During the controversy over the Bush administration's prosecutor purge in 2007, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales raised selective amnesia to an art form. In one single day of Congressional testimony, Gonzales uttered some variant of "I don't recall" 64 times, including the comical, "Senator, that I don't recall remembering." Now with the release of the […]

A gaffe, Michael Kinsley famously mused, is what results when a politician inadvertently tells the truth. And so it was Monday when Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch came clean about his party's scorched-earth opposition to health care reform being championed by President Obama and Congressional Democrats. Hatch acknowledged, as I've long argued, that the GOP […]

Like a broken clock, even George W. Bush can be right twice a day. And so it was with his pronouncement on the fate of Obama Bin Laden before a weekend conference of business leaders in New Delhi, "I guess he is not dead." But the 43rd president wasn't merely stating the obvious regarding the […]

On Wednesday, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush doubtless pleased his audience at the U.S Chamber of Commerce when he declared, "I think President Obama has used the bully pulpit as a way to attack capitalism." But in his knee-jerk assault on his brother's successor, Governor Bush conveniently omitted that George W. Bush compiled the worst […]

Back in September, a study by Harvard Medical School found that over 44,000 Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance. Now, in a complete reversal of both logic and the truth, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced that it is the availability of a public insurance option which could prove fatal. […]

One week after its devastating documentary ("The Warning") on federal regulator Brooksley Born's unheeded warning in the 1990's about the potential disaster in the offing for the U.S. financial system, on Tuesday the PBS program Frontline aired an episode which portrayed the subsequent recession's harsh impact on the residents of an Upper East Side New […]

On Thursday, the Commerce Department announced that the U.S. economy expanded at a surprisingly strong 3.5% rate. But despite Q3 GDP growth which exceeded consensus estimates, the outsized impact of one-time programs including the Cash for Clunkers incentives and the tax credit for first-time home buyers suggests the pace of economic expansion will slow in […]

Rush Limbaugh is like a faulty septic tank, always overflowing and spewing s**t everywhere. In addition to his frequent racist diatribes, Limbaugh's effluence routinely contains such on-air vulgarisms as "grab the ankles" and "bend over." Now, the right-wing radio host has branded President Obama a "man-child." And as it turns out, it's not the first […]

Among the more comic story lines of the Republican war on health care reform has been the Party's side-splitting defense of Medicare. After all, the GOP not only tried to block the program in the 1960's, but tried again to gut it thirty years later. But after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned Democrats were […]

In the wake of its shocking assessment that employer-provided health insurance now covers only 54.6% of the American people, Thomson Reuters released a disturbing assessment of wasteful spending in the U.S. health care system Echoing the estimates of Obama OMB chief Peter Orszag and others, the analysis concluded that the United States wastes up to […]