The American social safety net is back in the news, and not just because Mitt Romney acknowledged, "I'm not concerned about the very poor." This week, the libertarian Mercatus Center at George Mason University revealed that a third of Americans now receive Medicaid, food stamps or other means-based government assistance, a number that climbs to […]

A new study this week from the Commonwealth Fund confirmed the shocking gap between lower and higher income Americans when it comes to health insurance coverage. While only 12 percent of families making $89,400 a year (or four times the federal poverty rate for a family of four) was uninsured at some point last year, […]

This week, the Virginia House of Delegates passed a "Tebow bill" allowing home-schooled children to participate in sports and other activities at public schools. For the Republican presidential candidates, the Tebow bill is a two-fer that lets them score points with evangelical voters while riding the wave of the religious right's biggest cultural icon in […]

Back in 1992, President George H.W. Bush tried to counter to the growing perception that he was an aloof, out-of touch patrician utterly detached from the economic struggles of the American people. But his laughably awkward pronouncement to voters, "Message: I care," only served to confirm their suspicions. Now twenty years later, Bush 41's empathy-challenged […]

For decades, the conservative Heritage Foundation has provided a thin academic veneer to the Republican project of dismantling the post-New Deal social safety net. Last year, for example, Rep. Paul Ryan tried to sell his draconian budget plan by citing a comically flawed Heritage analysis declaring the GOP scheme would magically reduce unemployment to an […]

That GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney announced his support for the Susan G. Komen Foundation's aborted effort to end funding for Planned Parenthood comes as no surprise. After all, defunding the group that each year provides health care and reproductive services for hundreds of thousands of American women is now a litmus test for the 2012 […]

In the early 1980's, Reagan administration officials and some defense analysts fretted that the expanding Soviet arsenal of nuclear missiles gave the USSR a "window of opportunity" to launch a devastating "first-strike" against the United States. But in a famous article titled, "Windows of Opportunity: Do States Jump Through Them?" Professor Richard Ned Lebow questioned […]

Appearing on CNN Sunday, Romney endorser and VP wannabe Bob McDonnell gave his GOP credit for the nation's improving economic outlook. "Look, I'm glad the economy is starting to recover," the Virginia Governor declared, "but I think it's because of what Republican governors are doing in their states, not because of the president." Of course, […]

Federal Election Commission filings released this week showed that conservatives groups are amassing an ocean of cash for the 2012 presidential campaign. Thanks to the likes of the Koch brothers, the Walton clan and other of the usual suspects on the right, in 2011 conservative SuperPAC's outraised their liberal counterparts by more than seven to […]

Friday's promising employment report showing that the U.S. added 243,000 jobs in January is just the latest sign of a slowly improving American economy. But that good news for the American people is bad news for the "Hope America Fails" crowd of the Republican Party. After all, GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney has been falsely […]