The Nature of Things

One of the most maddening things about this whole interminable and wholly unnecessary squabble about raising the debt ceiling has been the mainstream media's insistence on a false equivalency of the two sides. When covering the story, they will invariably insist that both Republicans and Democrats are equally to blame for the debacle, the inability of the government to function.  This is categorically untrue, and so-called journalists do a great disservice to the country and betray their professional ethics when they choose to report the story in that way. In fact, the debt ceiling crisis has been entirely manufactured by the tea party-led Republicans whose goal is quite simply to destroy government, to do away with all regulation, oversight, consumer and public health protections, and with the social safety net that has made life more comfortable for the poor and for the middle class.  Their constituents are not the poor and the middle class.  Their constituents are the...

Nancy Pelosi has been Speaker of the House for four years, the first woman to hold that position. During her tenure, she has arguably been one of the most effective Speakers ever to hold the position. She has maintained the discipline of the House and, more importantly, the discipline of her Democratic caucus, a process often compared to herding cats. When the economy of the country and the world tanked during the last years of the Bush administration, she worked with members of that administration, regardless of political differences, to stave off disaster. She helped get the Bush bank bailout package passed. For her efforts she was later vilified by Republicans and demonized as if she had been the author of that package, even though she got it passed at the behest of Bush and his Treasury officials. When the Democrats won big in 2008, she worked with the Democratic White House to get their agenda through Congress. She was remarkably successful, passing just about every initiati...