The Daily Beast

Should Barack Obama win reelection this fall, he’ll almost immediately face one of the biggest issues of his second term: the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts. George W. Bush originally passed the tax breaks in two quick bursts—slashing income taxes in 2001, and lowering taxes on investment income in 2003. Then, just before these cuts were set to expire on Jan. 1, 2011, Obama struck a deal with congressional Republicans to extend them for two more years.

There’s a lot to admire about conservatives. By conservatives, I mean people who believe that when you cast aside the inherited wisdom of past generations in a bid to make society dramatically better, you usually make it worse. The problem with many in today’s Republican Party isn’t that they share this skepticism about change. It’s that they apply it selectively. When conservative principles restrain their country, their religion, their class, today’s conservative leaders cast them aside.

In a deft look at how the Obama administration bungled financial reform, Noam Scheiber points to political maneuvering and a president sometimes kept in the dark by his own advisers. By Ben Jacobs Barack Obama isn't Franklin Roosevelt, ...

This was in evidence at Anatol Lieven's panel discussion, the historian and policy analyst who released Pakistan: A Hard Country last year. Assuming the manner of a presidential debate, Lieven was thoroughly grilled by military analyst Ayesha Siddiqa ...

... Arizona at the Mesa Arts Center February 22, 2012 in Mesa, Arizona, Justin Sullivan / Getty Images Today the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released its scorecard of the Republican presidential candidates' long-term budget priorities.

The best question at last night’s CNN debate in Arizona was not asked by the network’s John King. It was asked by Ron Paul to his fellow candidates: If you’re so open to attacking Iran, why not declare war?

The press has offered basically two explanations for Mitt Romney’s failure to win over conservative voters. The first is ideological: conservatives know that Romney was once a moderate, and they don’t consider his swing to the right sincere. The second is personal: whether because of his money, his faith, or his hair, average Republican voters just don’t relate to him.

I've started reading Noam Scheiber's The Escape Artists, his new book about the Obama economic team's successes and failures. Scheiber writes that Christina Romer, the administration's first chief economist, got all the numbers on the economy from the ...

Newt Gingrich thinks that because CNN’s John King asked about his personal life last week, the “elite, liberal media” is out to get Republican presidential candidates. Nonsense. If journalists really wanted to make Gingrich and his fellow GOP frontrunners squirm, they’d ask why they supported the war in Iraq.

If you want to understand why the GOP is so ill prepared to compete in an increasingly nonwhite America, just look at the exchange between Fox News questioner Juan Williams and Newt Gingrich halfway through last night’s Republican presidential debate.

It being Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Williams asked Gingrich whether some poor and minority voters might not be insulted at his claim that poor kids lack a work ethic and that black people should be instructed to demand jobs, not food stamps. Gingrich, as is his wont, haughtily dismissed Williams’s question, to wild applause.