Writing in Salon today, Rick Perlstein examines "what Haley Barbour's amnesia tells us" about Southern conservatives' historical revisionism. But largely lost in the imbroglio over Barbour's literal white-washing of the Jim Crow era is that the Mississippi Governor and would-have-been 2012 White House hopeful has plenty of company among the leading lights of the Republican […]

Move over, welfare queens, IRS agents and trial lawyers. The Republican Party has a new bogeyman: the public employee. With a sluggish U.S. economy, cash-strapped states and under-funded pension programs, Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin and other leading lights of the GOP are scape-goating government workers and their unions for the nation's woes. Of course, there's […]

For years, American federalism has been characterized by "red state socialism," the one way flow of federal dollars from blue state taxpayers to red state recipients. For example, Sarah Palin's home state of Alaska ranked third in federal tax dollars received per dollar of taxes paid by state residents. But now that recession-ravaged states like […]

This weekend, Americans learned of a new domestic terror threat in Oregon. According to the FBI, Somali-born student Mohamed Osman Mohamud planned to detonate a bomb during the annual Christmas tree lighting in Portland. But while all eyes are now fixed on the tree lighting plot, down the road in Salem the trial of alleged […]

As a police photographer snapped his mug shot back in 2005, former House Majority Leader Tom Delay prayed, "Let people see Christ through me." Now, five years after he was indicted for money laundering, Delay's trial has finally begun in Austin, Texas. And while he may not walk on water, Tom Delay may yet walk […]

While today's employment report showed the private sector added jobs for the ninth straight month, those gains were more than offset by the deep cuts by state and local governments. But those layoffs, the biggest in 30 years, didn't have to be this severe. After all, President Obama in June asked Congress for $50 billion […]

This week, Time magazine offered an inside look at "the Secret World of Extreme Militias," the increasingly dangerous ranks of anti-government extremists, white supremacists, tax deniers, gun rights activists and anti-abortion radicals. But even as Barton Gellman reported that "Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist […]

In August, the New Republic, the New York Times and others warned that the 2010 campaign would feature a new Republican bogeyman. The Times announced, "There's a class war coming to the world of government pensions," while TNR's Jonathan Cohn explained the latest GOP hatefest in "Why Public Employees are the New Welfare Queens." Of […]

Back in February, 42 governors signed a letter pleading with Congressional leaders to extend the federal matching assistance program for Medicaid. And with good reason. 30 cash-strapped states, including Republican bastions Georgia and Alabama, had already assumed new federal Medicaid funds in their budgets. Worse still, drastic downturns in revenues combined with the recession's escalating […]

In the wake of his ruling overturning California's Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage, one legal observer concluded Judge Vaughn Walker "is speaking to Justice Kennedy." Slate's Dahlia Lithwick went a step further, suggesting that while "Judge Vaughn R. Walker is not Anthony Kennedy," he "certainly knows how to write like him." If so, Judge […]