Samuel Knight

Much to the surprise of very few, Jack Lew was confirmed as Treasury Secretary yesterday. A gifted technocrat with ties to Wall Street—one whose Citibank contract urged him to take a whirl through the revolving door—Lew seems to be the sort of person one would expect to find occupying a cabinet level position. And occupy […]

If you’re anything like me – and most Americans are, according to an AP poll – you think that Congress, like its counterpart in Germany, should already be aggressively supporting the development of renewable energy. Even if the 97 percent of scientists who say that climate change is anthropogenic are wrong, the proliferation of clean […]

The link round-up is coming earlier than usual. I am about to head down to the “Forward on Climate” rally (I will be cycling) where I will ask attendees what other issues they’d be willing to compromise in order to get a climate change bill passed (this is, however, operating under the fatal assumption that […]

In case you missed it, Elizabeth Warren made quite the splash at her first Senate Banking Committee hearing on Thursday. In front of a panel entitled “Wall Street Reform: Oversight of Financial Stability and Consumer and Investor Protections,” Warren berated regulators for failing to prosecute a single Wall Street criminal in recent years, and for […]

New White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough did the Sunday talk show rounds this morning. While on on ABC’s “This Week,” he was questioned about John Boehner’s assertion that President Obama lacks “the guts…to take on the liberal side of his own party” in budget negotiations. McDonough responded with talking points, stressing that the […]

–USA Today obtained a leaked draft of President Obama’s plan for immigration reform. At it’s core are proposals to offer permanent residency within eight years, more security funding, and a requirement that businesses check the immigration status of new hires “within four years.” The paper also reports that “the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants could […]

-President Obama, in Chicago yesterday to promote his gun control initiative, lamented the violence that plagues the city’s youth. “Last year, there were 443 murders with a firearm in this city, and 65 of them were 18 and under. That’s the equivalent of a Newtown every four months,” he said, according to POLITICO. Just two […]

By most accounts, “Won’t Back Down” is a film that everyone would like to forget. The cringe-inducing anti-teachers’ unions movie may have had the backing of wealthy corporate education reformers, but the magnates couldn’t seem to use their entrepreneurial spirit to cobble together a decent flick. The astroturfers dream, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis, […]

On Friday, in a written response to questions submitted by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA Director nominee John Brennan said that the number of civilian casualties caused by drone should be made public, but claimed that they are “rare instances.” Setting aside the fact that, as Reuters pointed out it, the government “assumes […]

In his latest salvo in his back-and-forth with Paul Krugman over the significance of the national debt, Joe Scarborough, writing in POLITICO today, displayed such a foul misunderstanding about economics, Krugman must have choked on his oatmeal laughing as he read it. In “Paul Krugman is wrong – but don’t take my word for it,” […]