The IRS, always friendless, now is a pariah. Republicans can't stop condemning it. Democrats can't stop agreeing.

Targeting Tea Party groups for scrutiny, even if through incompetence, not intention, turned the IRS into a nasty carbuncle on the governing body.

Carbuncles are never good. Strength-sapping, painful,...

President Obama went to Austin, Texas, last week in pursuit of an industrial and employment revival. He wants to launch manufacturing institutes to foster American innovation and job creation.

Republicans responded by ridiculing the president, in the same arrogant way that the blooded aristocrats on the British television series...

A century ago, workers were a lot more "flexible" than they are now. Veritable Gumbies in the mills and mines and factories they were, distorting their lives to slog 10 or 12 hours a day, six -- even seven -- days a week.

Then came the 40-hour week. And weekends....

You are not safe. Not at work. Not at home in your bed. The biggest threat is not terrorism. It's corporate negligence leading to a blast or collapse or release of toxic chemicals.

Terrorism killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11. But in the dozen years since then, terrorists on American soil...

Iciness is the defining feature of Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom's first and only female prime minister, who died last week. She was the cold-as-steel Iron Lady. President Obama, warm, friendly, shaking hands, hugging the bereft, is the opposite.

It's the same with their philosophies. President Obama, who worked as...

As the U.S. Commerce Department released a report late last month showing corporate profits at a 60-year high, suddenly the big news was about how cheating surely must be rampant in social security disability.

Wait, what?

Also late last month, a Washington Post investigation showed that the 30...

Republicans are suffering grievously from the syndrome that singer Joni Mitchell memorialized in the hit "Big Yellow Taxi" in 1970. The chorus says it all:

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking...

It's hard to believe considering what happened in 2008 on Wall Street and in Washington, but banking is built on trust.

A worker hands his hard-earned dollars to a teller and trusts the money will be deposited and available for withdrawal when needed. Despite the crash on Wall Street, workers...

Just four months ago, Americans told the Romney-Ryan team: "No." The electorate rejected them. Many voters objected to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan treating them the way arrogant 1 percenters treat "The Help."

Rep. Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, exposed his condescension toward the masses when he described 60...

The U.S. Attorney last week confirmed Americans' fears about Wall Street. The banks, Eric Holder said, were not just too big to fail, they were also too big to jail.

That means bankers operate beyond the pale, outside the historical fence line encircling civil society. Past the pale is...

The invisible hand of the market, which the GOP worships as an infallible god, is curled into a fist and is pounding America's lowest-paid workers.

Those workers have complained about the grinding poverty level of minimum wage. Wal-Mart warehouse workers and New York fast food workers recently demonstrated. They're fed...

Last week, President Obama described the sequestration situation in simple, stark terms: keep it in place and punch the middle class in the gut. Or, he suggested, soften the blow substantially by ending special tax breaks for the rich.

Here's what he said:

Republicans in Congress face a...

Rig the Vote is the evil opposite of Rock the Vote. Rock is the campaign by a nonprofit to increase political engagement and register young people. Rig is the campaign by the GOP to suppress political engagement and subvert balloting.

The GOP rigged the vote by limiting registration, demanding specific...

President Obama demonstrated his gutsiness in recent months by speaking so many words that craven politicians contend cannot be spoken.

These are hot-button words like same sex-marriage, immigration reform, gun control and climate change. Fighting words. The president even specifically addressed three of these in his second inaugural speech...

Oscar came to the United States at the age of 16 to work. There were no jobs for him in his native Guatemala, and he felt obligated to help support his parents.

He was lured across borders by the promise of work. He believed, as so many immigrants do, that...

Last week, 11 European nations forged ahead to create a new tax while American Republicans walked backward into a no-new-tax trap.

On Jan. 22, the European Union gave 11 member countries -- including economic giants Germany and France -- permission to institute a financial transaction tax, a tiny fee...

Oddly, the top international cyclist -- Lance Armstrong -- and the top international retailer --Walmart -- revealed last week that they have much in common.

No, not doping.

It's their dopey concept of the atonement process.

Armstrong, already punished for misdeeds he'd denied, took to television on Thursday to...

"Uncertainty" is the pitchfork that corporations now effectively wield to prod politicians into action. It's a threat, as in, if Congress doesn't do this or that, such as avoid the fiscal cliff or raise the debt ceiling, then corporations will suffer the unbearable pain of "uncertainty."

Uncertainty is really, really...

Last week, as Congress opened its new session, two regular Joes -- Sen. Manchin of West Virginia and Vice President Biden of Delaware -- gave a hand to Sen. Mark Kirk, a Republican from Illinois, who'd suffered a stroke a year earlier.

Joe and Joe assisted Sen. Kirk in...

Apparently, uncertainty is a fate worse than death for a CEO. Billionaires bellyache about it constantly on TV, contending they must know, right now, whether next year's tax rates will rise. Republicans bewail uncertainty, insisting CEOs must know, right now, whether they'll get a tax holiday for overseas profits.

Their...