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 […]

As a quick glance at his record shows, no American political figure has been as consistently and catastrophically wrong on matters of national security than John McCain. (Worse still, McCain's out-of-control temper and erratic judgment led many of his Republican colleagues like Thad Cochran to worry that "the thought of his being President sends a […]

All along, the real danger of the so-called "fiscal cliff" wasn't that U.S. national debt would increase, but instead that it would drop too quickly. Now, the surprise news that the American economy contracted by 0.1 percent in the last quarter of 2012 is providing a case in point. Along with the impact of super […]

One sure sign of the success of Barack Obama's second inaugural address on Monday is that right and left shared a common assessment of its impact. Conservatives decried the "amazing" speech (Charles Krauthammer) as "among the best of the past half-century" (David Brooks) precisely because liberals found Obama's "expansive case for progressive governance, grounded in […]

When John Boehner picked up the Speaker's gavel in January 2011, he also laid down some new rules regarding the U.S. national debt. Despite the near-doubling of the red ink and the seven debt limit increases under President Bush (all of which Boehner supported), the first Boehner Rule demands "cuts and reforms greater than the […]

While Congressional Republicans are threatening to trigger a U.S. default if their debt ceiling blackmail is not paid, their allies in the conservative blogosphere are deploying the same chart to attack President Obama's supposedly out-of-control spending. But their horrifying picture of the yawning gap between in federal receipts and outlays between 1999 and 2012 isn't […]