Dear Mr. President--Since you were in Asia, you may have missed Bill Moyers' show last Friday night, about LBJ's radio clips as he reluctantly escalated in Vietnam (Moyers was an aide at the time).

LBJ's decision to escalate was a disaster. For America. For the Vietnamese people. For the long-term...

Mr. President: As you consider whether to march further into the trap of Afghanistan, please don't forget the memorable phrase that E. J. Dionne recently attributed to historian Robert Dallek: "In my judgment, war kills off great reform movements."
Can't get much more precise than that, can you?

Mr. President: The failure of Lyndon B. Johnson's Administration due to Vietnam is your model here. And you're smart enough to understand what that means.
You are not LBJ, with the Joe McCarthy "who lost China?" politics as your most relevant model.
The most recent and relevant model...

Ignore me if you want. After all, Van Jones has been an inspiration to me, I'm antiwar, pro-single-payer, pro-impeachment, a long-time member of the Jackson/Kucinich wing of the Democratic Party. I know I'm easy to dismiss. But seriously, dude--since when do you deal with right-wing wolves by feeding them sacrificial...

Are Blue Dogs & Republicans willing to attack the deficit? Will they go after wasteful and unnecessary weapons systems? We'll know soon, but don't hold your breath.

Most Blue Dog Democrats and most Republicans in the House and Senate are big hypocrites. They claim allegiance to attacking the deficit but...

"Our flag is red, white, and blue, but our nation is a rainbow -- red, yellow, brown, black, and white -- and we are all precious in God's sight... America is not a blanket -- one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size....

Most of the suggestions President Obama gets are hard to juggle, since they involve big problems with lots of important political players.
But here's a couple easy ones, Mr. President--you can do the right thing twice, and it's very obvious what the right thing is in both cases.

President Obama's recent trip to Europe focused a lot on the need for Europe to help us get the world economy going again by revving up their stimulus spending to complement ours.
This is all well and good, but Europe (and our good friends the Canadians) can also help...

When UAW members have to give up some of their hours, or forego their hard-earned pensions, or give back part of their salaries, those are real cuts.
But when military spending goes up 4%, after 8 years of Bush/Cheney increases that almost doubled the Pentagon's budget--while supplementing that...

NPR's Nina Totenberg had a touching story this week concerning the bridge at Selma, and the reconciliation of George Wallace's daughter with the civil rights movement.
Too bad she just couldn't resist taking a cheap shot at Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, injecting some irrelevant barbs because they got...

Election Day in the race to fill Rahm Emanuel's House seat is Tuesday, but as I expected for a special election in Chicago in March, the election buzz is somewhat muted.
I drove in last week from Washington, D.C., to help with the last minute voter turnout on...

An Open Letter to Our Congressional Leaders on Military Budget Cuts:
On the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birthday, I'd like to call attention to the closing line from his Second Inaugural Address: "...to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and...

Tom Geoghegan has a hard-to spell Irish name. It's Geoghegan, and it rhymes with Reagan. But Tom thinks like Paul Wellstone.

Here's his web site. Tom is way smart.
He is perhaps the best writer of any labor lawyer, ever. He was just endorsed by the Chicago area...

Hey, elephants, who's in charge of your political strategy these days? Anybody?
Yesterday you couldn't find a single vote to join with a popular President to begin digging out of the economic mineshaft your man Bush left us in.
Meanwhile, at least one of your geniuses...

As we approach what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 80th birthday, we should remember not just his dream, but his nightmares--his fear that without a "true revolution of values," the "giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
On April...

A new Rasmussen Poll out this morning has Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. with a solid lead among Illinois Democrats, and a huge lead (81% ofthe vote!) among Illinois African-Americans!

Reminder: Jackson would also be the only African-American in the U.S. Senate; was a National Co-Chair for the Obama for...

Latinos voted more than 2-to-1 for Barack Obama, basically providing him his margin of victory. Young people, who care the most about global warming, did the same. Solidifying the long-term voting patterns of these two groups could ensure a "center/left" political realignment in the near future.
The good news...

This was a great campaign.
If you weren't touched by the historic events of this election cycle, then you should probably give up politics.
My prediction, fwiw: Obama 363 evs, wins 53-45%.
Dems also gain 8 Senate seats and 25 House seats, the biggest back-to-back Democratic...

Yesterday McCain entered to the song "Rocky", as has done before, and as Hillary Clinton did late in the primaries...Don't these challengers remember the movie? Rocky didn't win, he lost--fittingly, to a Black guy...

One week from today, I hope we will not forget Barack Obama's eloquent--and specific--comment to debate moderator Tom Brokaw, that health care "should be a right for every American".
Note the rising lines on this video that Jason Linkins put up for us on HuffPost 3 weeks ago--once...