financial firms like AIG and J.P. Morgan Chase have served to highlight both the disproportionate growth of the financial sector, and the perverse incentives that led traders and executives to take reckless risks with their companies and our economy.

But...

The Senate Democratic Leader, Harry Reid -- and a majority of Members of the Senate -- support the inclusion of public health insurance option in the Senate's health care reform bill. The debate over where the Senate of the United States stands on this question is now settled. The...

From the beginning of the "Reagan Revolution" in 1980 until the election of Barack Obama, progressives were in a defensive crouch. The ideas and values of the right wing were predominant. During the Clinton years, at least there were two ideological teams on the field, but even then progressives...

Prepare for a new firestorm of completely justified populist outrage. Some of the country's largest Wall Street firms have set aside billions of dollars for bonuses to executives and traders -- many of whom are the same people whose reckless risk-taking led to the current recession.

Amazingly,...

Over the last several decades, the financial sector has grown relentlessly. It has doubled in size over the last 14 years. During the period 1973 to 1985 the financial sector never earned more than 16% of domestic profits. This decade, it has averaged 41% of all the profits earned by...

President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize is more than anything else a tribute to America's voters. In making the award, the Nobel Committee said, "The question we have to ask is, who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world, and who has done...

Lately there has been a growing wave of cynicism on the Left. Many progressive voices are poised, at the drop of a hat, to believe that the Obama Administration -- or the Democratic leadership in Congress, or even the leaders of many progressive institutions -- can't wait to abandon...

As the health care debate rages, one thing has become increasingly clear. This battle is not mainly some academic argument about the best approaches to health care policy -- or even a clash of ideological world views. It is a fight over who gets what. It is a battle...

In a surprising vote Tuesday, ten Democrats voted to add a public option to the most conservative of the five health insurance reform bills working their way through Congress. That's just two votes short of passage.

This robust support for the public option -- in what most observers consider...

A few years ago there was a great uproar from the Right Wing against France because its government opposed the War in Iraq. The Republican Congress went so far as to rename the "French Fries" in the Congressional cafeteria "freedom fries."

Of course, the Republican response was...

It's time to get real about the Republican distraction de jour - the great ACORN controversy.

The bottom line is this: if the same standard used to prevent ACORN from receiving federal contracts were applied to many large corporations -- Boeing, financial institutions like AIG and CitiCorp,...

Sounds like a movie script. Giant parasites stalk the American landscape disguised as benign upstanding participants in the "free market."

The dictionary defines parasite as:

"An organism that lives on or in an organism of another species, known as the host, from the body of which it obtains nutriment."

The Sunday New York Times ran a front page story headlined "The Fading Public Option." Since the beginning of the health care debate in April, the main stream media and purveyors of Conventional Wisdom have regularly pronounced the public option dead and gone. But in fact they continue to be...

When Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) yelled out that President Obama was a "liar" in the middle of Obama's nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress, he became the poster child for the new Republican Party.

I definitely mean poster "child." Since President Obama took office,...