The New Republic

Denial, then anger. No, I’m not talking about the well-known stages of grief. I’m talking about the way conservatives are reacting to budget sequestration, now that its automatic cuts have hit the Federal Aviation Administration. The reaction says a lot about conservative values, their grasp of policy reality, or maybe both. READ MORE >>

President Barack Obama’s new budget will call for cuts to Social Security and Medicare, according to the New York Times. This is a huge, shocking development—except for the fact that Obama called for these things already. READ MORE >>

Most video games try as hard as they can to immerse you in a world that's entirely imagined. SimCity, which originally launched in 1989, stands among the very few in trying to replicate the real world as closely as possible.   READ MORE >>

This is a weird moment in American politics. The sequester has just chopped $43 billion out of this year's defense budget and Republicans are pretending not to care. 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 >>

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 >>

With $85 billion in budget cuts set to take effect Friday, when the sequester kicks in, there's been plenty of debate about whether the economy will spiral back into a recession. In search of some clarity, The New Republic asked economists from across the political spectrum a simple question, "Will the sequester start another recession?" The answers were a bit more complicated.It could. And either way, it's dumb policy. READ MORE >>

Washington's preferred legislative tool, the manufactured crisis, is based on the idea that when Democrats and Republicans are forced to choose between catastrophe and compromise, they'll choose the latter. READ MORE >>