On Sunday, incoming House Speaker John Boehner had his prime time debut on CBS 60 Minutes. Proclaiming "I reject the word" compromise, Boehner made clear that past performance would be a guarantee of future results. But even more pathetic was his staggering hypocrisy. After all, Boehner claimed that President Obama, a man he accused of […]

Fresh off her pronouncements on the Fed's "quantitative easing" and federal aid to the states, Sarah Palin this week added the deficit and Medicare to her Potemkin façade of policy expertise. A year after she first endorsed converting Medicare into a voucher program, Palin took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to endorse […]

One day before the House Democratic caucus voiced its opposition to President Obama's tax cut deal with Senate Republicans, Speaker Nancy Pelosi focused on the estate tax as adding insult to injury. But Pelosi isn't alone in shining a spotlight on an estate tax proposal that would drain the U.S. Treasury of billions of dollars. […]

For years, American federalism has been characterized by "red state socialism," the one way flow of federal dollars from blue state taxpayers to red state recipients. For example, Sarah Palin's home state of Alaska ranked third in federal tax dollars received per dollar of taxes paid by state residents. But now that recession-ravaged states like […]

It is sadly ironic that President Obama held a Pearl Harbor Day press conference to defend his surrender to Republicans over the extension of Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. At a time when the United States is fighting two still-unpaid-for wars, facing staggering budget deficits and struggling to emerge from its deepest economic crisis […]

Perhaps the worst part of President Obama's very bad deal on taxes concerns the estate tax. After all, what Ezra Klein deemed "noxious" is a $7 billion annual giveaway to the heirs of the largest fortunes in America. It is estimated that only 0.11% of estates and just 40 family farms and businesses nationwide would […]

Back in 2006, billionaire Warren Buffett lamented, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." Now with President Obama's capitulation imminent on extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich, average Americans will once again be the big losers. After all, while the Bush years […]

In their scorched-earth effort to deliver another $700 billion tax cut windfall for the wealthy, Republicans have fittingly appropriated their favorite global warming talking point: "uncertainty." Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and John Boehner are just of the GOP leaders claiming "Congress ought to act today to stop all the tax hikes" because "it […]

Watching Barack Obama and John McCain over the past week has left pundits and armchair psychologists alike scratching their heads. While the two foes from the 2008 presidential election couldn't be more different, their puzzling performances over tax cuts for the wealthy and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell have the Washington commentariat paging […]

Assessing the impact of the Wikileaks revelations, Fareed Zakaria concluded the confidential cables actually show "the skills of U.S. diplomats." Overall, Zakaria was reassured that "the State Department works" and by "an American diplomatic establishment that is pretty good at analysis." But in one case - the conflict between Russia and Georgia in the summer […]