Matt O'Connor

The White House just announced its intention to reduce the Social Security payroll tax by 2 percent, from its current 6.2% to 4.2%. This coming from a president who has made a career out of demonizing the Bush tax cuts. (more)

The Obama administration’s ineptness has given birth to a new American pastime: wondering how much more preposterous Team Obama can possibly get. (more)

On Monday, the 9th Circuit ruled in favor of allowing eleven foreign governments to file friend of the court (amicus) briefs in the legal battle over Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law, SB 1070, which is almost identical to an existing federal law and was enacted to help Arizona combat its illegal immigration crisis. (more)

The country is fighting multiple wars, suffering from Depression-era levels of unemployment and drowning in $13.4 trillion of debt. So naturally, the Democrat-controlled Congress invited Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert to testify on immigration reform last Friday. (more)

The liberal apologetics of Bill Maher, the fourth-rate comedian in a third-rate time-slot, comes to us via The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington’s Grecian formula of liberal blogging and left-turn journalism.  The Huffington Post has become an interesting amalgamation of liberal senators, congressmen and administration officials writing liberal script. But it doesn’t end there. That liberal script is often juxtaposed with the political opinions of the Hollywood left -- people like Harry Shearer (voice of the Simpsons cartoon characters), Alec Baldwin, Mia Farrow and Nora Ephron (the screen writer who wrote the movies, When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle).  I guess her zany sis Amy Ephron was just too zany to include in the mix (several years ago, I attended a business meeting at Amy Ephron’s West L.A. home and um . . . zany is all I can say).  I guess even the Huffington Post has its limits. (more)

Last week, President Obama flew to Ohio to provide the country with more partisan rhetoric, but this time the president had one thing in mind -- well, actually two things.  The first was to provide a verbal shot in the arm of that old nugget of a political wedge: class warfare.  The second was to portray the Republican Minority Leader, John Boehner, as the personification of all that is bad with the country, despite the fact that the president and his party have been running the show for almost two years and most Americans have never even heard of Boehner. (more)

Earlier this week, President Obama strained to fill the seats of a community college auditorium located in one of Cleveland’s largest suburbs, leaving the White House scrambling to fill 75 seats an hour before the president’s scheduled appearance. (more)

For the past five days, my wife and I have been in Santa Barbara County, California, staying in an area close to Ronald Reagan's former ranch, Rancho del Cielo, which roughly translates to Sky's Ranch. While I did have my iPhone, spare cell phone and intrepid laptop among countless chargers and power cords, they remained idle.  Idle not by choice . . . but by rural circumstance. (more)

I have written extensively about the corruption inside the Obama administration and the inevitability that the “grown-ups” will eventually get to the bottom of the Obama administration’s hijinks.  The hallmark of the administration’s political bribery and graft is, of course, the so-called Obamacare legislation -- legislation that contains 2,841 pages, includes some 2,200 references to the new role of the Health and Human Services (HHS) czar, and creates 600 new authorities that CANNOT be challenged, 150 new bureaucracies and boards interposing between doctors and patients, and 17 new mandates governing insurance companies. (more)

Now that I am back on dry land, I am able to write about something that has been on my mind since last week, after watching a disaster of a TV show, a.k.a. The Charlie Rose Show.  The remote control was indeed working overtime late Thursday night in all of the seamless channel transitions between Letterman and Charlie Rose.  For last Thursday night I was on a quest: a quest to find TV comedy even if that meant finding it on the most unconventional of channels, PBS.   And wow, I sure struck gold Thursday night between CBS and PBS.  The "last channel" button on the remote is truly a fascinating feature to me ... forget the damn remote, just give me the "last channel" button ... but that wouldn't be very practical now would it? (more)

On Thursday the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced the federal budget deficit for 2010 will exceed $1.3 trillion. This is already on the heels of a 2009 budget deficit of $1.2 trillion and on top of a national debt of some $13.3 trillion. The word ‘trillion’ seems to have, almost overnight, crept into our standard economic parlance and by the looks of it is here to stay. And with the CBO’s forecast of more than $6 trillion in federal budget deficits accruing over the next nine years from 2010 to 2019, many are logically wondering if the United States has effectively crossed, or is fast approaching, a virtual economic point of no return — an economic Rubicon if you will. (more)