Ever since the tragic attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, "Benghazi" has been the Republican response to almost every question. Despite receiving the report of the State Department's Accountability Review Board (whose recommendations were immediately endorsed by the Obama administration), hearing the testimony of the […]

Douglas Holtz-Eakin is everywhere. This week, the conservative economist and former director of the Congressional Budget Office co-authored a widely read--and widely panned--prescription for Republican health care reform. And for months, the President of the American Action Forum has used his perch on The Guardian op-ed page to slam President Obama over the U.S. national […]

No account of how the United States ended up at the brink of the $1.2 trillion, ten-year budget sequester is complete without these two phrases: "debt ceiling hostage-taking" and "Super Committee." Nevertheless, in his grandstanding campaign to lay blame for the automatic spending cuts at President Obama's feet, Watergate journalist turned deficit hawk Bob Woodward […]

As the federal government nears the March 1st deadline to avoid the $1.2 trillion, ten year budget sequester, the media are breathlessly playing the blame game. While House Speaker John Boehner continued to decry "the Obama sequester" in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "the President is raging against a budget crisis he created," John […]

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 […]

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 […]

Back in December 2005, John Yoo was asked if any law or treaty could prevent the President of the United States from torturing someone, "including by crushing the testicles of the person's child." Yoo, then head of President Bush's Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, responded, "I think it depends on why […]