The annual Conservative Political Action Conference, held in mid-March, is four days of shrill, angry, conservative rants. Christopher Preble was this year’s exception. As senior defense analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, Preble is a persistent critic of defense spending that consistently amounts to almost 5 percent of GDP. On the day the president releases […]

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After President Barack Obama called on Congress to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9, it fell on U.S. Senator Marco Rubio to make the conservative case against it. Alas, for a Republican Party trying to reinvent itself for a brave new 21st-century world, all he offered were the same old […]

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Winslow Wheeler described the $54 billion scheduled to be cut from defense spending by sequester as “puny.” The former congressional budget analyst who works for the Project on Government Oversight was not defending the cut. He was putting it in context. More than 45 percent of all money spent on defense by all nations last […]

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When Oregon governor John Kitzhaber needs to get away from the stresses of work, he heads to the Rogue River and rafts the great whitewater rapids that churn through its canyons. In calmer waters, he fly-fishes. “It’s my church,” the 65-year-old politician explains. “You’re in the moment. Ospreys, eagles, bears. It’s the most spiritual place […]

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The biggest loser in the 2012 elections, perhaps a bigger loser than Mitt Romney, who does not have a future in politics, was former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove, who remarkably still does. Almost three years ago, Rove announced that he was going to raise enough money to reshape the political landscape. He did […]

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