Back in 2007, Bush press secretary Dana Perino famously admitted her total ignorance of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Now as they ratchet up their rhetoric towards Iran, Perino's conservative allies seem to have forgotten the lessons of that critical Cold War confrontation. Then as now, many voices across the political spectrum proclaimed that war […]

Last year, GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney unveiled a plan to extend the Bush tax cuts, eliminate the estate tax and slash corporate taxes. But that proposal, one which would deliver 60 percent of its benefits to the top one percent of taxpayers while draining $6.6 trillion from the U.S. Treasury over ten years, was blasted […]

With their presidential primary process devolving into a farce, Republicans are turning to rising gas prices to bludgeon President Obama. While Newt Gingrich thundered that "gasoline prices are unacceptable," Rick Santorum charged that "We need a president who is on the side of affordable energy." Sadly for the GOP messengers, the data suggest that something […]

As a quick glance at January's presidential fundraising numbers confirms, the unlimited cash flowing into SuperPACs is fundamentally distorting the 2012 election. The millions flowing into conservative SuperPAC coffers are not only far outpacing the GOP candidates' own campaigns, but continuing to overwhelm their Democratic counterparts. But for the likes of Charles and David Koch, […]

For the perpetual tax-cutters of the Republican Party, last week's surrender on the payroll tax cut extension for 160 million working Americans was an especially damaging one. While tried if untrue GOP talking points that "tax cuts pay for themselves" and "never need to be offset" were thoroughly debunked, new polling shows the large Republican […]

For years, conservatives have warned that rapidly rising health care costs require the United States to repeal the Affordable Care Act, gut Medicaid and privatize Medicare. Now, the American Enterprise Institute cheerfully insists, the recent slowdown in that rate of the growth argues for precisely the same Republican policies. But far from happily revealing new […]

As the Republican Party waged its all-out attack in 2010 to preserve the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, the GOP's number two man in the Senate provided the talking point to help sell the $70 billion annual giveaway to America's rich. "You should never," Arizona's Jon Kyl declared, "have to offset the cost of […]

In a new Gallup poll released Wednesday, small business owners revealed that the lack of need for new employees (76 percent), worries over revenue (71 percent) and concern about the state of the U.S. economy (66 percent) were the top three reasons for not hiring new workers. But you'd never know that if you just […]

On Monday, House Republican leaders announced they would support the extension of the payroll tax cut without a corresponding "offset" in other federal spending. While that new approach is designed to tie Democrats' hands on passage of continued unemployment benefits and the so-called Medicare "doc fix," Speaker Boehner's switch represents a return to a supposedly […]

Among the predictable Republican reactions to the President's proposed 2013 budget is the refrain that "Obama has failed to keep a 2009 promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term." Just days after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told a CPAC audience that President Obama "said he'd cut the […]