Two new reports this week served to highlight the central role of the housing market in the U.S. economy and in driving the living standards of Americans. Coming on the same day the Dow reached an all-time high, the housing data is not good. On Tuesday, the Census Bureau reported that Americans have become "house […]

Like the spotted owl or the Pacific sea otter, Black Republicans are something of an endangered species. This week, a select group of African-American conservatives and their GOP allies showed why. On Monday, the National Black Republican Association (NBRA) debuted ads declaring that Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan and that Martin Luther King Junior […]

Virginia Senator George Allen has once again confirmed the wisdom of the old aphorism that when stuck in a hole, stop digging. Just days after the "Macacagate" episode highlighted Allen's neo-Confederate proclivities, his ham-handed response to revelations of his Jewish ancestry put Allen in hot water. During his September 18 debate with Democrat Jim Webb, […]

There's an old saying that a gaffe is what results when a politician inadvertently tells the truth. By that standard, then, the Republican Party must be confessing its deeply held beliefs when it comes to race. After all, despicable racial slurs like Arnold Schwarzenegger's lecture on black and Latino blood and George Allen's MacacaGate are […]

The fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks and primary politics have helped to once again bring out the worst from the mouths of the right. Featuring fear-mongering, the politics of the pulpit and outright racism, here are the latest mantras from the leading lights of the Republican Party. "I wonder if [Democrats] they're more […]

With this weekend's upcoming mockumentary "The Path to 9/11," Disney and ABC are breaking dangerous new ground in the conservative propaganda war. Even as the ABC network follows in the footsteps of Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ in "mobilizing the base," ABC News on Sunday declared Robert Greenwald's new documentary "Iraq for […]

Despite grandiose claims from the White House regarding the strength of the U.S. economy, a flood of new data helps explain Americans' continued feelings of insecurity. While the unemployment rate (4.7%), GDP growth (2.9%) and productivity gains (2.3%)look impressive, below the surface the picture for wages and income grows bleaker still. Whether the incumbent Republicans […]

Just days after Senator George Allen's MacacaGate scandal, the Republican Party continued to offer a cornucopia of egregious gaffes and uproarious utterances. In Montana, Senator Conrad Burns lived up to his recent claim that he could "self-destruct in one sentence." Just weeks after attacking out-of-state firefighters who came to the aid of Montana, the Senator […]

By now, Perrspectives readers have grown familiar with the surprising neo-Confederate tendencies of Virginia Senator and presidential aspirant George Allen. (His abiding love of the CSA flag and the heritage of the ante bellum South are all the more surprising, given that Allen was born and raised in Southern California.) Today, the New Republic's Ryan […]

Virginia Senator and 2008 GOP presidential hopeful George Allen continued to burnish his neo-Confederate credentials this week. During a reelection campaign event in front of an all white audience, Allen singled out Jim Webb campaign volunteer and U.S. citizen S.R. Sidarth as a "macaca." In his apology, Allen feigned ignorance of the meaning of the […]