Over the weekend, President Obama wrote Congressional leaders urging action on a $50 billion aid package for the states designed in part to avert "massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters." Which is exactly right. Because while the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has worked as intended to boost employment and GDP, the dire […]

"Reagan," Dick Cheney famously said in 2002, "proved deficits don't matter." Until, that is, a Democrat is in the White House. And it so was on Friday, when House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) insisted the Bush tax cuts did not help produce a hemorrhage of red ink from the U.S. Treasury. Of course, the […]

From almost the moment he was elected, Barack Obama has been counseled to channel the spirit of FDR in confronting both war and economic calamity. But with for the still unfolding oil spill disaster, President Obama needs a different role model. When CEO Tony Hayward and other BP executives come to the White House next […]

Just a day after winning the Republican nomination for Senate in California, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina lost a contest with an open microphone. She inadvertently told the world that fellow Republican Meg Whitman's appearance on the Sean Hannity show was "bizarre" and that Democratic opponent Barbara Boxer's hair style is "so yesterday." But as […]

On Tuesday, half-term Alaska Governor Sarah Palin weighed in again on the BP disaster, urging President Obama to "call me." Given her shocking ignorance about the subject, President Obama could be forgiven for calling her uninformed, a poser, a fraud or even a pathological liar. After all, the woman John McCain in 2008 insisted "knows […]

Thanks to obstructionist Republicans in Congress and their perpetual campaign to kill the estate tax, the United States Treasury stands to lose billions in revenue in 2010. And as the New York Times reported this week, a large chunk of it won't be coming from a single family. The heirs of Texas pipeline billionaire Dan […]

Somewhere in a gated community in Dallas, a former President of the United States is laughing very hard right now. A new ABC/Washington Post poll gives the Obama administration even lower marks for its response to the BP oil spill than to George W. Bush's calamitous bungling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. And so it […]

The past few days have not been kind to hard line conservatives determined to prevent gay and lesbian Americans from adopting children. In Florida, emails released Thursday show that Attorney General and GOP gubernatorial hopeful Bill McCollum ignored his staff's warnings against hiring Rentboy client and anti-gay crusader George Rekers to testify in support of […]

On May 7, 2001, press secretary Ari Fleischer uttered the four words that came to define the Bush administration's approach to the U.S. addiction to oil. Asked if Americans needed to "correct their lifestyles" to address the nation's energy vulnerability, Fleischer snapped, "That's a big no." And so, a government of the oil men, by […]

On Sunday, Liz Cheney took a brief hiatus from her preposterous charge that "President Obama is contributing to the isolation of Israel, and sending a clear signal to the Turkish-Syrian-Iranian axis that their methods for ostracizing Israel will succeed." In a rare moment of candor, Cheney temporarily withdrew her fangs to acknowledge her father's boss […]