There's a big scary new study out today from the health insurance lobby and PriceWaterhouseCoopers purporting to show that the Senate Finance Committee's reform bill -- funded by new excise taxes on "Cadillac" health plans -- would cause future health insurance premiums to spiral out of control.

Before this...

If School House Rock made a campaign ad it might look something like this:

Stop me if you've heard this before: "They" didn't let John McCain pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate.

Former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd gives this claim the loudest voicing I've heard yet:

"They didn't let John McCain pick the person he wanted to pick as VP. When...

I write about John McCain's shady dealings with the felonious financier Charlie Keating in this section of Rolling Stone's current cover story -- which includes Charlie Keating's bald declaration that he was, indeed, buying favors from the politicians whose war chests he larded.

But there's quite a bit more...

Let's step into Bizarro World for a second and pretend that Obama had decided to stick to his original vow, abandoning the prospect of raising untold hundreds of millions of dollars in favor of accepting the <$90 million constraints of public financing.

Can you imagine what the reaction would have...

We've reached a crude milestone today in the history of the Bush administration.

Oil prices have skyrocketed $100 per barrel since Bush took office.

Oil traded at $32.19 a barrel on the first business day after George W. Bush's inauguration in January 2001.

Today, oil is trading at $132...

An exhaustive Pentagon review has established definitively that there was no pre-war operational link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda.

So here's the question for Hillary Clinton. In the senator's war-authorization speech in October 2002, she claimed this:

Saddam "has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to...

The Obama campaign just held a conference call with Senator John Kerry who slammed Hillary Clinton for abandoning her previous commitment not to contest Florida or seek its forfeited delegates.

The Massachusetts senator couldn't quite bring himself to call the reversal a flip-flop, opting instead for this phrasing -- "a...

There's only one thing that makes sense of the Clinton campaign's clumsy and classless injection of race into her primary battle with Barack Obama. And that is that her victory in New Hampshire -- impressive though it was -- threatened to transform her into a special-interest candidate.

Hillary would...

Didja hear? There's a rumor that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim. No really, I read it in the Washington Post....

The first rule of recovering from a bout of shitty journalism is to stop defending it. That's true whether you're the New Republic, the National Review,...

Intensive questioning has to be used. Torture should not be used. The line between the two is a difficult one. --Rudy Giuliani

That line is not difficult. It's the line between us. And them. Or at least it was until Bush and Cheney and...

So in addition to telling America last week that Global Warming is good for you, Presidential spokesperson Dana Perino insisted that the White-House's edits to the Senate testimony of CDC Chief Julie Gerberding had not "watered down" the facts.

As we can see from the unedited version,...

Short Film Review: Documentary lovers. Do yourself a favor tonight at 9PM and check out A Summer in the Cage on the Sundance Channel.

Long Film Review:

Buddy flicks come in all shades and flavors, but Ben Selkow's film is probably the world's first guy movie about manic...

The Edwards presidential bid may just be over. Just ask Edwards' adviser Joe Trippi.

The Edwards campaign has decided to accept public matching funds in the primary -- and also accept federal spending limits. This gives the campaign a cash infusion of up to $21 million that it must...

The most troubling part about General Petraeus' report to Congress this week had little to do with Iraq. His bald statements about Iran should give us all pause. Here's the New Jesus speaking from high atop the Hill, passing down as fact what is in many cases contested intelligence about...

The Fred Thompson moment, if there ever was one, is already passed. It's strange how passed-the-sell-by-date his candidacy already feels. A lazy-man's John McCain to start with, I can't see Hollywood Fred catching fire... or really even sending off sparks.

But his candidacy is fantastic news for Mr. 9/11. And...

Let me get this straight:

Rudy's top advisers are into coke, hookers, race baiting and flattening Persia.

John McCain has less money than Ron Paul and just fired (as in axed) his campaign's top guns, leaving him essentially dead in the water.

Fred Thompson,...

Language is important in moments like this.

The White House has done a great job of framing this as a 'commutation' of Libby's sentence. 'To commute' is a cold, technocratic, emotionless verb.

But look at the actual order Bush signed and it calls the presidential quasi-pardon by its real name:...

"It's fucking Skull and Bones, man. The very secretive, behind-closed-doors nature of it is anathema to everything that blogging is supposed to be about: accountability. We are supposed to be showing the way, not skulking around behind closed doors, coming up with strategies. Those are the people who we're trying...