When he was director of central intelligence, Leon Panetta earned a reputation as an energetic advocate for his agency. When he replaced Robert Gates at the Pentagon, it was reasonable to hope that Panetta would continue to play the role of a senior statesman.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

John Kerry is right that there was a mysterious 13th member at the table who caused the supercommittee to fail. But it wasn’t Norquist. It was Occupy Wall Street.

‘A prolonged and solemn farce,” Churchill’s description of 1930s disarmament talks, applies even more accurately to the annual round of UN climate talks, which just wrapped up their 17th year of world-saving negotiations in Durban, South Africa, with another 11th-hour “breakthrough” that amounts only to agreeing to meet again next year and repeat the farce.

The Obama budget is already being ripped by Republicans as a political document and by deficit hawks for its failure to attack the debt problem vigorously enough. But in context, it is worth a brief comparison to the Romney and Santorum visions.

Conservatives should not look at the GOP's new "Pledge to America" as the sum total of the Republican agenda, but as the opening bid.

This is House budget week, and with it comes the strong possibility that Republican leaders will bow to the demands of their die-hards and try to alter the deal reached in the Budget Control Act last year that ended the impasse on the debt limit and set caps on discretionary domestic and defense spending.

Come November, it is very unlikely that conservative voters will stay home. So, barring a truly fringe GOP nominee, they will vote against Obama no matter what. Already, the conversation on the right is moving toward the all-important question of "electability."