Gas Tax Holiday

The teacher in me is starting to get uncomfortable watching pundits blasting Hillary Clinton and John McCain's proposed gas tax holiday. Denunciations of this plan revive memories of seminar sessions when a group of students seeing that one one of their more confident classmates has erred proceed to gang...

While the call by Hillary Clinton and John McCain to suspend the gasoline tax is unquestionably a crass pander to working class swing voters more concerned about rising energy prices than global warming, it is also a warning to Democrats that dealing with global warming by raising energy prices is...

grist.org

Senate Democrats have just proposed a new energy bill: the Consumer-First Energy Act. It is meant as a response to the Republican bill introduced last week, which R's are currently trying to pass as an amendment to the flood insurance bill.

Now, the Republican bill -- the Drill,...

The encouraging lesson from Obama's huge win in North Carolina and near-win in Indiana is that perhaps the fear card no longer trumps all others. The Bush presidencies were fueled by what Jonathan Alter of Newsweek recently called, "underinformed voters," explicitly voting against their own economic interests, often for reasons...

Reeling from Tuesday evening's results, a desperate Hillary Clinton today promised voters an extraordinary new platform that, while making no mention of pressing political issues, includes "zero-calorie" Hershey Bars, a month's-worth of free Marlboro Reds, and--somewhat controversially, in certain quarters--a mysterious new kind of crystal methedrine, which while having all...

Yesterday on MSNBC's Morning Joe, the eponymous Joe Scarborough and his colleague Mika Brzezinski were having an intellectual smack-down over Hillary's emblematic gas tax holiday scheme, and whether it grew from the candidate's desire to help the little guy or her own political future. Personally, I think it's the...

"The road goes on forever and the party never ends."
--Robert Earl Keen

Tomorrow is yet another primary day in the Democratic presidential nomination race, between Hillary Clinton and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

What's that? Wright is not running, you say?

Oh, that's right -- the actual candidate is...

It was bad enough that Sen. Clinton signed on to the plain-as-day-pander to suspend the 18 cent-per-gallon federal gas tax for the summer months, but her continued allegiance to an idea that has been universally (except for her and Sen. McCain) derided offers a couple disturbing insights.

In the face...

The campaign makes a last-ditch appeal to a large, necessary demographic.

To see more of August J. Pollak's cartoon "Some Guy With a Website," check out the archive.

After a week in which a chorus of television pundits talked about the Rev. Wright controversy ad nauseam, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama introduced a proposal today to silence such repetitious discussions.

"I am proposing a gas-bag holiday," Sen. Obama told a capacity crowd in Indianapolis. "Under my plan, all...