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... and I don't know what the right size of the bill should be," said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, ...

said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "Policymakers simply must put together a plan to assure the nation's ...

The problem in Israel, said former Israeli adviser Daniel Levy, is that the nation's voters are still largely driven by fear, whereas Obama's election was a ...

With his national security team in place, President-elect Barack Obama's foreign policy principals will be immediately struck by how many complex and expensive challenges they will face. Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine and Russia, will all require enormous energy, all the tools in our foreign policy toolbox, and will all take years to resolve, if they can be resolved. None of these crises will allow President Obama to signal swiftly to the world the kind of changes he proposes in American foreign policy. In contrast,

Obama, meanwhile, has been outspending McCain by so much that he's spent comparable amounts to McCain on negative advertising even while spending more on positive ads.

Obama also said he's proposed cuts to match new spending he wants. However, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Obama's plans would add a net $281 billion to the deficit.

Both candidates were somewhat misleading in talking about their opponents' health-care plans. LINK

"Does either candidate have a realistic budget plan? Absolutely not," Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan research group...

"You can't say either candidate is coming up with a credible plan," MacGuineas said. LINK

McCain has ruled out any new Social Security taxes, while Obama has expressed interest in boosting the cap by 2 percentage points to 4 percentage points for workers earning more than $250,000. The current 12.4 percent payroll tax that goes into Social Security is split between employer and employee.

The usual Washington way of making such unpopular changes is to have a bipartisan commission make recommendations, a method used successfully in 1983. The result raised Social Security taxes and trimmed benefits, and the system's solvency was significantly strengthened.

Many analysts… more

“What’s happening on Wall Street occurs alongside a very substantial slow-moving crisis for American families,” said Jacob Hacker, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “More and more financial responsibility and risk have moved from the broad shoulders of government and corporations onto the backs of American workers and their families.” LINK

If you live in Galveston, Texas, Hurricane Ike will be remembered for its destruction. But history may remember the ninth named storm of the 2008 season for swinging the 2008 presidential campaign.

That's because Ike devastated a little island off Florida named Cuba. In fact, Cuba sustained damage from four hurricanes: Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike. Gustav hit the Western end of Cuba as a Category 4 storm. Ike entered the east of Cuba as a strong Category 3 then shredded the full length of the island for three days.… more

This much is clear: Lieberman, who long ago broke with Democrats on the Iraq war but has a solid party-line voting record on nearly everything else, is playing such a key role in McCain's White House bid that a VP bid is possible.

Political analyst Stuart Rothenberg called Lieberman a "near perfect pick." Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a centrist public-policy group, said such a move would be "game changing." LINK