The AP suggests that accounting gimmicks make the cuts a lot smaller than their price tag implies. A close look at the government shutdown-dodging agreement to cut federal spending by $38 billion reveals that lawmakers significantly eased the fiscal pain by pruning money left over from previous years, using accounting sleight of hand and going [...]
This curious episode — in which former Floria Governor Charlie Crist apologizes as part of a lawsuit settlement for a campaign ad that used a Talking Heads song without permission — is just the most extreme variant of a story which dates to at least 1984, when Bruce Springsteen complained that Ronald Reagan had misappropriated [...]
D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray is arrested in front of the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Monday, April 11. (Bill Clark/Roll Call) –President Obama will use the Simpson-Bowles commission report as a framework for the deficit reduction plan he’s set to unveil Wednesday afternoon. Starting from the center will only exacerbate liberal frustration over the White [...]
On the night that Republicans won control of the House, the White House Press Office came to a startling realization: They had no contact information for Speaker-to-be John Boehner. In President Obama’s first two years in office, he’d reached out to House Republicans so little that they had no reason to get to know – [...]
Here’s the thing about Mitt Romney’s big news: It wasn’t really news to anyone. The Republican presidential candidate-in-waiting never really stopped running after 2008 and Monday’s announcement that he’s forming an exploratory committee to examine running for President hardly turned heads. He’s spent the last few years constructing a top-flight political organization, a robust network [...]
Since the start of the Arab Spring, the American media has paid precious little attention to the war in Afghanistan and our related headaches in volatile neighboring Pakistan. But less news has not meant good news. Today the New York Times reports that Pakistan is demanding the CIA sharply scale back its activities in that [...]
I’m not sure the left should be as worried about President Obama’s deficit-cutting plan as Kate Pickert reports below…especially if, as advertised, he is going to propose higher taxes on the wealthy as a way to help close the gap. The flashpoint, undoubtedly, will be old age entitlements, and I doubt that he’s going to [...]
Here’s one sector that hasn’t suffered in the recession: Washington lobbyists. Since 2000, the financial services industry’s spending on federal lobbying rose 102%, to $472.9 million last year, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks lobbying. Spending by the pharmaceutical and health-products industries, meanwhile, rose 139%, to [...]
Members of Congress may have landed themselves a budget deal on Friday, but their actions and reactions leading up to the accord will likely resurface as campaign-ad fodder. As with every cycle, some of those ads will be negative. But only some of those, ranging as they do from petulant mudslinging to polite objections, will [...]
Progressives are sounding the alarm ahead of President Obama’s upcoming speech on deficit reduction and entitlement reform. No one knows exactly what argument Obama will make in response to Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget proposal unveiled last week, but Jonathan Cohn foresees an opening negotiating stance too close to the center for his liking. I feel [...]
