"Reagan," Dick Cheney famously said in 2002, "proved deficits don't matter." Until, that is, a Democrat is in the White House. And it so was on Friday, when House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) insisted the Bush tax cuts did not help produce a hemorrhage of red ink from the U.S. Treasury. Of course, the […]

From almost the moment he was elected, Barack Obama has been counseled to channel the spirit of FDR in confronting both war and economic calamity. But with for the still unfolding oil spill disaster, President Obama needs a different role model. When CEO Tony Hayward and other BP executives come to the White House next […]

Somewhere in a gated community in Dallas, a former President of the United States is laughing very hard right now. A new ABC/Washington Post poll gives the Obama administration even lower marks for its response to the BP oil spill than to George W. Bush's calamitous bungling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. And so it […]

On May 7, 2001, press secretary Ari Fleischer uttered the four words that came to define the Bush administration's approach to the U.S. addiction to oil. Asked if Americans needed to "correct their lifestyles" to address the nation's energy vulnerability, Fleischer snapped, "That's a big no." And so, a government of the oil men, by […]

In December 2009, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales lamented not that President Bush had politicized the Justice Department, but that he didn't politicize it enough. But with its purge of U.S. attorneys, complicity in rubber-stamping detainee torture and blessing illegal domestic surveillance, the Bush administration's gutting of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division and the perversion […]

If creating new jobs is Job One for the Obama administration, then the past 24 hours have been a mixed blessing. Thursday brought good news of a continued if slow decline in first-time jobless claims, while a drop in the productivity rate suggested businesses are poised to expand hiring. But today's word that the 431,000 […]

Perhaps the only thing worse than a war criminal is an unrepentant one. And so it with Barack Obama's predecessor. Just months after former Vice President Dick Cheney boasted, "I was a big supporter of waterboarding," George W. Bush joined him by announcing, "I'd do it again." President Bush's endorsement of the use of waterboarding […]

While Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has deemed the Sestak no-pay-for-no-play non-scandal an "illegal quid pro quo" and "Obama's Watergate," the overwhelming consensus of legal opinion had concluded otherwise. While Bush White House ethics officer Richard Painter told his fellow Republicans to "move on," Steve Bunnell of the firm O'Melveny & Myers announced, "There is nothing […]

With today's release of statements by the White House Counsel and Congressman Joe Sestak regarding the no-pay for no-play Pennsylvania Senate contest, Sestakgate is emerging as a non-scandal. After all, in 1982 President Ronald Reagan offered Senator S.I. Hayakawa a job if he dropped out of the California GOP primary. And as CREW director Melanie […]

"You can fool some of the people some of the time, and that's our target market." Judging from the rhetoric of House Minority Leader John Boehner, that's the Republican mantra when it comes to the Obama recovery package. Nine months after Boehner wrongly decried a "stimulus bill that didn't create any jobs," his web site […]