America's soul-searching to mark the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq went pretty much according to script. While many of its liberal supporters offered their mea culpas for having been so catastrophically mistaken, the Bush administration's architects of the war doubled-down on their epic failure. (Meanwhile, some of their biggest cheerleaders lamented only […]

Republican Senator Rand Paul's 13 hour filibuster this week produced no shortage of spectacle--and irony. Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, one of the few Democratic voices questioning the secrecy and legal basis surrounding President Obama's policy of drone strikes against U.S. citizens engaged in terrorist efforts abroad, joined his colleague from across the aisle. But Paul's […]

Back in 2010, Ohio Rep. John Boehner defied recent history and basic math when he comically denied that the Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 played any role in producing federal budget deficits ever since. Now in his refusal to countenance any new tax revenue in a last minute compromise to avoid the […]

Nothing focuses the mind, Oscar Wilde famously said, like the sight of the gallows. And so it is with Republican Governors on the brink of losing $6 billion in federal aid thanks to automatic budget cuts currently set to kick in on March 1. But it shouldn't have taken the specter of the sequester's body […]

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 […]