carlin

One persistent GOP line of attack against President Obama is the intolerable “regulatory burden” he’s inflicting on American businesses. Mitt Romney, for instance, has been telling campaign crowds that the Obama administration has issued four times as much regulation as past presidents. This claim is false. According to Bloomberg news, the Obama administration has issued […]

With relatively little fanfare and overwhelming bipartisan support, the U.S. Senate recently passed a large Pentagon spending bill that includes provisions that could significantly expand the scope and meaning of our war on terror. Questions remain about the impact of the bill on the disposition of terrorism cases involving U.S. citizens, specifically those arrested on […]

One positive outgrowth of the various Occupy demonstrations and encampments around the country (and the world) is the increasing attention being paid to inequalities of wealth and power. In the United States, inequality has been increasing significantly and is no longer in serious dispute. A recently released study by the Congressional Budget Office shows that […]

In a recent column in The Washington Post, George Will made the following extraordinary, if unwitting, statement about potential GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney: “Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor who takes his bearings from ‘data’ … Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a […]

Perhaps the single most common media criticism of Occupy Wall Streetand mainstream media have found plenty to criticizeis that the movement’s grievances and demands are unclear. OWS is in its infancy. It is intentionally leaderlessdespite the usual right-wing nonsense that George Soros is bankrolling itand as a movement is focused on systemic problems, not a […]

Among the most disturbing and under-reported developments of the past year has been the attempts by GOP-controlled legislatures throughout the country to pass new laws that make it more difficult to register new voters, restrict or eliminate early voting and otherwise impede Americans’ access to the voting booth. These efforts, according to the Brennan Center […]

A good rule of thumb in contemporary American political discourse is that the louder GOP leaders and right-wing talking heads scream about a supposed transgression by “liberals,” the more likely it is that they are themselves guilty of that transgression. The right’s frothing condemnation last week of President Obama for engaging in “class warfare” is […]

Ten years ago this past Sunday, America suffered catastrophic attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. In the days following those murderous events, there was much talk about how everything was different now. Americans, we understood, needed to come together, to put aside our differences in order to fight this perilous new threat and to […]