President Obama abruptly walks out of talks  —  President Barack Obama abruptly walked out of a stormy debt-limit meeting with congressional leaders Wednesday, a dramatic setback to the already shaky negotiations, according to GOP sources.  —  “He shoved back and said 'I'll see you tomorrow' and walked out …

Graham: GOP has no one ‘to blame but ourselves’  —  South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham conceded Wednesday that he and his fellow Republicans are now eating their own words as they try to convince the country they are working to stave off a federal default.  —  “Our problem is we made a big deal about this for three months.

Michele Bachmann's Church Says the Pope Is the Antichrist  —  The Iowa front-runner for the GOP nomination was a longstanding member of a strict Lutheran synod with controversial views of Catholicism  —  Michele Bachmann is practically synonymous with political controversy …

Time is of the essence, any US budget deal will do  —  As the debt negotiators square off in Congress, much attention will focus on the size of the 10-year budget deal they come up with.  As almost everyone agrees, there is much more risk of doing too little than too much given the scale of America's fiscal challenge.

Bush trumps Barack in the Arab world: President Obama is proving an embarrassing flop in the Middle East  —  Today's eye-opening Zogby poll for the Arab American Institute Foundation should be a wake-up call to the White House on its failing foreign policy.  After two and a half years of bashing Israel …

Maid's ‘Fiancé’ Speaks  —  A call with an Arizona inmate tarnished the case of Strauss-Kahn's accuser.  The man, who says he's the maid's fiancé, gives his side of the story to The Daily Beast.  —  One of the most important and controversial characters in the complicated …

McCaskill: Republicans look like ‘hot, sloppy mess’  —  Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) slammed Republicans, claiming their internal divisions were impeding the ongoing debt-ceiling negotiations.  —  “I don't know what [House Speaker John] Boehner (R-Ohio) has going on in his caucus,” she said on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Thursday.

The Debt Debate's Real Doomsday Scenario  —  On Tuesday, in the late morning, I asked a banker to explain what will happen if the debt ceiling is not raised on August 2.  He was not just any banker; he was and is the authority on the U.S. bond market at one of the biggest banks in the world.

Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed  —  A little more than a year ago, Wired.com published excerpts from instant messenger chats between accused WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo, the ex-hacker in whom he confided and who reported him to the authorities.

The Republican Case for Compromise  —  I HAVE always been a conservative Republican, and I subscribe to the ideas of less government, lower taxes, innovation and entrepreneurship.  But I also believe that, in the face of a possible debt default by the federal government, Republicans need to embrace the principle of compromise.

Breast-feeding mother ‘told to leave council headquarters because she would offend Muslim visitors’  —  A mother was ordered not to breastfeed her baby in public because she was in a ‘multicultural building’.  —  Emma Mitchell, 32, was about to feed 19-week-old son Aaron when a receptionist at a town hall warned her to stop.

Religious right rushes to Bachmann's defense following ‘ex-gay’ reports  —  Several religious right groups — including those listed as anti-gay hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center — rushed to Michele Bachmann's defense following reports that she and her husband Marcus' Christian …

The Bain of Mitt Romney's campaign  —  A company that laid off hundreds of employees.  A federal “bailout” to rescue a failing bank.  Mitt Romney, at the center of it all.  —  It's a story line from a tough Democratic ad that was teed up for use against Romney in his 1994 Senate campaign in Massachusetts.

Debt ceiling: Moody's puts U.S. on notice  —  By: CNNMoney.com Senior Writer Jeanne Sahadi  —  NEW YORK (CNNMoney) - The public pressure on lawmakers to raise the debt ceiling was ratcheted up Wednesday when a major rating agency said it would put the sterling bond rating of the United States on review for possible downgrade.