Buoyed by bulk advance purchases by the right-wing faithful, Sarah Palin's upcoming book Going Rogue as expected catapulted to the top of the Amazon.com bestseller list. That Palin turned to ghostwriter Lynn Vincent, whose past conservatives screeds branded Democrats "treasonous" and lauded the Christian crusader General William Boykin reprimanded by President Bush, is similarly unsurprising. […]

That the elderly of all groups of Americans most strongly oppose President Obama on health care reform shows the success of Republican fear-mongering over supposed Medicare cuts and "death panels". And on Monday, the Washington Post did the GOP a great service in a piece titled, "On Medicare Spending, a Role Reversal." While exploring the […]

One day after the Washington Post's Bob Woodward published the confidential McChrystal report on Afghanistan, the Politico asked, "Who leaked and why?" But while the article speculates on the identity and motivation of the leaker, one issue - the punishment of Woodward's source for revealing national security documents -remains off the table. Which is a […]

On Wednesday, the fact checking web site Politifact deemed a "pants on fire" lie the Republican claim that President Obama planned to indoctrinate America's school children in a broadcast next week. On Friday, press secretary Robert Gibbs rightly noted that presidents Reagan and Bush similarly addressed students in speeches which, as Steve Benen pointed out, […]

While the Wall Street Journal editorial page can always be counted on to cheerlead the flat-earth economics of the Republican Party, on occasion the paper's reporters contradict GOP orthodoxy. And so it is today on the subject of the Obama stimulus package. Just one day after Eric Cantor (R-VA) followed the lead of John Boehner […]

One day after Newt Gingrich, no friend of the CIA, called on Attorney General Eric Holder to resign over his plan to investigate the agency, former Vice President Dick Cheney pronounced he was "offended as hell" by the probe. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported "Ex-Intelligence Officials Cite Low Spirits at CIA." To make its case, […]

As its 2003 support for President Bush's overpriced, unfunded and deeply flawed Medicare prescription benefit showed, the AARP can make some strange political bedfellows. Buti in a segment Monday slamming the 40 million member organization over its role in the current health care reform debate, CBS News made some strange bedfellows of it own. Its […]

There's nothing new under the sun, especially when it comes to the frothing at the mouth right-wing rage over health care reform. But thanks to the 24/7 media's transformation of politics into just another form of entertainment, delusional Birthers, deceitful Deathers, raging Teabaggers and town hall intimidators are dominating press coverage of the debate. And […]

"When politics is just another form of entertainment," I lamented in a presentation on the 2008 campaign last year, "the first thing that suffers is the truth." And so it is with the incendiary health care debate and so much else of what now passes for political discourse in the United States. Bolstered by flame-throwing […]

The Bush White House was notoriously famous for its purchases of positive press coverage. While columnists Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher pocketed $240,000 and $41,500 to push the Bush line on education and marriage initiatives, paid-for Pentagon pundits took to the airwaves to back the administration on Iraq. But as new documents from the U.S. […]