A $700 billion, 10-year windfall for the wealthiest Americans who need it least. With both parties generally supporting the continuation of middle class relief already on the books, that's the difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to making the expiring Bush tax cuts permanent. But just one day after his former budget director […]

The bad news just keeps coming for Democrats. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll gives the GOP a record 9-point edge in the generic Congressional ballot for November. Meanwhile, an ABC News/Washington Post survey shows that as President Obama's approval ratings continue to slide, support for his management of the economy and the deficit are […]

"Ninety percent of life," Woody Allen famously said, "is just showing up." For Congressional Republicans, the other 10% is voting no. But despite the apparent success of their unprecedented obstructionism, heading into the midterm elections a handful of Republicans are starting to get a little uncomfortable with only being the Party of No. When House […]

In perhaps the greatest comic moment of the 2010 campaign to date, John McCain last month complained, "I know how popular it is for the Eastern press to paint me as having changed positions. That's not true." Of course, his flip-flops are now so numerous that he long ago earned nicknames like "Jukebox John" and […]

Somewhere in America, a psychology graduate student is doubtless preparing the definitive thesis of the modern conservative mindset. After all, the Bush years produced a cottage industry of analyses on the roots of Dubya's "dead or alive, bring 'em on" macho talk. And now that Sarah Palin has added "impotent" and "limp" to a right-wing […]

In the wake of President Obama's speech last, the neoconservative architects of the Iraq War predictably reemerged to claim credit for the national disaster they portray as success. But one of them, Bill Kristol, allowed that the address was, "on the whole, not a bad speech by the president," adding that it was "unrealistic for […]

In her predictable Facebook pre-buttal to the President's primetime speech on Iraq, Sarah Palin demanded that Barack Obama "admit you were wrong about the surge." But in insisting that "the more honest you are about the past, the more likely it is you will gain the support of the American people," Palin exempted President Bush […]

In his pivotal address to the Southern Baptists in 1960, John F. Kennedy cautioned those suspicious of his Catholic faith, "Today, I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you -- until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of great national peril." But with his furious […]

On Saturday, Glenn Beck and tens of thousands of his Tea Party faithful descended on Washington supposedly to "restore honor" to America and defend the Constitution of the United States. Or, more accurately, parts of it. After all, once they get past their enthusiasm for the Second and Tenth Amendments, the same right-wing die-hards would […]

Back in the 1970's, the British comedy troupe Monty Python introduced the expression "nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" into the popular culture. Now, with the prospect of the GOP retaking control of the House of Representatives, everybody expects the Republican Inquisition. That is, the Party that decried the "criminalization of politics" in every scandal from […]