When I was in high school, I was an insufferable young Republican. Like a lot of kids who self-identify as conservative, as soon as I left home and began to learn about the real world, among other things via higher education in the field of political science, my personal values...

Alex Jones is a nut sandwich. But there's one thing I'd offer up as a compliment: at least Alex Jones is original. He's mentally unstable and an exploitative matchstick man who's making millions on the paranoid naivete of his gullible, mentally unbalanced disciples. But he's kind of the first big-time...

They say two wrongs don't make a right, but ignoring one of those wrongs while vilifying the other is intellectually dishonest and violently hypocritical, among other things. And certainly that's the case surrounding news that the IRS targeted tea-party groups as a means of determining and verifying their tax-exempt...

The Republican inquisition over the attacks against Americans in Benghazi has never really gone away, but it appears as though in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and the House Oversight Committee's Benghazi hearings this week there are renewed psycho-histrionics over Benghazi.

Lindsey Graham and Fox News...

Fox News Channel amplified its crusade against the president this week, implying that the same administration that killed Bin Laden and much of al Qaeda's leadership, and the same administration that boasts a considerable record of killing terrorist operatives with targeted attacks using an escalating number of drone strikes is...

I'm old enough to remember when country singer Natalie Maines said, "We're ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." She wasn't broadcasting a political demand for impeachment or a half-baked conspiracy theory, and it wasn't delivered to anyone outside of the auditorium -- no audiences of...

If Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had somehow managed to evade capture and had traveled to a gun show in, say, neighboring Vermont, New Hampshire or Maine, he would've been able to easily purchase one or more military-style assault weapons without a background check thanks in part to the efforts of

Yesterday, the president released his 2014 budget and, among some solid line items like additional infrastructure spending, universal preschool and reductions in tax breaks for Big Oil, he also proposed the truly stupid idea of linking Social Security cost-of-living-adjustments (COLAs) to something called "chained CPI" (chained consumer price...

You might not have heard about Republican congressman Tim Griffin, an otherwise nondescript conservative lawmaker from Arkansas, but bear with me on this.

Before being elected to Congress in 2010, Griffin, whose physical appearance and speaking voice remind me of a stumpier, mini-me clone of George W. Bush, served...

It's not the first time and it won't be the last time, but today I'm ashamed to be a registered member of the Democratic Party. Not only is today, March 21, the tenth anniversary of America's "shock and awe" attack on Baghdad during the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which...

When I began the day, I promised myself I wasn't going to write about drones or anti-drone crusader and Guardian blogger Glenn Greenwald or the war on terrorism again, mainly because I covered the topic here last week and several more times elsewhere. But the drone...

This week, Eric Holder wrote to Rand Paul in response to a letter the senator wrote to John Brennan inquiring whether the administration could use drones to kill American citizens on American soil. It was difficult to miss, with headlines blazoned everywhere, from The Huffington Post ("Eric Holder:...

As a political writer, being outraged by certain issues and policies is like rocket fuel. I'm not an angry guy by nature, but there's a universe of things in politics that anger me and, combined with an almost involuntary drive to seek and disseminate the truth, I'm never really at...

Just when I thought it was safe to carry on a reasonable conversation on the left about various Obama administration policies, the phrases "same as Bush" or "worse than Bush" have skulked back into popular use thanks to the leaked Office of Legal Counsel white paper on the targeted killing...

On HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday there was an extended and heated debate about gun control. The participants included Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker and author Sam Harris, who, in case you don't recognize the name, happens to be an insufferable marketeer of the "both...

Way back in mid-August of 2006, President Bush was dealing with two ground wars; a crisis between Israel and Lebanon; a midterm election; a housing market on the verge of collapse; the forthcoming hurricane season (Katrina was just a year earlier); a laundry list of scandals; and the day-to-day struggle...

Last week, the annual SHOT Show was held in Las Vegas. The NRA had not one but three different booths and Bushmaster, the manufacturer of the assault rifle used by the Sandy Hook shooter, had two different booths. So it comes as no surprise that aging rocker, secessionist and...

This week, President Obama and Vice President Biden announced a bold series of new gun control regulations designed to restrict access to the deadliest weapons available, while also focusing on other firearm-related areas through a series of 23 executive orders, which the president immediately authorized. Needless to say, the...

This is what happens when one very delusional, very opportunistic grifter makes more money than he knows what to do with thanks to easily-tricked disciples who willingly endorse his madness. Yes, Glenn Beck is building an amusement park called -- what else? -- Independence Park.

But he's pitching it...

I don't usually get into movie reviews here, but I wanted to take some time with the new Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained; partly because racial issues and the American Civil War are two areas that I discuss quite frequently, but primarily because it took me several days...