Multimedia

Leaders of a major education coalition on March 26 released a report, "Obama's Budget: Supporting Students, Not Banks," that outlined how much additional college financial aid students will receive in each state under President Obama's proposed fiscal 2010 budget. The budget increases direct student aid while cutting subsidies to banks that market student loans.

This news teleconference features Robert Brandon, the director of the Campaign for College Affordability; Robert Borosage, the co-director of the Institute for America's Future; Christine Lindstrom, director of the U.S. PIRG Higher Education Program; Bill Scheibler, national field director of the United States Student Association; and Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP Washington Bureau.

The report was co-written by the Institute for America's Future and U.S. PIRG.

Robert Borosage, Campaign for America's Future co-director; William McNary, president of USAction; and Jane Hamsher, editor of FireDogLake, explained in a teleconference with reporters why they have launched an offensive targeting conservative Democrats who have indicated they may block key portions of President Obama's budget priorities.

“We are been pretty unhappy to see many often-conservative Democrats – New Democrats, Blue Dogs, etc. --suggesting that they are beginning to have doubts about the president’s program and are ready to move against it," Borosage said. “We think it is very important that they hear from their constituents and not simply from their contributors.”

McNary said that conservative Democrats can't be allowed to be "the unwitting accomplices of the obstructionists who have only declared that they want the president to fail." Using a football analogy, McNary said that if President Obama is the quarterback, "we need to block" so that he has room to maneuver his agenda through Congress.

"This is primarily an education campaign," said Hamsher, who has been leading an "accountability" project on FireDogLake that tracks how Congress is measuring up to the pledges President Obama and Democrats made during the 2008 campaign. "It is fortunate that several of members are up for re-election, because that is they time when they are listening to their constituents and hearing what they care about. I think if we make people aware of what’s going on, then they can decide for themselves."

The Campaign for America's Future has launched a website that lists conservative Democrats, makes it easy to send members emails or make calls, and contains links to up-to-date information on their actions.

Underneath the comity displayed at the White House health care summit, fault lines between progressives and insurance lobbyists were clear, especially on the issue of whether we provide the choice of a public health insurance plan to compete against private plans. That's what health care blogger Richard "R.J." Eskow (Huffington Post and Sentinel Effect) told listeners of The LiberalOasis Radio Show, heard on WHMP in Western MA.

We won't know until perhaps April what President Barack Obama's budget proposal really means for the military and the possibility of serious savings from scrubbing wasteful spending. That's what National Priorities Project Executive Director and budget expert Jo Comerford tells us on the LiberalOasis Radio Show (airing on WHMP in Western MA.) This week's edition breaks down the budget, with Comerford analyzing the military side, and blogger David Dayen exploring the transformational aspects on the domestic side, particularly regarding health care, energy and education.

For more detail on the military component of the budget, check out Armand Biroonak's post, "Push To Cut Defense Waste."

As the right continues its campaign to slander the Obama administration's efforts to stem the foreclosure crisis, ACORN officials are mounting a vigorous defense.

Austin King, director of the ACORN Financial Justice Center, makes the case for the administration's plan as well as for a House bill that will allow bankruptcy courts to rewrite the principal of mortgages to make them more affordable and keep people in their homes. That bill was scheduled to be voted on February 26, where King said he expected easy passage. The real fight will come up in the Senate, where the battle will be to win the votes of centrist senators in both parties.

"The foreclosure crisis is at the heart of the economic crisis," King says, adding that the key conservative failure of the Bush administration was rushing to aid Wall Street but failing to immediately address the foreclosure crisis. If it had faced the foreclosure crisis first, he said, "I have no doubt we would not be in the broader economic crisis we are in today."

Was Eric Holder, the first African American to serve as Attorney General, guilty of a poor choice of words when he said that America is "a nation of cowards" when it comes to race? Yes, says Roger Wilkins, history professor at George Mason University and the first African American to be appointed to a senior-level position at the Justice Department during the Johnson administration. But Wilkins agrees that Holder is right that the nation has a lot of unfinished work on racial matters—and the controversy surrounding a recent racist cartoon in the New York Post is just the latest proof.

While some people may disagree with how Holder characterized race relations in the United States, Wilkins says in this interview, "we shouldn't be able to walk away from Holder's thing by saying 'Oh, Jesus, that was really stupid; he shouldn't have said that; he didn't have to do that right away.' But that's wrong. He did it because he's observed something in his lifetime as a black man in America, and he said it and that's why we should be doing what we're doing, having a conversation about it, writing about it."

Wilkins explains why that New York Post cartoon must continue to be denounced "in the strongest possible way." He also explains why he feels that the progressive movement is not doing enough to address continuing racism in America. "I think [the progressive movement] feels it is pure, that it has crossed over to the promised land. ...They think it's over. On the other hand, black people want to say, 'It's not over. Are you kidding me? Let me tell you what happened to me last Thursday.'"

Wilkins, who has also been a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a board member of the Campaign for America's Future.