During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican nominee John McCain traveled to Ynez, Kentucky to announce his economic vision in the place where LBJ launched the War on Poverty back in 1965. His solution for Americans struggling to make ends meet? Ebay: "Today, for example, 1.3 million people in the world make a living off eBay, […]

With the ink barely dry on the Iranian nuclear deal, the Israeli government and its allies in the U.S. are mounting an all-out effort to stop the agreement in Congress. Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rival Isaac Herzog of the Zionist Union, will be coming to the United States to press Congress. As […]

For the past five years, Republicans determined to gut federal spending have been warning that "we look a lot like Greece." A preposterous claim then, the charge is even more ridiculous now. Unlike Greece, the United States controls its own currency and has enjoyed economic growth even as Washington's national debt as a share of […]

As the negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 powers over Tehran's nuclear program near their end, those dedicated to killing a deal potential deal are out in force. The cable news networks are littered with TV ads by United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), a group funded in large part by the right-wing billionaire Sheldon […]

So it's come to this. In the wake of Donald Trump's description of Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers, remarks that have divided the GOP presidential field, the "severely conservative" former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney declared, "I think he made a severe error in saying what he did about Mexican-Americans." And for that, Bernie […]

In the wake of the Charleston massacre, Americans are debating when, where and whether states, businesses and individuals should display the Confederate flag. But as a recent CNN/ORC poll suggests, the debate we are having is the wrong one. Even after neo-confederate terrorist Dylann Roof slaughtered 9 in the cradle of secession, 57 percent of […]

As the Confederate flag is coming down, calls for states to nullify federal laws are going up. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton advised county clerks, magistrates and justices of the peace they may opt-out of performing same-sex marriages the United States Supreme Court legalized nationwide on Friday. As it turns out, Paxton isn't just […]

From its inception, America's history has often been the product of the changing balance between compelling but conflicting national ideals. The federal versus the state, "rugged individualism" versus collective action for the public good, the separation of church and state, and isolationism versus crusading globalism are just some of the pendulum swings that have defined--and […]

If nothing else, the Republican Party is an irony producing machine. In the very week that some GOP leaders reversed course on displaying the Confederate battle flag in the wake of the Charleston slaughter, the party's best and brightest protested that the Supreme Court's decision in the King v. Burwell was its "worst since Dred […]