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.
Gun victims will get a vote, but not the one an overwhelming majority of Americans say they want. That's because the NRA is winning the shouting match on Capitol Hill, and it may have just squashed cooperation in favor of a less strict bill.
President Obama will continue to woo Republicans over meals — and to woo editorial pages that have demanded more schmoozing by releasing vague details about those meals — by lunching with Ryan on Thursday. Details are scarce, and that's kind of the point.
President Obama descended upon the Jefferson Hotel, "a neutral gathering place," Wednesday night for a secretive dinner date with a group of GOP senators. Encouragingly, a food fight did not ensue.
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.
In a news cycle already clogged with troubling reports from Guantanamo Bay arrives an even more troubling report: In January, a guard fired a "non-lethal" round at a prisoner.
What's surprising about Pew Research's study suggesting that sentiment on Twitter often doesn't track with public opinion isn't that this happens — it's that the extremes are fairly ideologically balanced.
Jon Stewart pointed out in his show last night because of sequester-related stress both Barack Obama and John Boehner slipped up in public remarks.
Despite the lawyers of over a dozen inmates reporting a widespread hunger strike happening right now inside Guantanamo, a prison spokesperson issued a no-such-thing statement on Monday.
The president's problem is simple: on November 6, he had a massive, nationwide campaign infrastructure which advocated for his policy priorities and values, and on November 7, that carefully crafted machine all but evaporated.
We learned today that Oprah would be speaking at Harvard's commencement. Let's look at some of the most intriguing and most WTF options for 2013 commencement speakers.
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.
The president's nomination at the White House today of Gina McCarthy as administrator of the EPA and Ernest Moniz to head the Department of Energy are inextricably linked, and their confirmations will be far from headache-free.
It can get better for you, too. Walmart Foundation head Sylvia Mathews Burwell will be announced as President Obama's new White House Office of Management and Budget nominee on Monday, according to a new Reuters report.
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.
It's a good thing Obama isn't running for office again: the president, who has been known to be Spock-like and nerd-courting, just lost the support of both Star Wars and Star Trek fans. Well, except maybe J.J. Abrams.
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.
Welcome to Sequester Day! How will you celebrate and/or mourn? And what is your government doing to put a stop to it?
Though it's no surprise that president's in favor of same-sex marriages, one or two heads were turned on Thursday when the Obama administration inserted itself into California's Prop. 8 debate.
Today's announcement that the administration will file an amicus brief with the Supreme Court asking that it overturn California's ban on gay marriage suggests that the president's support — once considered lacking — has now checked nearly every box.
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.
Bob Woodward tells Politico about how an Obama aide "yelled at [him] for about a half hour" and later said he'd "regret" asking the administration tough questions. But did the White House really threaten him? Some people think that Woodward's gone a little too far this time.
Everybody assumed that the Senate would confirm hard-working, navel-gazing Jack Lew as treasury secretary. And they just did. The real question is: Does Lew know what he's getting into?
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.
Today on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Bob Woodward blasted President Obama's "madness" for letting budget considerations influence military policy, continuing to stumble through his transition from Bush turncoat to Obama hater.
Despite his promise today that he's "not interested in playing a blame game," polls suggest that doing just that would be a very effective strategy for President Obama.
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.
As the rest of the country gawked at dresses on the red carpet, President Obama welcomed the governors from all 50 states to the White House on Sunday evening.
President Obama's exit plan for Afghanistan is growing clearer — but it's not yet certain how many American troops will bear the weight of maintaining peace in post-war Afghanistan. And there's disagreement at a big NATO meeting with Leon Panetta.
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.
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?
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.
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.
How worried is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell about protecting his Senate seat in 2014? According to a new attack ad published today by McConnell's campaign staff, very worried.
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.
With 48-hours of spin and Republican criticism on its side, the Obama administration continued to back away from an immigration plan that leaked over the weekend.
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.
A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.
The White House Press Pool made a stink on Sunday after they were refused access to President Obama's golf game with Tiger Woods in Florida.
Things seemed to escalate quickly there. After a copy of the White House's back-up immigration reform bill leaked, Marco Rubio moved quickly to shoot down the bill's proposals to ensure his bipartisan effort remained the favored method to get this deal done.
In a speech given two weeks ago in Las Vegas, the President gave the first preview of his immigration reform back up plan. If Senate or Congress can't get the job done, he has a bill waiting for them to vote on. We now know what, exactly, makes up a chunk of the President's proposals.
Yesterday The Atlantic Wire published a post titled "Hillary Clinton Is Running for President, OK?" suggesting that the traditional campaign kabuki, in which we all pretend there is reasonable doubt that someone is running for president right up until the moment the words "I'm running" leave a candidate's mouth, is needless.
When President Obama played with pre-school children in Decatur, Georgia on Valentine's Day, one "brave" little girl was not impressed by the president, or so Daily Intel's Dan Amira would have you believe.
Republican senators filibustered Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel on Thursday (though they'd rather you didn't call it that) for one reason, but they're hoping the delay gives them enough time to find another reason to block his nomination.
During a speech about preschool education on Thursday, President Obama jokingly suggested that his older daughter was going on dates. But who might she be dating? And what to do on the date? Let's speculate.
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.
President Obama spoke of many issues and challenges facing the nation in his State of the Union, but, having grown up among the bridge-and-tunnel crowd in Central Jersey, there was one crisis that stood out for Daily Show host Jon Stewart's: the crumbling infrastructure of those bridges and tunnels.
What with all of the political drama in this year's Best Picture crop — and Michelle Obama hosting the kid from Beasts of the Southern Wild at the White House — we couldn't help but wonder which films our top politicians would like to see win.
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.
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