President Obama's new budget attempts to define a progressive alternative to conservative demands for a politics of austerity. Having just returned from a gathering of center-left parties in Copenhagen, I can report that European progressives are wrestling with the same challenge, and are reaching similar conclusions.

Mitt Romney's campaign for the Republican nomination is unfolding like a well-crafted business plan. He hit his numbers in New Hampshire last night, saw his most dangerous rivals tumble, and reinforced the aura of inevitability that surrounds his candidacy.

Everything seemed to fall Romney's way. After his dizzying ascent in...

AT&T is a big company, which perhaps explains why federal regulators are ganging up to block its proposed merger with T-Mobile. Big must be bad, right?

That's certainly the view of consumer advocacy groups, which routinely oppose business mergers as threats to competition. They seem to have the ear of...

Is the super committee President Obama's revenge?

After last summer's showdown over raising the debt ceiling, Obama was roundly criticized for agreeing to a deficit-reduction deal that was all spending cuts and no tax hikes. Democrats, disconsolate over this seeming capitulation to House Republicans, saw it as the low-water mark...

Unlike the dictators of Tunisia and Egypt, Muammar Gaddafi refused to go peaceably when the Arab spring uprisings migrated next door to Libya. Last week he paid for that defiance with his life; an outcome that should rattle other regional tyrants, especially Syria's Bashar al-Assad.

Gaddafi's ouster was a triumph...

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas will ask the United Nations tomorrow to welcome Palestine as its 194th member and newest state. As Abbas well knows, that's not going to happen. So why are Palestinians devoting their diplomatic energies to scoring purely symbolic points at Turtle Bay?

In essence, Palestinians...

The White House this week is dribbling out new details about Obama's forthcoming jobs package. Liberals already are complaining that the president is thinking too small, while conservatives dismiss his ideas as just more "stimulus" in drag.

Neither critique gets to the heart of the problem. The U.S. economy is...

Some liberal commentators marked the 15th anniversary of welfare reform last week with a curious lament: Welfare rolls aren't growing fast enough.

"If you think the point of the program is to help the poor, then no, welfare reform is not working," asserts Ezra Klein of the Washington Post....

Libyan rebels -- the "rats" as Muammar Gaddafi calls them -- are closing in on the eccentric dictator. Although a hundred things could go wrong in post-Gaddafi Libya, Americans should always welcome a tyrant's fall.

Rather than ponder what comes next, the ever-parochial U.S. media is fixated on whether Gaddafi's ouster...

Not a moment too soon, the Gang of Six has resurfaced in the U.S. Senate, breathing new life into hopes for a bipartisan "grand bargain" on deficit reduction.

Even if Eric Cantor were abducted by aliens, there's no way that Congress could pass the Gang's elaborate plan to solve the...

The stock market plunged over 150 points Monday as Republicans hardened their stance in debt reduction talks with the White House. The sharp drop was a timely reminder that a political failure to raise the debt ceiling would be a body blow to America's already weak economy.

The odds of...

President Obama is taking heat for announcing troop withdrawals last night without clarifying U.S. war aims in Afghanistan. Yet his basic strategy couldn't be clearer. It is to depart Afghanistan gradually -- a fighting withdrawal -- to maximize the odds that the Taliban won't be able to take over once...

Whether U.S. presidents succeed or fail often depends on a big factor beyond their control: the timing of the business cycle. Lucky presidents -- Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush -- experienced downturns early in their first term, leaving plenty of time for an economic rebound to lift them to reelection.

Amid the high drama of fiscal brinkmanship in Washington, it's easy to forget that reducing budget deficits isn't the biggest economic challenge we face. Even more important is kick-starting the great American job machine and reversing our country's slide in global competition.

Critical to both goals is shoring up the...

Americans, conditioned by harsh experience to expect nothing but trouble from the Middle East, have been thrilled and inspired by the Arab Spring. But now a practical question looms: Just how far are we prepared to go to help these rebellions succeed?

Early successes in Tunisia and Egypt may have...

President Obama made the cardinal mistake last week of stepping on his own message. His "winds of change" speech was supposed to formalize an historic shift in U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Instead, Obama managed to put the spotlight on the one thing in the region that seems impervious...

President Obama's dramatic announcement last night that that U.S. intelligence and security forces finally caught up with Osama bin Laden was deeply satisfying. Bin Laden picked a fight with America, slaughtered thousands of our citizens, and has been called to account for his crimes. That's a huge victory for the...

Entering the lists at last, President Obama delivered a stout defense of progressive values yesterday and checked the rightward drift of the deficit debate. For all its strengths, though, his speech also left open the question of whether he and his party are ready to grapple effectively with...

As progressives pounce on Rep. Paul Ryan's new budget proposal, they should also give the man a little credit. The plan he unveiled is a daring attempt to define an actual conservative governing philosophy. That's a big improvement on the reactionary and crotchety anti-government platitudes served up by the Tea...

It's spring and the sap is rising in Washington -- especially among the Tea Party. They seem determined to shut down the federal government, even if it means making the United States look like a plus-size banana republic.

House Speaker John Boehner has been trying to talk sense to his...