On Friday, Medicare's board of trustees announced that the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 has added eight years of solvency to the health care program serving 46 million American seniors. That news capped a week of political irony involving Medicare. After freshmen House Republicans complained to President Obama about the backlash over their vote […]

The presence of Grammy-winning rapper Common at a White House poetry event last night brought frothing-at-the-mouth conservatives to brink of broken blood vessels. While Fox News ran special segments on "The Invitation," employee Sarah Palin complained, "It's just so lacking of class and decency and all that's good about America." Of course, the right-wing chattering […]

If you were wondering what impact the Paul Ryan budget passed last month by all but four House Republicans will have on American health care, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Urban Institute have your answer. If enacted, the GOP repeal of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) combined with the conversion of Medicaid into […]

In the least surprising political development in recent years, the leading lights of the Bush administration fanned out across Americans' TV screens to give their old boss credit for the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Ex-chief of staff Andy Card, who famously dressed up George W. Bush in a flight suit to announce "Mission Accomplished" […]

While all eyes this week were focused on the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, back in Washington Vice President Biden met with Democratic and Republican budget negotiators in search of a compromise to reduce the U.S. national debt. As it turns out, the two events are related. Because almost 10 years after President […]

As their massive mobilization in response to the killing of Osama Bin Laden shows, nobody circles the wagons like the Republican Party. And that goes double for Team Bush. Confronting President Obama's success where George W. Bush failed to deliver Bin Laden either dead or alive, torture architect John Yoo and former Attorney General Michael […]

This week, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) admitted that the Republican effort to repeal the 2010 health care law is "dead." But while all eyes are now focused on the lawsuit by 26 states to overturn the law and its individual insurance mandate, hundreds of thousands of Americans are already getting […]

Back in 2008, Republicans for a fleeting moment held high hopes of making inroads into the monolithic Democratic voting block that is Jewish Americans. Fleeting, it turned out, in no small measure due to the selection of Sarah Palin as the GOP VP choice. Now, the leading lights of the Republican Party are once again […]

In a nationally televised address to the American people on March 4, 1987, President Ronald Reagan admitted he had traded arms for hostages in the Iran-Contra scandal and declared, "This happened on my watch." Sadly, that may have been the last time a Republican leader took ownership of a disaster by simply acknowledging the calendar. […]

The only thing more predictable than Americans' jubilation over the killing of Osama Bin Laden is the Republican campaign to give George W. Bush credit for it. Sadly for the right-wing propaganda machine, as Stephen Colbert warned President Bush five years ago, "reality has a well-known liberal bias." Bush, after all, shrugged off Bin Laden's […]