In January, the new Hispanic Leadership Network is hosting a forum to showcase the 2012 Republican presidential field. But while the event is well funded by the conservative American Action Network, it is lacking for one thing: the GOP White House hopefuls themselves. If this slap in the face of America's fastest growing voting block […]

If nothing else, Sarah Palin is an irony producing machine. Just last week, the propagator-in-chief of the 2009 death panels "Lie of the Year" endorsed Medicare rationing. Now, the ironies are double in her new get-tough-on-Iran op-ed. After all, she not only cites leaked diplomatic cables published by the "treasonous" Australian, Julian Assange. Worse still, […]

This week's release of the 2010 U.S. Census produced gloating from conservatives ecstatic about new Congressional seats in Republican, low-tax states. But as even as they celebrate their added political clout, GOP cheerleaders remain predictably silent about another recent study. The UnitedHealth Foundation's "America's Health Rankings" became just the latest analysis to show that health […]

Writing in Salon today, Rick Perlstein examines "what Haley Barbour's amnesia tells us" about Southern conservatives' historical revisionism. But largely lost in the imbroglio over Barbour's literal white-washing of the Jim Crow era is that the Mississippi Governor and would-have-been 2012 White House hopeful has plenty of company among the leading lights of the Republican […]

In one of the most condescending and paternalistic Supreme Court opinions in recent memory, Justice Anthony Kennedy in April 2007 upheld a federal late term abortion ban on the grounds that "some women come to regret their choice." 18 months later, an exhaustive study of 20 years of research concluded that there is no evidence […]

Over the last several weeks, John McCain's rapid descent into furious incoherence has spawned a cottage industry of McCainologists. But his open scorn and seething rage over Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the DREAM Act, the START Treaty and even aid to 9/11 responders is hardly McCain's first performance of King Lear. But after his humiliation […]

Like a broken clock, even Sarah Palin is occasionally right. So it is with her suggestion that the perpetually weepy incoming House Speaker John Boehner is getting a free pass for theatrical water works a woman could never survive politically. As it turns out, the half-term governor is speaking from experience when she claimed "that's […]

On Friday, the House approved the $801 billion "compromise" tax bill, sending it on to the White House for President Obama's signature. Over the next two years, that budget-busting, gilded class giveaway will cost the Treasury $70 billion in revenue lost from the top 2% of taxpayers and another $25 billion uncollected from the richest […]

Republican politics are now defined by necessary lies, untruths like "tax cuts pay for themselves" which GOP orthodoxy requires be true. So it should come as no surprise that the Republican members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are dissenting from the panel's upcoming report to falsely claim that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were […]

Move over, welfare queens, IRS agents and trial lawyers. The Republican Party has a new bogeyman: the public employee. With a sluggish U.S. economy, cash-strapped states and under-funded pension programs, Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin and other leading lights of the GOP are scape-goating government workers and their unions for the nation's woes. Of course, there's […]