The New Republic

Senator Rand Paul got a lot of chuckles—some admiring, some less so—for his bona fide talking filibuster Wednesday on the Senate floor, refusing to allow a vote on John Brennan's nomination to head the CIA unless he got a written guarantee from Attorney General Eric Holder that the government would not turn armed drones on Americans on U.S. soil. READ MORE >>

We all know how difficult it is these days to find moments of bipartisan comity in our polarized capital. Heck, even the good folks at Fix the Debt seem to have faded from the scene. So it was gratifying indeed to attend an event Tuesday night that stood as a beacon of all that Washington once was and could yet be, if we could only learn to get along again: Lanny Davis's book party. READ MORE >>

Paul Ryan is about to unveil a new proposal for how the government should spend its money. According to multiple media accounts, it will look a lot like the budget plans he's produced before, the ones that famously called for radically downsizing the government. The main difference? The cuts in this proposal will be even bigger. READ MORE >>

I have a confession to 
make: I'm a big fan of John Boehner. One of his very few, it turns out. The White House complains that Boehner's near-total ignorance of policy makes him impossible to negotiate with, and that it's pointless to deal with him anyway, since he exerts zero control over his members. Pundits deride him as strategically inept, constantly backing himself into corners from which there's no obvious escape. READ MORE >>

The sequestration impasse is so obviously the Republicans' fault that the punditocracy, which can't abide an obvious and unchanging story line, is trying hard to invent a new one that blames President Obama. READ MORE >>

On the morning of Thursday, August 16, 2012, as thousands of striking South African miners marched in circles atop a pile of red rocks, the police lined up their tanks in front of it. Roughly 30 feet high and 50 feet across, the rock pile was the closest thing to a mountain for miles, jutting out of the flat expanse of the mining area called Marikana, 60 miles northwest of Johannesburg. READ MORE >>

Jonathan Chait has a good post up about how Republicans don't really care about tax reform. I'd go further and say they aren't all that interested in deficit reduction, either. Let's review the contours of the current dispute between President Obama and House Republicans over ending the sequester. Here is what the president has put on the table: READ MORE >>

The automatic budget cuts of "sequestration" are starting to take effect, but most Americans probably aren't going to notice right away. The lines at the airport won't be longer on Saturday and the border gates to Canada and Mexico won't suddenly fling open. Officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and inspectors from the Agriculture Department aren't walking off the job. Come Monday, parents will be able to send their kids to Head Start and college students will be able to get their loans processed, just as they always have. READ MORE >>

Gene Sperling once intimidated me.  READ MORE >>

While Washington was obsessing Wednesday over whether or not the oh-so-intimidating Gene Sperling had threatened Bob Woodward over his deeply misguided take on the budget sequester, another veter READ MORE >>