buy contrasting previous Presidents with Trump on their reaction to crises Clinton on OK City bombing, Olympic Park bombing G W Bush on 9/11 Obama on Sandy Hook massacre, Mother Emmanuel AME shooting Charleston contrasted with Trump on Charlottesville and Kenosha just video clips of each President speaking after the...
BillClinton
This pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? From today’s New York Daily News cover story: One by one, former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton stood tall Thursday at the Atlanta funeral of civil rights icon John Lewis, honoring the life and legacy of the fearless Congressional...
As we all binge watch TV and YouTube, I came across this great clip of Elvis Costello interviewing fmr. President Bill Clinton before a relatively small crowd in Arkansas. What makes the clip interesting is that the subject matter is largely confined to music. Whatever you think of his policies, Clinton is...
December 22, 2019 The Honorable Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House of Representatives Washington, D.C. 20515 Dear Madam Speaker: I wrote you this past Tuesday to protest in the strongest possible terms the partisan impeachment charade you and your Democrat conspirators were about to perpetrate in the House of Representatives....
Firmly adopting Republican spin as the best way to view the House impeachment of Donald Trump, The New York Times in recent days appears to have forfeited much of its news coverage to the GOP. Adopting Republican talking points that impeachment is “a political plus” for Trump; “risky” for Democrats; that the...
Mitt Romney has never missed an opportunity to be an opportunist. Romney the leveraged buyout pioneer took advantage of the U.S. tax code to pocket tens of millions of dollars from investments in companies that failed. Mitt the mythical Massachusetts moderate transformed himself into the “severely conservative” 2012 presidential nominee...
You may remember Lynne Patton from the Michael Cohen hearings, when she attempted to refute Cohen’s (rather obvious) assertion that Donald Trump is a racist. Well, now the regional HUD administrator for the Trump administration is stepping into the fray again to (naturally!) accuse Bill and Hillary Clinton of killing Jeffrey...
Donald Trump has elevated some real kooks since announcing his presidential bid, but earlier today he retweeted a serious nutter, proving once again that this bozo is to respectable humans what hot diarrhea is to $3,000 wedding cake. Seriously, this “Lynn Thomas” makes Alex Jones look like Edward R. Murrow. From the...
Imagine you’re in a coffee shop when a man you don’t know sits down uninvited next to you. Scribbling on a napkin and spouting something about “tax cuts pay for themselves,” the man then confidently proclaims: “You really can't collect much money from upper-income people. They know how to get...
E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote a recent column that covers the recent Third Way meeting in Charleston, SC. There is the usual blather from the attendees who describe themselves as “moderates” against leftists in the Democratic Party. But Dionne goes on to take some quotes from Third Way President Jon Cowan...
It seems to be an argument almost as fundamental as “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”, and just about as insoluble. On the one hand you have activist progressives who argue that the constitution isn’t interpreted by politics, and Trump’s offenses require impeachment, and the consequences be damned....
Historical events occur twice, Karl Marx famously said, first as tragedy and then as farce. But when it comes to the rampant lawlessness of Republican presidential administrations, the record is a succession of national tragedies for the United States. And the damage to America’s democratic institutions is no laughing matter....
Yes, Ken Starr, who somehow turned an investigation into a failed real estate deal into the world’s longest Penthouse Forum letter. This guy is worried about the Mueller report appearing overly politicized. This guy. Talking Points Memo: “So many questions have been raised about that staff and their leanings and...
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was back in the headlines this week—not for any particular wisdom regarding authoritarian regimes and movements she shared with the House Intelligence Committee, but for this: “I personally owe an apology to now-Senator Romney, because I think that we underestimated what was going on...
Mr. Bothsiderist — Chuck “Not My Job to Be a Referee” Todd – and several other talking heads have bemoaned the fact of the lack of “bipartisanship” by Democrats during the upcoming House hearings, but yesterday, the Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform proved that they cannot be allowed...
Last week I wrote a diary arguing that Donald Trump, harebrained idiot, almost certainly lied when he said this during his speech in the Rose Garden on Friday: “This should have been done by all of the presidents that preceded me,” Trump said. “And they all know it. Some of them...
Trump doesn’t just lie. He makes up entire conversations that never happened. And he does it all the time. The latest? He claimed today during his press conference/harrowing public mental breakdown that “some” former presidents have told him they should have done what he’s currently doing — i.e., shutting down the...
As 2018 draws to a close, there is growing concern about what the next year will bring for the American economy. President Trump’s twin self-inflicted wounds of an ongoing trade war with China and a needless government shutdown helped send stock markets into a December panic. The expanding global economy,...
And now for today’s thought exercise. Imagine you are a member of Congress. Recent assessments from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warn that the budget deficit for fiscal year 2018, which ended on Sept. 30, jumped to $779 billion and annual trillion-dollar shortfalls will return beginning in FY 2020. But then...
The passing of President George H.W. Bush this week presented Americans with an opportunity to reflect on a life lived in service to the United States. A child of privilege, at age 18 Bush nevertheless volunteered for the military after Pearl Harbor. A bomber pilot who survived after his plane...
During the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Mitt Romney made a not-so-bold promise about the stewardship he would provide for the American economy. “I can tell you,” he guaranteed, “after a period of four years, by virtue of the policies we'd put in place, we'd get the unemployment rate down...
Mitch McConnell probably thought he was being very clever, waiting almost a full year after the passage of the Republican tax scam to blame the resultant budget hole on an 83-year-old program. Yes, the public has a short memory, but if the GOP succeeds in stripping them of their Social Security...
In the wake of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, Americans will long debate whether he was the first (or, arguably, the second) member of the nation’s highest court to have engaged in sexual misconduct. But what is indisputable is that Kavanaugh is the Supreme Court’s first Plumber. By “Plumber,” I’m not referring...
Like a recurring biblical plague, they descend across the country. Despite the repeated warnings from both experts and lay persons of good faith and common sense, the media and tens of millions of people are nevertheless still shocked by their arrival. As predicted, they devastate everything in their path, leaving...
No Russians. No Collusion. No Russians. No Collusion. No Russians. No Collusion. Since the day that Robert Mueller was appointed, this has been the Tantric meditative chant for Trump and his nitwit cabal. Geico used to run ads with the catch phrase, “So simple, even a caveman can...
If Donald Trump was a Marvel character, his name might be something like “DeceptiCon.” That is, the never-before-seen frequency and magnitude of Trump’s lies combine to create a Cloak of Confusion, a black hole-like force from which the truth seemingly cannot escape. Defying the laws of physics and logic, he...
Campaign Action During the run-up to the passage of the “Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” late last year, one technical paper from the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis suddenly went missing. Why “Distributing the Corporate Income Tax: Revised U.S. Treasury Methodology” alone among the office’s four-decade online archive of...
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and that’s our target market.” That perversion of Abraham Lincoln’s timeless adage might as well be the slogan of the modern Republican Party, especially when the topic is taxes. After all, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Joint Committee...
With apologies to Benjamin Disraeli, there are three kinds of lies Republicans are telling about their tax plan: lies, damned lies, and f**king lies. Constraints of space and time preclude listing them all, but here is a handful of the GOP’s most farfetched falsehoods. For example, earlier this month House...