If I liked anything about John Boehner I’d be tempted to feel sorry for him. He has wanted on a number of occasions to make a deal with President Obama–on the debt ceiling, on unemployment insurance, on taxes–and every time he thought he had one the Tea Party balked. He wants to be the guy [...]

Yesterday, the last of the recall elections in Wisconsin were decided. All told, more than $35 million was spent to overturn two seats in the Wisconsin statehouse. That was just for the campaigns. I don’t know how much the state of Wisconsin spent to hold the elections. The total for the nine recall elections was [...]

No explanation needed, I’m guessing. Sadly, the market gyrations, as I expected, have produced a hardening of partisan positions, rather than the hoped-for wakeup call. We are in the hands of lunatics on the right and cowards on the left. Let’s go the Wisconsin route and recall the lot of them.

Washington has zeroes in with laser-like focus on the most pressing issue of our day–the unacceptable level of unemployment. No, wait! Just kidding. It’s cutting the size of government, which of course, matters more than anything else to the millions of Americans who can’t find work, who have lost or are in are in danger [...]

The post-2010 Obama style is emerging. Out is the optimistic liberal standard bearer. In is the Clintonian triangler. Let the Republicans frame the agenda, stay above the fray, expend as little political capital as possible, then step in as the mediator to forge a last-minute consensus. Hey, it worked brilliantly for Clinton, and it might [...]

We may yet get a budget deal without a government shutdown, but it won’t be any credit to the Tea Party absolutists who see ANY compromise as a betrayal of their core principles. It will be because feckless Democrats caved on theirs. The last I heard, the Dems were so desperate for a deal they [...]

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin has released his budget, and as expected, school funding takes an enormous hit. Wisconsin is not alone in sacrificing education, and it’s not just Republican governors who are mortgaging our kids’ futures to balance today’s budgets. Colorado’s new Democratic governor, John  Hickenlooper, has called for drastic cuts, too. I don’t [...]

Nikita Krushchev used to tell this joke about himself: a man was arrested for running through Red Square shouting, “Krushchev is an idiot! Krushchev is an idiot!” He was sentenced to 33 years in Siberia, 3 for insulting the Party Secretary, and 30 for revealing a state secret. I received an email a few days [...]

As you would expect at a time of crisis, liberals and conservatives have banded together in a rare show of unity to deflect blame and take no absolutely personal responsibility for what happened in Tucson. Liberals (myself included) were quick to point the finger at the heated anti-governement rhetoric of conservatives, and conservatives were just [...]

It now appears that Representative Gabrielle Giffords was the target of an assassination plot. The reasons are unknown, and it’s too early to claim categorically that the shooting of Ms. Giffords and the other victims was motivated by a political grievance. That said, it’s not hard to believe that the poisonous political climate of the [...]