That Paul Ryan's one-man crusade against poverty has gotten off to a laughably bad start should have surprised no one. After all, his various "roadmaps" and GOP budgets have called for giving massive tax cuts for the rich, slashing non-defense discretionary spending to its lowest share of the U.S. economy in generations, privatizing Social Security […]

Wyoming Republican legislator Troy Mader made headlines this weekend with news that he stands by his 1987 book, The Death Sentence of AIDS: Vital Information For You and Your Family's Health and Safety. Ironically, the very same year Mader called for a quarantine of AIDS victims, President Ronald Reagan publicly rejected that kind of dangerous […]

A hearing this week before the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging shows what happens when Republican obstruction of the Affordable Care Act moves from the ridiculous to the sublime. When Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) tried to demonize the single payer Canadian system by asking Dr. Danielle Martin how many people die on Canadian […]

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney must be laughing their asses off. President Obama has a budding constitutional crisis on his hands, with a leading Senate Democrat accusing Obama's CIA director of spying on Intelligence Committee staff. But at the heart of the issue is a still-classified, 6,000 page report said to catalog abuses and […]

President Obama this week took the unusual step of appearing with Zach Galifianakis on his online ersatz talk show, "Between Two Ferns." If Obama's goal was to encourage younger Americans to check out the Affordable Care Act, then the President can rightly declare "Mission Accomplished": the Funny or Die web site is now the number […]

Last month, Republican House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) introduced his proposal for a major overhaul of the U.S. tax code. But among Republican leaders in Congress, its arrival was about as welcome as an ill-timed fart. Hoping to focus the 2014 midterm elections on Obamacare instead of controversial new tax provisions, […]

Bloomberg News this week offered the state of Washington as a powerful rebuttal to those who claim hiking the minimum wage would kill jobs. Washington, it turns out, has had the nation's highest minimum wage since 1998 and over the past 15 years enjoyed annual job growth well above the national average. New Jersey, too, […]

In the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the conservative echo chamber chants in unison, President Obama has been "weak" and "feckless" and is wearing "mom jeans," which "invites aggression." For the likes of Lindsey Graham, Sarah Palin and most of all John McCain, those are pretty shameless statements to make. After all, when […]

Proving once again that politics no longer ends at the water's edge, Republican leaders and many in the media have been lambasting President Obama's response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While the Washington Post editorial board charged that Obama's foreign policy is "based on fantasy," Senator John McCain and his Mini-Me Lindsey Graham (R-SC) […]

This week brought news of a vitally important medical development for millions of future parents. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that a new fetal DNA test is far more accurate and much less risky than current methods at identifying--and ruling out--serious genetic disorders including Down syndrome and Trisomy 18. […]