Bob Schieffer interviewed Attorney General Eric Holder on CBS’s Face the Nation, and of course questioned him about the Obama administration’s decision to file suit against Arizona over that state’s new illegal immigration law.

We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us by Ben Zuckerman and Paul Scott Years ago Pogo said: “we have met the enemy and he is us”. No truer words could apply to the horrific oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. While British Petroleum and U.S. government regulatory agencies have, deservedly, been criticized for their actions, or inactions, the cornerstone blame lies with individual Americans. Many Americans felt...

The kind of useful dorks who enjoy digging into the guts of proposed statutes have unearthed a real gem — racial and gender quotas imposed on financial companies hidden deep within the financial reform bill. The problem with this is not only the inherent dishonesty of slipping a highly controversial social policy into a bill that is being sold to the public as an essential tool to prevent another economic...

John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

A holiday from taxes, that is. All taxes. For 18 months. It’s “economist” Arthur Laffer’s prescription for getting the unemployed back to work:

And that is why, according to Sister Sarah, the military budget should be off limits when looking for places to reduce the deficit:

The current conservative resurgence is being built on the back of one fundamental policy demand — the unsustainable debt spiral of the United States government has to be rolled back.  The seemingly endless debt spiral is itself built on political cowardice and self-serving — everyone in Washington has political supporters that demand their payoff and scream bloody murder at the mere mention of the...

As India gets increasingly trumpted overseas as an “almost” superpower, the sensitivity of some people from this big Asian country who have now settled abroad has risen in a seemingly direct proportion. So when Joel Stein wrote a recent humor column “My Own Private India”, the Time magazine had to print an apology to assuage the “hurt” among some readers, and explained that “it...

Has Dmitry Medvedev learned all the wrong lessons from 20 years of Russian capitalism? According to Gazeta columnist Yulia Latynina, the Russian president’s recent visit to California will be for naught if he follows in the footsteps of his communist forbears and creates a state-guided version Silicon Valley near Moscow. For Gazeta, Yulia Latynina writes in part: Like any major official venture, China’s...

In the Past Decade – Extreme Weather Deaths Outnumbered War Casualties by Tina Dupuy Safe to say, nothing is so bad that a hurricane can’t make worse. Take an existing problem, toss it around in the wind and smack it with flying debris – it’s certainly not going to improve. Shoddy construction is made worse, communication concerns – made worse, a struggling economy – made worse,...

See, this is why I have trouble taking conservatives seriously when they talk about cutting the deficit or finding ways to pay for essential spending programs. Tanning salons are shrieking over what the Washington Post calls an “overlooked” provision in the health care reform bill that charges those salons a 10% surtax on the use of ultraviolet indoor tanning beds:

WASHINGTON — It’s easy to understand why Democrats want Michael Steele to stay in the news. The Republican National Committee chairman is a wonderful distraction, a constant source of gaffes, laughs, clarifications and denials. But Steele recently scored a victory of sorts, even though you wouldn’t know it from the coverage: His comments on Afghanistan got Democrats to recite GOP...

During the contentious health care debate in Congress, Democratic leaders frequently pointed to Massachusetts as a model for the kind of reforms they were enacting.  If vastly expanded access could be achieved without an corresponding increase in costs in Massachusetts, Democratic leaders hoped to be able to lend credence to the contrived claims of deficit reductions that they had extracted from the Congressional...

A Summer of Discontent by Michael Reagan President Obama has had a rather challenging start to the Summer of 2010: Gen. McChrystal’s remarks to Rolling Stone magazine and the resulting shift of NATO control in Afghanistan to Gen. Petraeus; the continuation of the high-profile and painful BP oil spill; the Elena Kagan Supreme Court nomination hearings; and the move by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer to enact strict...

It has long been argued that the United States has too much influence over the Internet. But abroad, a recent proposal making its way through the U.S. Senate has raised the debate to a fever pitch. The proposal drawn up by Senator Joe Lieberman would give the U.S. president the authority to ‘shut down’ the Internet for 90 days without Congressional authorization. Columnist Vittorio Emanuele Parsi...

Yesterday, we reported that Iran was accusing England, Germany and the UAE of refusing to provide fuel to its passenger aircraft. The BBC theorizes that fuel companies might be worried that their annual sales of refined petroleum products to Iran might add up to $5 million. This is the maximum value of annual sales permitted under unilateral U.S. sanctions signed by President Obama a few days ago. The US sanction...

There’s a lot of blogging going on today about the economy, and here is another good piece, from Matthew Yglesias. He points to the conservative fear that once spending programs are put into place, they will never be dismantled. The liberal/progressive response to that, of course (or at least the one that comes immediately to mind) is, Why should they be? What’s so funny ’bout peace, love,...

Yves Smith and Rob Parenteau make an interesting argument on the op-ed pages of the New York Times today. If I’m understanding them correctly, they are pushing back on the prevailing view that deficit-cutting austerity programs are the path to economic growth — in other words, spending, not saving, is the key to solving our economic woes. This is not, obviously, an unfamiliar stance — except...

Did you know that the United States has spent $700 billion in Iraq since the war began — on direct military costs alone?

Paul Krugman thinks it’s possible: