Here is Pelosi's plan for the first 100 hours as Speaker of the House. Much to my surprise, her agenda is coherent, well-packaged and urgently needed:
Day One: Put new rules in place to "break the link between lobbyists and legislation."
Day Two: Enact all the recommendations made by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Time remaining until 100 hours: Raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, maybe in one step. Cut the interest rate on student loans in half. Allow the government to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for Medicare patients.
Broaden the types of stem cell research allowed with federal funds -- "I hope with a veto-proof majority," she added in an Associated Press interview Thursday.
All the days after that: "Pay as you go," meaning no increasing the deficit, whether the issue is middle class tax relief, health care or some other priority.
To do that, she said, Bush-era tax cuts would have to be rolled back for those above "a certain level." She mentioned annual incomes of $250,000 or $300,000 a year and higher, and said tax rates for those individuals might revert to those of the Clinton era. Details will have to be worked out, she emphasized.
"We believe in the marketplace," Pelosi said of Democrats, then drew a contrast with Republicans. "They have only rewarded wealth, not work."
Well said. And she didn't even need to resort to Lakoffian framing.
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It's too bad she doesn't have in there rolling back the end-of-democracy laws that were recently passed....
Which is surprising, because the Democrats are, you know, soft on terror. Or at least that's what I heard somewhere.
I think this all sounds fantastic. But this:
Is easier said than done and could take a hundred hours to hash out by itself.
So, a democrat has now actually put forward an explanation of what would be different if the Democrats were elected. Will anyone in the media notice?
I can't handle all this common sense and logic she is offering. It seems so foreign.
Amazing...she doesn't seem aware that we are at war with terrorists who will change our "rights" and way of life in a heartbeat if we have a government that says "we need to do unto others" (guess that's a veiled attempt to try to reach out to the religious). We're all doomed if we believe the terrorists, Chavez, North Korea will all be nice to us if we just be sweet.
Pelosi isn't bright enough to have penned that herself.
robin,
That's a parody, right? You don't really believe that a group of rag-tag desperados, a Latin-American leftist or a tin-pot dictator in a rapidly failing state can take us over military and undermine our rights and liberties, do you?
You have a nice science blog with great intellectual themes, but I don't understand why you have to mess it up with (not very intellectual) political themes?
Your praising of raising the minimum wage and cutting student loan interest rates (without you even commenting on being somehow skeptic of the ideas) seems scientifically as sound as a republican praising an agenda that includes teaching ID. After all, both sound to novices as intuitively good ideas.
Could you at least offer different feeds for people who just want the science? Ie., two main categories, political and non-political?
After all, both sound to novices as intuitively good ideas.
And to everyone else, except perhaps libertarians who live in free market fantasy land.