Big business and GOP have a mutually beneficial relationship — but why do the party’s favorite victims keep voting Republican? Something amazing happened when conservatives deciding that the biggest problem in America today is that gay people can buy things with money: Big business rose up and helped quash conservative overreach. Apple’s Tim Cook help lead a backlash that soon […]

The Republican Party is now engaged in a great battle of the spirit, according to The Daily Beast‘s Matt Lewis. Lewis channels The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent to ask: Will the Republican Party run for the White House in 2016 with a genuine effort to expand the party’s appeal beyond its core constituencies and make inroads with the voter groups that have […]

“It is as if the government had developed the economic policy equivalent of smart bombs, except these bombs carry payloads of cash for their carefully selected recipients,” Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson write in Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Those carefully selected recipients are the richest 1 […]

Last week Ted Cruz showed us why we need another season of Cosmos. On Late Night with Seth Meyers, he was presented with a chance to explain why the world is on fire but it isn’t getting hotter — and he took it. It was as if the world’s greatest internet commenter had crawled into the news and started spraying […]

The opponents of interracial marriage must be kicking themselves. If they’d been as ruthlessly creative as today’s anti-gay movement, they could have denied “mixed” couples services and legitimacy for decades. Acceptance of same-sex marriage has reached new highs in recent polls, with 59 percent in favor of marriage equality in a recent poll. But the idea that people should be […]

If there were actually a liberal Fox News, America would be messing itself over the GOP’s new budget proposal. Relying on savage cuts to those who have been most brutalized by the Bush Recession, the new blueprint from House Republicans claims to make a huge dent in our long-term debt. But the proposal is so much less believable than Harry […]

Republicans are so supportive these days! Matt Drudge is thrilled about the presidential candidacy of Martin O’Malley. William Kristol and Karl Rove want to see Elizabeth Warren get into the 2016 Democratic primary. Reihan Salam has five progressives he’d like to see oppose Hillary. Either our conservative friends want a candidate who would be tougher on corporate greed or they […]

Robert D. Putnam wants to have a debate without starting an argument. And he may succeed. His new book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis succeeds in displaying the kind of canniness that makes the Harvard professor a favorite of both President Obama and Jeb Bush. To maintain the kind of equanimity that keeps your work at the heart of […]

Recently economists and commentators have been debating how much richer the rich have gotten since the Great Recession. Republicans have decided shouldn’t be just sitting around yapping about it — we should get busy trying to make the richest richest-er. New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait took a look at the new proposal from Marco Rubio and Mike Lee and found […]

Help me out with this. Why are we still arguing about Obamacare — in 2015? Why haven’t conservatives even voted on a replacement? Could it be that the plan inspired by the guy we nominated for president in 2012 isn’t exactly pure, distilled communism? As I read the coverage of the Supreme Court arguments in the case of King v. […]

If Republicans are trying to show people how crucial Obamacare is, King v. Burwell could be the perfect way to do it. The lawsuit that could end subsidies to the millions of Americans in 34 states who purchased insurance through the federal health care exchange will be argued on March 4. But we already have hints of what the impact […]