Matt Taibbi is probably right. Donald Trump’s campaign has stopped being funny. Now it’s beyond a living satire. Even Paddy Chayefsky wouldn’t let things get this vile. We’re now under the rock seething in the squishy, stomach-turning underbelly of conservative politics that has festered in the resentment of a politics that has capitalized on the anxieties created by the growing […]

The following post is from my friend Stuart Dowty of Washtenaw County. Stu is the Chair of the group Reclaim Our American Democracy (ROAD) and is a fierce warrior in the effort to get money out of our political system and to eliminate the corrosive impact of corporate personhood. The post is in response to law professor Lawrence Lessig’s recent […]

Why did Wisconsin’s Republican Party decide it immediately needed a voter ID law before the 2014 election? The law’s proponents claimed it was necessary but offered no evidence — less than zero — to support that claim. “As there is no evidence that voter-impersonation fraud is a problem, how can the fact that a legislature says it’s a problem turn […]

Donald Trump has been pretending to run for president since 1988, but it took 21 years for him to act racist enough for conservatives to take him seriously. In 2011, it was his birtherism. In 2015, it’s him calling immigrants “rapists.” Rather unsurprisingly, serious people want to pretend his appeal is built on anything other than race. “A new Bloomberg […]

It took corporate America about four years to get the subtext of Donald Trump’s birtherism. But when he decided to use his announcement that he was running for president to reveal his belief that immigrants are criminals and rapists, Madison Avenue was forced to recognize that they probably shouldn’t be tolerating a guy whose comments would get him kicked out […]

The Republican Party’s approval rating is now lower in the Pew poll than at any time since 1992. It’s lower now than it was during the government shutdowns in 2013 and the mid 1990s — lower than the absolute nadir of George W. Bush’s presidency when we were actively losing two wars as the global economy teetered on the edge […]

What is going on here and why does it matter? “Nope, zero.” That was President Obama’s response when Speaker Boehner asked him how much he was willing to cut from Planned Parenthood in 2011. Defunding the organization that has provided health care for 1 in 5 women in America has become a conservative obsession since the rise of the “non-partisan, […]

America is going through a strange sort of puberty. Since the late 1960s, the Republican Party has built a majority based on exploiting the Democratic Party’s “negro problem,” as it was described in the 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority. In the late 70s found an activist army big and bold enough to counter organized labor by embracing evangelical furor, […]

Donald Trump’s Saturday afternoon anti-immigrant bro-down with fellow birther Sheriff Joe reminded me a lot of another Fox News-fed phenomenon that died off when it no longer became electorally convenient for the GOP: GOP elites bash Trump supporters now. But they sure loved these “nonpartisan political neophytes” when they were called the Tea Party. — LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) July 12, 2015 […]

Somebody has to pay off all those debts George W. left us A gaffe only matters if it reinforces a narrative. And that narrative only matters if it induces one reaction: “How dare you?” Jeb Bush said this on Wednesday: My aspirations for the country, and I believe we can achieve it, is for 4 percent growth as far as the […]

I’m cynical. When a politician is forced to do the right thing, I’m glad and don’t really care why s/he did it. But when I see Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus standing behind Governor Nikki Haley as she calls for the removal of the Confederate battle flag* from South Carolina’s state capital, I know something is up. The good news […]