During their unprecedented televised gathering Friday, 140 House Republicans were intellectually and politically outnumbered by President Obama. Perhaps on no subject was the rout more complete than on the federal budget. Led by Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the Republicans touted their own alternative budget proposed by Wisconsin's Paul Ryan. But as Americans should recall, with […]

Shaking his head at the bad economics and worse politics of the White House's proposed spending freeze, Paul Krugman deemed President Obama not a deficit hawk, but a "deficit peacock." "You can identify deficit peacocks," he wrote, "by the way they pretend that our budget problems can be solved with gimmicks like a temporary freeze […]

While legal analysts like Glenn Greenwald and Jonathan Turley lamented Justice Samuel Alito's "serious and substantive breach of protocol" during last night's State of the Union address, conservatives are predictably apoplectic about President Obama's temerity in questioning the Supreme Court's campaign finance decision in that setting. As it turns out, the right-wing hypocrisy in defense […]

Barack Obama's first State of the Union address last night was a needed reminder that Americans elect presidents and not popes. Throughout a speech which was well received by viewers for both style and substance, Obama acknowledged his failures. But if his language about "so much disappointment" and "deserved" political "setbacks" seemed unusual coming from […]

The dictionary describes the "Stockholm Syndrome" as "the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with, identify with, or sympathize with his or her captor." By that definition, then, Barack Obama has been in its grip from the moment he took the oath of office. On the economic recovery, health care, reform of the financial […]

Just one week after the media chattering classes announced that Republican Scott Brown's upset win in Massachusetts represented a political sea change, voters in Oregon sent an unmistakable message of their own. And to be sure, they signaled an important win for Democrats and their progressive allies. Rather than gut school funding and other essential […]

During his first State of the Union address Wednesday, President Barack Obama will apparently endorse two bad ideas whose time hasn't come. The first, a freeze affecting $477 billion in domestic spending, has been rightly labeled "appalling" (Paul Krugman), "a mistake on par with John McCain's 'suspending my campaign' gaffe" (Nate Silver), "fundamental unseriousness" (Brad […]

As President Obama prepares for his State of the Union address, two stories Monday regarding his stimulus package highlighted his political conundrum. USA Today's quarterly survey of 50 economists produced a median estimate that the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) prevented unemployment from reaching 10.8%, saving 1.2 million jobs as a result. […]

Years ago, John McCain said of the Keating Five scandal that nearly ended his career, "The fact is, it was the wrong thing to do, and it will be on my tombstone and deservedly so." But if his new cause of campaign finance reform was the penance for his Keating "nightmare," the Supreme Court last […]

Apparently, judicial activism like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. On Sunday, Texas Senator John Cornyn told Fox News that the impact of the Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling, which erased decades of precedents on corporate political campaign financing, has "been overstated." Given the victory in Massachusetts this week that his National Republican […]