What Are the Solutions to This Week's Scandals?
As Scandal Week comes to a close, it's worth reviewing the policy proposals that have followed in the revelations' wake. There aren't many.
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The IRS official who revealed the IRS had inappropriately targeted conservative groups on Friday did so on purpose -- by asking a tax lawyer to ask her about it at American Bar Association tax section’s annual meeting.
As Scandal Week comes to a close, it's worth reviewing the policy proposals that have followed in the revelations' wake. There aren't many.
Now that everyone is paying attention to the scandal stories Republicans have been pushing for months against President Obama, they have a bit of stage fright.
The main thrust of all of President Obama's press conferences for the last two years has been to tell Congress to do its job, and that held true on Thursday, when he answered questions about a trio of scandals by repeatedly saying he was looking forward to "fixing a problem" by working with Congress to pass laws he's wanted all along.
To be clear: There are not three scandals plaguing the Obama White House. By embracing the leaked talking points, Obama's opponents may have taken Benghazi off the table completely.
President Obama held a joint press conference today with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, but the press had plenty of other things they wanted to talk about.
As expected, President Obama's remarks Wednesday evening on the investigation into the IRS's targeting of "Tea Party" and "Patriot" groups were short, but not without consequence: the acting commissioner of the IRS, Steven Miller, has resigned in the wake of the scandal.
The White House took a step Wednesday to try and limit any political fall-out of the seizure of phone records from the AP. By making overtures to renew a media shield law, the administration gets to have its beloved subpoena power and condemn it, too.
How bad is it in Washington for the Obama Administration? It's Obama "needs to fire somebody" bad, according to former Clinton adviser Vernon Jordan — and, you know, Politico.
If you're looking for a way to simultaneously criticize the president and renewable energy, it doesn't get much easier than the phrase, "Obama is allowing wind companies to kill eagles." Which is true. But a more nuanced assessment is probably in order.
After admitting that his 2012 Republican "fever" theory was wrong, President Obama told donors like Jessica Biel, Justin Timberlake (who was wearing hipster glasses), and Tommy Hilfiger that Washington gridlock is pretty much Rush Limbaugh's fault on Monday evening at a fundraiser at Harvey Weinstein's house in New York's Greenwich Village.
President Obama answered a question about Benghazi during a press conference on Monday, and hi-def photos reveal that some moisture traveled from the president's eye area to his cheekbone in a thin stream. Was it a tear? It certainly looks like a tear. These images revealing Obama's epiphora raise new and troubling questions.
Forced to take questions about the event that will not go away, Obama angrily pushed back Monday at the White House on the idea of a coverup of the Benghazi consulate attack, calling newly surfaced emails a "side show" and insisting that the "whole thing defies logic."
Could what happened in Benghazi lead to an impeachment of the president? Yes, because impeachment and allegations of misbehavior have become the Godwin's Law of national politics.
The revelation that Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan and White House chief of staff Dennis McDonough had a successful secret beer date might be cause to fundamentally rethink skepticism that dinner diplomacy could end Washington gridlock caused by Republicans and Democrats holding diametrically opposed positions.
A Pew poll released Wednesday offers some interesting insights: Democrats are bored with Democrats, independents blame Republicans, and Republicans hate everyone — but a closer look at the data may reveal why Congressional Republicans are tracking higher than Democrats on some of the key issues of the day.
There had been whispers, of course — whatever happened to The Guy Who Famously Elbowed President Obama? — but no one ever landed the post-pickup-game interview. Until now.
Over the weekend, two new "We the People" petitions met the White House's 100,000-signatory standard for a formal response. Unlike most previous petitions, though, the majority of the people doing the signing are more than likely not American citizens.
Accusations that an American documentary filmmaker was posing as a U.S. spy in Venezuela are "ridiculous," if you believe President Obama, who according to Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro is the "chief of the devils." Did you catch all of that? Here's the whole story.
It may be mere coincidence, but after The Atlantic Wire reported that the Twitter account @barackobama is no longer controlled by the Obama administration or the White House, the account began tweeting far less frequently — and the @whitehouse account began tweeting much more frequently.
Despite its straight-from-science-fiction premise, it's real: A group of scientists meeting at the White House to discuss a brand-new ocean. Impending Arctic ice melt makes this just another day in the geopolitics of climate change.
The conventional wisdom going into the midterm elections is that Obama fatigue puts Democrats in major trouble, but the historical evidence says otherwise.
The Obama administration is getting ready to send arms to Syrian rebels, The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung reports, by way of very convoluted descriptions from anonymous senior administration officials attempting to describe the Obama administration's thinking. Got that? Didn't think so. Here's a guide to where we're at — almost.
Obama's approval ratings track much more closely with Bush's than Clinton's, and if he repeats the pattern he saw during his first term — a slow drop followed by a recovery — Obama could see fairly low popularity, right around the time of midterm elections.
With Congress out of town, the president Obama held a rare Q&Awith reporters at the White House today, swatting away the idea of an intelligence failure in the Boston bombings, and a Fox News report about intimidation of witnesses in the Benghazi investigation. He also promised to continue to push for the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison.
Why hasn't the American public risen up in fury at Republicans over the sequester's annoyances and inconveniences, as President Obama had clearly hoped? Because the annoying things about the sequester perfectly play into the Republican talking point that government is dumb and wasteful and run by people with no common sense.
Fox News reports that "at least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency" have retained lawyers after being threatened by the Obama administration.
At the White House Correspondents' Dinner, President Obama joked: "Some folks still don't think I spend enough time with Congress. 'Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?' they ask… Really? Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?" It got a laugh. Today, McConnell has a snappy comeback.
Answers to a Politico story today amount to a polite way of noting that since Obama's election, the national conversation about race hasn't always been enlightening. But while racism among some people, particularly in the South, plays a role, there are other barriers keeping black politicians from winning statewide.
Both President Barack Obama and Conan O'Brien decided to cast Hollywood versions of D.C. at the White House Correspondents' Dinner this year. Obama's version was directed by Steven Spielberg, O'Brien's starred "Tan Mom" as John Boehner. Watch their full speeches here.
Long portrayed as technologically aloof, the end of the comeback week gives us a portrait of Bush fully in thrall to consumer technology, leveraging the iPad not to check and respond to email but to express himself in art. Yes, he learned how to paint on an app.
As president Obama spoke to Planned Parenthood on Friday, Fox News aired footage of the Kermit Gosnell trial. The coverage is a perfect representation of the split in the abortion debate: on one side, a triumphant march of progress for women, and on the other side, a fixation on late-term abortion nationally. Less covered is how some states are working to stop all abortions.
What do President Obama, the Russian mob, Tobey Maguire, hedge funds, Olympic figure skaters, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Bill Clinton, A-Rod, France, and the "London Whale" have in common? They're all connected (more or less) to a complicated web of money, celebrity, politics, and illegal poker that may have cost one innocent millionaire an ambassadorship in France.
The odds are good that you didn't know about yesterday's House hearing on climate change or a new video from OFA. The urgency with which scientists look at the issue has still not been translated to Capitol Hill — or to the rest of America.
The opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library brought together all of the living presidents in his honor. Which prompted us to wonder: At what point were the most presidents alive at once?
In a moment that's become almost as big a presidential milestone as the inauguration itself, today George W. Bush celebrates the opening of his presidential library and museum, which is opening the floodgates for historical judgements on his eight years in office.
The First Dad told the Today show Wednesday that he can stop the First Daughters from getting tattoos... by getting his own, and taking it viral. But if history has taught us anything, kids are always going to find a way to screw over their folks. Like so, perhaps.
After senators filibustered a gun background checks bill, President Obama gave an angry speech, promising that "we can still bring about meaningful changes that reduce gun violence so long as the American people don't give up on it." But according to a new Washington Post/ Pew Research Center poll, the American people are kind of over it.
On its front page today, The New York Times criticizes President Obama for failing to hold Democrats who voted against the gun compromise accountable. But the president's bigger challenge may have been overestimating their empathy.
A few days after The New York Times published a rather arresting column written by an inmate staging a hunger strike, 25 percent more prisoners have joined the protest.
Like most presidents, part of Barack Obama's job has always been to speak up for the nation in times of grief, a role he's become all too familiar with in the last year. In addition to his remarks in Boston, we have gathered some of his previous speeches — three of which followed mass shooting — that are the best examples of his knack for rhetoric in times of crisis.
There was mass fury at the Senate for filibustering a weakened gun background checks bill that had been driven by the outrage that one man with an AR-15 could kill 20 schoolchildren. What's more interesting is whether all that rage will end up changing anything on its own.
Federal agents took a man from Corinth, Mississippi into custody on Wednesday evening under suspicion of sending letters covered in ricin to the president and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker.
As part of a tense day in Washington, the FBI reported that a second ricin-contaminated envelope sent to a mail processing facility in Washington, D.C. Its intended recipient appears to have been the president. At another point, two Senate office buildings were locked down, one due to a person who apparently was carrying suspicious envelopes. Here's everything you need to know.
No one wants to politicize the Boston Marathon bombing. But a political opponent politicizing the Boston Marathon bombing? Well, that might be useful!
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