In the election of 1928, the Republican Party of Herbert Hoover promised voters "a chicken in every pot and a car in every backyard." (We all know how that turned out.) Now, Mitt Romney is pledging that "If I'm President" every college graduate will be guaranteed a job, Iran will have no nuclear weapons and […]

President Barack Obama took an oath to "promote the general Welfare." Venture capitalist Mitt Romney pledged to maximize shareholder value. Unfortunately, candidate Mitt Romney is pretending the two are the same thing. As Romney repeatedly insisted this month, President Obama's rescue of the U.S. auto industry and over one million jobs associated with it is […]

During his presidency and after, George W. Bush was often criticized as the "nobody could have predicted president." After all, from 9/11 and the post-invasion chaos in Iraq to Hurricane Katrina's drowning of New Orleans, the economic calamity of 2008 and so much more, Bush and his team repeatedly claimed "I don't think anybody could […]

When President Obama on Tuesday declared that decades of Republican trickle-down economics "never worked," conservatives were predictably apoplectic. But for all of their protests of "class warfare", "socialism" and worse, Obama was being kind to the Republican ideologues. After all, as the historical record shows, from economic growth and job creation to stock market performance […]

By almost any measure, the 2006 universal care law Governor Mitt Romney championed in Massachusetts has been a clear success. A bipartisan bill which Ted Kennedy worked closely with Romney to pass, the law has reduced the ranks of the uninsured from 10 percent to a national low of two percent. Massachusetts residents overwhelmingly favor […]

On this the fourth Thanksgiving since the start of the Bush recession, families across America are still struggling with persistently high unemployment, underwater mortgages and stagnant wages. But as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reminded us this week, Americans can be thankful for the 2009 stimulus. Despite Republican mythmaking that the American Recovery and […]

The Wall Street Journal greeted the failure of the Congressional debt super committee with an editorial titled, "Thank You, Grover Norquist." That gratitude should have surprised no one. After all, Norquist's anti-tax pledge led handcuffed committee Republicans not just to oppose even modest tax increases on the richest Americans, but to demand another tax cut […]

On Thursday, Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to subpoena all White House documents related to the lost $535 federal loan to the failed solar company Solyndra. But just one day earlier, the GOP majority on the House Natural Resources Committee blocked Democratic efforts to subpoena the CEOs of BP and […]

During the debate over the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in early 2009, stimulus opponent Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed, "If the money were lent rather than just granted, states would, I think, spend it wisely and the states that didn't need it at all wouldn't take any." Now would be a […]

As the House GOP's probe into the $535 million lost loan to Solyndra heated up, the Obama White House had dutifully provided thousands of documents demanded by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Dutifully, that is, until Friday, when White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler announced that President Obama's Blackberry messages and other internal White House […]