Just two weeks after he seconded Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's dire warnings about the August 2 deadline to raise the U.S debt ceiling, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor walked out of the budget talks aimed at reaching a bipartisan compromise over deficit reduction. Like Arizona GOP Senator Jon Kyl, Cantor shifted the burden to Speaker […]

Today's 10th anniversary of the Bush tax cuts arrives at a particularly ironic time. Ironic, that is, because even as talk of deficits dominates the debate in Washington, that windfall for the wealthy was the single-biggest driver of U.S national debt over the past decade and, if made permanent, will be so for the next. […]

Bolstered by new polls and fresh off their vote to bar an increase in the nation's $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, House Republicans swaggered into the White House for the latest negotiation to end their economic hostage taking. One, Rep. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, refused to attend and be "lectured to by a president whose failed […]

On Thursday, John Boehner and the House Republican leadership team unveiled their "Plan for America's Job Creators." As he repeatedly made clear before the Economic Club of New York and again on CBS Face the Nation, Boehner's "job creators" are the top two percent of income earners whose Bush tax cuts President Obama has proposed […]

The presence of Grammy-winning rapper Common at a White House poetry event last night brought frothing-at-the-mouth conservatives to brink of broken blood vessels. While Fox News ran special segments on "The Invitation," employee Sarah Palin complained, "It's just so lacking of class and decency and all that's good about America." Of course, the right-wing chattering […]

In the least surprising political development in recent years, the leading lights of the Bush administration fanned out across Americans' TV screens to give their old boss credit for the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Ex-chief of staff Andy Card, who famously dressed up George W. Bush in a flight suit to announce "Mission Accomplished" […]

As their massive mobilization in response to the killing of Osama Bin Laden shows, nobody circles the wagons like the Republican Party. And that goes double for Team Bush. Confronting President Obama's success where George W. Bush failed to deliver Bin Laden either dead or alive, torture architect John Yoo and former Attorney General Michael […]

In a nationally televised address to the American people on March 4, 1987, President Ronald Reagan admitted he had traded arms for hostages in the Iran-Contra scandal and declared, "This happened on my watch." Sadly, that may have been the last time a Republican leader took ownership of a disaster by simply acknowledging the calendar. […]

The only thing more predictable than Americans' jubilation over the killing of Osama Bin Laden is the Republican campaign to give George W. Bush credit for it. Sadly for the right-wing propaganda machine, as Stephen Colbert warned President Bush five years ago, "reality has a well-known liberal bias." Bush, after all, shrugged off Bin Laden's […]

As Tax Day 2011 arrives, the distance between the tax debate and tax reality has perhaps never been larger. New data from the IRS revealed that over since the mid-1990's, the richest 400 taxpayers saw their incomes double and their tax rates halved. Overall, the gilded-class has seen its effective tax rates plummet. Meanwhile, prosecutions […]