Conservatives have discovered that ending the career of the third most powerful public official in the world and hijacking the U.S. Congress is pretty easy. It doesn’t even take a majority of both houses — though Republicans have that — it just takes a few dozen House members who are ready to burn some shit down. Meet the House Freedom […]

Backlash over Ben Carson’s anti-Muslim smears forced the Detroit-born neurosurgeon to twist and spin. But his refusal to apologize is winning him donations and crucial support. “I wouldn’t expect those remarks would hurt Dr. Carson in Iowa,” Steve King, Iowa congressman and the GOP’s Pope of Xenophobia, said. “I think they help him.” King is probably right. Republicans crave exactly […]

After a sluggish debate that forced him compliment job destroyer/new GOP favorite Carly Fiorina’s looks and deliver a scorchingly white low-five to Jeb Bush, Donald Trump got back into the groove on Thursday by suggesting that he may be willing to build a wall around American Muslims in case they try to make a clock or something. “That’s my question. […]

This guest post comes from Sean McElwee — a research associate at Demos and an excellent follow on Twitter. If you haven’t already, check out Sean’s work on Salon, Rolling Stone, his own blog and various other publications. You’ll see that he has a gift for lucidity and a healthy obsession with improving our democracy by increasing voting, dispelling economic […]

And it could be Democrats greatest nightmare, too How did Mitt Romney end up losing more of the Latino vote than John McCain who lost more than George W. Bush? It mainly comes down to one utterance of “self-deportation” in one primary debate. Sure, there were other utterances that involved him saying he’d have vetoed the DREAM Act and planned […]

When it comes to our economy, we have one massive problem that’s like a black hole sucking in all hope of rebuilding the middle class: Only the richest are getting richer. From the year before Ronald Reagan was elected to the year before George W. Bush left the White House, the only income gains for most Americans came from working […]

A “low-information voter” has come to mean “anyone not smart enough to vote the way I do.” The discernment is not usually made on facts, since we all choose which facts to focus upon. Voters are not generally rational actors making perfect decisions, no matter how much we like to pretend we are. For instance, I know studies have shown […]

On Thursday, the chairman of the Republican Party — a man who presented a report that called on the GOP to take a new, less-Republican tone toward immigrants — stood on stage with Donald Trump and got him to pledge to support the Republican nominee in 2016. Meanwhile the other Republican candidates did the same thing, knowing that Trump is […]

It’s easy for Democrats to hope that Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination because it’s easy to believe he can’t win. For those of us who watched in horror as George W. Bush won (twice), we know otherwise. For those who watched the Michigan state legislature be completely taken over by tea party religious zealots, we know otherwise. Trump, who […]

Call Ari Berman the Paul Revere of voting rights. “In 2011 and 2012, 180 new voting restrictions were introduced in forty-one states, with twenty-seven new laws taking effect in nineteen states, nearly all of them controlled by Republicans,” Berman writes in his new book Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. This wasn’t some freak […]

The following guest post is from my dear friend Wally Welch. In it, he compares and contrasts former President Jimmy Carter (a personal hero of mine who is battling brain cancer) and Donald Trump (not a hero of mine who is battling xenophobia, racism, and sexism.) Enjoy Jimmy Carter, 91, in typically cheerful, humble, and matter-of-fact fashion, recently announced he […]