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 […]

When George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office, Republican majorities in Congress voted seven times to increase the U.S. debt ceiling. That recent history, combined with the inconvenient truth that the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under Bush, may have prompted then Minority Leader John Boehner to warn his GOP […]

In the aftermath of Friday's budget agreement, it's no longer a question of whether the U.S. is going to slash spending, but where, when and by how much. On the heels of the $38.5 billion in cuts to discretionary, non-defense spending Obama adviser David Plouffe deemed "draconian", President Obama this week will lay out his […]

The national debt of the United States tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under George W. Bush. Bush and the GOP Congress cut taxes during wartime, a first in modern American history. During his presidency, Republicans voted seven times to increase the debt ceiling. As Utah Senator Orrin Hatch in 2009 described Republican orthodoxy […]

In October 2001, President Bush's Attorney General John Ashcroft reversed 35 years of White House practice regarding Freedom of Information Act requests. For the first time since the passage of the Act, disclosure became the exception to the rule. As Dick Cheney's secret energy task force, 22 million "missing" Bush administration emails and Karl Rove's […]