We face, today, our own hard and inescapable facts that call into question what the most important pursuits of America's responsibility and purpose at home and abroad really are. Guns to kill people in other countries or butter to save people in our own?

See -- we're not that stupid. Wait. Maybe that should be the new slogan: "Congress -- we're not that stupid."

The super committee failed to reach an agreement that would have unnecessarily imposed untold hardship on the vast majority of those of us already struggling in a bad economy. If this inability to reach a terrible deal is "failure," can you imagine what "success," defined by this crowd, would have looked like?

Once again Congress managed to dodge a public outcry by appearing to do something until demand for action wanes. It's about the only thing Capitol Hill does well.

Clinton greeted a steady stream of people hailing from next door, to New Zealand, shaking every person's hand and thanking them for attending. He also...

The burgeoning debt has been blamed on reckless government and consumer spending; but the debt crisis was created, not by a social safety net bought and paid for by the taxpayers, but by a banking system taken over by Wall Street gamblers.

We all know that the president plans to run against a "do nothing" Congress, and what is more "do nothing" than Congress failing to reach a deal that Congress itself designed?

The Super Committee needs to die of its own weight and its perverse policy assumptions. Its collapse will leave the Republicans exposed as a party with no plan for economic recovery other than more tax cuts for the rich and cuts in social insurance that most Americans value -- leaving the whole question of what programs to cut and what taxes to raise as the proper subject of a 2012 election that Democrats could actually win. Here's a better program: raise taxes on the wealthy and on corporations; use the proceeds for jobs and public infrastructure investment; get some budget cuts out of military spending by ending two wars.

It's a terrible mistake to ask the Americans who were wounded most by deficit-causing behavior to carry so much of the cost of fixing it. And to propose cuts to Medicare and Medicaid simply to preserve low tax rates for the wealthy is nothing less than a moral obscenity.

Grover Norquist isn't worried about a GOP supercomittee proposal on taxes because he thinks Democrats want the panel to fail to reach a deal. ...

WASHINGTON — A sputtering Congress enveloped in an atmosphere poisoned with politics and distrust enters its final weeks of the year struggling ...

WASHINGTON — A top Senate Democrat says that a deficit "supercommittee" is unlikely to succeed because of a deadlock over taxes. New York Democ...

Democrats cannot keep putting cuts on the table that will hurt low-income people, only to see their package rejected by the Republicans, who are likely to adopt every spending cut proposal but little or none of the revenues.

WASHINGTON -- Congress flooded its supercommittee with a jumble of advice Thursday about taming the government's out-of-control debt, with top agricul...

By ANDREW TAYLOR, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON (AP) -- The super committee is struggling. After weeks of secret meetings, the 12-member defic...