[ Posted Monday, February 14th, 2011 – 17:38 PST ]
It's "Budget Season" once again in Washington, and since it's going to be a particularly contentious and complex one this year, it's worth taking a moment at the beginning to provide an overview of the entire process which is about to play out over the next two or three months. There are, at this point, three main budget battles to be fought. One of these isn't strictly a budget battle, but will likely devolve into one, hence its inclusion in the list. Two of these have hard and fast calendar deadlines. All three of them are going to be major political battles, and it's unclear what the outcome of any of them is going to be at this point.
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[ Posted Friday, January 28th, 2011 – 12:38 PST ]
But for now, let's take a quick look back at the week that was, and then spend the rest of the column examining the "narrative" of Obama's speech.
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[ Posted Monday, January 3rd, 2011 – 04:58 PST ]
President Barack Obama had a mildly good month in the polls during December. Not a fantastic month, mind you; maybe not even a great month... but a mildly good month, nonetheless.
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[ Posted Friday, December 24th, 2010 – 19:34 PST ]
Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!
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[ Posted Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010 – 18:08 PST ]
President Barack Obama gave an afternoon press conference today, and he sounded a lot more confident than he has sounded for quite a while. The reason for this is that the 111th Congress is ending with a bang, and not the expected whimper. After the Democrats' "shellacking" (to use Obama's preferred term) in the midterm elections, few inside-the-Beltway prognosticators figured much of anything would get done in the lame duck session of Congress before the newly-elected Congress is seated in January. As it turned out, this conventional wisdom was wrong. The lame duck Congress produced more weighty legislation than most lame ducks manage -- a fitting end to two years with more significant legislative victories than any Congress since Lyndon B. Johnson (or even Franklin D. Roosevelt, depending on how you score these things). Which is why President Obama had good reason to sound as confident as he did today.
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[ Posted Friday, December 17th, 2010 – 17:45 PST ]
My apologies to anyone tuning in who was expecting to see the 150th "Friday Talking Points" column, since it will be pre-empted for two weeks here. But the good news is we're doing so to bring you our annual "McLaughlin Awards," which are even more fun!
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[ Posted Friday, December 10th, 2010 – 17:46 PST ]
The holidays are just around the corner, and the preparatory legislative sausage-making on Capitol Hill is in full swing. What a happy, happy time of year!
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[ Posted Friday, December 3rd, 2010 – 17:42 PST ]
So the good news this week was apparently that giant mutant space monsters are not, in fact, about to arrive and (assumably) enslave humankind and eat our children for snacks.
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[ Posted Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 – 15:50 PST ]
President Obama just had his most stable month ever in the public opinion polls. This month also caps off a truly remarkable year of polling stability for Obama.
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[ Posted Monday, November 29th, 2010 – 17:52 PST ]
President Barack Obama has a busy week scheduled, as Congress begins the lame duck session. Everyone in Washington has a few busy weeks ahead, until the 111th Congress wraps up business and heads off into the sunset, but President Obama will be at the center of this whirlwind. So it's worth taking a look at how the week is going to play out. To put it in football-watching terms, we're just returning from the "two-minute warning" commercial break, in the fourth quarter. And anything could happen.
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