House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that he will oppose any increase in the nation's borrowing limit unless Congress agrees to first slash spending, a move that promises a budget showdown with Democrats that could ultimately shut down the government.

 

 

Several email correspondents have asked me to comment on last week’s story in the Washington Post about Mitt Romney’s high school years since I also attended Cranbrook School; I was there from 1956 to 1962 and Romney was there from 1959 to 1965.

Several email correspondents have asked me to comment on last week’s story in the Washington Post about Mitt Romney’s high school years since I also attended Cranbrook School; I was there from 1956 to 1962 and Romney was there from 1959 to 1965.

Conservatives are having a laugh after it surfaced that the official presidential biographies on the White House website have been updated to inject President Obama into history. But kidding aside, this is a truly disgraceful behavior. In the most egregious example, noted by the Heritage Foundation's Rory Cooper, the official Ronald Reagan biography is appended with the note: "In a June 28, 1985 speech Reagan called for a fairer tax code, one where a multi-millionaire did not have a lower tax rate than his secretary. Today, President Obama is calling for the same with the Buffet Rule." (Over at Commentary, Seth Mandel has a roundup of more examples.) Put aside the fact that what Reagan was proposing in 1985 had nothing to do with the Buffett Rule. Obama should not vandalize his predecessors' biographies to promote his own agenda.

Obama campaign deputy manager Stephanie Cutter dismissed today's CBS/New York Times poll showing that 67 percent of people believed Obama made his decision on gay marriage for political reasons. Only 24 percent said that Obama did it “mostly because he thinks it is right.” Host Chuck Todd asked Cutter about the poll, admitting that the methodology of the poll was different, because it was a callback poll. "Put those caveats aside that's a lot of people saying that he did this for political reasons," Todd said, noting that it was a 3-1 margin. "We can't put the methodology of that poll aside, because the methodology was significantly biased." Cutter insisted on MSNBC this morning. When pressed by Todd, Cutter said that she didn't want to bore the viewers with talk of methodology, but repeated that she believed the poll was flawed.

President Obama has released a new campaign ad attacking Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital. The ad focuses on GST Steel, which Bain took over in 1993. The company subsequently declared bankruptcy in 2001, two years after Romney had already left Bain to run the Salt Lake City olympics. Obviously, it's sad to see any factory have to close and workers lose their jobs. But it's also impossible to look at the failure of one firm and attempt to blame it on Romney without looking at the context of the U.S. steel industry.

President Obama's economy is failing again. Just as it did in 2010 and 2011, what was thought to be strong job growth in the winter has turned out to be nothing more than a figment of the Department of Labor's imagination come spring.

"Gays are the next Jews of fundraising," declared Rahm Emanuel, who is now an Obama confidant, while hustling for donors for Bill Clinton back in 1992.

Reports that one of the nation's largest banks, JPMorgan Chase & Co., lost $2 billion in just six weeks of derivatives trading have reverberated through Washington and on the presidential campaign trail, with Democrats renewing their call for stricter government regulations of Wall Street.

LYNCHBURG, Va. — Mitt Romney's Mormon faith has shaped his life, but he barely mentioned it as he spoke to graduates at an evangelical Christian university Saturday. And he barely touched on hot-button social issues like abortion and gay marriage, instead offering a broad-based defense of values like family and hard work. "Culture — what you believe, what you value, how you live — matters," Romney told graduates gathered in the football stadium on Liberty University's campus in the Virginia mountains. "The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and at the foundation, the preeminence of the family."

President Obama insisted he wouldn't spend much time discussing his newfound support of gay marriage, but it's clear the president isn't going to shy away from the divisive issue any time soon.

The Republican-led House voted Thursday to block impending cuts to the nation’s defense budget and replace them with reductions in spending on food stamps, Medicaid and other social welfare programs.