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On Wednesday, Pelosi had a forum with top House Democrats and a team of economists: Former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, October 21, 2009 'Absolutely horrendous long term fiscal out look' This is a graph presented by Jared Bernstein, chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden. Do you see any current recovery? There are not going to be Job increases for a long time, look at that curve in the graph Yet, Pelosi says the recession is coming to an end; http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_102209/content/01125107.guest.html PELOSI: It's no accident that right now that as the recession's coming to an end it does...

GET READY FOR a revolution in trade politics. This week, President Bush reiterated his call for authority to make more trade deals, which expires June 30. He went on the road for a photo-op at a Caterpillar Tractor plant, arguing that trade deals promote exports. But in the new Congress, extension of current "fast track" negotiating authority is a dead letter. The entering class of Democrats are nearly all fair-traders, demanding much more balanced rules for the trading system. Thirty-nine of the 42 freshma n Democrats in the House recently sent a letter to the Democratic leadership warning their leaders...

CONGRESSMAN BARNEY FRANK, incoming chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, has proposed something big and bold -- a grand bargain with labor and business to create a society more equal, more dynamic, and less bureaucratic. Democrats control Congress by narrow margins, which limits their power to two areas. They can block things Republicans and business elites want -- and hold those goals hostage for things Democrats and liberals want. And they can use the hearing process to shed light on the real America. Frank plans to do both. His committee has broad economic jurisdiction. Business, Frank explains, wants...

Thanks, Bob Kuttner. You might doubt my sincerity. But really, I mean it. With Nancy AWOL, and Charley Rangel endlessly recycling his line about not buying green bananas at his age let alone speculating about what he would do as Way & Means Chairman, perhaps Americans have lost sight of what the Dems have up their sleeve if they get back the majority. So in all sincerity, thanks for telling it like it is.In Nervous excitement builds for Democrats, Kuttner lets the Dem cat out of the bag: "We are about to get something all too rare in Democratic politics...

by Mark Finkelstein October 14, 2006 - 12:42 I was dutifully working my way through Robert Kuttner's Boston Globe column of this morning, Cleaning Up the Mess, on the lookout for some outrageous MSM morsel with which to arouse NewsBusters readers. But all I was getting were Kuttner's "on the one hand, but on the other hand" arguments as to whether it is in Democratic interests to retake one or both houses of Congress come November. His thesis is that America is such a mess thanks to years of Republican misrule that fixing it could be a thankless task for...

My father was a machine gunner with the Army's 28th Infantry Division, which was among the first units to march down the Champs-Elysées after the Allied liberation of Paris . In December 1944, having landed at Normandy and fought across France and Belgium, he was captured in the Battle of the Bulge, and sent hundreds of miles through northern Germany in an unheated boxcar in the dead of winter to a prison camp at Muhlberg in the east. My father survived the war not because of the generosity of the Nazis to Jewish soldiers. The Germans must have been tempted...

American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner lists the bumbling mistakes of the Bush administration that have led the world further and further toward a cataclysm in the Middle East. In contrast, former Presidents in former crises used diplomacy and containment, which Bush, until now, has eschewed.

by Mark Finkelstein July 22, 2006 - 07:47 Even for a Boston Globe columnist, Robert Kuttner's effort this morning has to go down in the annals of Bush-hatred at its most rabid. Consider these excerpts, annotated with my comments: 'The latest violence in the Middle East demonstrates the bankruptcy of the Bush administration's grand design for the region.' Stay with me - Bob's just clearing his throat. 'The quagmire has demonstrated the humiliating limits of US military power.' Crocodile tears? 'Saddam turned out to be telling the truth about nuclear weapons and Bush turned out to be lying,' Make your...

WITH THE indictment of Lewis Libby and possible indictment of Karl Rove, President Bush faces a fateful choice. Bush can adopt a bunker mentality and try to appease his base of social ultra-conservatives and military hawks who have brought him such grief. Or he can reach out to the broad mainstream, as he pretended to do when he ran as a ''uniter, not a divider" in 2000. Who would have predicted that the Bush machine would implode so spectacularly, on so many fronts simultaneously? -snip- If he were Bill Clinton, you would expect him to ''triangulate" -- forsake his own...

The quality of the reporting on the Valerie Plame/Judith Miller matter has been abysmal. Here are two examples. This Associated Press article is by Pete Yost. For the most part, it is a straightforward account of Judith Miller's appearance in court today. But note Yost's account of the Plame affair that forms the background of the subpoena on Miller: Plame's name was disclosed in a column by Robert Novak days after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, questioned part of President Bush's justification for invading Iraq. Wilson was sent to Africa by the Bush administration to investigate an intelligence claim...

The other day columnist George F. Will took a swipe at what he called "Kuttnerism" -- the sin of liberal condescension toward middle Americans ["Redefining Liberalism," op-ed, Dec. 12]. I have long observed that when Democrats and liberals honor the pocketbook struggles of regular people, social tolerance is more easily advanced. For instance, Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy championed workaday Americans -- and were able to expand minority rights at a time when most whites needed some prodding. In that spirit, I wrote in the December American Prospect magazine: "Bill Clinton won election by declaring, as a...

Democrats Must Revert To Resisting Oppression Some liberals simply cannot control their reflex to look down their upturned noses at the American electorate. Writing in the American Prospect, a liberal monthly of which he is co-editor, Robert Kuttner, in a thoughtful analysis of Democrats' difficulties developing a distinctive values vocabulary, argues that "when Democrats fail to articulate pocketbook issues as values, class resentments become cultural ones," and Republicans prosper. Then, in his penultimate paragraph, his own cultural resentments against the American majority, as he imagines it, drive him into a ditch: "Bill Clinton won election by declaring, as a matter...

In an odd way, I eagerly await the next could-be scandal that the left will attempt to hang around the neck of George W. Bush. It has become a perverse type of spectator sport for me. Granted the current "corporate greed" thing hasn't run its course and it may yet "have legs", irrespective of any truth behind it. No matter, should it die out tomorrow, whatever the next big problem may be, we can all rest assured that it will be Bush's fault. If we're to accept the rhetoric of the Democrats and the blazingly irresponsible headlines in the...