This Congress potentially could be the most productive in over forty years. It has passed the largest recovery plan in the nation's history. It extended health care to millions of children. It passed Obama's first budget with its significant down payment on education and energy. The House just passed the...

The administration has rolled out its financial reform plan, which the president accurately calls the "the boldest set of reforms in financial regulation in 75 years."

Rep. Barney Frank, the chair of the House Banking Committee, promises to act rapidly, hoping to pass reforms by the end of...

We're headed into the end game for health care reform. The president has put himself in the arena. The insurance lobby is unleashing the scare campaign. A strong bill will pass the House. But at this point, too many Senators are still standing in the way.

The reform includes a...

I stopped reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page when it soared off into wingnuttery, writing tomes on the imaginary conspiracy to off Vince Foster and other fantasies. The news pages remain useful; the editorial page hasn't improved much.

But as they say, even a monkey at a typewriter eventually...

President Obama has deep and strong support from progressives. But in Washington, the media is increasingly focused on areas where Obama's base is disappointed or restive. In recent weeks, we seen the uproar over his retreat on preventive detention and military tribunals, dismay over the dallying on "don't ask, don't...

Congressional Republicans are marginally more popular and significantly less contagious than the swine flu. Even conservatives are keeping their distance. House leader John Boehner's perpetual tan has become a presidential punch line. Senate leader Mitch Dr. No McConnell is known only for obstruction. Ideologues like Rush rush to fill...

A crisis that demands fundamental change. A president with a mandate to drive it. A Congress, controlled by Democrats, ready to act. Now comes the hard part - actually getting something real done.

These are salad days for Democratic lobbyists, because deep pocket interests - health insurance companies, Big Pharma,...

Is the Obama Administration saving General Motors or is it saving auto industry jobs in the US? Is it saving GM as an American brand or GM as an American manufacturer?

These aren't academic questions. General Motors, which has been buttressed by $15.2 billion in loans from taxpayers with more...

"And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place"

That was Sen Richard Durbin, the powerful Senate Democratic whip, irate...

Grading a president after 100 days always strikes me as presumptuous. The only real grade is an incomplete. And as good teachers will tell you, letter grades - as opposed to written evaluations - are inherently arbitrary and misleading.

One thing is clear. If we're grading on a curve, Barack...

"The decisions that are made in the next six months or so are likely to set the economic course of this country for the next 50 years," says Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the COP, the Congressional Oversight Panel charged with reviewing the banking bailout. "That's what happened coming out of...

Tax Day. Fox News is flogging Astroturf "tea parties" underwritten by corporate lobbyists, while its pundits warn that raising the top income tax rate to the level it was under Bill Clinton constitutes "socialism." The Wall Street Journal editorializes about the evils of the estate tax. Ari Fleischer, Daddy Bush's...

Democratic Senator Chris Dodd is in deep trouble. According to Stuart Rothenberg, Dodd is the most vulnerable Senator up for re-election in 2010 - despite the fact that he's coasted to election easily in this deep blue state since his first Senate run in 1980.

A March Quinnipiac...

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has called for "sweeping regulation" of the financial community, beginning a discussion of how we restructure the banking system -- in and out of the shadows -- as we emerge from what Robert Kuttner calls the Great Collapse. Literally trillions have already been committed in...

Will Obama's transformative budget survive? As his press conference last night illustrated, it runs a serious risk of drowning in a swamp of cant.

The budget is getting strafed by politicians in both parties for its deficits and debt. (the deficit is the annual shortfall between revenue and spending;...

Who stands in the way of the reforms vital to get us out of the deep hole we are in?

Republicans, of course, have decided to be the party of "no," staking their future on Obama's failure. But that isn't a surprise.

The entrenched interests whose oxen get gored...

Last year we worried about homes below water; now it is the economy itself that is sinking. Warren Buffett says the US economy has "fallen off a cliff." And, as bad as the US is, the rest of the world is worse. Germany's exports have collapsed; Japan is in free...

It ain't easy. No use jokin'. Everything's broken."
-Bob Dylan

We can't go back to the old economy. That economy -- marked by booms and busts, Gilded Age inequality, declining wages, growing household debts, and unsustainable trade deficits -- didn't work very well for most Americans. President Obama is faced with...

The man can give a speech. Confident, relaxed, bold, serious, President Obama made his case to the American people with boffo reviews from all who saw it no matter what their party allegiance.

And his case was a clear and bold statement of the need for progressive government as...

Will President Obama defend Social Security from the folks who want to plunder it? That's the question Bill Grieder poses in a critically important article in the Nation Magazine.

We'll get an early indication this Monday when the president convenes a "Fiscal Responsibility Summit," designed as he put...