Ezra Klein launched his new Vox venture on Monday with a piece titled, "How Politics Makes Us Stupid." Looking at some recent research suggesting that "individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values," Klein concluded, "People weren't reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted […]

As they have for months, conservatives are trumpeting polls showing Obamacare's difficulty in winning the hearts and minds of the American people. While The Hill reported "four years later, Democrats wait for ObamaCare popularity bounce," the far-right Townhall celebrated a spate of negative surveys, including a 53 to 41 disapproval score in the latest from […]

Politics, it is said, ends at the water's edge. Or at least it did until January 20, 2009. Sensing yet another opportunity to bludgeon President Obama, the usual suspects on the right have fanned out across TV screens and op-ed pages to blame him for Russian aggression in Ukraine. John McCain, who defended President Bush […]

President Obama this week took the unusual step of appearing with Zach Galifianakis on his online ersatz talk show, "Between Two Ferns." If Obama's goal was to encourage younger Americans to check out the Affordable Care Act, then the President can rightly declare "Mission Accomplished": the Funny or Die web site is now the number […]

Bloomberg News this week offered the state of Washington as a powerful rebuttal to those who claim hiking the minimum wage would kill jobs. Washington, it turns out, has had the nation's highest minimum wage since 1998 and over the past 15 years enjoyed annual job growth well above the national average. New Jersey, too, […]

With Russian troops poised to sever Crimea from Ukraine, tough-talking conservatives are claiming they were right about the threat from Vladimir Putin all along. The Wall Street Journal interviewed former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who offered the West his lessons learned from losing the 2008 clash with the Russians. Meanwhile to the delight of the […]

Five years ago today, CNBC regular Rick Santelli launched into the infamous rant that many credit with birthing the Tea Party movement. That the Tea Party's toxic mix of blind rage, shocking detachment from the facts and periodic descent into racist rhetoric pre-dated Santelli's frothing at the mouth performance has largely been overlooked. Nevertheless, five […]

While income inequality in the United States has hit record highs, so too has the decibel level from the tragically rich protesting their victimhood in the new class warfare. After walking back his "Kristallnacht" Holocaust analogy, legendary venture capitalist Tom Perkins nevertheless fretted that the 1 percent faces "economic extinction." Sam Zell, the billionaire chairman […]

Long before he became America's preeminent conservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer was a practicing physician in Boston. Now, the psychiatrist turned commentator is offering a prescription for his Republican Party suffering from the blowback of its war on women. The antidote to the yawning gender gap expanded by GOP proclamations about "legitimate rape" and other "gifts […]

There is little question that President Obama will address the Affordable Care Act in his 2014 State of the Union address. Given its troubled rollout and the neverending Republican effort to sabotage his signature domestic policy achievement, silence on Obamacare isn't an option. Nor should it be. After all, with as many 13.5 million Americans […]