For two days John McCain and Ted Cruz have been fighting on the Senate floor over the rules for negotiating a budget, but, like so many fights, it's also about so much more. Cruz is being annoying about the budget, but worse, he just doesn't get the Senate.
In a speech to promote his State of the Union education plan, President Obama framed it in a way to appeal to Republicans: It saves money. But the question is not whether it's a good idea so much as whether it can pass the Republican-controlled House.
John Boehner can't stop making jokes that show how he earned his high school nickname, and his sexual innuendo campaign went there today — on sweet and innocent Valentine's Day, no less.
Bill Clinton confirmed Hillary Clinton is running for president in 2016, according to Angelo Tsakopoulos, a "real-estate honcho" who's a major donor to Clinton campaigns, the New York Post reports. No kidding?
"GOP grassroots" can mean thousands of activists, drawn from Christian conservatives and Tea Partiers, gathering because they feel the the country and culture is drifting dangerously off course, or it can mean the paid consultants, like FreedomWorks, who think a video in which two female interns, one dressed as a panda and the other as Hillary Clinton, simulated oral sex, is hilarious.
Americans don't just need guns to fight criminals anymore, says the National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre, Americans need more guns to fight the weather.
Rubio defended the Republicans against charges "they only care about rich people" in his State of the Union response Tuesday night by pointing to his residency: "Mr. President, I still live in the same working class neighborhood I grew up in." What he did not mention is that he'd like to move out of that neighborhood as soon as possible.
Insisting that raising the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour would cost jobs, House Speaker John Boehner has already rejected President Obama's State of the Union call to bring it up from $7.25. Here's research that says otherwise.
The president's gun request in the State of the Union was memorable, but it was also just that — a very, very modest request for Congress to vote, amidst a wish list that otherwise called for an ambitious agenda. Why just a vote? Because the deeper conversation has changed.
This was a very consequential sip of water, given that Rubio's lines about "big government" were quite familiar, as was his biography. Let's break down the one moment America may remember about Tuesday night more than Obama's gun refrain.
The most powerful moment of the State of the Union on Tuesday night came when President Obama said the victims of gun violence — people like Gabby Giffords and the family of Hadiya Pendleton — deserve a vote on gun control measures. But there were many more moments and issues than that. Re-live them all here.
You can bet on two things from President Obama's State of the Union: post-speech hype about how he's making an aggressive case for liberal policies, followed by liberal disappointment at Obama's policies.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will give the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union speech tonight, and while it will give Rubio a chance to be seen by millions of Americans, recent history says it will be no help to his 2016 presidential candidacy.
The Navy SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden "IS SCREWED" blares Esquire's new cover. But he's not quite as screwed as the much discussed story makes him out to be.
We already know how President Obama will describe the state of our union in his State of the Union address Tuesday: strong. Here's how the traditional line became a cliché.
"Nobody has bought me, No. 1. Nobody. Never," New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez told Univision last week. But if you survey the kind of things Menedez has done for opthamologist Salomon E. Melgen in the last 20 years, Menedez sure is a great friend.
President Obama will unveil a set of concrete proposals in his State of the Union speech Tuesday, and as in his inaugural address last month, he's expected to sound pretty liberal.
The Washington Free Beacon gives a glowing review to George W. Bush's hacked-and-leaked self-portraits, declaring, "Greatest Living President is Also Fantastic Painter." Sadly, it appears to be a joke.
There is broad agreement that allowing the sequester -- automatic spending cuts set to go into effect March 1 -- to go into effect would be disastrous. And yet, like fresh growth after a forest fire, both parties see a way to benefit from all the economic destruction.
If only Chris Christie were a woman, his weight, and his ability to make jokes about his weight, would make him a folk hero. But the New Jersey governor is s dude, so his fat is a liability.
In the week before John Brennan's confirmation hearing, the conversation about the nominee to be CIA director was almost entirely about drones. The hearing itself mostly wasn't.
Early into the John Brennan's confirmation hearing to be CIA director, his most difficult to believe statement is his claim, "I never believed it's better to kill a terrorist than to detain them." The Obama administration's drone program has, since 2008, incinerated not-even-high-ranking Al Qaeda members in thousands of drone strikes.
President Obama previewed the disappointment that members of his party are almost destined to eventually feel in a speech at the House Democratic Issues Conference on Thursday in Leesburg, Virginia.
Fox News and the Republican Party, while still technically distinct entities, are moving to purge figures who are so controversial they're damaging the conservative brand. Even Dick Morris says he was wrong.
The CIA drone program sure feels like a war, and if you look at the reach of the targeted killing — now that everyone seems to be looking at the reach of the targeted killing — well, it's nearly worldwide. Here's a map to catch you up before Brennan's hearing.
Yes, it is possible for a pundit to lose his job for being very, very wrong. Dick Morris, one of the most spectacularly wrong pundits of the 2012 election, has been fired by Fox News.
At a hearing on immigration Tuesday, Republican Rep. Robert Goodlatte tried to define a proposal to eventually grant illegal immigrants citizenship as extreme. If that's true, then some of his most conservative fellow Republicans are liberal extremists.
Karl Rove said on Fox News Tuesday night, "This is not Tea Party versus the establishment... I don’t want a fight." It looks like he's too late.
Both Republicans and Democrats cast themselves as deficit cutters during the presidential election, but the new reality from the anual CO report is further evidence that no one in Washington — not Obama or Boehner — will take credit for the sequester anymore.
One of the ways youngish Republicans try to reach out to America's youth is by declaring their love of artists who, while not all that new, do cuss enough to upset the people at The National Review. But in Rubio's case, Tupac fandom is glaringly off-message.
On the very same day House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is giving a major speech about the GOP's next steps at the American Enterprise Institute, Politico reports that former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan is considering abandoning a 2016 presidential run in favor of consolidating power in the House in areas where Cantor has been influential.
On Monday we saw two very different ideas for how President Obama might achieve his second-term policy goals — one in a campaign-style speech on gun control in Minneapolis and another in the recorded gripes of Democrats on Capitol Hill in Politico. Which one has the best chance of working?
Karl Rove's American Crossroads has started a new group to make sure the 2014 Senate races produce zero Todd Akins. But it turns out some conservatives like Rove less than Akin.
The frequently angry pundit says she's quitting the punditry business because "I can't just live my life going on TV and being angry all the time."
It's only been eight days since the Pentagon announced it would lift its longtime ban on women in combat, and the objections just keep on coming.
Chuck Hagel's confirmation hearing to become the next Secretary of Defense did not go well, but if he fails to get the job, it won't be because of some deeply held foreign-policy principle. And the best evidence rests with one man: John McCain.
There's no publicity in the follow-up. Conservative activist James O'Keefe earned praise for secretly taping Virginia Rep. Jim Moran's son Patrick seemingly giving advice on how to commit voter fraud in October, but three months later law enforcement has closed their investigation because, they say, O'Keefe wouldn't cooperate.
"I am convinced that as these things are discussed, that we're going to come out about where we have come out in the past," NRA president David Keene said Thursday. But the NRA is not where it was in the past, not even the recent past. Specifically, 1999.
Sen. John McCain wanted one thing from his aggressive questioning of his former friend Chuck Hagel at his confirmation hearing Thursday: for Hagel to admit that McCain had been right about the Iraq surge. He did not get what he wanted.
Fashion people are getting diarrhea from eating too much kale, the leafy green vegetable that is allegedly trendy because it has lots of vitamins but actually trendy because it allows people to chew things without ingesting many calories.
Karl Rove warns that Democrats not to over-interpret the 2012 election results in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Thursday, arguing that the supposed "permanent Democratic majority" could be gone in an election or two if they overreach. Rove, of all people, should know.
The former congresswoman spoke about gun violence before a Senate hearing Wednesday, but Michelle Malkin and Twitchy, her conservative tweet news site, uncovered a scandal: Giffords did not handwrite her speech. That's the handwriting of her therapist.
Several political people revealed in Wednesday's gun control hearing that they, too, have been the heroes in imaginary crimes. Fighting hypothetical crimes with guns has an obvious appeal, because when real people use real weapons, they screw up. A lot.
Gun advocates spent their Wednesday fighting on Capitol Hill for the right of female civilians to carry semi-automatic assault weapons while their compatriots on the right are mourning the decision to allow female soldiers to carry guns on the battlefield.
Wayne LaPierre will say some controversial things in his testimony before Congress Wednesday, and while he's said some shocking things since the Newtown massacre sparked a gun control debate, the archives show that LaPierre has actually toned it down in the two decades he's been the face of the National Rifle Association.
The president's proposals from a speech on Tuesday afternoon are remarkably similar to those released by a bipartisan group of senators Monday, except that while both call for tougher enforcement of immigration laws, only the Senate version really invokes a keyword you'll be hearing a lot about in the coming weeks.
Sen. Marco Rubio went on Rush Limbaugh's show to sell his proposal for comprehensive immigration reform on Tuesday, a day after the radio host said only he and Fox News stand can stop amnesty now, and while Rubio charmed Limbaugh, the Senator from Florida didn't win a new supporter for his immigration proposal.
Rush Limbaugh warned on Monday that "It's up to me and Fox News" to stop the threat of amnesty for illegal immigrants he sees in a new bipartisan immigration reform plan. But it's looking like it's up to Sen. Marco Rubio to sell the plan.
For much of the past year, the hottest debate in the world of women's stuff has been, Can women have it all?, as memorably answered in the negative by The Atlantic's July cover story last year. More than six months later, The New Republic's Noreen Malone, as part of that mag's relaunch, has suggested that "Beyoncé says yes" they can.
One of the recurring arguments against women serving in combat appears on its face to be just good common horse sense: women just don't have the upper body strength to carry a heavy male soldier out of combat. The thing is, you don't need much upper body strength to carry a guy out of combat.
Hillary Clinton received a ringing endorsement from President Obama out of their joint interview on 60 Minutes Sunday night, but what did Obama get out of it? He got the chance to tell any other Democrats planning a 2016 run to back off.
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