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House speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Wednesday defended the $1 trillion spending bill as a bipartisan bill that's needed to keep the government open after Thursday, even as it came under attack from both Republican and Democrats. ...

In the wake of the Democratic Party’s second disastrous midterm election in a row, the progressive wing of the party is acknowledging that Democrats need to renew their focus on policy rather than politics. On Wednesday, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee launched the “Big Ideas Project,” an initiative aimed at soliciting proposals from the public. It’s not a bad idea; the president’s party needs all the help they can get. “After being diminished in Congress, wiped out in the South, and marginalized in the states Dems focus on gun control,” wrote National Review’s Charles Cooke on Wednesday. It’s true. “A...

Think it’s elitist or wrongheaded to admit that Democrats can’t win down south? Then let’s go through the numbers, shall we?All right. Now that I’ve gotten your attention about the South, let’s stay at it, shall we? I’ll keep the rhetorical flourishes to a minimum this time and make no references to specific religious figures, but I will instead use hard numbers to drive home what was the clear substantive point of my Monday column: That from the level of Congress on down, with a small number of exceptions, the Democratic Party is largely wasting its time (and indeed worse—diluting...

Hillary Clinton is by far the most qualified person in the United States to serve as President. If she runs, I will support her. I have known Hillary for almost twenty-five years. We first met when I was the governor of Vermont and she was the First Lady, giving us the opportunity to work together in various capacities, particularly on expanding health care access. During those years, I have learned that she is one of the most conscientious and competent people I have ever met. She has an enormous capacity to analyze and solve problems. She has a work ethic...

'Very Sober,' Not 'Political': Halperin and Peters Defend Feinstein CIA Report By Mark Finkelstein | December 10, 2014 | 8:23 AM EST VIDEO Who were those guys on Morning Joe today—two Feinstein staffers? Nope, they were Mark Halperin and Jeremy Peters, making like Dem aides in defending the report on the CIA that Dem Senator Dianne Feinstein released yesterday. Halperin, head of Bloomberg Politics, had the chutzpah to claim that the report was not "political." Peters of the New York Times then chimed in to say that in releasing the report, the Senate conducted itself in a "very sober" way....

From 1965 through 1990, Republican presidential nominees carried California six times in a row, the GOP’s best winning streak ever in the Golden State. California not only was the greatest source of Republican votes in the nation (roughly 10% of GOP votes nationally were delivered here in the 1980s), but its Republican Party produced two presidents within 20 years (Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972, and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984). California’s “populist conservatives” also passed initiatives such as the property tax-cutting Proposition 13 in 1978 that helped spark the national “Tax Revolt.”During the 1980s, California’s population grew...

After weeks of promising bipartisanship and refusing to make policy announcements that might rile Democratic lawmakers, Maryland Gov.-elect Larry Hogan has picked his first political fight, coming out swinging against environmentalists and their powerful allies in the General Assembly. Mr. Hogan vowed Monday to roll back proposed new regulations that would limit phosphorus runoff from farms, siding with Eastern Shore farmers who rely on phosphorus-rich chicken manure for fertilizer and against environmentalists who blame it for choking the life out of the Chesapeake Bay. The regulation, known as the “phosphorus management tool,” or PMT, has been hotly debated in the...

The progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org is preparing to launch a campaign to draft Sen. Elizabeth Warren into the 2016 presidential race. MoveOn is conducting a one-day poll of its eight million members that, if they approve, would mark the beginning of a $1 million initial grassroots investment to convince the freshman Massachusetts Democrat to throw her hat into the presidential ring. “There is too much at stake to have anything other than our best candidates in the debate. We are prepared to show Senator Warren she has the support she needs to enter—and win—the presidential race,” said Ilya Sheyman, executive...

Tuesday’s willful, unnecessary and gratuitously destructive release of the one-sided “torture report” at the insistence of outgoing Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. (backed by the White House) amounts to nothing less than providing aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime. Can anyone cite one practical good accomplished by releasing this gratuitously destructive report at this time? Will revealing successful practices make us more secure? No. The report provides a propaganda windfall for Islamist fanatics. Will it benefit our allies? No. It exposes those who took great risks to help us in the wake of 9/11. Will it...

The CIA’s use of torture failed to gain any intelligence on imminent terrorist threats, didn’t lead to any high-level terrorists – including Osama bin Laden – produced fabricated information and was far more brutal than the agency has portrayed to policymakers and the public, according to a long-awaited Senate report released Tuesday.

Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings tore into MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber on Tuesday for his remarks on American voters and the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee made GOP chairman Darrell Issa’s opening statement sound tame by comparison. “As far as I can tell, we are here today to beat up on Jonathan Gruber for stupid — I mean absolutely stupid — comments he made over the last few years,” he began, staring angrily at the hapless professor.

SUBSCRIBELOG INWorld Senate Torture Report Condemns C.I.A. Interrogation Program A satellite image of a prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit. The C.I.A. said the prison never used waterboarding, but the Senate Intelligence Committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard there surrounded by buckets of water. SPACE IMAGING, VIA GETTY IMAGES By MARK MAZZETTI DECEMBER 9, 2014 WASHINGTON — A scathing report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday found that the Central Intelligence Agency routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained from the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects, and that its...

Anyone who followed this year's Senate race in Kansas — the one longtime GOP incumbent Pat Roberts appeared to be losing to Greg Orman, the businessman running as an independent — knows Orman and his supporters vigorously denied Roberts' allegation that Orman was really a Democrat running to further the Democratic agenda. "By word, by deed, by campaign contribution, this man is a liberal Democrat," Roberts said of Orman during a debate in October. "A vote for Greg Orman is a vote to extend the Barack Obama/Harry Reid agenda." Not true, Orman answered. "The senator can say that over and...

A psychology professor at South Texas College in Weslaco, Texas, was seemingly caught on video last month comparing the tea party to the Nazis of the 1930s in Germany. He then told his students not to “tell anybody” about his remarks — but one of his students had already started filming after he allegedly called Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) a “bastard” for using the name “Cruz” to win his election. “In 1931, which was really interesting, the Nazis — people were kind of tired of them. They’ve been around since 1920, 11 years now. They’ve won seats — they’re like...

Republicans hate Obama. They hate him so much that they’ve lost all perspective. In the red mist that falls over their eyes when thinking about the President of the United States, they are now advocating the near-total destruction of the executive branch if it means Barack Obama may be inconvenienced for the next two years – and hinder the government’s functionality for the rest of time. They think that’s a fair trade. In the screeching hissy fit the GOP is throwing over Obama’s actions on immigration – just the latest in a long line of perceived slights that conservatives have...

The likely Democratic presidential nominee needs to duplicate, or at least come close to duplicating, Obama's performance among African-Americans. It's a tall task. Mary Landrieu lost her runoff race Saturday because President Obama isn't well-liked, national Democrats abandoned her, and, statewide, Louisiana pretty much only elects Republicans. But Democrats and their likely presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, might squirm the most over her defeat for a different reason: The longtime senator couldn't get enough support from African-Americans. Like Landrieu, Clinton (or whoever becomes the party's standard-bearer) will try to win over black voters at the same rate Obama did in both...

Much has been made of the fact that when losing Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) leaves office in January, Louisiana will not have a Democratic statewide elected official in office for the first time since the 1870s. The Republicans who occupy all of the Pelican State’s high offices are in good company; Republicans now control every U.S. Senate seat, legislative chamber, and governor’s mansion across the Deep South – from Texas to the Carolinas. This condition is giving some Democrats, loyal to the party for whom the term “Solid South” was coined, indigestion. The best example of this phenomenon is an...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says fellow Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer’s (N.Y.) recent comments on ObamaCare are "beyond comprehension." Schumer caused a stir last month when he said Democrats “blew the opportunity the American people gave them” in 2008 by focusing on healthcare out of the gate instead of on measures to boost the middle class. In an interview with The Washington Post published Monday, Pelosi noted that Schumer wrote the 1994 assault weapons ban that was blamed for Democratic losses that year. She hit Senate Democrats for distancing themselves from President Obama in the midterm elections, and the...

In July, New York Times political writer Nate Cohn wrote a long piece, "Demographic Shift Black Southern Voters, Poised to Play a Historic Role," in which he surveyed the collapse of white support for the Democratic Party (in the November election, Senator Landrieu in Louisiana received only 18 percent of the white vote) and the vital, as he saw it, new role of Southern black voters. Using Georgia as an example, Cohn found that "demographics" might win the Senate for the Dems: Today, 57 percent of black Americans live in the South; more than one million black Southerners today were...

The Democrats say that there is no reason to require voters to present identification, nor is any other measure to curb voter fraud needed. They should meet one of their own, Opelousas, La., Mayor Don Cravins Sr. While speaking on Nov. 3, the day before the midterm elections, Cravins told a gathering, "If you 'early voted'" for Sen. Mary Landrieu, "go vote again tomorrow. One more time's not going to hurt." In Louisiana, voters can go to the polls early, which Cravins sees as an invitation to stuff the ballots. But he's not worried about breaking the law. In the...