Dana Milbank's Slant

In the United States Senate, failure is not an option. It is a requirement. Lawmakers, unable to agree on action to deal with the looming debt crisis, set up camp on a new plateau of pointlessness Wednesday: They scheduled votes on two rival plans to cut spending - but only after guaranteeing in a ..

On paper, Tim Pawlenty may be the most formidable Republican challenger to President Obama in 2012. Too bad he's running as somebody else. At this week's first cattle call of the GOP presidential primary, hosted by the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition, Pawlenty, a former Minnesota governor, masqu ..

It was another important moment in the education of Barack Obama. He began his presidency with a pledge to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay within a year. Within months, he realized that was impossible. And now he has essentially formalized George W. Bush's detention policy.

The Supreme Court is earning its reputation as the high court. The robed ones have deliberated over cocaine at least half a dozen times in recent years, taking up the drug in some form in each of the past four years. On Monday, the justices took another hit - and this one was particularly mind-blow ..

"He's not one of us." That phrase, uttered in the fourth minute of what Scott Walker believed to be a private phone conversation, tells you everything you need to know about the rookie governor of Wisconsin.

To say that our lawmakers are carping at trifles gives them too much credit. In fact, they are carping at carp. "Asian carp [are] one of the world's most rampant invasive species," Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, proclaimed on the House floor, 35 hours into the d ..

"So be it." That was House Speaker John Boehner's cold answer when asked Tuesday about job losses that would come from his new Republican majority's plans to cut tens of billions of dollars in government spending this year.

Our leaders are so good at kicking the can that it's almost uncanny. "The way we've dealt with it for most of the last decade," White House budget director Jack Lew said Monday afternoon as he laid out President Obama's new budget, "is simply to put the expense on our national credit card and to ki ..

On his final day as White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs was preceded at the podium in the briefing room by a distinguished warm-up act. "Obviously, Gibbs's departure is not the biggest one today," said the president of the United States, who had minutes earlier delivered his statement bidding ..

Did Arianna Huffington just sell out her fellow progressives? In the literal sense, she undoubtedly has: The sale of Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million (including a large pile of cash going to Huffington herself) means this powerful liberal voice is formally joining the "corporate media" its w ..

The Chamber of Commerce's main hall, where President Obama gave his I-love-business speech on Monday, displays the flags of Columbus, Cortes and Ponce de Leon. Inscribed on the beams overhead are messages such as: Alexander the Great found India.

Don Rumsfeld is a dead-ender. Not in the meaning of the phrase as we understood it in 2003, back when he prematurely described the Iraqi insurgents as mere "pockets of dead-enders." No, Rumsfeld is a dead-ender under the revised definition, provided by the former defense secretary in his score-set ..

Rand Paul gave his maiden speech on the floor of the Senate Wednesday, and he immediately Whigged out. The Kentucky Republican was sent by the Tea Party to bring change to Washington -- and change he brought. His first address to his Senate colleagues came in the form of an extended denunciation of ..

After MSNBC let go Keith Olbermann last week, Glenn Beck couldn't resist celebrating. "Keith Olbermann is the biggest pain in the ass in the world," he judged. But Olbermann's departure really should give Beck pause: With political speech coming under new scrutiny, how much longer can Beck's brutal ..

The president was lofty. "We will move forward together, or not at all - for the challenges we face are bigger than party, and bigger than politics," he said in his State of the Union address.