Michael B. Keegan

Obama supporters are seething and the RNC is dancing with delight in the aftermath of Newark Mayor Cory Booker's nonsensical comparison of ads exposing Mitt Romney's real record on job creation with racially tinged attacks on Barack Obama's former pastor.

The RNC thinks...

George W. Bush has gay friends. So does Sarah Palin. Amazingly, so does Rick Santorum. And let me guess: soon Mitt Romney will, too.

Every Republican politician seems to have at least one gay friend these days. That's not too difficult: even if you...

Now that Mitt Romney has ground out a victory against the weakest GOP field in a generation and the most extreme in history, he's now turning his attention to the general election. To use a particularly vivid metaphor, he's shaking his Etch-a-Sketch as hard as he can, trying to erase...

Last month, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett offered a solution for women who were going to be forced by the government to undergo a completely unnecessary ultrasound against their wills: "You can't make anybody watch, okay? Because you just have to close your eyes." The governor's suggestion would be...

In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida, the national spotlight has finally been turned on a secretive organization that helped put in place the "shoot first" legislation that has obstructed efforts to arrest and prosecute Martin's killer. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. After...

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch made headlines yesterday when he claimed that Democrats will "smear" Mitt Romney for his Mormon faith during the general election.

Hatch's claim is ridiculous. In fact, it is right-wing politicians and pundits who keep on "warning" us that Democrats will attack...

The Senate GOP seems to be banking on the assumption that Latino voters are stupid, don't read the fine print -- or are not paying any attention at all.

Panicking from a series of polls that show their years of bashing Latinos haven't been endearing them to...

Ralph Reed reached out to Rush Limbaugh via Twitter yesterday and accepted his apology. "Apology accepted. Let's move on," he said -- a magnanimous gesture had Rush Limbaugh actually apologized to Ralph Reed. Too bad that, despite the too-quick headlines, Limbaugh not only hadn't apologized to...

Earlier this week a Great Falls Tribune reporter found something startling in his inbox: a shockingly racist and misogynistic email forwarded from the most powerful federal judge in Montana, which "joked" that the president of the United States was the product of his mother having sex...

Fighting contraception. Stopping domestic violence protections. Extending tax cuts for the wealthy, while hiking taxes on the middle class. Welcoming white supremacists to a conference, but banning gay conservatives. The GOP has followed its extremist fringe off the deep end, leaving the rest of us back in the reality-based world,...

My email inbox has been flooded over the last three days with messages of outrage over Susan G. Komen for the Cure's surprise metamorphosis into a purveyor of right-wing culture wars -- a change that the organization is now frantically trying to undo. Americans have been shaken by...

The GOP presidential candidates had every right to hold a debate in South Carolina on Martin Luther King Day, Jr. Day this week, but maybe, out of a sense of self-preservation, they should have thought twice about the timing. What could have been an opportunity for the candidates to express...

Mitt Romney's close call at the Iowa caucuses Tuesday will doubtless contribute to speculation that he is too "moderate" to appeal to Republican primary voters. While Romney has a complicated relationship with his new party-line stances on social issues, I'd argue that his new positions and his Olympian flip flops...

Dear Mr. Hafner:

I am writing to express my deep concern about Kayak's decision to pull advertising from the TLC program "All-American Muslim" in the wake of complaints from a far-right anti-Muslim group that resented the program's portrayal of Muslims as ordinary people facing ordinary challenges. We were also baffled...

One year ago, we were all struck by a severe sense of déjà vu when the Smithsonian became mired in a disturbingly retro culture war. The controversy stemmed from a National Portrait Gallery exhibit about the experience of gays and lesbians in American art, and specifically one snippet...

The new, new Mitt Romney has been doing everything he can to fit in. But on Tuesday, he faced a big setback: he found out that he had been trying too hard to fit in with the wrong crowd.

Mitt was having a hard time figuring out...

Has the GOP primary gone off the rails before the first vote has even been cast?

In 2008, Sen. John McCain rejected the endorsement of John Hagee, a far-right pastor who had called the Catholic Church the "Great Whore" and said that Hitler was...

You would have been forgiven for experiencing some ideological whiplash earlier this month when, after listening to two days of speeches emphasizing the profound threat that rights for gay people, legal abortion, and the freedom of religion pose to our society, the attendees of...

Mitt Romney is scheduled to speak at the far-right "Values Voter Summit" on Saturday morning, immediately before the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer, a man with a long and shocking record of bigotry toward gays and lesbians, American Muslims, Native Americans, African-Americans, Mormons and other minorities....

At the last GOP presidential debate, Americans of all political persuasions were shocked when the audience loudly booed Stephen Hill, an openly gay soldier who sent in a video question from Iraq about the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. We were even more shocked when it dawned...