For Republicans, a funny thing happened on the way to privatizing Medicare. Hoping to transform the wildly popular, low-overhead government program for 46 million American seniors into a voucher system for purchasing private insurance, Paul Ryan and his GOP allies inadvertently made a strong case for the Affordable Care Act for everyone else. A little […]

CNBC host, National Review contributor and former Reagan adviser Lawrence Kudlow has long embodied the gin-and-tonic-sipping, anyone-for-tennis, let-them-eat-cake laissez faire Republican attitude towards the suffering of the American people. Even still, his jaw-dropping reaction to the devastation in Japan that "the human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we […]

In the late 1970's film Animal House, John Belushi's character Bluto famously rallies his fraternity brothers by proclaiming, "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?" Now, a latter-day Bluto may be running for President of the United States. Pandering to Republican voters in New Hampshire on Saturday, Tea Party darling Michele Bachmann comically […]

Terrified by bogus Republican claims of draconian Democratic cuts to Medicare, elderly voters propelled the GOP to an overwhelming victory last November. Voters 65 and over, the only age group to support John McCain in 2008, boosted their share of the turnout to 21% from 16% two years earlier. Nationwide, Republicans won seniors by a […]

The conservative commentariat is predictably apoplectic this morning about a New York Times story on the Middle East which claimed "Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China." While the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol protested, "Unfortunately for him and us, Barack Obama is president of […]

Republicans have seen the future and it's in Mississippi. On the same day Wisconsin Republicans turned to unprecedented and possibly illegal maneuvers to strip public workers of collective bargaining rights, the Michigan legislature blessed emergency powers for Governor Rick Snyder to terminate municipal contracts across the state. And while Idaho joined Tennessee in seeking to […]

As former IRA terror sympathizer turned anti-Muslim inquisitor Peter King prepares begins his Congressional hearings into Islamic radicalization, authorities have made an arrest in connection with January's backpack bomb plot in Spokane. While the identity and motivation of the suspect have yet to be revealed, the carnage narrowly avoided in Spokane could have added to […]

Call it the "Seriousness Test." Any so-called deficit hawk that refuses to countenance increasing federal taxes simply isn't serious. After all, as the CBO concluded in January, with tax revenues now below 15%, "levels that low have not been seen since 1950." The two-year tax cut compromise in December made matters worse, adding $400 billion […]

Ten years ago, George W. Bush was sworn in as America's first MBA President. Now, Mitt Romney wants to be the second. Two years after President Bush completed the worst economic record since Herbert Hoover, Romney the perpetual White House hopeful declared, "I spent my career in the private sector. I know how jobs are […]

2011 is becoming a kind of political Rorschach Test; which of its myriad anniversaries you celebrate most says a lot about who you are and what you believe. While JFK's swearing-in 50 years ago conjures up what might have been, Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday commemorates what never was. And the 150th anniversary of the birth […]