Six days after Abraham Lincoln's 204th birthday, the Great Emancipator is very much in the news on this President's Day. Pundits, polls and politicians of both parties are once again recognizing America's 16th president as its greatest. Inspired by the Oscar-nominated film, a Mississippi physician prompted his state to formally and finally ratify the 13th […]

Barring a last minute miracle compromise, on March 1 the first year of the $1.2 trillion, decade-long budget sequester will begin. With few exceptions, that's a development neither party wants to come to pass. For Democrats, the sequester doesn't just mean the potential loss of 750,000 jobs in 2013 alone, but slashing non-defense discretionary spending […]

Back in 2009, the American media offered a series of stories on the recession's impact on the tragically rich. The New York Times, CBS News, AP and even PBS toured yachts, vineyards and beach resorts (even profiling soon-to-be fugitive millionaire John McAfee) to warn that the super-rich "are not sleeping any better than the rest […]

As things now stand, Senate Republicans will carry through on their threat to filibuster Chuck Hagel, President Obama's nominee for Secretary of Defense. As the GOP's number two man John Cornyn declared Wednesday, "There is a 60-vote threshold for every nomination." Two votes short of the needed filibuster-breaking tally, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called […]

While most eyes were trained on the State of the Union address (or a burning cabin in California), PBS on Tuesday aired a documentary on the ongoing fiscal deadlock in Washington titled, "Cliffhanger." In it, the House Speaker John Boehner is portrayed as hopelessly trapped between an equivocating and untrustworthy President Obama who "poisoned the […]

With Barack Obama's 2013 State of the Union address just hours away, the media conventional wisdom machine is already busy warning about an "aggressive" and "partisan" speech from the reelected President. Despite four years of unprecedented Republican obstructionism, Politico alerted readers to beware a speech that is "less a presidential olive branch than a congressional […]

When it comes to political commentary and analysis, the only thing worse than conventional wisdom is no wisdom at all. But each day, Washington Post writer and MSNBC regular Chris Cillizza walks that fine line between the banal and the inane. And with his latest stenography on the budget, the national debt, President Obama's cabinet […]

Last summer, John McCain was asked about his vote for the August 2011 Budget Control Act, a law which starting March 1st will slash defense spending by $500 billion over the next decade. "I plead guilty. It was a bad thing to do, OK?" But now in his latest effort to avoid just the first […]