Like clockwork the continued obstructionism of Senate Republicans has got Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to start vaguely threatening to fix the Senate, possibly in July. From Greg Sargent: Reid has privately consulted with President Obama on the need to revisit filibuster reform, and the President has told the Majority Leader that he will support the [...]

Americans are not expecting to retire until much later in life according to a new Gallup poll. Since the recession started the number of people who don’t think they will retire until they are past age 65 has increased significant. From Gallup: I look at this trends and see a sad expression of the breakdown of the [...]

There has been a slow steady drip of indicators that President Obama will approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Recently there was Obama’s statements at a fundraiser and Biden claiming that he is “in the minority” in the administration who opposes the pipeline. Now the Huffington Post is reporting that Obama campaign spin-off Organizing for Action [...]

One of the biggest developments from Attorney General Eric Holder’s grilling yesterday is that he apparently only orally recused himself from the controversial case involving the AP phone records. While Holder claims he believes he recused himself around June, during examination he admitted he never did so in writing with an explanation for his action. [...]

The best part about Washington’s new obsession with scandals is that it seems to have killed any hopes for a grand bargain in the near future. Congress has only so much bandwidth to deal with issues and it looks like most of that time will be consumed by “investigations.” In addition, while Republican are in [...]

The most amazing part of the press conference yesterday is when Attorney General Eric Holder turned the fear mongering up to 11 while trying to defend the way his department went after the AP’s phone records. From Holder (via WSJ) Well, you know, as I said, I don’t know all that went into the formulation [...]

According to a new Pew Research poll, 75 percent of Americans think our immigration system either needs major changes or a complete redesign. From Pew: No other part of our government’s bureaucracy, including our tax system and health care system, is seen as more broken than our immigration system. It is viewed as almost uniquely [...]

In a disappointing but sadly expected move, Jared Bernstein’s tries to use the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) newly released data on hospital prices to argue for Obamacare even though the law does almost nothing to solve the underlying problem. Bernstein writes: You go to buy a Snicker’s bar, you a) face a [...]

House Republicans have a problem. They have trapped themselves in a no man’s land of political hostage taking. The GOP leadership has basically admitted they can’t really play chicken with the debt limit again, but at the same time many in the rank and file refuse to give up on the idea that voting on [...]

I would like to take a moment to praise the Obama administration for having the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) release this huge database of what different hospitals charge for common procedures. The New York Times was given a preview of the data and put together a few examples of the widely divergent and [...]