Five years ago, I described Dick Cheney's strident defense of detainee torture as a strategy of "mutual assured destruction." The former Vice President's gambit was a simple one. In 2009, Cheney dared President Obama to either prosecute him and other Bush administration officials over their program of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (in which case massive Republican […]

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the target of the latest right-wing slander du jour. In an interview with CNN's Candy Crowley, Pelosi blamed Hamas for initiating the current war in Gaza and reiterated U.S. support for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. As to why Hamas sponsor Qatar was included in truce negotiations, the number one […]

In their controversial 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt proposed a dramatic change in American financial aid for Israel currently amounting to $3 billion annually. "It is time to treat Israel like a normal country," they argued, "and make U.S. aid conditional on an end to […]

Once upon a time, Democrats were the party of slavery, states' rights, secession and nullification. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, the solid Democratic south sought the "Redemption" of the former Confederate States with the reestablishment of white supremacy through violence and voter suppression. For a hundred years, the architects and enforcers of Jim Crow's […]

With the overlapping crises in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel, Republicans trying to pin the blame on President Obama are singing the same sound bite in unison. As Mitt Romney put it earlier this year: Our esteem around the world has fallen. I can't think of a major country, it's hard to think of […]

Earlier this week, two federal appeals courts reached opposite conclusions as to whether Congress intended for the Affordable Care Act to provide health insurance subsidies to Americans purchasing coverage through both state and federally-run exchanges. While Romneycare architect and Obamacare consultant Jonathan Gruber seemed to create some confusion with remarks from 2012, for the drafters […]

When two appeals courts issued conflicting rulings Tuesday on whether Obamacare's health insurance subsidies apply to the 34 states that chose to let the federal government run their exchanges, Republicans were quick to pounce on the one decision they liked. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) called the DC Circuit's decision a "repudiation of Obamacare" which "should […]

Last week, the Pew Research Center released the largely predictable findings of a survey measuring how Americans feel about the nation's various religious faiths. While adherents unsurprisingly gave their co-religionists high marks, one factoid stood out. White evangelical Protestants love the Jews, giving them an impressive 69 on Pew's 100 degree thermometer. Alas, that love […]

After months of their much-hyped but still unproven charges of partisan skullduggery at the Internal Revenue Service, House Republicans this week took an axe to the IRS budget. The cost of the GOP vendetta is massive. Cutting the agency's funding for the fifth consecutive year, the House in a 228-to-195 vote slashed the overall IRS […]

With the body count growing daily in Gaza, the conservative commentariat has predictably circled the wagons around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud government. "Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity," Charles Krauthammer declared this week and repeating Bibi's mantra about his Hamas enemies. "We're using missile defense to […]