"It's never been easy for House Republicans to raise the debt limit." With that opening sentence, Jake Sherman and Steven Sloan of Politico provided air cover for the GOP's unprecedented--and dangerously irresponsible--debt ceiling hostage-taking. After all, Republicans in both houses of Congress had no problem raising the debt limit until Democrat Barack Obama became President. […]

During his tenure as a South Carolina Senator, Republican Jim Demint was a big supporter of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). In the fall of 2009, he cosponsored a bill requiring the budgetary impact of all legislation to be "scored" by the CBO at least 72 hours before its consideration on the Senate floor […]

Like "whorehouse morals," the term "celebrity historian" is one of those oxymoronic expressions that should be viewed with instant distrust. So it is with Niall Ferguson, the Harvard professor and fellow at Oxford and Stanford's Hoover Institute. Long a fixture on American television screens (including on taxpayer-funded PBS), the hyper-partisan Ferguson has among other things […]

Almost everything you need to know about the self-destructive economic policy coming out of Congress was contained in two simple statements this week. While the Federal Reserve warned that "fiscal policy is restraining economic growth," the Republican National Committee released an ad crowing that "the sequester is here to stay." Judging by the April jobs […]

This week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a major study of Medicaid in Oregon which has rapidly emerged of a Rorschach test of sorts. That is, partisans on either side of the political divide tend to see what they want to see in its results. While conservatives claim Medicaid expansion has been debunked […]

"Reality," Stephen Colbert famously lamented to President Bush in 2006, "has a well-known liberal bias." It is conservatives' perpetual fear that the truth will not set them free that is the driving force behind two House Republican proposals announced this week. For starters, Lamar Smith (R-TX), the GOP chairman of the House Science, Space and […]