Joseph Lawler

With just a month left before the one-year payroll tax break expires, Senate Democrats are trying to get Republicans to agree to extending it, to be paid for with a 3.5 percentage point surtax on income above $1 million. The…

Happy Thanksgiving to all our readers, and thanks for you readership and support.

President Obama will pardon the Thanksgiving turkey (Politico) Obama will press for an extension of the payroll tax holiday (New York Times) The possibility of the sequester’s cuts taking effect has taken the Pentagon off-guard (New York Times) The federal…

James Pethokoukis reports that Jon Huntsman has proposed a solution to the problem of banks that are too big to fail. Huntsman’s six-point list: 1. Set a hard cap on bank size based on assets as a percentage of GDP….

The Bipartisan Policy Center provides some context on the sequester — the automatic cuts now scheduled to take place because the supercommittee failed. Basically, the cuts included in the sequester would push discretionary and defense spending down to historic lows:…

Sen. Pat Toomey tells the Weekly Standard‘s John McCormack that supercommittee Democrats rejected his offer to raise taxes on the two highest brackets by $250 billion out of sheer partisanship.  For the supercommitttee’s recommendations to move to the full Congress…

From LifeNews:  Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is at it again, bashing Catholics for their pro-life position when she has promoted abortion in defiance of Catholic Church teaching at every turn. This time, Pelosi is upset that the nation’s Catholic…

This email came from Vice President Joe Biden:  I’ll cut to the chase: If Congress doesn’t act soon, middle-class Americans will see their taxes go up starting on January 1st, taking almost $1,000 out of the pockets of a typical…

In National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru takes on the “Freeloader Myth,” namely, the increasingly prevalent worry that half of all workers “pay no taxes.” It’s a meme that Michele Bachman, prominently among others, has helped perpetuate.  Ponnuru explains that 47 percent…