One of the most bizarre defenses of the NSA program collecting Americans’ phone metadata is the claim it is not so bad because they are not actively linking the phone numbers to individuals. It appears to be a talking point because I have now seen it made several times. The most recent was by Sen. [...]

Attorney General Eric Holder is in full damage control mode following news that the Department of Justice aggressively investigated journalists. According to Politico, Holder is meeting with several bureau chiefs. Attorney General Eric Holder will hold meetings with several Washington bureau chiefs of national news organizations in the next two days as part of the [...]

When asked by Politico if he had changed his opinion on same-sex marriage Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) simply responded, “I’m not gay. So I’m not going to marry one.” This should be forever remembered as the defining Zen kōan for the problem with the current GOP. In just two short sentences Chambliss some how magically [...]

If nothing is done, the sequestration cuts will take place in less than a month and roughly half the cuts come from the military. House Republicans want to cut Medicare and Social Security instead to pay for stopping the sequestration cuts. From Politico: GOP policy prescriptions to replace the massive spending cuts currently include: changing [...]

If you had to pick someone on the Democratic side to be the poster child for the revolving door problem, it would be hard to find someone better than Elizabeth Fowler. She worked for the Senate Finance Committee back in 2003 when it helped write the Medicare prescription drug program. The program helped needlessly enrich [...]

While elected Republicans claim they, in general, want entitlement reform, they are currently refusing to put forward any proposals that might actually make it into a final deal. From Politico: A top Democratic official said talks have stalled on this question since Obama and congressional leaders had their friendly-looking post-election session at the White House. [...]

After facing an unprecedented number of filibusters over the past several years, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is finally seriously talking about adopting a few very modest reforms to the Senate’s rules to make it slightly less dysfunctional. In response some Senate Republicans are threatening to use every stupid Senate rule available to effective shut [...]

Expect the magic of the certainty pixies to be evoked often during the lame duck session to justify adopting policy that the American electorate opposes.

Even though there is a very good chance the Supreme Court could rule against some or all of the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration seems to have done nothing to prepare Democrats in Congress for this eventuality, according to Politico. Congressional Democrats who wrote Barack Obama’s health care plan into law say they’re getting virtually [...]

In the Affordable Care Act the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was given the power to review health insurance premium increases, but it wasn’t given the power to actually do anything about unreasonable increases.  HHS can only say an increase is “unreasonable,” but it has zero regulatory power to force the companies to [...]