In December 2009, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales lamented not that President Bush had politicized the Justice Department, but that he didn't politicize it enough. But with its purge of U.S. attorneys, complicity in rubber-stamping detainee torture and blessing illegal domestic surveillance, the Bush administration's gutting of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division and the perversion […]

If creating new jobs is Job One for the Obama administration, then the past 24 hours have been a mixed blessing. Thursday brought good news of a continued if slow decline in first-time jobless claims, while a drop in the productivity rate suggested businesses are poised to expand hiring. But today's word that the 431,000 […]

Perhaps the only thing worse than a war criminal is an unrepentant one. And so it with Barack Obama's predecessor. Just months after former Vice President Dick Cheney boasted, "I was a big supporter of waterboarding," George W. Bush joined him by announcing, "I'd do it again." President Bush's endorsement of the use of waterboarding […]

While Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has deemed the Sestak no-pay-for-no-play non-scandal an "illegal quid pro quo" and "Obama's Watergate," the overwhelming consensus of legal opinion had concluded otherwise. While Bush White House ethics officer Richard Painter told his fellow Republicans to "move on," Steve Bunnell of the firm O'Melveny & Myers announced, "There is nothing […]

With today's release of statements by the White House Counsel and Congressman Joe Sestak regarding the no-pay for no-play Pennsylvania Senate contest, Sestakgate is emerging as a non-scandal. After all, in 1982 President Ronald Reagan offered Senator S.I. Hayakawa a job if he dropped out of the California GOP primary. And as CREW director Melanie […]

"You can fool some of the people some of the time, and that's our target market." Judging from the rhetoric of House Minority Leader John Boehner, that's the Republican mantra when it comes to the Obama recovery package. Nine months after Boehner wrongly decried a "stimulus bill that didn't create any jobs," his web site […]

Back in February, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) rolled out his Republican "Roadmap for America's Future." When confronted about the certainty that his drastic privatization scheme would inevitably lead to rationing of Medicare, Ryan departed from the GOP health care script to protest, "Rationing happens today!" But now, Senate Republicans are trying to block Donald Berwick, […]

For almost a year and a half, furious Tea Party protesters have been chanting "Taxed Enough Already." But as it turns out, "taxed enough" actually means "at the lowest levels since 1950." That's the word from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which found that Americans paid the smallest overall tax bill since Harry Truman was […]

One month after Republican Governors Bob McDonnell and Haley Barbour celebrated a slavery-free version of the Confederacy, the GOP is defending slavery in order to attack President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan. In an RNC memo released today, Republicans blast the former clerk to Thurgood Marshall for concurring with her boss' assessment that the […]

As oil was spreading across the Gulf on April 29, AP reporter Calvin Woodward did some spreading of his own. Amplifying the predictable Republican talking point, Woodward asked, "Will this be Obama's Katrina?" Now a week later, his AP colleagues H. Josef Hebert and Erica Werner have responded with an emphatic no in an article […]