On the eve of Barack Obama's address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, a media cottage industry has emerged examining why the President "failed to change the tone in Washington." Writing in the Washington Post, Dan Balz asked, "Was there a way around united Republican opposition?" and reported that "to the partisans on both sides, […]

If for nothing else, you have to give Republican leaders and their conservative echo chamber credit for staying on message. After Paul Ryan famously declared the America was becoming a nation of "makers versus takers," Jeb Bush praised Ryan's defense of "the right to rise" supposedly now under assault. Last week, supply-side propagandist George Gilder, […]

The experience of the past three decades shows that for the GOP, there are only two certainties in life: debt and tax cuts. But you'd never know that watching the Republican National Convention, where a massive ticking debt clock and obvious falsehoods like "President Obama has doubled the national debt" nevertheless dominate the proceedings. Of […]

In the week since Mitt Romney named Paul Ryan as his running mate, both Democrats and Republicans have claimed theirs is the party which will save and protect Medicare, the federal health insurance program for nearly 50 million seniors. But Americans have good reason to believe one side is lying to them. After all, the […]

Before departing on his trip to tout America's Anglo-Saxon heritage in the UK, Poland and Israel, Mitt Romney used an address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) to deliver a blistering attack on President Obama. Blistering and, of course, duplicitous. Romney accused President Obama of "massive defense cuts," ignoring that much of the "arbitrary, […]

With the year-end expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the looming "sequestration" of $1.2 trillion they agreed to during their debt ceiling hostage-taking last summer, the message from Republican leaders is the same as it ever was. Taxes (especially for the rich) must not go up, defense spending must not go down, and the […]

During Mitt Romney's first run for the White House four years ago, his GOP rival Mike Huckabee warned that the former private equity CEO reminded voters of "the guy who laid them off." Now, with the growing imbroglio over his secret tax returns, labyrinthine overseas accounts and "I win even when they lose" Bain business […]

The GOP response to the President's call for higher tax rates on upper income Americans came fast and furious. His proposal, Republicans warned, was "class warfare" and a "job killer" which will "kill the current recovery and put us back in a recession" and still "not give you deficit reduction." As it turns out, the […]

With the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 once again set to expire at the end of this year, President Obama on Monday once again proposed temporarily extending them only for families earning less than $250,000 annually. Predictably, his Republican rival Mitt Romney called the return of upper-income tax rates to their slightly higher […]

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision in NFIB v. Sebelius, the greatest threat to enabling health insurance for 30 million uninsured Americans may come not from Republicans in Congress, but in the states. With the Court's ruling that the federal government cannot penalize states who refuse to accept the expansion of Medicaid, Republican […]