As Ronald Reagan's budget chief almost thirty years ago, a frustrated David Stockman famously lamented that when it comes to spending discipline, "there are no real conservatives in Congress." Now, three decades after he concluded "the supply-siders have gone too far," Stockman called the Republican demand for another $700 billion tax cut windfall for the […]

Everything you need to know about the difference between the governing style of Republicans and Democrats is on display in the battles over the passage and expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Despite large Congressional majorities and broad public support for ending as promised the budget-busting Bush windfall for the wealthy, President Obama and squeamish […]

For most of the 1990's, the top income earners in the United States paid a 39.6% tax rate during a time which produced a booming economy for them - and pretty much everyone else. Now, after the Bush tax cut windfall for the wealthy produced a decade of falling household incomes, skyrocketing deficits and record […]

Karl Marx famously said that historical events occur twice: first as tragedy, then as farce. But when it comes to his debt commission, President Obama is in danger of standing that old chestnut on its head. Unlike President George H.W. Bush's almost comic dismissal of the recommendations of a Congressional debt panel in 1989, Obama […]

On Wednesday, New York Rep. Peter King became just the latest Republican to conclude there ought to be a prize for torture. Defending George W. Bush's admission this week that he authorized waterboarding of terror detainees, King insisted the former president "should get a medal." If that sounds familiar, it should. In 2007, Bush's failed […]

Emboldened by their midterm victories, the GOP and its amen corner have stepped up their war against the Affordable Care Act. Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell promised to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the multistate lawsuit challenging its constitutionality. In Texas, Republicans are threatening to withdraw from Medicaid, a move which would swell the […]

Pushing his new memoir in an interview with NBC's Matt Lauer which aired Monday, George W. Bush addressed one of the defining episodes of his presidency. Finding no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush claimed, left him feeling "sickened." But in 2004, as you may recall, President Bush found his Iraqi WMD fiasco side-splittingly […]

"Reagan proved," Vice President Dick Cheney famously said in 2002, "deficits don't matter." Not, that is, when a Republican is sitting in the White House. After all, Republicans were silent as the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under George W. Bush. As it turns out, the same hypocrisy of the GOP's […]

The only thing worse than a war criminal is an unrepentant one. Sadly, that's the self-portrait George W. Bush will present this week with the release of his new memoir, Decision Points. As his new book apparently makes quite clear, Bush has no regrets about his regime of detainee torture that broke U.S. law, violated […]

This week, Republicans swept to power by promising to cut, in the words of Indiana's Mike Pence, "runaway federal spending." But when it comes to putting taxpayers' money where their mouths are, Pence, incoming Speaker John Boehner, future Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Michele Bachmann and much of the cowardly GOP's top-brass refuse to say what […]