By now, Americans have grown accustomed to Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio saying (and doing) what most hard-line conservatives are only thinking. So when Sheriff Joe tweeted that he gave Sarah Palin a pair of pink underwear, right-wing eyebrows weren't the only things being raised. Of course, this episode is just the latest to highlight the […]

This weekend, the New York Times and Washington Post offered almost identical assessments of the 2010 Congressional elections. While the Times announced "GOP poised to seize House, if not Senate," the Post predicted 'historic" losses with "more than 90 Democratic House seats are potentially in play." But lost in the conventional wisdom that Barack Obama […]

During the 2008, the campaign of multimillionaire and multiple home owner John McCain tried and failed to paint Barack Obama as "elitist" and "out of touch." But now that moribund Democrats are showing some signs of life as Election Day nears, the right-wing Obama as Snob meme is back with a vengeance. Over just the […]

When it comes to cutting the federal budget, talk is cheap. But as the New York Times is just the latest to report, across the country Republican candidates are talking tough about spending cuts they can't - or won't - explain. Yet even as they promise another $700 billion Treasury-draining windfall for the wealthy, the […]

On Monday, the New York Times asked, "What if a president cut Americans' income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed?" As it turns out, that question neatly sums up the sad dynamic at play in the 2010 midterm elections. On the one hand, President Obama and his Democratic allies have utterly failed to tout […]

According to legend, the boxer Joe Louis introduced the expression, "you can run, but you can't hide." Well, he never met this year's crop of GOP candidates. Earlier this month, Politico surveyed the extreme media avoidance strategies of Sharron Angle, Ron Johnson, Rand Paul, Christine O'Donnell and other skittish Republicans in an article titled, "Year […]

Even more than the 2007 surge of U.S. troops, it was the earlier Sunni Awakening which helped dramatically seduce the sectarian carnage in Iraq. While Colonel John Tien called it "the tipping point in Anbar province," the BBC cited U.S. soldiers insisting it was the Awakening, not the Surge, which was "the game changer." But […]

When Brian Kilmeade of Fox News declared Friday that "not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims," he revealed he knows little about terrorism and even less about recent American history. If, as Adam Serwer defines it, "Terrorism is the deliberate murder of civilians or destruction of property in order to achieve a […]

On Thursday, the Washington Post literally offered a blast from the past with its profile of vice presidential buckshot recipient Harry Whittington. As the Post reports, "Nearly five years on, he's still waiting for Dick Cheney to say he's sorry" for accidentally shooting him the face during a 2005 hunting trip. Whittington shouldn't hold his […]

It's awfully tough to present your party as the champion of populist fury when the centerpiece of your 2010 campaign is another $700 billion tax cut windfall for the wealthiest two percent of Americans. Alas, for Republicans, that steep challenge is getting much worse. After all, at a time of record income inequality and growing […]