Democrat Al Franken beat Republican incumbent Norm Coleman to win the US Senate seat from Minnesota, officials conducting a final recount said on Monday, though the loser promised to challenge the result

Barack Obama started pushing his economic stimulus plan on Capitol Hill, including about $300bn of tax cuts that could soften Republican resistance

This article argues that partisanship is important to democratic engagement. I agree. The Obama campaign was organised on a partisan basis - as people wanted an end to Republican rule. Polite bipartisanship will not engage grassroots activists. You need strong partisan feelings and organisation to engage lots of people. This, of course, doesn't mean that the Obama campaign was highly partisan. It ...

Ezra Klein highlights differences in the US Senate today from 1993 - the last time the Democrats had a significant majority in it. In 1993, there were still a significant contingent of conservative Democrats - Dixiecrats - and not many Republican moderates. Now, the Dixiecrats seem to have more or less disappeared. And the Senate remains a haven for the small number of moderate Republicans. This d...

Another contender for the How Shit is Your Media series, this story slips into its own, just. News is thin on the ground - excepting of course the odd bit of ethic cleansing. But the Britpress always goes all Jocktastic around Hogmanay. Yesterday the Guardian splashed a whole page (!) on Jockoland with the exclusive story that Robert Burns (a poet) was a republican, and a democrat too! What next? ...

Jacob Heilbrunn raises the most disagreeable spectre of the neoconservatives' classically Trotskyist re-entry into the Democratic Party (to which they are entirely alien, just as they are to the Republican Party), but it is Daniel McCarthy who really provides the long view: For 30 years, Republicans, neoconservatives, and liberal hawks have cultivated the myth of the McGovern Party: weak on defens...

Members of Congress are poised to resume negotiations over Barack Obama's proposed fiscal stimulus, amid Republican warnings against hasty legislation laden with wasteful spending

For years, at least since the Reagan era, we in the US have heard the Republican Party mantra that the answer to growing the economy is to cut taxes for the richest, since they will 'invest in business'. It never made sense to me, especially as I saw such a transfer of wealth to those same rich people, who spent their money on luxury imported goods. Incomes for the middle and lower class...

2009 is going to be an interesting year, particularly in the USA. Big State Democrat Barack "The One" Obama crushed Big State Republican John "I Support the Bail Outs" McCain and this means the country is going to have a new president whose politics make him the most committed statist since LBJ. The country was given a choice between statism and statism and it voted for... statism. Well to quote M...

Yesterday The Washington Times reported that members of the Republican National Committee will consider a resolution in January that is critical of President Bush and Republican Members of Congress for supporting the $700 billion bailout of the financial sector and other socialist policies. Sunlit Uplands has obtained the full text of the resolution which has been drafted by RNC Vice Chairman Jame...