We already know the next two acts of this drama. The Senate will refuse to accept the latest disingenuous House offer of allowing temporary government funding in exchange for a one-year delay in implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Barring a miracle, the government will then be forced to cease...

Now it gets really interesting.

Republicans in the House are determined to shut down the government, by holding defunding of Obamacare hostage for continued funding of the rest of the budget. In past budget negotiations, Obama has often been too quick to fold a strong hand.

But this time, the...

Larry Summers is out. But who is in?

On Sunday afternoon, Administration sources leaked to the Wall Street Journal an exchange of letters between Summers and President Obama.

Summers wrote: "I have reluctantly concluded that any possible confirmation process for me would be acrimonious and would not...

For decades, you could always count on the Federal Reserve to pull the plug on prosperity too soon, seeing ghosts of inflation everywhere. The Fed, responsive as it was to creditors, preferred a dose of recession to any sort of price pressures, especially wage increases.

That changed with the regimes...

A happy Labor Day to all -- a day for a last summer outing to the beach, a three-day weekend to shop the sales, or maybe just a day to stay home and get ready for the school year.

And, oh yeah, a day to honor working people.

As this...

The New York Times had a terrific Sunday article on a new waste-to-energy technology that could convert massive quantities of trash into synthetic natural gas. This technology, from isn't perfect -- the product is still a carbon fuel. But unlike hydro-fracking, it doesn't destroy land and water supplies...

Do you think the damage from the pending bankruptcy of the city of Detroit will be limited to Detroit? Think again.

Detroit is partly the victim of economic trends far beyond its control, the downsizing and outsourcing of the auto industry and the collapse of the sub-prime bubble, to name...

The latest figures on the economy make it all too clear that we are stuck in a feeble recovery that could go on for several years to come. Growth was only 1.4 percent in the first half of 2013, and the economy is still creating too few jobs to increase...

What a difference a week makes. A week ago, a carefully orchestrated series of leaks signaled that President Obama was on the verge of naming Larry Summers to succeed Ben Bernanke as chair of the Federal Reserve. Those leaks came from senior administration officials, including Obama himself. Now, a massive...

Larry Summers is running hard to succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. This is a terrible idea, on several grounds (which I'll discuss in a moment.) Even so, I'd place the odds of President Obama giving Summers the job at 50-50 or better, unless progressive Democrats get...

On July 1, the Oregon legislature unanimously passed a plan to allow students to attend public colleges and universities tuition free and without incurring college loans.

The plan is revolutionary, and long overdue. It could change the politics of student debt nationally. The program permits an Oregon...

So is Edward Snowden a hero or a creepy betrayer? The fact that he is huddled in a Moscow airport waiting for some country to take him in lends credence to the betrayer view.

Since September 11, 2001, a lot of queasy liberals have cut the U.S. government a fair...

Ever since the election of George W. Bush, the Republican strategy has been to keep a growing Democratic majority at bay by repressing the votes of people and groups likely to vote Democratic.

In 2000, when Al Gore beat George W. Bush, a corrupt Republican election official in Florida and,...

I spent the last couple of days at Netroots Nation, and it was one impressive gathering. Netroots is highly professional in how it's organized and wonderfully amateur in its inclusiveness. Most of this year's attendees were first-timers, including me.

As a veteran of a different generation whose progressive and journalistic...

I remember a time when liberals were the people who used government as a democratic counterweight to the abuses of capitalism, and conservatives were those close to big business who wanted to limit government. Liberals also recognized, with the Framers of the Constitution, that government had to be strong enough...

President Obama's personal summit with China's new president, Xi Jinping, at the well-named venue of Rancho Mirage, Calif., covered a wide range of issues, from North Korea to cyber-spying to territorial disputes with Japan and Taiwan, to global climate change. What the meetings did not engage is the fact that...

Just as markets over-built housing, mispriced mortgages and bid up prices beyond the real financial capacity of homebuyers, America's colleges and universities have over-expanded and over-priced their product. We are getting an education bubble with dynamics similar to the late housing bubble.

As more and more students find themselves with...

Austerity has failed in Europe, where the European Union just racked up 18 months of negative growth with no end in sight. It is failing in the United States, where this year's deficit reductions will cut the growth rate in half.

But austerity is succeeding as politics. The German government...

Republicans in both Houses of Congress are becoming more and more flagrant in their strategy of holding the governing process hostage for far-right demands not shared by most voters. And the pity is that the strategy is mostly working.

The more that the Obama Administration tries to meet the Republicans...

The press strained to find some good news in the government's April employment report. Superficially, things appeared a little better. The official unemployment rate dropped to 7.5 percent, and the number of long-term unemployed people declined by about 258,000. The government revised upwards the number of new jobs created, to...