Just in the time for this week's one year anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, a new study by the Commonwealth Fund revealed that the new health care reform law's full implementation can't come soon enough. Since the start of the recession, almost 60% of Americans who lost a job and their […]

This week, two members of Congress offered new plans to overhaul the U.S. tax code. One proposes cutting the top tax rate for the wealthiest Americans by 10% and draining the U.S. Treasury by $2 trillion over the next decade. The other calls for higher rates for millionaires and billionaires to reduce the federal budget […]

Politics makes strange bedfellows, especially when the bed contains Newt Gingrich. Despite his belief that marriage is an institution between one man and three women in rapid succession, Newt has been warmly embraced by the Republicans' family values crowd. Now, the Baptist-turned-Catholic Gingrich is seeking the support of Pastor John Hagee, who once called Newt's […]

As any good free-marketeer will tell you, you've got to spend money to make money. Just not, Republicans insist, when it comes to collecting federal tax revenue. The GOP, after all, gutted the Internal Revenue Service in the late 1990's. And two weeks ago, House Republicans voted to cut $600 million from the agency this […]

For Republicans, a funny thing happened on the way to privatizing Medicare. Hoping to transform the wildly popular, low-overhead government program for 46 million American seniors into a voucher system for purchasing private insurance, Paul Ryan and his GOP allies inadvertently made a strong case for the Affordable Care Act for everyone else. A little […]

CNBC host, National Review contributor and former Reagan adviser Lawrence Kudlow has long embodied the gin-and-tonic-sipping, anyone-for-tennis, let-them-eat-cake laissez faire Republican attitude towards the suffering of the American people. Even still, his jaw-dropping reaction to the devastation in Japan that "the human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we […]

In the late 1970's film Animal House, John Belushi's character Bluto famously rallies his fraternity brothers by proclaiming, "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?" Now, a latter-day Bluto may be running for President of the United States. Pandering to Republican voters in New Hampshire on Saturday, Tea Party darling Michele Bachmann comically […]

Terrified by bogus Republican claims of draconian Democratic cuts to Medicare, elderly voters propelled the GOP to an overwhelming victory last November. Voters 65 and over, the only age group to support John McCain in 2008, boosted their share of the turnout to 21% from 16% two years earlier. Nationwide, Republicans won seniors by a […]

The conservative commentariat is predictably apoplectic this morning about a New York Times story on the Middle East which claimed "Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China." While the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol protested, "Unfortunately for him and us, Barack Obama is president of […]

Republicans have seen the future and it's in Mississippi. On the same day Wisconsin Republicans turned to unprecedented and possibly illegal maneuvers to strip public workers of collective bargaining rights, the Michigan legislature blessed emergency powers for Governor Rick Snyder to terminate municipal contracts across the state. And while Idaho joined Tennessee in seeking to […]