As prepared for delivery by the president (provided the president is not named Donald Trump), February 19, 2018. My fellow Americans, I have requested this time tonight to speak to you regarding a matter of the greatest national urgency. As your commander in chief, I have no greater responsibility and no more solemn obligation than […]

Health industry stocks plunged on Tuesday with word that corporate powerhouses Amazon, J.P. Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway were partnering to create a new, nonprofit company to "focus on technological solutions to provide coverage for U.S. employees at a lower cost." But if Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Jamie Dimon were less than clear about precisely […]

Less than a week into the new year, the Trump administration kicked off 2018 with one of the most cynical and craven acts of political favoritism in recent American history. On January 4, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke unveiled the Draft Five Year Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program. That massive gift to Donald […]

If nothing else, Republicans over the past few weeks have delivered an important civics lesson to the American people in general--and Democrats in particular. Facing a growing mountain of irrefutable evidence that the incompetent, out-of-his-depth GOP president of the United States has been enmeshed in a network of ties to Russian business and government interests […]

"If you had gone into a chemical laboratory to concoct a politician whose background and manner would sound liberal alarms," Washington Free Beacon editor-in-chief and Bill Kristol son-in-law Matthew Continetti pondered in 2009, "You probably would have come up with someone like Sarah Palin." While the Quitta from Wasilla made Continetti's theory laughable at the […]

As the new year begins, press, pundits and politicians alike are saying 2018 could be the year of the "blue wave." Led by a historically unpopular first-year president and still smarting from embarrassing losses in Virginia and Alabama, many Republicans are talking out loud about "bloodbath" in next November's midterm elections. While Democrats are fielding […]

As 2017 draws to a close, President Donald Trump and his amen corner are bragging about his "year of solid policy accomplishments." Despite approval ratings only slightly higher than the Ebola virus, Trump took to Twitter to soak up praise from Maria Bartiromo, who gushed that "Year One has been excellent from an economic standpoint." […]

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and that's our target market." That perversion of Abraham Lincoln's timeless adage might as well be the slogan of the modern Republican Party, especially when the topic is taxes. After all, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Joint Committee on Taxation, (JCT), the Wharton […]

Donald Trump and his Republican allies have two definitions of the term, "golden showers." The first concerns a notorious--and as-yet unsubstantiated--claim from the so-called Russian dossier: Decorum prohibits elaborating further here. The second meaning of the term, however, describes any public policy--usually involving taxes--which overwhelmingly delivers its benefits to the very richest people in America. […]

With apologies to Benjamin Disraeli, there are three kinds of lies Republicans are telling about their tax plan: lies, damned lies, and f**king lies. Constraints of space and time preclude listing them all, but here is a handful of the GOP's most farfetched falsehoods. For example, earlier this month House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) repeatedly […]