The national debt of the United States tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under George W. Bush. Bush and the GOP Congress cut taxes during wartime, a first in modern American history. During his presidency, Republicans voted seven times to increase the debt ceiling. As Utah Senator Orrin Hatch in 2009 described Republican orthodoxy […]

In October 2001, President Bush's Attorney General John Ashcroft reversed 35 years of White House practice regarding Freedom of Information Act requests. For the first time since the passage of the Act, disclosure became the exception to the rule. As Dick Cheney's secret energy task force, 22 million "missing" Bush administration emails and Karl Rove's […]

On Wednesday, Sarah Palin made what history will soon record as the shortest-lived promise in American political history. Last night, Palin pledged to Fox News colleague Greta Van Susteren, "I'm through whining about a liberal press." Of course, when the half-term governor claimed, "it doesn't do any good to whine about it," she knows what […]

A year after President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, comically dire Republican predictions of an "Armageddon" which will "ruin our country" and mean "a lot of people are going to die" have not come to pass. Of course, that didn't stop Mitt Romney from marking the anniversary by pretending he never supported […]

And now for today's quiz. You are a member of Congress. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) tells you that as a percentage of American gross domestic product, total taxes in the U.S. are at their lowest level since 1950. The nation is fighting two wars (and now, arguably a third), conflicts which were not only […]

With her visit to Israel, Sarah Palin is going for a Republican twofer. Hoping to burnish her non-existent foreign policy credentials, Palin is simultaneously making what after going to Iowa and New Hampshire may be the most important pilgrimage for any aspiring GOP White House hopeful. But while her trip may win her some new […]

Just in the time for this week's one year anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, a new study by the Commonwealth Fund revealed that the new health care reform law's full implementation can't come soon enough. Since the start of the recession, almost 60% of Americans who lost a job and their […]

This week, two members of Congress offered new plans to overhaul the U.S. tax code. One proposes cutting the top tax rate for the wealthiest Americans by 10% and draining the U.S. Treasury by $2 trillion over the next decade. The other calls for higher rates for millionaires and billionaires to reduce the federal budget […]

Politics makes strange bedfellows, especially when the bed contains Newt Gingrich. Despite his belief that marriage is an institution between one man and three women in rapid succession, Newt has been warmly embraced by the Republicans' family values crowd. Now, the Baptist-turned-Catholic Gingrich is seeking the support of Pastor John Hagee, who once called Newt's […]

As any good free-marketeer will tell you, you've got to spend money to make money. Just not, Republicans insist, when it comes to collecting federal tax revenue. The GOP, after all, gutted the Internal Revenue Service in the late 1990's. And two weeks ago, House Republicans voted to cut $600 million from the agency this […]