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 […]

While today's employment report showed the private sector added jobs for the ninth straight month, those gains were more than offset by the deep cuts by state and local governments. But those layoffs, the biggest in 30 years, didn't have to be this severe. After all, President Obama in June asked Congress for $50 billion […]

In his latest effort to rebrand both the Republican and Democratic parties, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has also rewritten history. Labeling his GOP "the party of paychecks" and Democrats "the party of food stamps" in advance of his upcoming campaign swing, Gingrich declared "we have historically since Ronald Reagan of 1980 been the party […]

Somewhere, Wall Street Journal columnist and What's the Matter with Kansas author Thomas Frank is shaking his head. In 2004, Frank detailed how the GOP successfully turned to divisive social issues and fear-mongering to persuade working class whites in his home state to consistently vote against their own economic self-interest. Now, a new AP-GfK poll […]

This spring, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Week and The Grio (among others) pointed to the new crop of African-American GOP candidates and pondered, "2010: The year of the black Republican?" And on Sunday, RealClearPolitics contributor Jack Kelly touted the candidacies of Tim Scott, Allen West and Ryan Frazier as proof of […]