As you wade through the often confusing political posturing over the impending expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the automatic budget "sequester," consider the following political dynamics that will determine the outcome.

1. President Obama's swagger. More than just a post-election glow, Obama has actual leverage over Republicans, and he is not going to waste it. Some pundits say that Obama's newly confident negotiating posture is the result of lessons learned during the first term wrestling over the debt limit and budgets: He could offer the farm for free and Republicans wouldn't accept it....  More»

It remains the archetypal tale about how far governments will go to protect their intelligence secrets, even at great cost to civilians. 

But even though people at the top of our intelligence establishment have told me this story, there is clear and convincing evidence that it's not true. Did Winston Churchill, nervous about the Germans discovering that U.K. cypher-crackers had broken their Enigma codes, fail to act on intelligence warning of a Luftwaffe raid against Coventry in November of 1940?

By that time, the small huts full of men and women and Bletchey Park in England were routinely breaking the cypher that encrypted traffic...  More»

The U.S Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear two gay marriage cases, including one in which federal benefits for a Massachusetts couple were denied under the Defense of Marriage Act, and another that overturned California's Proposition 8, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

The court said it will hear oral arguments in late March. 

The case that has attracted the most attention from advocates and opponents alike is Windsor v. United States. The plaintiff, Edith Windsor, was required to pay a significant federal tax on the estate that she had inherited from her partner, who died in 2009....  More»

Rarely has a small decline in the rate of an increase caused so much commotion. But the news, confirmed this past week, that obesity rates are not growing in certain cities, is an essential and necessary moment for public policy. The dirty little secret among obesity researchers is that many of them will tell you in private that no intervention short of the type of government intrusiveness that is intolerable for most Americans would actually have an impact on the problem. In that, they sound a lot like climate change researchers who despair that the damage done so far to the mechanisms of climate is beyond repair and that mitigation of future...  More»

There are two factors common to mass shootings in the United States, and a "vector," as the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg says, that links the two.

One is easy access to firearms capable of killing lots of people quickly. The second is the perpetrator's having a history with mental illness. 

On the first, significant minorities of all guns purchased or obtained in the United States are done without the benefit of an instant background check. This is not a loophole; it is a circus ring. The background checks are relatively limited in scope, as is normal....  More»

Doctors can't save every patient. But they must be able to tell the patient's family that they've done everything they can. Our politicians cannot say the same. Hollywood, by glorifying gun violence, can't say the same. If "guns don't kill people, people kill people," then make it harder for "people" to get guns. And make guns harder to be misused. 

In 11 years of living in Washington, D.C., I  knew one person who was mugged. In the six months since I've lived in LA, I've had a friend raped, two friends mugged at gunpoint, and another was the victim of a gay bashing attack....  More»

There are two reasons why House Republicans are playing petulant games with the Sandy aid bill. One is the public reason: FEMA still has enough emergency reserves through February, and there's plenty of time to pass a bill extending FEMA funding during the new session of Congress, which begins tomorrow. Okay.

The private reason, and the real reason, is that House Republicans were irate about the spending provisions in the "fiscal cliff" band-aid that was forced down their throat last night by Speaker John Boehner and probably indicated to him, at a late hour, that another spending bill was just not going to wash....  More»