On Feb. 8, 2009, CNBC talking head Rick Santelli helped launched the tea party movement with an epic rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But eight years later, as Republicans are now learning the hard way, the tea bag is on the other cheek. The signs of sizable, sustained, and seriously angry […]

Looking back on it now, the result of the election is even more unfathomable than when media outlets first called the race. Thanks to a strong economy, the two-term Democratic president enjoyed an approval rating well over 50 percent--with good reason. Despite near-total Republican opposition to his health care and stimulus plans and dire GOP […]

Before he leaves office on January 20, 2017, President Obama should take two unpleasant, unfortunate but absolutely necessary steps. First, Obama should pardon his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton because she's violated no laws yet nevertheless faces the likely prospect of indefinite investigation and possible prosecution. Then the 44th President should also pardon the […]

Less than 72 hours after Tuesday's shocking election result, Donald Trump's transition team is hard at work transforming American government. A rogue's gallery of extremist right-wing has-beens and never-should-be's is being lined up for Trump Cabinet slots. With the success of Mitch McConnell's unprecedented blockade of Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, a list of […]

Former Boston Red Sox pitching great Curt Schilling announced this week that he might run against Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2018. Schilling, previously best known as a bankrupt businessman and collector of Nazi memorabilia who was fired by ESPN despite famously bleeding from wherever in the 2004 American League playoffs, took to the cable […]

In 1993, the late New York Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his famous paper, titled "Defining Deviancy Down." Lamenting the rising rates of crime, homelessness, and family breakdown among other American pathologies, the social scientist and member of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations warned, "We have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt […]

This was the week that some Republicans finally responded to their wake up call about Donald Trump. Or perhaps more accurately, found themselves like the married man at 3 AM who discovers himself naked in a seedy hotel room bed, with his face covered in cocaine and a dead hooker laying motionless by his side, […]

From the beginning of his unlikely quest for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump has enjoyed the strong backing of those GOP voters who say they want a successful businessman in the White House. After only his outsider status, Gallup polling showed earlier this year, backers of the real estate mogul turned reality TV […]

During the 1984 race for the Democratic nomination, I worked as a field organizer for the insurgent presidential campaign of Senator Gary Hart (D-CO). After a string of early wins in New Hampshire and states in New England and the northwest, Hart got battered in New York and the industrial Midwest. But a late surge […]

Hillary Clinton 38, Donald Trump 0. If you haven't been keeping score, that's how many years of tax returns Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump respectively have made available to the American public. But Trump's declaration that "it's none of your business" what tax rate he pays isn't the only sign that the Donald is only […]