During the debate over the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in early 2009, stimulus opponent Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed, "If the money were lent rather than just granted, states would, I think, spend it wisely and the states that didn't need it at all wouldn't take any." Now would be a […]

Judging by the headlines, Herman Cain's tenure as the frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination may be a brief one. After his supposed "jokes" about lethal electrified borders fences, Politico and the New York Times wondered if candidate Cain is even "serious" about the White House. Following his jaw-dropping pro-choice, anti-abortion declaration, the Greg […]

Herman Cain's now ubiquitous 9-9-9 tax plan went from the ridiculous to the sublime during Tuesday night's Republican presidential debate. While House Republicans and Grover Norquist had complained that the pizza mogul's proposals constituted a tax increase, some of Cain's fellow White House hopefuls actually expressed concern that it would be lower and middle income […]

Here's a handy cheat sheet for those trying to make sense of the protest movements of the past three years. Tea Party followers were mad about losing the 2008 election; Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are angry about losing the American Dream. But for defenders of the Tea Party, that unhappy band of especially ardent Republicans, […]

As the House GOP's probe into the $535 million lost loan to Solyndra heated up, the Obama White House had dutifully provided thousands of documents demanded by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Dutifully, that is, until Friday, when White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler announced that President Obama's Blackberry messages and other internal White House […]

On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner took Barack Obama to task for the President's claim that he had not yet seen a jobs plan from Republicans. "I want to make sure," Boehner lectured the President, "you have all the facts." As it turns out, this is one of those rare occasions where John Boehner is […]

For Republicans on the warpath against Warren Buffett, President Obama's willing poster child for raising taxes on wealthy Americans, this week has been a very bad one. First, new polling confirmed that Americans overwhelmingly support President Obama's jobs plan in general and his proposed gilded-class tax hikes in particular. (On that second point, Republican voters […]

If nothing else, Herman Cain is a man who is very sure of himself. This week, Cain once again declared God told him to run for President. But on the same day Senate Republicans continued their unprecedented obstructionism by blocking President Obama's jobs bill, Cain's own 9-9-9 plan finally started to come under scrutiny. As […]

These are tough times for Ronald Reagan's heirs, or at least some of them. After a generation of disastrous supply-side tax cuts helped produce mountains of debt, plummeting upper-income tax rates a decades-low federal tax burden and record income inequality, thousands of Occupy Wall Street protesters nationwide are finally drawing attention to the plight of […]

In their never-ending attempts to prevent upper-income tax increases at all costs, Republicans have bemoaned the mythical impacts on small business owners and supposed "job creators." But in pointing out that the Democrats' proposed millionaires' tax to fund the American Jobs Act would disproportionately hit the gilded-class in Blue State America, the right-wing's latest gambit […]