Next month, veteran Washington Post reporter Dan Balz will release Collision 2012, his book on last year's presidential campaign. But in an account supposedly jam-packed with never-before heard details, Balz apparently reproduces one of the tallest tales manufactured by Team Romney. Despite the overwhelming evidence that he never stopped running for President of the United […]
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Memo to the good people of Tulsa, Oklahoma: If you hope to have any chance of becoming the smallest city ever to host the summer Olympics, don't start your campaign by insulting the rest of the country. Sadly, that's precisely what the committee organizing Tulsa's incredibly long-shot bid to capture the 2024 summer games has […]
God, it is often said, works in mysterious ways. Just ask Mike Huckabee. After all, the Baptist minister turned Arkansas governor turned Fox News host responded to the Supreme Court's marriage equality decisions this week by lamenting, "Jesus wept." But back in 2008, Huckabee had a different reaction to the passage of Proposition 8 that […]
During his confirmation hearings in 2005, John Roberts made three promises to the American people. Less than a decade later, he's broken them all. For starters, the future Chief Justice proclaimed his fidelity to precedent, a commitment he shattered so quickly that a Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) lamented he and his colleagues had been "hoodwinked." […]
As the New York Times documented last week, the choices and pricing of private health insurance will vary widely from state to state when the Affordable Care Act's exchanges launch this fall. In state-run marketplaces in California, Colorado and Oregon, residents will have a wide array of providers and plans to choose from. But in […]
Few issues incite Republican fury like medical malpractice. For conservative ideologues, malpractice lawsuits are a double affront which interferes with the righteous operation of the free market while lining the pockets of trial lawyers who help fund the Democratic Party. That's why, despite the near-total debunking of GOP mythology that frivolous lawsuits and "jackpot justice" […]
There is a saying that America is always preparing to fight the last war. So it is with the conservative crusade against illegal immigration. After all, even as Tea Party Republicans demand draconian--and expensive-- new "border security" measures, apprehensions of the undocumented have plummeted to 40 year lows. And thanks to the slow U.S. economy […]
For four years, "death panels" has been the GOP's killer lie in the debate over the Affordable Care Act. The slander that proposed Medicare coverage for end-of-life counseling constituted a government "death panel" that would "pull the plug on grandma" was Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year. Then what Sarah Palin dubbed a "metaphor" for […]
If House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa's faltering inquisition of the IRS seems familiar, it should. Back in the 1990's, Republicans demonized the agency, slashed its enforcement staff and, unsurprisingly, helped the growth of tax cheating which now costs Uncle Sam up to $500 billion in lost revenue annually. And as Reuters reported Saturday, history […]
News that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had denied additional disaster aid to the town of West, Texas has Lone Star State leaders crying foul. President Obama, they charge, "used West, Texas as a photo op" and "turned his back on Texas and gone against his word." But while their disappointment is understandable, it's […]

