His inauguration just days away, President-elect Barack Obama is facing friendly fire over his economic stimulus plan. With today's grim news that unemployment skyrocketed to 7.2% in December came rumblings of discontent from economist Paul Krugman, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a bevy of Democratic Senators worried that Obama's proposed recovery package is too timid […]

Just days after Bristol Palin officially became the poster child for her mother's failed abstinence-only sex education policy, a new report from the CDC revealed that in 2006 Alaska experienced the nation's fastest growing teen birth rate. While Mississippi suddenly surpassed Texas to earn the dubious leadership distinction, it comes as no surprise that the […]

In a Newsweek exclusive three week ago, former Justice Department official Thomas Tamm revealed his role in helping the New York Times make public President Bush's program of illegal domestic surveillance. Now Salon's Glenn Greenwald has details on the DOJ's efforts to punish the whistleblower. And as it turns out (and as I suggested back […]

Beaten and battered, the Republican Party long ago was reduced to an irony-producing machine. But for sheer productivity, Monday's hypocrisy generation by leading lights of the conservative movement was impressive. In the span of 24 hours, would-be RNC chairman and distributor of "Barack the Magic Negro" Chip Saltsman announced his party needed to improve its […]

On Monday, the Scribner division of publishing giant Simon & Schuster announced it had signed a book deal with First Lady Laura Bush. While her husband and his former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have each so far failed to secure publishers for their respective memoirs, Laura Bush's "intimate account" of her eight years in the […]

While the controversy over would-be RNC chairman Chip Saltsman's distribution of a CD featuring a song titled "Barack the Magic Negro" continues, the transformation of the GOP into a Southern rump party appears to be virtually complete. After four decades in which race-baiting became a central Republican electoral strategy, Saltsman's gambit is finding both quiet […]

For Ohio State football fans, the arrival of the New Year's bowl season can't help but produce fear and loathing. After all, the Buckeyes not only got crushed in the past two BCS title games, but on Monday face a heavily favored Texas team many believe should be playing for the national championship. Which is […]

10 days ago, the Obama transition team notified about 90 of the Pentagon's 250 Bush political appointees that their services would no longer be needed after Inauguration Day. But despite DoD spokesman Geoff Morrell's declaration that holdover Republican Defense Secretary Robert Gates was "absolutely satisfied" with way the transition was being handled, one loyal Bushie […]