This Is What a Filibuster Should Be
It's easy to make fun of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul riffing on drones and other stuff for hours on the Senate floor on Wednesday, but it's also something to celebrate.
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President Obama's speech on counterterrorism on Thursday won rave reviews among some who seemed to see it as a return of the liberal constitutional law professor who ran for president in 2008. But while the tone might have been refreshing, maybe we should wait to see Obama's follow-through?
It's easy to make fun of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul riffing on drones and other stuff for hours on the Senate floor on Wednesday, but it's also something to celebrate.
The sequester has gone into effect, and no deal has materialized, so Obama is working behind the scenes to woo people on Capitol Hill. Or at least, the White House is waging a PR offensive to get op-ed writers to praise him for doing so. And there's good reason to be skeptical.
There are plenty of zingers in a new excerpt from the first of competing books on the Fox news boss. That appears to be the point — when Ailes is in charge, the Ailes book is about everyone else's fatal human flaws.
Until Donald Trump's invitation was announced on Tuesday afternoon, this year's Conservative Political Action Conference was mostly in the news for the uninvited guests — their sins were unforgivable. But what do the forgivable CPAC invitees say about the conservative agenda right now? That's where things get weird.
The whole political world is baffled Ashley Judd might run for Senate in Kentucky against Mitch McConnell in 2014.
As Ryan finishes up the House Republican budget before he presents it on Wednesday, he's confronting a last-minute problem on Medicare.
He was the immigration guy in the Republican Party. But now, there's a new immigration guy — Bush's protege, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — and suddenly Bush's position on immigration is very confused.
Republicans have been going through a civil war since they fared much worse than they expected in the 2012 elections. Actually, it's a lot of civil wars. So many that it's hard to keep them all straight. We've created a chart of GOP infighting to help you sort them out.
The Republican Party has earned such a reputation for stubbornness that the kind of extralegal presidential powers George W. Bush used to handle terrorists are now popping up in discussions of Barack Obama's budget negotiations with Congress. But Republicans have not decided to block all things forever. "No" has its limits.
An affair destroyed former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's career, and it turns out he wanted his ex-wife to manage his comeback. What a jerk! Except, it's now time to dispose of the sad little Good Wife trope.
Scientology's Freedom Magazine has sicced an investigative reporter on one of the best investigative reporters of Scientology: former Village Voice editor Tony Ortega. Freedom reporter James Lynch sent Ortega's former coworker, Foster Kamer, an email seeking dirt on Ortega. Top questions include, Why does Ortega write about Scientology so much?
State Rep. Ernest Hewett told a 17-year-old girl, "If you're bashful I got a snake sitting under my desk here." In public. On the record. At a legislative hearing. While she was testifying about a program to overcome social anxiety of the very sort you might develop if a creep humiliates you by saying sexual things about you in public.
The 112th Congress was widely regarded as the worst Congress ever. The 113th -- which is just 58 days old, but will go into recess on Friday as the sequester hits -- is taking do-nothingness to the next level, because it has done nothing to stop the deliberately stupid cuts of the sequester from happening.
The two most powerful men in Washington failed to come up with a deal to stop the sequester in their White House meeting on Friday, and they said as much. But you don't need words to understand the deterioration of their relationship — you can see it in their faces.
Paul Ryan promises the sequester will not be the last fiscal crisis this year, but it didn't have to be this way.
We've heard a lot of falsehoods on the topic this year, from women being too weak to men not wanting to poop in front of them. But The National Review's Heather Mac Donald has a new one: Women can't serve in combat because when they get raped by fellow soldiers, they get too depressed.
Many people have noticed the GOP is increasingly becoming a southern party. So has New York Republican Peter King. The congressman is getting tired of his colleagues insulting his state and then begging it for money.
Since the sequester hasn't forced a deficit-cutting deal, some pundits, like The Washington Post's editorial page, David Brooks, and most spectacularly Bob Woodward, are putting their faith in mind control magic to get the centrist deal they want.
Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has been telling everyone who will listen that the White House is so mad he called them out on the sequester that they're making threats. But on Thursday, the White House released the emails containing the threats. They turn out to be not that threatening.
Because there appears to be no serious effort to stop it before it starts, we have to think about the actual mechanics of the sequester.
During Sen. Diane Feinstein's hearing on a new assault weapon ban, the NRA account returned to the point that regular old handguns and "things other than firearms" have been used in mass shootings. Wait a minute, guys: A handgun is a firearm.
Erick Erickson is all outraged out. The founder of the popular conservative blog RedState, a brand-new Fox News pundit, and the creator of a piece of outrage that inadvertently hobbled Mitt Romney's campaign, the "We Are the 53%" meme, writes today, "We do our cause more harm than good if we get outrageously outraged over every slight and grievance."
Which is worse: raising taxes or ceding your biggest and most important power to someone else? Some Senate Republicans would rather be irrelevant than raise taxes.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is not going to the Conservative Political Action Conference, but he is going to implement the expansion of Medicaid called for under Obamacare.
Brand-new Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech Tuesday proudly defending Americans' "right to be stupid" in front of the very people who are most likely to think Americans are stupid, Europeans.
Jack Lew is well-known and well-respected for quietly doing his job well. He is not as well known for quietly quitting his job well.
The Cherokee Scout of Murphy, North Carolina, has printed an absolutely groveling apology to its readers and to the local sheriff for even asking the sheriff for public records of those with concealed carry gun permits.
The Obama administration has microtargeted its sequester warnings to appeal to very specific sets of people. Is it working?
The person who deserves the most blame for the sequester -- the automatic spending cuts that kick in March 1 and will slow GDP growth by 0.5 percent -- is not President Obama or John Boehner, but House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
Where are we most likely to see dresses inspired by the ladies on the Oscars red carpet? At the mall.
Here are the best and — let's be charitable — most unusual dresses from the Oscar red carpet, with closeups of beads, velvet, and tulle, plus the occasional haircut and refreshed face.
The New Yorker reports that the freshman Senator claimed there were 12 communists actively plotting against the government at Harvard Law School when he was a student there. But Harvard (and Chuck Hagel) shouldn't feel singled out — Ted Cruz sees anti-American plotters all over the place.
The New York Times columnist is wrong about sequestration, and he's somewhat admitted as much. But we can diagnose his wrongness as a compulsive desire to Arbitrarily Capitalize Things. Here are 34 examples from the past 365 days.
We're one week away from the sequester, and Republicans and Democrats are panicking about it actually hitting and over their side having to cave. But fear is a good sign, right? The fiscal cliff proved it can force a deal. Here's the current state of panic.
There are enough votes in the Senate to confirm Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary, the Associated Press' Donna Cassata reports, signaling an end to a loud fight that that always seemed a little fake.
The National Rifle Association has no patience for gun-grabbers' anecdotes — yes, one crazy person with a gun can kill a lot of people, but most gun owners are not murderous sociopaths. Instead, what the NRA likes is cold, hard hypotheticals.
Rick Scott is not alone: Of the seven Republican governors who've betrayed the anti-Obamacare cause, four are in states with very large Latino populations. And watch out — some of these bleeding hearts could be "the future of the GOP."
Democratic Sen. Ed Markey mentioned Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court case allowing unlimited political ad spending, in the same breath as the Dred Scott decision, the 1858 Supreme Court keeping slavery legal by saying it was OK for white people to keep black people as their private property. Cue unthinking outrage!
Donald Trump's Twitter account might have been hacked Thursday, or he might have been sincerely quoting Lil' Wayne when he tweeted, "These hoes think they classy, well that's the class I'm skippen." It's so hard to tell with The Donald.
Both House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama agree that the sequester will be a disaster for the economy. But Republicans and Democrats aren't allowed to agree on anything, so, with eight days before $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts kick in, a chorus of conservatives have emerged to ask, what's so bad about sequestration?
The governor announced he will accept federal funds to expand Medicaid, in a major about-face for yet another major opponent of President Obama's plan. "I cannot in good conscience deny Floridians to healthcare," Scott said late Wednesday.
President Obama is giving interviews to eight local TV news reporters to highlight the effect of the sequester on their cities, again snubbing the poor White House correspondents who are routinely denied access to the president, as Politico vividly chronicled earlier this week. And what are these lucky local news reporters doing with their precious access? Tweeting about Bo, the dog.
Mitt Romney will give a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, his first public speaking appearance since conceding defeat on election night, the National Review's Robert Costa reports.
Pundit and lobbyist Michelle Laxalt gave an impassioned defense of then-Sen. Pete Domenici on CNN in 2007, saying he was a man of "integrity" who was "supporting no fewer than eight children." That curiously inexact reference makes sense now that Domenici has admitted to fathering a son with her.
The massive amount of outside political spending unleashed by Citizens United did not, as feared, make it easier for rich people to buy an election. Instead, it showed that rich people are pretty dumb about politics.
A lot of people are noticing that Marco Rubio's immigration reform plan has a lot in common with President Obama's immigration reform plan, which Rubio denounced as "half-baked." This is not good for Rubio.
President Obama accepted the general's request to retire from the military, instead of going forward with his nomination to be supreme commander of NATO, and now the scandal has ended the careers of two very high-ranking national security officials.
It is starting to look less likely that Congress will reach a deal that prevents automatic spending cuts from taking effect March 1, so politicians are finding the strength to accept the things they cannot change, and change the things they cannot accept. That means accepting the sequester but changing who gets blamed for it.
Although Sen. Marco Rubio trashed President Obama's immigration plan, it is not clear what the major differences are between the two proposals, especially for one of Rubio's most important audiences, conservatives.
During the 2012 Republican primary, several candidates were criticized as unserious hustlers who cared less about America's problems than getting more famous into order to sell books — or get a Fox News contract like the one Herman Cain landed on Friday. Well, it's a year later. How did everyone do?
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