Joe Conason

Opinion Source Information:

PolitickerNY

In short, there is no need to re-brand, let alone rethink or reconsider. Forget the listening tour. As Mr. Limbaugh put it, “We need a teaching tour.”

The frustration of the hardliners is understandable. The mushy, liberal-sounding rhetoric of the governors on the listening tour must be unbearable to true believers among the dittoheads, who want to hear that the president is a communist and that tax cuts, and only tax cuts, are the panacea that will solve every national problem.

So long as that attitude prevails within the Republican Party, the Democrats need only fear apathy. The oldest saying in politics is that you can’t beat somebody with nobody—and in the eternal contest of ideas, you can’t beat something with nothing.

Opinion Source Information:

Salon

Obama, don't waffle on engagement with Cuba

End the travel ban now for everyone -- and prepare to get rid of the ineffective and unjust embargo.

Opinion Source Information:

Salon

Obama, don't waffle on engagement with Cuba

End the travel ban now for everyone -- and prepare to get rid of the ineffective and unjust embargo.

Opinion Source Information:

Salon

Obama, don't waffle on engagement with Cuba
End the travel ban now for everyone -- and prepare to get rid of the ineffective and unjust embargo.

But more important is the fundamental truth that has been ignored by the embargo's supporters for more than two decades -- namely that the idea of isolating one small island, supposedly over human rights violations, directly conflicts with American policy toward regimes that oppress millions more people.

Opinion Source Information:

Salon

Obama, don't waffle on engagement with Cuba
End the travel ban now for everyone -- and prepare to get rid of the ineffective and unjust embargo.

Whenever a Democratic president takes office, hopes arise for a more rational approach to our relationship with Cuba, object of an embargo that has lasted for nearly half a century without improving the behavior of that country's authoritarian leaders. Such hopes are encouraged by the Obama administration, which has signaled its intention to lift restrictions on travel to the island and cash remittances to family members by Cuban-Americans and -- as members of the Organization of American States prepare for their upcoming summit in Trinidad -- offered a few tantalizing hints that this tentative new opening is merely a beginning.
 

Opinion Source Information:

Stronger, Please, Mr. President

Spending is the main purpose of the stimulus package — indeed, there is no stimulus without spending, as economists of almost every school agree — so the stimulus bill involves spending because "that's the point." And as for the politicians now whining about the deficit, their irresponsible stewardship when they controlled Congress left the federal fisc drowned in red.