On April 12th, Americans will mark the 150th anniversary of the Southern attack on Fort Sumter and the start of the Civil War. The reenactors will be out in force, though their numbers will be dwarfed by the revisionists pretending the conflict was about anything else but slavery. Even as the sons of the South […]

On Sunday, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) previewed his party's 2012 budget proposal due out Tuesday. Needless to say, its target of $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade won't be met by simply letting the Bush tax cuts expire. Instead, Ryan as widely expected will propose the "voucherization" and inevitable […]

Having won one class war, Republicans are starting a second. To perpetuate record levels of income inequality not seen since before the Great Depression, conservatives are agitating for middle class Americans to wage a civil war on each other. Their latest divide-and-conquer tactic is to portray government workers as "takers" and "parasites" somehow responsible for […]

Facing dire budget crises, governors nationwide are waging an economic race to the bottom. In Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee and Idaho, the new GOP leadership is pursuing draconian curbs on public employee unions supposedly to rein in compensation and pensions of government workers. Meanwhile, in Florida, Michigan and elsewhere, Republican governors have slashed corporate […]

As was proven once again this weekend, for Republicans nothing succeeds like failure. Across the Sunday talk shows and op-ed pages, a legion of GOP luminaries spoke authoritatively on subjects they had frequently - and often catastrophically - bungled in the past. Apparently, no transgression is too serious, no series of mistakes too disastrous and […]

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 […]

Republicans have seen the future and it's in Mississippi. On the same day Wisconsin Republicans turned to unprecedented and possibly illegal maneuvers to strip public workers of collective bargaining rights, the Michigan legislature blessed emergency powers for Governor Rick Snyder to terminate municipal contracts across the state. And while Idaho joined Tennessee in seeking to […]

2011 is becoming a kind of political Rorschach Test; which of its myriad anniversaries you celebrate most says a lot about who you are and what you believe. While JFK's swearing-in 50 years ago conjures up what might have been, Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday commemorates what never was. And the 150th anniversary of the birth […]

At some point in the next several weeks, former RNC chairman and current Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour will decide whether he will seek the White House in 2012. To be sure, Barbour's path to the presidency is full of obstacles. And it's not just because America's foremost neo-Confederate literally whitewashed the Jim Crow era and […]

Just days after his sneering "so be it" at the prospect of massive job losses which could result from GOP budget policies, House Speaker John Boehner declared public employees have a "machine gun" pointed "at the heads of local officials." That makes Boehner just the latest Republican leader respond to a $175 billion shortfall in […]