Progressive Democrats issued a challenge this morning to their colleagues in the House on the eve of a scheduled vote on the war supplemental: the only fiscally responsible stance is to end the emergency funding.

The Cost of War has hit $1 trillion. Are you getting what you paid for?

I wonder if anyone will wait outside the door in the Cannon office building tomorrow while the first working group plots to force the middle class to “sacrifice” for the bailouts of the rich and connected. Maybe someone will put a glass up to the door and listen in and get us a rough sketch of what they have planned.

At the end of this month, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform will hold its first meeting and begin to consider ways to dig our nation out from the irresponsible deficits created by the Bush Administration. This presidentially-created 18-member commission is tasked with addressing “the growth of entitlement spending and the gap between the projected revenues and expenditures of the Federal Government.”

While I and many of my fellow Members of Congress support efforts to balance the budget, it is critically important that this commission examine every part of the federal budget during this process. For example, the Commission should most certainly consider the $985 billion dollars spent on foreign wars since 2001.

Nothing quite has the power of hearing the words contained in critical documents the torture era read out loud.

The letter the National Archives wrote to the U.S. Dept. of Justice last week inquiring about John Yoo’s missing emails focused on USDOJ’s violation–as a Federal Agency–of the Federal Records Act.

Now, House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. John Conyers is taking the reverse approach–asking for email exchanges to which the White House was a party–which would be preserved pursuant to the Presidential Records Act.

With the votes to pass health care in the Senate a fait accompli, everyone has turned their attention to the conference committee, and the numerous knotty issues involved in reconciling the House and Senate bills and arriving at something that can pass both chambers. Democratic Senators spent the weekend vowing that whatever comes out in [...]

John Conyers is like the rest of progressives who fell in love with Obama the person and not Obama the moderate.

A quick overview of Wednesday’s doings in House Judiciary Committee’s mark-up of the PATRIOT Act renewal. The hearing started with John Conyers introducing a managers amendment to the bill that made tweaks to the overal bill to move them slightly closer to what the Obama Administration wanted. Republicans tried to gut National Security Letters (NSLs). [...]

Now why do you suppose Robert Luskin went to the trouble of orchestrating a limited hang-out in the NYT and WaPo yesterday?