It is sadly ironic that President Obama held a Pearl Harbor Day press conference to defend his surrender to Republicans over the extension of Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. At a time when the United States is fighting two still-unpaid-for wars, facing staggering budget deficits and struggling to emerge from its deepest economic crisis […]

Perhaps the worst part of President Obama's very bad deal on taxes concerns the estate tax. After all, what Ezra Klein deemed "noxious" is a $7 billion annual giveaway to the heirs of the largest fortunes in America. It is estimated that only 0.11% of estates and just 40 family farms and businesses nationwide would […]

Back in 2006, billionaire Warren Buffett lamented, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." Now with President Obama's capitulation imminent on extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich, average Americans will once again be the big losers. After all, while the Bush years […]

In their scorched-earth effort to deliver another $700 billion tax cut windfall for the wealthy, Republicans have fittingly appropriated their favorite global warming talking point: "uncertainty." Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and John Boehner are just of the GOP leaders claiming "Congress ought to act today to stop all the tax hikes" because "it […]

Watching Barack Obama and John McCain over the past week has left pundits and armchair psychologists alike scratching their heads. While the two foes from the 2008 presidential election couldn't be more different, their puzzling performances over tax cuts for the wealthy and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell have the Washington commentariat paging […]

Assessing the impact of the Wikileaks revelations, Fareed Zakaria concluded the confidential cables actually show "the skills of U.S. diplomats." Overall, Zakaria was reassured that "the State Department works" and by "an American diplomatic establishment that is pretty good at analysis." But in one case - the conflict between Russia and Georgia in the summer […]

In January 2009, President Obama journeyed to Capitol Hill to meet with Congressional Republicans on the stimulus. Unbeknownst to the President, Minority Leader John Boehner had already instructed his entire GOP caucus to vote "no" on the bill they were to discuss with Obama. Now, history is repeating. Even as the President was asking his […]

Just because you can leak embarrassing, classified national security information doesn't mean you should. And just because the American government may be able to prosecute someone for it doesn't mean they should, either. But in the case of the Wikileaks, prosecution - to the extent that U.S. law allows it - is warranted. Because Julian […]

To be sure, Wikileaks' release this weekend of a quarter million diplomatic cables is a devastating blow to the national security interests and foreign policy of the United States. And the secret assessments they contain regarding U.S. allies and potential partners like Germany's Angela Merkel ("avoids risk and is rarely creative"), Nicolas Sarkozy ("emperor with […]

This weekend, Americans learned of a new domestic terror threat in Oregon. According to the FBI, Somali-born student Mohamed Osman Mohamud planned to detonate a bomb during the annual Christmas tree lighting in Portland. But while all eyes are now fixed on the tree lighting plot, down the road in Salem the trial of alleged […]