The IRS, always friendless, now is a pariah. Republicans can’t stop condemning it. Democrats can’t stop agreeing. Targeting Tea Party groups for scrutiny, even if through incompetence, not intention, turned the IRS into a nasty carbuncle on the governing body. Carbuncles are never good. Strength-sapping, painful, ugly, they’re to be avoided. Here’s the thing, though: [...]
Read Post
Over at The Week, I make the argument that presidential scandal politics usually fail to lift the political prospects of the party outside the White House. No party has reaped a political reward from pushing scandal since Nixon, yet both parties have repeatedly tried. However, short of impeachment or electoral gains, opposition parties may be [...]
Read Post
… because if he were we could dismiss him as a typical stupid hippie to whom nobody should ever pay attention (particularly when sharp analysts like Newt Gingrich and George Will exist.) But now that people who the mainstream media can respect, like Tim Kaine, are saying it, now it’s respectable:
Read Post
Watching the various Republican responses — official and otherwise — to President Obama's state of the Union address was a bit like watching a right-wing remake of The Three Faces of Eve, the 1957 classic about a woman who suffered from "multiple personality disorder" that won Joanne Woodward an Academy Award. In fact, Woodward was the first actress to take home the Best Actress Oscar for portraying three different personalities.
In an attempt to win big political prizes in 2014 and 2016, the GOP is attempting to portray itself as three different parties, but nowhere near as dissociated as the three personalities of Woodward's Eve. But behind what looks like an identity crisis is the same old party..
By my count, there were at least three Republican responses — two official, one unofficial — to the State of the Union address, representing three different faces of the same old GOP: the "Re-Branded" Republican party, the tea party, and the "alienated white men."
Read Post
If you are reading this, you already know the national score from the November election. The Democrats won the presidency, added two seats in the Senate, and won eight seats in the House by over 500,000 votes – while remaining in the minority. But 2012 is old news. Now, in Washington, focus is on the [...]
Read Post
Hey GOP, here’s some friendly advice. You know that diverse coalition that carried President Obama to victory (not to mention sending a number of progressives to the Senate, and delivering an across-the-board victory for marriage equality)? The one that conservatives like Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly have complained about since the election? [...]
Read Post
There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. —Warren Buffett In 2012, class warfare broke out in American politics. And from the president to key Senate races, the middle class won. Today the Campaign for America’s Future launches a new website – WageClassWar.org – to [...]
Read Post
Are you sleeping, are you sleeping, Brother John? Brother John? Morning bells are ringing! Morning bells are ringing! Ding, dang, dong. Ding, dang, dong. Early in the morning, the day after Americans awarded him four more years in the White House, President Obama gave his acceptance speech then sought détente immediately by calling GOP Speaker [...]
Read Post
“The one word description of this election is spelled J-E-E-P,” said a friend early Tuesday evening. “This proves you can’t keep giving the finger to the American people and be elected president,” he said, with evident relief. True enough, in the final days of the campaign, Romney’s oily shape-shifting, etch-a-sketch prevaricating sales pitch finally exceeded [...]
Read Post
The Romney campaign has turned to a strategy of swamping the public with flat-out, blatant lies, one after another, again and again, endlessly and lavishly repeated. They do this because they are making a calculation that it will work! So what is going on? And can democracy survive this assault?
The Growing List Of Lies
Read Post
