Jonathan Zasloff

Hank Williams, Jr. of Monday Night Football-bad-theme-song fame compared Obama with Hitler, an analogy so outrageous that it was too much even for Fox & Friends. Less than four hours later, ESPN executives fired him. Good for them. It is so obvious that Williams should be replaced by the Dixie Chicks that I’m not even […]

Texas unemployment rises to 8.5%, the highest in 24 years. (h/t TPM). Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, clearly a basket case due to liberal policies, the unemployment rate has dropped to 7.4%, the lowest in two and a half years. It should be mentioned that Texas job losses stem from public sector reductions. Since public sector workers […]

One of the most annoying things about the troglodyte right is its celebration of “Tax Freedom Day” where supposedly you are no longer working for the government. As soon as they start saying that they don’t want to benefit from Social Security, Medicare, national security, food safety, environmental protection, education etc. etc. then we can […]

Tim Noah no longer has a job. Andrew Malcolm still does. [Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]

Rick Perry’s asserts that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. We should remember that. Unfortunately, our last Ponzi scheme is already hurtling downward. If you think about it, a large part of American (and global) prosperity rests on a real Ponzi scheme: the financial system. I’m actually not being hyperbolic here. In order to make […]

Poll results now show President Obama leading “Generic Republican” by six points. That is genuinely good news, since “generic Republican,” like “generic Democrat” is usually its party’s strongest contestant. My morning started off badly when, for the first time in his Presidency (although later than many others), President Obama’s approval rating came below 40% — […]

Thousands of Israelis are camping out on the nation’s streets, protesting over the country’s acute shortage of affordable housing. Reading through a useful story from JTA, I was struck by this comment: “What is very troubling for Netanyahu is that this is not a left wing versus right wing protest. It’s one of the few […]

I realize that a large part of President Obama’s strategy through the debt limit fight has been to present himself as the grown-up, the reasonable one when everyone else is screaming and yelling. Fair enough. But he should also listen to his most recent Democratic predecessor: When we look weak in a time where people […]

This, confirmed by a senior administration official to Jonathan Cohn: Medicare: Raising the eligibility age, imposing higher premiums for upper income beneficiaries, changing the cost-sharing structure, and shifting Medigap insurance in ways that would likely reduce first-dollar coverage. This was to generate about $250 billion in ten-year savings. This was virtually identical to what Boehner […]

Ezra Klein explains that the White House doesn’t want a clean debt-ceiling bill: A lot of Democrats took one look at the McConnell plan, which would raise the debt ceiling without substantive fiscal concessions, and saw their way out of this mess. But not the White House. What’s come clear in recent weeks is that […]