By Elaine Donnelly
Extending sexual misconduct to combat units
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
The Senate's top Democrat said this week he agrees with Sen. Max Baucus' recent comments warning of "a huge train wreck coming down" if President Obama's health care overhaul isn't implemented properly.
After several years of complaining that Congress didn't have a budget, Republicans are now the ones holding up the 2014 budget process.
Saturday's razor-thin, predawn approval of a spending plan in the Senate is being called a victory by Democrats — but Republicans emerged from the all-nighter with momentum on two key issues: deficit reduction and the Keystone XL pipeline.
The Senate kicked off what promises to be a lengthy "vote-a-rama" session tied to their budget plan Friday afternoon by swiftly approving funds for forest firefighters out West and then defeating, largely along party lines, an amendment that would have let secular employers refuse to insure contraception.
Senate Democrats had four years to consider spending and taxing policies that would help our bad economy. Apparently, they ignored their lawful responsibility since 2009 only so that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could avoid exposing that his party has no ideas to avoid our nation going bankrupt.
For Republicans, the budget debate is all about "balance." For Democrats, it's about being "balanced." That letter "d" amounts to a $4 trillion difference between the two sides.
The Republicans and Democrats unveiled their budgets in Congress this week. And though they say numbers don't lie, some of their rhetoric stretches the truth.
Four years after they last passed a budget through the Senate, Democrats announced a new blueprint for federal spending Wednesday that proposes significant tax increases, new stimulus spending and some budget cuts — making slight headway in controlling federal debt.
With the automatic cuts looming March 1, the Obama administration is offering more specifics on what lower spending would mean, pointing to everything from fewer agents on the U.S.-Mexico border to cutting funding for special education in school districts around the country.
Laying out an activist, big-spending second-term agenda, President Obama called on Congress in Tuesday night's State of the Union address to spend more on job-creation proposals for the middle class and claimed it would not add to the nation's huge budget deficits.
Senate Republicans are sending a letter Monday to the White House budget office arguing that President Obama's nominee to be treasury secretary, Jacob "Jack" Lew, was complicit in breaking a Medicare budget law.
Acting well before the deadline and with rare bipartisan unity, the House voted Wednesday to waive the federal debt ceiling for the next four months as Republicans retreated from their insistence that any raising of the ceiling be matched dollar-for-dollar with spending cuts.
The top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee will lead a charge to try to block White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew's prospective nomination to become Treasury secretary.
Afundamental misunderstanding of the Robin Hood legend in the current discussion of tax policy undergirds a mistaken idea, too rarely evaluated -- that hurting the "rich" helps the "poor."
As the city, the markets and the world weigh in on a possible "fiscal cliff" deal, it's increasingly clear that only two opinions will count in the end.
