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And please call in to share your questions: 1-888-432-7434 As part of today’s theme here at The Recovering Politician, the RP himself weighs in on the debt ceiling crisis consuming Washington. Here is his column, cross-posted at The Huffington Post:
Click here to read the rest of the RP’s column at The Huffington Post.
I know this, because I am now up at 3am, scared right out my damn sleep from the horror movie that would be defaulting on our nation’s debt. I have read too many of these Freddy Krueger-themed articles not to believe it. Phrases like “global financial meltdown”, “financial apocalypse”, “the American economy dragging the global economy down the drain”, and “millions of unemployed joined by millions more” own me now, people. This is a cry for help.
And so it goes. The Republican Party’s “top negotiator” on the debt ceiling, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, has already walked out of the talks. Democrats, in return, have begun to urge the President to invoke a little-known clause in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that may legally require our nation not to default on its debt. The President could simply say he’s not legally allowed to permit our nation to default, and instruct the Treasury to continue to pay the bills. The GOP’s response is to threaten impeachment if the president goes that route, claiming he will have superseded Congress’ power of the purse. I am going insane trying to keep up with this stuff, people. Read the rest of… Yesterday, the RP conducted a fascinating interview with Christine Todd Whitman, the former GOP Governor from New Jersey and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during George W. Bush’s first term in office. Whitman shared her frustrations with the hyper-partisanship in Washington, the impact of the Tea Party on her beloved GOP, and the gridlock on environmental action and climate change remediation. She also offers her ideas on how to fix her party and her country’s political system. Listen here: No Labels is a new grassroots movement of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are united in the belief that we do not have to give up our labels, merely put them aside to do what’s best for America. No Labels Radio will offer a weekly dose of news and interviews with the policymakers who are working to find bipartisan answers to the otherwise intractable problems our country faces.
It is the first hard push to the right by a moderate Republican Governor who is an ally of the state’s powerful, and liberal, teachers’ union and who has soft-pedaled his opposition to what his party calls “Obamacare.” I think, taken in its totality, it is a push too far, and the Obama Justice Department should challenge its worst features as fiercely as it has attacked Arizona’s controversial 2010 restrictions. I don’t criticize the provisions that make businesses confirm the legal status of their employees through E-Verify, or the stiff sanctions the law imposes on companies who knowingly hire illegal immigrants: those policies add teeth to current laws that are reasonable but often under-enforced. There is also a sound underlying rationale: employers who hire undocumented workers are not motivated by a rush of generosity, but usually by a desire to undercut wages and to pad their payrolls with vulnerable, cheap laborers who can’t sue and who fear deportation too much to complain about lax safety standards. Read the rest of… RIGHT NOW contributing RP Lisa Borders and the RP are co-hosting the weekly episode of No Labels Radio. Their primary guest is former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman. Click here to tune into the broadcast. No Labels is a new grassroots movement of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are united in the belief that we do not have to give up our labels, merely put them aside to do what’s best for America. No Labels Radio will offer a weekly dose of news and interviews with the policymakers who are working to find bipartisan answers to the otherwise intractable problems our country faces. Today at 2 PM EDT, contributing RP Lisa Borders and I are co-hosting the weekly episode of No Labels Radio. No Labels is a new grassroots movement of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are united in the belief that we do not have to give up our labels, merely put them aside to do what’s best for America. No Labels Radio will offer a weekly dose of news and interviews with the policymakers who are working to find bipartisan answers to the otherwise intractable problems our country faces. Our primary guest is former New Jersey Governor and Bush Administration EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman. Whitman has been a long and strong advocate of bipartisan cooperation in Washington and our state capitals. Click here to find out more about today’s broadcast. OK, RP Nation. Here’s your chance to suggest a question for Governor Whitman. Make your suggestions in the comments section below. And then tune in at 2 PM EDT to see if I used it. Thanks for your help!
You might be wondering…who? Well, first and foremost, I am a proud native son of Louisville, KY. I grew up in the Highlands, in a family that passionately mixed politics with the arts. My father was a civil rights attorney, my mother an actress and acting teacher. If we weren’t at Actor’s Theatre, we were at a rally at Memorial Hall. One of my earliest memories is watching my mother perform in a one-woman show, portraying the South African anti-apartheid activist Ruth First. I guess you could say that experience was emblematic of my parents’ activism, and the values they taught their children. Both of my sisters entered the arts, so as I became a teenager, I tried to take a different path, focusing on writing rather than politics or the theatre. However, I was quickly drawn back to the stage, attending the Youth Performing Arts School and falling in love all over again with Euripides and Stephen Sondheim alike. Assured I would become the next Ralph Fiennes, I journeyed far after high school from Louisville to Boston to continue my acting training. I had some great moments with Pinter, Brecht, Kaufman, Shakespeare and others. Assured I would become the next Philip Seymour Hoffman, I journeyed (not so) far after college from Boston to New York, to take the world by storm. Well, that didn’t pan out so much. So, I turned back to the other family business.  Jane Hoffman In the spring of 2002, I joined Democrat Jane Hoffman’s campaign for Lieutenant Governor of NY State as a junior staffer. It’s worth pointing out that joining any Democrat’s campaign for anything in the spring of 2002 was a risky proposition at best. The city was still reeling from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. George W. Bush had poll numbers in the stratosphere. Locally, Republican Rudy Giuliani had gone from disgraced philanderer and failed Senate candidate to “America’s Mayor”. And Gov. George Pataki was cruising to re-election for a third term with more money than any opponent could compete with. All three men were wielding 9/11 as a deadly political weapon, and doing it brilliantly (if cynically). But Jane was a compelling presence on the stump, a dedicated Consumer Affairs Commissioner, and a highly telegenic figure. As the summer campaign wore on, we felt we had at least an outsider’s shot of upsetting the establishment candidates in the race. That feeling ended the day Jane announced she had become very ill with a rare eye disease, and the campaign would have to end. A campaign without a victory is by its very nature a sad place to be, but I can’t recall a sadder way to end a campaign than that. Read the rest of… Two weeks ago, I shared with readers of The Recovering Politician a disturbing interview in which Kentucky GOP bigwig Larry Forgy stated his bizarre and pernicious theory that Jews such as George Soros, Barbra Streisand and Steve Spielberg would be pumping in significant loads of cash to support their co-religionist, Jerry Abramson, in his bid for Lieutenant Governor. The RP Nation responded with outrage — dozens of your comments and emails unanimously denounced Forgy’s slur. As far as the Kentucky mainstream media…well…the response was much more muted. It took two weeks for one of the state’s leading newspapers to issue a condemnation, and it did not even address the most offensive remarks. The other editorial page — from the very paper that broke the story — has been atypically silent. I share my own views about the media response — as well as my belief that it is incumbent on all of us to denounce intolerance whenever it rears its ugly head — in my column this week in The Huffington Post:
Last week, I wrote about my father, Robert Kennedy, and his critique of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the measure of national well-being. He said, “It measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.” Had my father lived, we might have started work a lot sooner on truer ways to measure the state of the nation. Sadly, that did not happen. His critique of the GDP was forgotten. Instead, other values came to govern American life. In 1968, David Frost asked both Ronald Reagan and my father to speak on the purpose of life. Ronald Reagan answered:
My father said:
Ronald Reagan’s views came to dominate the political landscape. Later, when he was asked what he meant by freedom, he described driving up the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible with the wind blowing through his hair. Here was a man truly doing his own thing, alone.
What Ronald Reagan is remembered for does not reflect what he actually did. Of course, he believed in public engagement. He was a six-term president of the Screen Actors guild, calling union membership a “fundamental human right.” He was governor of California and president of the United States. He spoke eloquently about America as a “shining city on a hill.” Read the rest of… |
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