In a blog post titled “In Voting Rights Arguments, Chief Justice Misconstrued Census Data” on NPR’s website, veteran NPR Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg deconstructs a sophism offered by John Roberts at the oral argument on Wednesday on the continued constitutionality of a key section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Congress has […]

“The revenue issue is now closed,” Mr. Boehner said Thursday, before the House left town for the weekend without acting on the cuts and a Senate attempt to avert them died. Mr. Boehner said the dispute with Democrats amounted to a question of “how much more money do we want to steal from the American […]

Bob Woodward, the legendary Watergate reporter turned reliable chronicler of insider accounts of political events, has made a series of bizarre assertions over the past week. — Matthew Yglesias, Bob Woodward Trolls the World, Slate, today Yglesias then summarizes last weekend’s exciting Woodward-related events, and then updates us: Things moved into the absurd Wednesday night […]

[O]ne thing Americans simply will not accept is another tax increase to replace spending reductions we already agreed to. — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, yesterday He’s right, of course, since, by “Americans,” he means the roughly 278 Americans who comprise the House and Senate Republican caucuses.   As Greg Sargent points out this morning, […]

Justice Scalia provided the most jarring comment throughout the lengthened argument.  Belittling the government argument that the reenacted law was passed by a unanimous vote in the Senate, Scalia set off in a lengthy counter-argument, saying that made no difference because members of Congress would not take the political risk of undoing what he called […]

This is the political atmosphere within which the battle will unfold over who is to blame for the damage done by the sequester. Now, in fairness, Republicans are favored on the deficit and controlling government spending. But even here, when you drill down deeper, you find that fifty two percent say the automatic across the […]

To me, one of the big mysteries of the sequester blame game is why some in the punditry keep echoing John Boehner’s proud Obama-proposed-the-sequester line, without pointing out what the only alternative was.  The most baldly ridiculous of articles in that narrow genre is Washington Post columnist–and, I suspect, not coincidentally, Bob Woodward colleague–David Ignatius’s […]

Forget that being-worth-a-thousand-words thing. The picture and its caption in this Krugman blog post are … priceless.  (I just about fell out of my chair when I saw that.  And, five minutes later, I’m still laughing.)

As Greg Sargent pointed out this morning, the new “it” gimmick of the pox-on-both-houses punditry is to borrow National Journal editorial something-or-other Ron Fournier’s tac of pretending that Obama can order the military to invade the House of Representatives and hold its members at assault-weapon-point until they agree to a grand bargain.  Or at least […]

Two weeks ago, Linda posted a terrific, detailed post on the Camp hearings in the House Ways and Means Committee–which is not known for kumbaya, despite the chairman’s surname–on the possibility of ending or curtailing the tax deduction for charitable donations.  The hearings apparently were surprisingly serious in tone and nature, from what I could […]