Charles Dickens would find these times rather too familiar for comfort. In seeking to awaken a spirit of charity in his countrymen, the author called attention to those who callously dismissed the poor as a burden and the unemployed as a lazy lot best forced by hunger to grab at bootstraps and pull themselves upward.
Dickens was, to be sure, more articulate than House Speaker John Boehner and the members of Congress who on the cusp of this Christmas season left Washington without extending jobless benefits for 2 million long-unemployed Americans. But surely he captured the essence of their sentiments with his imagining of a certain conservative businessman’s response to a visit by two gentlemen—“liberals,” we will call them—on Christmas Eve. Wrote Dickens:
They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off, in Scrooge’s office. They had books and papers in their hands, and bowed to him. “Scrooge and Marley’s, I believe,” said one of the gentlemen, referring to his list. “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?”
No one has worked harder in recent days to delegitimize John Boehner than John Boehner.
Boehner’s boneheaded “Plan B” scheme, which crashed and burned Thursday night after his own House Republican Caucus refused to provide the needed votes, will rank as one of the greatest failures ever by a House Speaker.
The latest Gallup Poll suggests only a quarter of Americans now support Boehner’s approach to the “fiscal cliff” negotiations, as opposed to 48 percent who approve the way President Obama is handling the fight over taxes and spending.
There are a lot of complicated ways in which to describe the schemes being floated by President Obama and congressional Republicans to abandon the traditional Consumer Price Index in favor of the so-called “chained-CPI” scheme. But there is nothing complicated about the reality that changing the calculations on which cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients are based has the potential to dramatically reduce the buying power of Americans who rely on this successful and stable federal program.
So the word for what is being proposed is “cut”—as in: President Obama and congressional Republicans are proposing to cut Social Security.
“This is a cut affecting every single beneficiary—widows, orphans, people with disabilities and many others. It is a cut which hurts the most those who are most vulnerable: the oldest of the old, those disabled at the youngest ages, and the poorest of the poor. Perhaps fittingly, this will be done during the holiday season, when the American people are distracted,” says Nancy Altman, the founding co-director of the advocacy group Social Security Works. “They will cut Social Security not openly but by stealth—through a cruel cut known colloquially as the chained CPI.”

US Senator Daniel Inouye speaks at the Japanese Cultural Center in Honolulu. (AP Photo/Marco Garcia, File)
Daniel Inouye, who as the son of Japanese immigrants petitioned his government for the right to serve in World War II and then earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for that service in the fight against fascism, became the highest-ranking Asian-American political figure in the United States.
Barack Obama will on Monday win election to his second presidential term by 62 percent to 38 percent.
That’s a dramatically higher margin than he obtained with his 4.8 million popular-vote victory November 6. While there’s no question Obama earned a mandate when he beat Mitt Romney 51-47 in the popular-vote count, that's nowhere near the 2-1 win he will get when the 538 members of the Electoral College gather in state capitals to vote Monday.
It is vital to recognize—as unfortunate as the reality may be—that the Electoral College, not the American electorate, is the final determiner of who becomes president.
The first response of any country to violence of the sort seen in Connecticut must be one of horror.
And sorrow.
President Obama showed that sorrow when he wiped his tears, like those so many Americans shed Friday.
Michigan legislators did not write the so-called “right to work” legislation that they have enacted in a mad rush of anti-democratic excess.
They simply did as they were told.
The ideas, the outlines and the words themselves came from the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing “bill mill” that produces “model legislation” at the behest of Koch Industries, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, ExxonMobil and the corporate cabal that is always looking to “buy” states.

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 29, 2012. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
House Speaker John Boehner has grown increasingly belligerent in his “fiscal cliff” fight with the Obama administration. Struggling to hold together a caucus that never really respected his “leadership,” Boehner is trying to rally his troops by ripping President Obama’s supposed disregard for Republican control of the House of Representatives.

A union steel worker holds up a sign during a rally outside the Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, Thursday, December 6, 2012, as Senate Republicans introduced “right to work” legislation in the waning days of the legislative session. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
We now know that top players with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel plotted with General David Petraeus about the prospect of using the cable network as a platform for launching a “Petraeus for President” campaign. As Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author Bob Woodward writes in the The Washington Post:
So in spring 2011, [former Republican campaign strategist and now Fox News president Roger] Ailes asked a Fox News analyst headed to Afghanistan to pass on his thoughts to Petraeus, who was then the commander of U.S. and coalition forces there. Petraeus, Ailes advised, should turn down an expected offer from President Obama to become CIA director and accept nothing less than the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military post. If Obama did not offer the Joint Chiefs post, Petraeus should resign from the military and run for president, Ailes suggested.
The Fox News chairman’s message was delivered to Petraeus by Kathleen T. McFarland, a Fox News national security analyst and former national security and Pentagon aide in three Republican administrations. She did so at the end of a 90-minute, unfiltered conversation with Petraeus that touched on the general’s future, his relationship with the media and his political aspirations—or lack thereof. The Washington Post has obtained a digital recording from the meeting, which took place in Petraeus’s office in Kabul.


