Even a broken clock, the old saying goes, is right twice a day. So it was for Donald Trump during his 2019 State of the Union address on Tuesday night. During perhaps the most backward-looking presidential message in memory, the president thundered about a mythical national crisis of undocumented immigration putting America and Americans at […]

"Both sides do it" may well be the most dangerous and deceitful phrase in U.S. politics. The lazy analyst's substitute for actual journalism doesn't merely misdiagnose what plagues the American body politic, but fails to correctly identify the source of the disease. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in their 2012 book, It's […]

When Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King lamented that language like "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization" had "become offensive," GOP leaders like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appeared horrified. But if they were shocked--SHOCKED!--to find Steve King's racism going on in their Republican Party, they shouldn't have been. King, […]

As the New Year begins, imagine that this is how your 2018 ended: You work at a company where the CEO and the management team are notoriously corrupt. They began the year by taking on $150 million in new debt for the purpose of rewarding themselves and their shareholders with a massive stock buyback. But […]

As 2018 draws to a close, there is growing concern about what the next year will bring for the American economy. President Trump's twin self-inflicted wounds of an ongoing trade war with China and a needless government shutdown helped send stock markets into a December panic. The expanding global economy, too, shows signs of a […]

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 […]