Like a child who begrudgingly has to invite his weird cousin to his birthday party, there are some things a president simply must do. So it must have been when President Obama asked George W. Bush to join with U.N. special envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton to raise funds for the earthquake-ravaged nation. After all, […]

On Monday, January 11, PBS Newshour aired what may have been the most upbeat assessment of the progress in and future prospects for long-suffering Haiti offered in years. That 10 minute segment ("Despite Years of Crushing Poverty, Hope Grows in Haiti") revealed new investment, government improvements and signs of economic life in the Western Hemisphere's […]

Throughout his failed 2008 presidential run, Republican John McCain campaigned on a theme of "Country First." As it turns out, that country was Georgia. After his bellicose August 2008 declaration to Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili that "today we are all Georgians," Saakashvili returned the favor Monday by decorating McCain with a "National Hero of Georgia" […]

On Monday, Tucker Carlson to great fanfare launched The Daily Caller, a conservative alternative to The Huffington Post. But even as the first edition featured gay-bashing, rape jokes, mockery of leading Democrats and opinion pieces by Republican Congressmen, analysts wondered whether TDC's $3 million in funding from right-wing money man Foster Friess would influence Carlson's […]

The preposterous Republican campaign to equate Harry Reid's off-the-record "dialect" comment with neo-Confederate Trent Lott's lavish public praise of Strom Thurmond has shifted into overdrive. But even as Michael Steele, Jon Kyl and other leading lights of the Party of Hate press Reid like Lott before him to surrender his Senate leadership post, they conveniently […]

The first Republican Abraham Lincoln famously proclaimed, "My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side." Sadly, as RNC Chairman Michael Steele confirmed again this week, his successors believe the GOP truly is God's Own Party. As it turns out, Steele has joined George W. […]

Witnessing the Republican reaction to the Obama administration's handling of the failed Christmas bombing is like watching reruns of The Apprentice. Like Donald Trump, each conservative talking head proclaims "You're Fired!" to members of the Obama team. Of course, when President Bush presided over the 9/11 catastrophe, Osama Bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora, the […]

Fox News anchor Brit Hume is rightly being mocked for suggesting that the road to redemption for a philandering Tiger Woods begins with his conversion to Christianity. But Hume's on-air evangelical fervor doesn't merely show his religious bigotry in general or ignorance towards Buddhists in particular. It also won't work, at least not with his […]

On Tuesday, President Obama described the failed Christmas airliner attack as a "potentially disastrous" failure of the system, one "that's not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it." Unsurprisingly, the usual mouthpieces of the right like Peter King and Ron Christie have fanned out to demand "someone will have to go" and that Obama "fire […]