It occurs to me that we cannot even really have a Pentagon Papers event in this country anymore. Sure, Wikileaks releases gained a decent amount of attention, but the real evidence for this comes in the past week. Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis wrote an 84-page report detailing his experiences in Afghanistan, which are at odds [...]

The White House formally threatened a veto of the House version of a surface transportation bill, opening the question of whether any long-term bill will get signed before March when current funding on roads and bridges expires. There are currently different versions of the surface transportation bill moving through each chamber of Congress. The House [...]

New statistics out of Greece show that austerity shrunk the economy more than expected last year. GDP in Greece fell 6.8% in 2011, and a slightly faster 7% in the fourth quarter. The country is in a fifth straight year of recession, and the numbers are rapidly approaching a full-on depression. So of course, the [...]

Happy to allow a debate on birth control in 2012, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will give Republicans a vote on an amendment to the surface transportation bill authored by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), known as the “Freedom of Conscience” amendment. The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), would let employers opt out of [...]

Late yesterday afternoon, news broke of a tentative deal to extend the payroll tax cut, unemployment insurance and the “doc fix” on Medicare reimbursement rates. Only we shouldn’t say that the deal would extend unemployment benefits, because it wouldn’t extend all of them. There will be cuts to the maximum number of weeks of benefits [...]

Happy Buy-Chocolate-and-Flowers-and-a-Card Day, supporting the chocolate, flowers and card industries. • John Boehner is forced to split up the House surface transportation bill into three separate bills, to overcome far-right oppposition. What a clown show it is over there. • The federal government recovered $4.1 billion in health care fraud last year. On the flip [...]

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had to go before Congress today and defend the $614 billion proposed budget for the military in the coming fiscal year. Not because that’s a staggering amount, especially with spending caps all over the government. Because it’s too small for [...]

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi released a statement that probably secures passage for a standalone, unfunded payroll tax cut: “The House Republican leadership plans to bring to the floor a stand-alone payroll tax cut extension bill tomorrow. We have long proposed bringing this tax cut to the floor without payfors and House Democrats will support [...]

A Gallup poll out today shows virtually no ill effects to President Obama’s poll numbers among Catholics after a week of controversy about birth control access rules opposed by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. The poll shows that support for Obama has hovered between 45% and 51% over the past couple months, and after [...]

The Republican theory on the Keystone XL pipeline is that the President is holding back the immediate creation of eleventy billion jobs by refusing to give approval to a permit for construction. Under their various pieces of legislation, TransCanada, the pipeline operator, would be able to immediately begin construction and create jobs hauling tar sands [...]

Blowing right past the Republican concession on the payroll tax cut, the President demanded passage of all three expiring measures without delay in remarks at the White House today. He only referred to the new GOP concession in passing: Now, the good news is over the last couple of days, we’ve seen some hopeful signs [...]