So, 13 months after Donald Trump took the oath of office, it's come to this for the Republican Party. Its putative leader used to be pro-choice. He routinely boasted about getting "everybody" insured, only to then promise to "kill" Obamacare. He not only reversed past positions at a rapid-fire rate, he lied to voters at […]

Less than a week into the new year, the Trump administration kicked off 2018 with one of the most cynical and craven acts of political favoritism in recent American history. On January 4, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke unveiled the Draft Five Year Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program. That massive gift to Donald […]

Thursday's release of the House GOP tax plan will be greeted with a flurry of "hot takes" about its "winners and losers." So, for everyone's sake, let's keep this simple. Unsurprisingly, the biggest winners from what the President called a "big, beautiful Christmas present" are people named Trump and those like them. Just as predictable, […]

Next week, Congressional Republicans will vote on the Graham-Cassidy bill supposedly designed to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. Shockingly, they will do so without a score from Capitol Hill's nonpartisan scorekeeper, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). As the office led by the GOP's hand-picked director Keith Hall warned last Monday, "CBO will not be able to […]

Even as the U.S. Census reported that the percentage of Americans lacking health insurance dropped to a new record low of 8.8 percent, the past week was nevertheless a big one for health care reform proposals in Washington. Sen. Bernie Sanders, backed by 15 of his Democratic colleagues, unveiled his "Medicare for All" bill providing […]

In recent years, "red state socialism" has become the hallmark of American federalism. That is, even as supposed GOP budget hawks loudly (and wrongly) decry "out of control" spending by Uncle Sam, less well-off Republican-controlled states generally benefit from a one-way flow of federal tax dollars made possible by wealthier blue states usually dominated by […]

Defending the indefensible on Tuesday, President Donald Trump traveled back in time to deploy the "both sides do it" talking point to explain the Civil War. Providing air cover for white supremacists, Trump declared "you had some very fine people on both sides," apparently including "many of those people were there to protest the taking […]

What if the South had won the Civil War? Hardly a new question, and it's doubtless one of the most common counterfactual thought exercises in American history. It's also already been recently asked--though not answered seriously--in the 2004 mockumentary, CSA: The Confederate States of America. Nevertheless, HBO is turning to some of the folks who […]

The ink from President Obama's signature on the Affordable Care Act wasn't even dry when then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell unveiled the Republican mantra for the upcoming midterm elections. As he put it on March 23, 2010, "I think the slogan will be "repeal and replace", "repeal and replace." Now, almost seven years later, […]

For much of the past week, President-elect Donald Trump boasted about saving 1,000 jobs at the Carrier air conditioning plant in Indianapolis, Indiana. Representing only about half of the positions candidate Trump promised to protect from relocation to Mexico, the murky Carrier deal appears to be a one-off bargain combining the carrot of state tax […]