Dems threaten budget deal  —  The budget deal worked out by House and Senate negotiators is on the verge of unraveling over the exclusion of federal unemployment benefits, several leading Democrats warned Wednesday.  —  The lawmakers are outraged by a GOP move to add the Medicare “doc fix” …

Columnist Blasts Obama For Acting Like ‘Hormone-Ravaged Frat Boy’ At Mandela Service  —  Employing an inordinate number of pastry puns and an inexplicable knowledge of the first family's marital harmony, the New York Post's Andrea Peyser unleashed a torrent of outrage toward President Obama for …

Mother of girl involved in ‘kissing’ discipline speaks out  —  Boy was suspended for two days after second kissing incident  —  The mother of a girl involved in the case of a 6-year-old Cañon City school boy being suspended for a second violation of giving a classmate unwanted kisses …

Biden: My ancestors 'didn't all come here legally'  —  Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday that some of his ancestors came to the United States illegally and said it's fruitless to compare the immigration system of the 1800s to today's.  —  “My great-great grandparents came escaping …

Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore  —  It's time to give St. Nick his long overdue makeover.  —  When I was a kid, I knew two different Santa Clauses.  The first had a fat belly, rosy cheeks, a long white beard, and skin as pink as bubble gum.  He was omnipresent …

Unprecedented Austerity  —  As many people have noted, a strange thing has happened on the fiscal policy front.  Intellectually, the case for austerity has pretty much collapsed, having been reduced at this point to the Three Stooges Theory: we're supposed to consider austerity a success …

Lament of the Plutocrats  —  Why Wall Street is fed up with the White House—and Republicans too.  —  On a recent afternoon, executives at Goldman Sachs invited a few hundred major investors to the Conrad Hotel in lower Manhattan.  The bankers and their guests filed into a large room and turned their eyes to Hillary Clinton.

Mandela and the Question of Violence … I have the misfortune of being near the end of Tony Judt's Postwar at a moment when of the great figures of our history, Nelson Mandela, has passed.  Judt's gaze is relentless.  He rejects all grand narratives, skewers Utopianism (mostly in the form of Communism) …

Obama administration extends state high-risk pools through January  —  With some high-risk patients still struggling to gain health insurance, the Obama administration is extending a health law program that covers more than 100,000 Americans with preexisting conditions.

Health director who approved Obama birth certificate dies in plane crash  —  The health director who approved the release of President Obama's birth certificate has died in a plane crash, Hawaiian officials said Thursday.  —  Loretta Fuddy died after the Cessna Grand Caravan aircraft …

Strike Iran Now to Avert Disaster Later  —  A conventional-weapons attack is preferable to the nuclear war sure to come.  —  Not too many years ago, hardly anyone disagreed with John McCain when he first said that “the only thing worse than bombing Iran is letting Iran get the bomb.”