The prize for impolitic remark of the year goes to House Speaker John Boehner, who told a television interviewer Aug. 1 that, in the negotiations to raise the debt ceiling, “When you look at this final agreement that we came to with the White House, I got 98 per cent of what I wanted. I’m [...]

Notice how House Speaker John Boehner turned a deaf ear to the president in his so-called rebuttal to Obama’s July 25 address on the debt ceiling? If you hadn’t noticed, you have plenty of company. The press evidently wasn’t paying attention either. In his talk, Obama took a hard crack at the GOP for not [...]

Somebody’s missing something in the grueling debt-limit debate; maybe it’s me. On the other hand, maybe it’s not. I heard and saw President Obama say on July 22nd that he would go it alone to raise the debt ceiling if need be – and in my view that should have put an end to concern [...]

From Dublin to Lisbon, London to Paris the newspapers and television were filled with grumblings about bailing out Greece, of course. Parisian disgust with Sarkozy was as common as croissants for breakfast, economic downtrends were predicted everywhere. Obama, once a shining leader, was relegated to the back pages. But where was the doom and gloom? [...]

Segments of the freedom-of-information community are critical of President Obama for not releasing what are acknowledged to be gruesome photos of the corpse of Osama bin Laden. The public, the argument goes, under the federal FOI Act has a “right to know” about the man’s shattered skull, and the rest of the remains, too. The [...]

Franklin Graham is no different from many sons who insist that dad’s style is not for them. While the evangelist has followed the same calling as his famous father, the Rev. Billy Graham, he has tried to do it his way. Reviews are mixed, at best. Over the weekend, Franklin Graham visited tornado-ravaged Alabama representing [...]

We may have bested them in the Revolutionary War, but are we more like the English than we care to admit? It was a bit of a shock to be greeted by wall-to-wall breathless coverage of William and Kate when I flipped on my TV Friday morning, though the build-up should have prepared me. I [...]

Used to be, partisanship in foreign policy was kept moderate, civil. The expression was, “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” Republicans and Democrats in Washington were happy to use the phrase; it implied they cared more about what’s good for America than politics. Those days are gone. For the Republican leadership the goal since Jan. [...]

By Danielle Brian Cross-posted on POGO’s blog. Yesterday afternoon, POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian—along with OMB Watch Executive Director Gary Bass, OpenTheGovernment.org Director Patrice McDermott, National Security Archive Executive Director Tom Blanton, and Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Executive Director Lucy Dalglish—met with President Obama about open government issues. The meeting was originally [...]

Jane Mayer’s piece in the Aug. 30 New Yorker, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama,” has continued to generate an unusual amount of buzz. It turned the under-the radar bothers, Charles and David Koch, and their privately held conglomerate, Koch Industries, into familiar names synonymous with how super-rich ideologues [...]