Senate Republicans Threaten Tax Dispute Blockade  —  WASHINGTON — Not even 24 hours after President Obama met with senior Republican Congressional leaders and expressed hopes for a “new dialogue,” renewed partisan fury engulfed the Senate on Wednesday, as Republicans threatened to block …

Fed wants to strip a key protection for homeowners  —  WASHINGTON — As Americans continue to lose their homes in record numbers, the Federal Reserve is considering making it much harder for homeowners to stop foreclosures and escape predatory home loans with onerous terms.

Tea Party Caucus Takes $1 Billion In Earmarks  —  Members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus may tout their commitment to cutting government spending now, but they used the 111th Congress to request hundreds of earmarks that, taken cumulatively, added more than $1 billion to the federal budget.

It took a guy to do this?  House Speaker-elect John Boehner orders a change to benefit just 71 members  —  For some reason it took a male Speaker of the House to accomplish this:  —  The nearly six dozen female members of the incoming House of Representatives will have a new restroom …

GOP to upend spending process  —  House Republicans seem intent on blowing up the staid appropriations process when they take power in January — potentially upending the old bulls in both parties who have spent decades building their power over the federal budget.

RTC  —  Receiving / paying for stolen property IS a crime.  Once the official request to not release classified information was issued the release IS a crime.  In the US the maximum penalty for that crime is death.  —  Mark Anthony  —  Why haven't British police arrested WikiLeaks boss …

Obama and GOPers Worked Together to Kill Bush Torture Probe  —  A WikiLeaks cable shows that when Spain considered a criminal case against ex-Bush officials, the Obama White House and Republicans got really bipartisan.  —  Post Comment  —  In its first months in office …

McCain: Repeal of 'Don't ask, don't tell' policy ‘premature’  —  Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Thursday urged Congress to take time to scrutinize a 10-month Pentagon study on the implications of repealing the “Don't ask, don't tell policy,” calling it “premature” to rush through legislation scrapping …

Andy Stern takes on America's second deficit  —  “Do we really need another deficit-reduction plan?”  I ask Andy Stern.  I like this stuff, but even I'm getting exhausted by the endless parade of plans, each just slightly different than the last, and none with an obviously supportive constituency in Congress.

How Lieberman Got Amazon To Drop Wikileaks  —  Early this week, after hacker attacks on its site, Wikileaks moved its operation, including all those diplomatic cables, to the greener pastures of Amazon.com's cloud servers.  But today, it was down again and mid-afternoon we found out the reason …

Fox is quickly becoming the second-chance employer for fiery figures  —  Don't panic.  Fox is hiring.  —  The leading cable news network and its business news offshoot, Fox Business Network, have made a habit of signing up reporters and media personalities who've found themselves on the wrong side in employee-employer spats.

A strange way to honor the founding fathers  —  Republicans gained control of the House last month on a promise to “restore the Constitution.”  So it is no small irony that one of their first orders of business is an attempt to rewrite the Constitution.  —  On Tuesday, Rep. Rob Bishop …

Kasich: Don't Count Obama Out in 2012  —  Does last month's election suggest that President Barack Obama is toast in 2012, particularly in key states like Ohio?  Many Republicans think so.  But that state's next governor, Republican John Kasich, isn't among them.

GOP Will Retain House Control in 2012 — Guaranteed.  —  Control of the House of Representatives after the 2012 elections will still belong to the Republicans.  IF Barack Obama stages a political comeback (which is certianly within the realm of possibility), Democrats will start the presidential coattails drumbeat.

The Republican case for ratifying New START  —  Republican presidents have long led the crucial fight to protect the United States against nuclear dangers.  That is why Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush negotiated the SALT I, START I and START II agreements.

Keeping Cuomo out  —  I moderated a pair of roundtables at The New School in New York yesterday in which top staffers to statewide candidates talked more or less candidly about their strategy and tactics in the recent election.  —  One particularly instructive glimpse at the granular working …

The Dickishness Of The GOP  —  What we've observed these past two years is a political party that knows nothing but scorched earth tactics, cannot begin to see any merits in the other party's arguments, refuses to compromise one inch on anything, and has sought from the very beginning to do nothing but destroy the Obama presidency.

On World AIDS Day, Larry Kramer, who first warned of epidemic, rips ‘Do-nothing’ Obama  —  On World AIDS Day, the man who first sounded the alarm about the AIDS epidemic and shamed the government into action for a decade, had some choice words for President Obama.

U.S. Diplomats Noted Canadian Mistrust  —  WASHINGTON — In early 2008, American diplomats stationed in Ottawa turned on their television sets and were aghast: there was an “onslaught” of Canadian shows depicting “nefarious American officials carrying out equally nefarious deeds in Canada,” …