Sarah Palin follows in the footsteps of Susan Molinari, who 12 years ago set a precedent for other GOP leaders such as Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, Trent Lott, Richard Baker and Joe Scarborough. These elected officials all quit before their terms of office expired. None of them left to take...

"What is really behind the mushrooming rate of mortgage foreclosures since 2007?" asked Professor Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas, Dallas on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. His answer might have seemed revelatory to someone utterly bereft of common sense. After studying a huge...

"During the floor debate this morning over the historic American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) received a round of applause from GOP colleagues when he claimed that man-made global warming is a 'hoax' with 'no scientific consensus.'' ThinkProgress, June 26, 2009

One of the...

"A Daring Trade Has Wall Street Seething," is a simplified case study into the pitfalls of credit default swaps. Nobody, including The Wall Street Journal's reporters, could figure out exactly what was going on. The transaction, illustrated by Journal below, involved sophisticated players who ostensibly knew what they were...

"The Great Debt Scare is back," writes Robert Reich in response to a New York Times analysis of how the government's finances devolved into a "Sea of Red Ink." The Times' starting point is a Congressional Budget Office forecast, presented in January 2001, which showed a $3.5...

Manuel Miranda, one of the more notorious attack dogs attempting to derail the Sotomayor nomination, remains the only lawyer permanently tainted by the scandal known as Memogate, involving the theft of 4600 confidential Democratic computer files. This is largely because the GOP was remarkably effective at burying the story....

Talk about running from your record. "The Bush administration is gone and people addicted to attacking it really have to get over that," said George Will. Bush may be gone, but his failures have a cost that accrues with time. And conservatives who aided and abetted Bush's failures haven't...

When General Antonio Taguba investigated the abuses at Abu Ghraib, he soon realized that General Ricardo Sanchez, the army commander in Iraq, "knew exactly what was going on." But Taguba's report did not implicate Sanchez, because his assignment had a very limited scope.

As directed by Sanchez,...

The headline,"2008 profits plunge 85% for top 500 US firms," is largely about three wards of the state. AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, together lost $208 billion. Add in the losses at Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, which totaled $56 billion, and the cumulative 2008 profits at the 495...

In his sworn testimony, Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis said that the $3.6 billion bonus pool at Merrill Lynch was not his highest priority. Given that the phrase "Wall Street bonus" currently invokes greater revulsion than "Osama bin Ladin," his answer is not likely to win him many friends.

There was nothing subtle about Larry Kudlow's lies. No one at CNBC who paid attention to Kudlow's rant could doubt that he intended to deceive the network's viewers. But CNBC management seemed unconcerned. Kudlow's lies were artful, like magic tricks that fool an audience into believing it heard something different...

"Don't blame me," argues Alan Greenspan in a piece of historical revisionism that would have embarrassed Kurt Waldheim. Greenspan offered up a Panglossian analysis in today's Wall Street Journal that goes something like this:

The rise in housing prices was tied to the decline in the rates for long-term,...

Five months ago, when the world trembled at the specter of a global financial meltdown, Rep. Darrell Issa of California ran on to Hardball to deliver a "f____-you" to his constituents. They live in San Diego and Riverside County, Ground Zero in the foreclosure crisis.

Explaining why he...

Much of Time's "25 People to Blame" is a sham. Instead of pinpointing culpability among the key players, it deflects blame away from Republicans and falsely implicates Democrats, to create a muddleheaded "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" narrative.

For a sense of how Time distorted the facts, imagine an article on 25 people...

Mortgage products are confusing, which is why a "whistleblower" could bamboozle the press into believing that Chris Dodd saved $75,000 on mortgages from Countrywide Financial. Suze Orman could have immediately explained why the correct amount is approximately zero. Senator Dodd made full disclosure last Monday, but the media narrative about...

William McGurn never specified exactly, "What Obama Could Learn From Cheney," though his broader message - that Bush administration lawbreakers should not be held accountable - was perfectly clear. The message is amplified regularly by McGurn's colleagues in the opinion pages of the Journal, especially now that Bush is...

"My conscience is clear," said Donald Rumsfeld at Cafe Milano last Thursday, as Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney held court nearby. Maureen Dowd claimed that she "zigged and zagged" to avoid contact with the neocon troika. They didn't even "have the decency to leave the scene," wrote Dowd. Bob...

Imagine if Rod Blagojevich appeared on the Today show, and no one asked him about his legal troubles. Imagine instead that Matt Lauer's entire interview focused the governor's take on Obama's plan to rebuild America's infrastructure, and the role that Illinois companies such as Caterpillar, Deere and Navistar, would play...

My friend swears this story about Donald Trump is absolutely true, and I believe him.

In a Park Avenue office building, Trump gets into an empty elevator alone. Five stories later, the doors open and a woman enters. The doors close and the elevator continues carrying both of them upward.

Ask any computer guy. Five million emails don't disappear by accident, especially in the White House. It takes a lot of hard work, involving deliberate action from a team of seasoned professionals, to make the evidence unretrievable.

The missing emails, many of which were sent by Karl Rove, are...