While most eyes this week were on the carnage in Las Vegas, the catastrophe in Puerto Rico, or the dangerous provocations towards Pyongyang and Tehran, the Trump administration was hard at work deconstructing the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. While that bulwark of American civil rights promises "due process of law" and "equal […]

Donald Trump lost the 2016 presidential popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million ballots. But by another seemingly meaningless measure, Trump got clobbered 38 to 0. That lopsided score represents the number of years of tax returns Democrat Clinton and Republican Trump respectively released to the American public. But Trump's unprecedented opacity--for the […]

Next week, Congressional Republicans will vote on the Graham-Cassidy bill supposedly designed to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. Shockingly, they will do so without a score from Capitol Hill's nonpartisan scorekeeper, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). As the office led by the GOP's hand-picked director Keith Hall warned last Monday, "CBO will not be able to […]

Even as the U.S. Census reported that the percentage of Americans lacking health insurance dropped to a new record low of 8.8 percent, the past week was nevertheless a big one for health care reform proposals in Washington. Sen. Bernie Sanders, backed by 15 of his Democratic colleagues, unveiled his "Medicare for All" bill providing […]

In recent years, "red state socialism" has become the hallmark of American federalism. That is, even as supposed GOP budget hawks loudly (and wrongly) decry "out of control" spending by Uncle Sam, less well-off Republican-controlled states generally benefit from a one-way flow of federal tax dollars made possible by wealthier blue states usually dominated by […]

The neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville has spurred calls around the nation for the removal of public statues, monuments and symbols venerating white supremacy and the "lost cause" of the Confederacy. Those sites include Capitol Hill, where eight statues of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Alexander Stephens and five other traitors to the United States were […]

Republican leaders in Congress may not be ready to abandon Donald Trump, but there's little doubt about their growing discomfort with the president of the United States. Supposedly shocked by Trump's coddling of white supremacists in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker questioned Trump's ability to either the "demonstrate […]

In the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, Republicans were shocked--SHOCKED--to find that President Trump was providing air cover for neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Declaring "there can be no moral ambiguity," House Speaker Paul Ryan tweeted, "White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for." Mitt Romney, the GOP's […]

Defending the indefensible on Tuesday, President Donald Trump traveled back in time to deploy the "both sides do it" talking point to explain the Civil War. Providing air cover for white supremacists, Trump declared "you had some very fine people on both sides," apparently including "many of those people were there to protest the taking […]

What if the South had won the Civil War? Hardly a new question, and it's doubtless one of the most common counterfactual thought exercises in American history. It's also already been recently asked--though not answered seriously--in the 2004 mockumentary, CSA: The Confederate States of America. Nevertheless, HBO is turning to some of the folks who […]