(Source: Demos) The debate over America’s federal budget is getting stale—and getting us nowhere, as the latest government shutdown depressingly reminds us. Political obsession over budget deficits has now morphed into legislative extortion. Today, more than ever, we need to refocus the federal “tax and spend” debate—from deficits to inequality. Two researchers from the New […]

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(Source: ABC) I have always believed that, at some point, the Israeli prime minister and his lobby would lose their grip on U.S. Middle East policy, at least I’ve believed that since 1982 when Tom Dine, AIPAC’s most successful executive director, explained how it would happen. It was during my four year stint at AIPAC […]

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(Source: AP via CNN) Poor T.S. Eliot: it seems the world will end with a bang instead of a whimper. At least that’s the plan the Tea Party wing of the House has for the government shutdown. The word in D.C. is that “phase two” is to keep the government closed through October 17. Crashing […]

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  While the world (Israel and the U.S. in particular) waits to see if Tehran is sincere in its overtures regarding nuclear weapons, let’s take a moment to recall that we won this war 10 years ago until Dick Cheney decided that the victory was unacceptable. Jake Bernstein and I turned this up while working […]

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The federal income tax this week turns a century old. On October 3, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the first modern federal tax on income. John Buenker has been writing about the events—and attitudes—that led to that signing for a good bit of the last 50 years. His 1985 book, The Income Tax […]

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