And now for today's thought exercise. Imagine you are a member of Congress. Recent assessments from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warn that the budget deficit for fiscal year 2018, which ended on Sept. 30, jumped to $779 billion and annual trillion-dollar shortfalls will return beginning in FY 2020. But then you learn of […]

On June 4, 2014, Donald Trump as usual was apoplectic. His fury that day was ignited by word that President Obama had authorized the exchange of five Taliban prisoners for Bowe Bergdahl, the Army sergeant held captive in Afghanistan since 2009. So Trump took to Twitter to ask, "Are you allowed to impeach a president […]

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Mitt Romney made a not-so-bold promise about the stewardship he would provide for the American economy. "I can tell you," he guaranteed, "after a period of four years, by virtue of the policies we'd put in place, we'd get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent--perhaps a little […]

In the wake of Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court, Americans will long debate whether he was the first (or, arguably, the second) member of the nation's highest court to have engaged in sexual misconduct. But what is indisputable is that Kavanaugh is the Supreme Court's first Plumber. By "Plumber," I'm not referring to […]

Like a recurring biblical plague, they descend across the country. Despite the repeated warnings from both experts and lay persons of good faith and common sense, the media and tens of millions of people are nevertheless still shocked by their arrival. As predicted, they devastate everything in their path, leaving a swath of destruction in […]

Over the past couple of weeks, the Trump administration and its allies have been engaging in a lot of wishful thinking. Fresh off the strong second quarter economic growth number of 4.1 percent, Trump told a gathering of business leaders next quarter "could be in the fives." Not content to rest there, the President echoed […]

During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump gave full-throated support for resurrecting the Bush administration's regime of torture for terror detainees. But Trump's brand of state-sanctioned sadism promised to go much further. Trump warned he would seek reprisals against the kin of suspected terrorists, "because they may not care much about their lives, but […]

If nothing else, Donald Trump is a one-of-a-kind occupant of the Oval Office. His jaw-dropping corruption, staggering incompetence, mind-numbing policy ignorance, puerile penchant for payback, and unprecedented deceit put the Trump presidency in a class by itself. Nevertheless, Trump's courtiers, sycophants, and water-carriers have tried to elevate his leadership to a place among the greatest […]

Many Congressional Republicans were shocked--SHOCKED!--this week at Donald Trump's humiliation in Helsinki. Like the rest of the world, they watched in real time as an American president kowtowed on foreign soil to a dangerous adversary of the United States. Siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the repeated conclusions of the unified American intelligence community […]

In the spring of 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump promised Americans he would eliminate the entire $19 trillion national debt of the United States "say over a period of eight years." His pledge was ludicrous on its face. With the CBO already forecasting $6.7 trillion in new debt and Trump proposing a tax plan that would […]