Pledge to resist Keystone XL

The clock is ticking — 45 days and counting — on the most important comment period yet for stopping the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The State Department released its latest report on the pipeline last Friday, and it utterly downplays the

The Week Ahead in Congress

The House and Senate return this week, with plans to work on one major piece of legislation — a spending bill for the rest of fiscal year 2013. While the $85 billion sequester went into effect last Friday, neither the House nor Senate has any

The Progress Report: Devastating Cuts Take Hold

Mar 4, 2013 | by ThinkProgress War Room Devastating, painful, and, above all, avoidable spending cuts went into effect Friday evening after sequestration became official. Instead of agreeing to a balanced replacement that includes targeted spending cuts and new revenues from closing

Articles I’ve Been Reading: 2013-03-04

THE BOEHNER-QUESTER Sequester: The Finger on the TriggerRichard (RJ) Eskow, Op-Ed: Today is the day the package of budget cuts they call the “Sequester” takes effect. There will be endless postmortems and real-time analyses. But as its draconian effects, there’s one thing

Sequestration, the Pentagon, and the States

Sequestration, the Pentagon, and the States offers selected state-level briefs focused on the local impact of looming automatic across-the-board federal spending cuts known as sequestration and historically high levels of Pentagon spending. On March 1, unless Congress acts, billions of dollars will

Why Use a Bludgeon When a Calculator Will Do?

Some lawmakers have an almost-mythical resistance to raising revenue at a moment when affluent individuals and big corporations have the lowest tax burden in more than half a century. — by Jo Comerford Sequestration is both ugly and hard to explain. As

Hope and Change Fade, but War Endures—Seven Reasons Why We Can’t Stop Making War

— by William J. Astore If one quality characterizes our wars today, it’s their endurance.  They never seem to end.  Though war itself may not be an American inevitability, these days many factors combine to make constant war an American near certainty.