Four years ago, some conservatives created an uproar when pro-choice President Barack Obama was invited to deliver the commencement address at Notre Dame University. (That protest was more than a little hypocritical, given the school's tradition of featuring pro-choice speakers including Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.) Now, Boston Cardinal Sean […]

Two years ago, Congressional Republicans took the unprecedented step of holding the debt ceiling hostage in order to extract draconian spending cuts. Now, the GOP's willingness to sabotage the American (and global) economy may be about to take an even more dangerous--and obscene--turn. House Republicans are suggesting they will not support an increase in the […]

On Wednesday, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) will hold new hearings into the Benghazi consulate attack which claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Hyping tomorrow's show, the Grand Inquisitor of Barack Obama boasted that he intends on "making the president come clean." Not content to […]

As the chaos and carnage in Syria continues to escalate, some conservatives are very happy indeed with word of Israeli air strikes against weapons shipments reportedly destined for Hezbollah. While John McCain crowed that "the Israelis seem to be able to penetrate it [the Syrian air defense system] rather easily," former Mitt Romney stenographer Jennifer […]

"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 […]