Looking back this week at his budget-busting windfall for the wealthy, George W. Bush lamented, "I wish they weren't called the Bush tax cuts." With good reason. After all, the first modern president to cut taxes during war-time, Bush's gravy train for the gilded-class helped double the national debt and produce record income inequality even […]

In the history book of Democratic politics, the chapter titled "Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory" is a long one. Years from now, CNN regular and Democratic consultant Hilary Rosen may be prominently featured in it. After all, she may have accomplished the virtually impossible: making Mr. and Mrs. Romney seem sympathetic. Twenty years […]

Now for a thought experiment. Suppose that I told you I had a plan which over the next decade would slash $6 trillion from the national debt of the United States. Imagine further that I promised I would achieve those savings just by closing some tax loopholes and deductions, so-called tax expenditures that all told […]

With its general election opponent now certain, the Obama campaign this week has been highlighting the Buffett Rule, the Democratic proposal for those earning over a million dollars a year to pay a minimum 30 percent tax. And with good reason. After all, having paid only 13.9 percent to Uncle Sam on $45 million in […]

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a glowing story of the 36-year relationship between GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney and his old Boston Consulting Group colleague turned two-time Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. But if theirs is a "mandatory friendship" which conveniently helps Romney both woo the GOP's evangelical base and bludgeon President Obama, […]

Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan has become the perfect Republican Easter story. Each spring, Ryan reemerges with a new version of his draconian "Roadmap for America's Future." Despite being crucified each time by most Democrats, much of the press and even some members of his own party, Ryan nevertheless rises again, earning more followers (like Mitt […]

For years, the Bush torture team and its ardent supporters have depended on what might be called the Seinfeld defense of its regime of detainee interrogation: it's not a lie, if you believe it. But with the release of this week Philip Zelikow's 2006 memo warning the Bush administration about its illegal detainee interrogation techniques, […]

"Conservative commentators." "Commerce." "New Deal." Only if you pretend Barack Obama never uttered those three phases this week can you manufacture a controversy in which the President supposedly questioned the authority of the Supreme Court to overturn the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA). But in the hands of his Republican opponents and a lazy and […]

As recent polling shows, Mitt Romney has a very large problem with women voters. So, it comes as no surprise that the Romney camp has deployed an army of women surrogates including South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte to tout his wife Ann as a "secret bullet" and "secret weapon" to […]

On Monday, President Obama unsurprisingly expressed confidence that the Supreme Court would uphold the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Even less remarkable, Obama rightly reminded Americans that "conservative commentators" have for year said "the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint -- that an unelected group of people would […]