As the 2020 election season heats up, voters’ priorities are coming into sharper focus. As in years past, there is a great divergence in what each party ranks as its top issues. Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center found that Republicans identify terrorism, the economy, Social Security, immigration, and the military as their five greatest concerns. Democrats prioritize health care, […]

Writers, bloggers, commenters, and pundits nearly exhausted the dictionary in the runup to the president's July 4th Trumpapalooza™. With his tanks, parades, flyovers, and personal address, Donald Trump's appropriation of America's Independence Day rightly earned descriptions ranging from inappropriate, disgusting, and self-serving to grotesque, Orwellian, and masturbatory. But word that the Republican National Committee was […]

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 […]

Just in time for the Fourth of July, Gallup released the results of its latest survey of patriotism. Its primary finding? For the first time in Gallup's 18-year history asking U.S. adults how proud they are to be Americans, fewer than a majority say they are "extremely proud." Currently, 47% describe themselves this way, down […]

With apologies to Benjamin Disraeli, there are three kinds of lies Republicans are telling about their tax plan: lies, damned lies, and f**king lies. Constraints of space and time preclude listing them all, but here is a handful of the GOP's most farfetched falsehoods. For example, earlier this month House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) repeatedly […]

Friday's news that U.S. second quarter economic growth slipped to 2.4% produced shared concern across the political spectrum about the sluggish pace of the recovery. But among economists if not politicians, there is also an overwhelming consensus that without the Obama stimulus program, things would have been much, much worse. Now, a new analysis from […]

As Senate Republicans added blocking aid to small business to their record-setting obstructionism, Democrats this week failed to secure the needed votes for reform of the filibuster rule. But largely overlooked in the debate over the filibuster is the Republicans' unprecedented obstructionism when it comes to the confirmation of President Obama's judicial nominees. As it […]

In recent years, Pew Research, Time and others have found that almost half of Americans believe that the Second Coming of Christ and the End Times will occur during their lifetimes. Now, conservatives just need to make up their minds about whether this is a good thing. Because while Left Behind series author Tim Lahaye […]

Everything, they say, is bigger in the Texas. So it is with the failure of the health care system. Leading the nation with a horrifying 25% of its residents uninsured, Texas ranked 46th in the Commonwealth Fund's 2009 scorecard of state health care performance. Nevertheless, that dismal performance was no barrier to Governor Rick Perry […]

In Washington, the partisan war is flaring up again, this time of over taxes. President Obama wants to keep the "Making Work Pay" middle class tax credit while rolling back the expiring Bush tax cuts for households earning over $250,000. Republicans hope to stop him, keeping the Treasury-draining Bush windfall for the wealthy despite the […]