As Jake Tapper explained on ABC World News Thursday night, the Republican response to President Obama's statements regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was "much ado about nothing." After all, U.S. policy under both Presidents Bush and Clinton was largely identical to Obama's assertion that "the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the […]

The presence of Grammy-winning rapper Common at a White House poetry event last night brought frothing-at-the-mouth conservatives to brink of broken blood vessels. While Fox News ran special segments on "The Invitation," employee Sarah Palin complained, "It's just so lacking of class and decency and all that's good about America." Of course, the right-wing chattering […]

While all eyes this week were focused on the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, back in Washington Vice President Biden met with Democratic and Republican budget negotiators in search of a compromise to reduce the U.S. national debt. As it turns out, the two events are related. Because almost 10 years after President […]

This week, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) admitted that the Republican effort to repeal the 2010 health care law is "dead." But while all eyes are now focused on the lawsuit by 26 states to overturn the law and its individual insurance mandate, hundreds of thousands of Americans are already getting […]

In a nationally televised address to the American people on March 4, 1987, President Ronald Reagan admitted he had traded arms for hostages in the Iran-Contra scandal and declared, "This happened on my watch." Sadly, that may have been the last time a Republican leader took ownership of a disaster by simply acknowledging the calendar. […]

The only thing more predictable than Americans' jubilation over the killing of Osama Bin Laden is the Republican campaign to give George W. Bush credit for it. Sadly for the right-wing propaganda machine, as Stephen Colbert warned President Bush five years ago, "reality has a well-known liberal bias." Bush, after all, shrugged off Bin Laden's […]

Announcing the U.S. operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, President Obama reminded Americans and the world, "Over the years, I've repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was." But when candidate Barack Obama declared in 2007 "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and […]

"Reagan," Vice President Dick Cheney famously declared in 2002, "proved deficits don't matter." Unless, that is, a Democrat is in the White House. After all, while Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt and George W. Bush doubled it again, each Republican was rewarded with a second term in office. But as the Gallup polling data […]

As Tax Day 2011 arrives, the distance between the tax debate and tax reality has perhaps never been larger. New data from the IRS revealed that over since the mid-1990's, the richest 400 taxpayers saw their incomes double and their tax rates halved. Overall, the gilded-class has seen its effective tax rates plummet. Meanwhile, prosecutions […]

Last week, the political chattering classes praised Republican Paul Ryan's "serious" budget proposal to slash $4.3 trillion in spending in order to fund yet another round of upper-income tax cuts. But over just the past few days, the New York Times' David Leonhardt, Slate's Annie Lowery and Ezra Klein of the Washington Post offered a […]