Paul Waldman

The image at right is a screenshot of Yahoo News from this morning, with stories about the fact that a package of programs to boost small business was filibustered by Republicans in the Senate. You’ll notice that while some of the stories make clear who actually killed this bill, many do not. The facts are […]

A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows support for the Affordable Care Act building, but it also shows some other interesting things, including this: On the other hand, large shares of seniors mistakenly believe the law includes provisions that cut some previously universal Medicare benefits and creates “death panels.” Half of seniors (50%) […]

As you might have heard, yesterday the House passed a bill addressing the inequities in sentencing between possession of crack cocaine and powder cocaine. Yay! Oh wait… It’s never easy, politically, to lower criminal sentences. But a compromise earlier this year between Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions finally got […]

Jonathan Chait, in a post that proves his wisdom by linking to a prior post of mine, points us to this rather remarkable column by conservative radio host and columnist Dennis Prager, which is worth discussing. Prager argues that conservatives just don’t have the same kind of dislike for their opponents that liberals do: Granting […]

We’ve seen recently that Sarah Palin has the power to sprinkle her magical moose dust on a Republican primary candidate and take that candidate from also-ran to front-runner with a single Facebook endorsement. Nikki Haley, the likely next governor of South Carolina, is the most prominent example, but Palin has endorsed lots of candidates in […]

Lately, some Republicans have been saying with a smirk that pretty soon people are going to start missing George W. Bush. They mean that will happen because of the socialist nightmare Barack Obama has turned America into, of course. But we may start missing Bush for quite the opposite reason: because today’s Republicans are making […]

As a progressive, I tend to think the Republican Party is much more ideologically extreme than the Democratic Party. There are many reasons, some of which may be more legitimate than others. But it turns out that my opinion isn’t representative. According to this research from the Pew Research Center, the typical Democrat thinks the […]

Literature and pop culture are full of characters who start off hating each other — couples fated for romance, a black cop and a white cop thrown together unwillingly as partners, a new recruit and a grizzled old sergeant. They fight bitterly, then go through trials together, and come to realize that underneath all that […]

Today, E.J.Dionne takes on everyone’s propensity to pick up bogus stories from the right, especially Fox News, which raises a point I’ve been thinking about: This goes way back. Al Gore never actually said he “invented the Internet,” but you could be forgiven for not knowing this because the mainstream media kept reporting he had. […]