This week's tenth anniversary of the catastrophic U.S. invasion of Iraq produced perhaps the most bizarre post-mortem in in recent history. While liberal supporters of the war like Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait lined up to apologize for their error, right-wing cheerleaders like Peggy Noonan and Ross Douthat lamented only that President Bush's calamitous conflict […]

Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann marked the third anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act by urging her colleagues to repeal Obamacare "before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens." Of course, as the likes of Rep. Virginia Foxx (who similarly declared the ACA would "put seniors in a position of being […]

This week, House Speaker John Boehner and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan made two important if largely overlooked admissions regarding the U.S. national debt. While Boehner told ABC News that "we have no immediate debt crisis," Ryan similarly acknowledged to CBS News, "We do not have a debt crisis right now." That is indisputably […]

As Pope Francis starts his papacy, polls show that American Catholics overwhelmingly believe the issue of clergy sex abuse must be his number one priority. As a Pew Research survey two weeks ago showed, while that crisis tops the list for 34 percent, neither abortion (3 percent) or contraception (2 percent) or any other issue […]

Ten years later, there is little question that the Iraq war was a disaster for the United States and its people. Over 4,400 Americans died and another 30,000 were wounded in the conflict. While U.S. forces were left to "muddle through" in Afghanistan, America's Mesopotamia misadventure significantly strengthened Iran's influence in the region. All told, […]

On Sunday, GOP House Speaker John Boehner and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan agreed with President Obama "we do not an immediate debt crisis." But, as both sides similarly acknowledge, the longer term is a different story. In future decades, it is health care spending in general and Medicare in particular that is at the […]

Back in the 1990s, the CEO of my former company had a simple way of questioning the wisdom of some of our more dubious business strategies. "Are we," he would ask, "smoking the drapes?" By that standard, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan must be dropping acid. Because as a quick glance at his job-killing, […]

As most of the leading lights of the fractured Republican Party gather in Washington for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), organizer Al Cardenas is looking backwards for guidance in taking the GOP forward. Reflecting on Ronald Reagan's 1975 post-Watergate address to the conclave, Cardenas recalled the Gipper's lessons that "conservatives will never compromise […]

When Congressman Paul Ryan first rolled out his plan three years ago to replace Medicare with a voucher system, he acknowledged the inescapable conclusion that his massive cost-shifting to seniors constituted rationing. "Rationing happens today!" Ryan protested, "The question is who will do it? The government? Or you, your doctor and your family?" But then […]

This week, former GOP vice presidential nominee and current House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan will present the 2013 Republican budget proposal. Unlike his last plan which didn't balance the budget until 2038, this time Ryan insists he will hit break even in just 10 ten years. As Ezra Klein explained, Ryan will close much […]