Judging by the stories dominating the domestic news, the past couple of weeks have not been kind to that 47 percent of Americans Mitt Romney mocked as takers, freeloaders and self-proclaimed victims. While the Washington Post profiled a Rhode Island town in which a third of the residents are dependent on food stamps, former SNAP […]

As the nation teetered on the edge of the so-called "fiscal cliff" in late 2012, Republican leaders warned that higher taxes for the rich would crush "job creators" and derail the U.S. economic recovery. But according to a new survey, a majority of those earning over $500,000 a year report that the new higher rates […]

Perhaps the greatest myth in the Republican pantheon is the claim that "tax cuts pay for themselves." Sadly, that article of supply-side faith--that tax cuts fuel economic growth so explosive that federal revenue exceeds what otherwise would have been collected--has been painfully debunked by decades of history. Unfortunately, as part of budget deal just completed […]

The White House marked the third anniversary of the Affordable Care Act with numbers highlighting its early impact. Over six million seniors have saved $6.1 billion on prescription drugs, while 3.1 million young Americans under age 26 have gained health insurance on their parents' policies. All told, 71 million people have received free preventive services […]

America's soul-searching to mark the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq went pretty much according to script. While many of its liberal supporters offered their mea culpas for having been so catastrophically mistaken, the Bush administration's architects of the war doubled-down on their epic failure. (Meanwhile, some of their biggest cheerleaders lamented only […]

This week's tenth anniversary of the catastrophic U.S. invasion of Iraq produced perhaps the most bizarre post-mortem in in recent history. While liberal supporters of the war like Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait lined up to apologize for their error, right-wing cheerleaders like Peggy Noonan and Ross Douthat lamented only that President Bush's calamitous conflict […]

Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann marked the third anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act by urging her colleagues to repeal Obamacare "before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens." Of course, as the likes of Rep. Virginia Foxx (who similarly declared the ACA would "put seniors in a position of being […]

This week, House Speaker John Boehner and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan made two important if largely overlooked admissions regarding the U.S. national debt. While Boehner told ABC News that "we have no immediate debt crisis," Ryan similarly acknowledged to CBS News, "We do not have a debt crisis right now." That is indisputably […]

As Pope Francis starts his papacy, polls show that American Catholics overwhelmingly believe the issue of clergy sex abuse must be his number one priority. As a Pew Research survey two weeks ago showed, while that crisis tops the list for 34 percent, neither abortion (3 percent) or contraception (2 percent) or any other issue […]

Ten years later, there is little question that the Iraq war was a disaster for the United States and its people. Over 4,400 Americans died and another 30,000 were wounded in the conflict. While U.S. forces were left to "muddle through" in Afghanistan, America's Mesopotamia misadventure significantly strengthened Iran's influence in the region. All told, […]