The Republican Party is at a crossroads. It could modernize some of its positions and attitudes, in a bid to stay relevant to national politics in 21st century America. Or it could shrink to becoming a party of the South, the Plains, and a dwindling portion of the Mountain West.

Jonah Goldberg doesn't believe there are any racists in the Republican Party. In his column last week, he began by explaining that the Republican Party is, in fact, not racist at all. Apologies if you reflexively spat out your beverage, soaking your keyboard. Send the bill to Goldberg.

In too many ways, the GOP of 2012 could not plausibly deny that which has become too plain to ignore -- that it is the part of antipathy to difference and social change.

The vomit of racism still finds a place in Republican Party politics. It is sad to watch John Sununu -- twenty years ago, a younger Sununu might have known better. But it is even sadder to watch the rest of Lincoln's old party sink in the mire.

The 2012 election, like every election before it, has been defined by race. This is America, and race always matters. Death, taxes, and race.

Of course Mitt Romney supports redistribution. Everyone supports redistribution to some extent. It's literally how the government collects and spends tax revenue.

The contrast between a strong Democratic Party and a flaky, unstable, flip-floppy Republican Party has prompted the GOP to spend the week whining and pooping their big boy pants about how the Democrats are being so mean.

Ryan will not only fatten the percentage of conservative voters for Romney, it will fatten their numbers as well. This is not speculation. He's already bumped up the Romney percentage in some polls by a notch. Romney had badly slipped in those polls before the Ryan pick.

That's about the same tone as the Obama ad. Way to go, I thought. So why isn't this what we generally get from these candidates, and from their respective parties?

In 2009 Obama put country above party.  Bringing health security to over 30 million Americans and laying the foundation for a major restructuring of our health system were sufficient rewards for him to accept the political risks.

Author and legal scholar, Michelle Alexander, has written a powerful and highly acclaimed, well-researched book titled, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness."

Southern Democracy -- recently purged of moderate-to-conservative leaders, facing the rumored forfeiture of white working class voters, and banking on college-educated professionals and poor minorities -- cannot continue as a competitive force.

Fundamentally, we are looking at a transformed Southern political system dominated by the Republican Party, particularly in the deep South. Southern Democrats would be well-served to do some sober thinking about their predicament in a still-reddening political environment.

An organization that always turns right can only move in circles, or more accurately, in an ever tightening spiral. Rule and Ruin aims to explain how the GOP came to be drawn into its accelerating tornado of extremism.

Driving the right wing's flight into irrationality is the fear of complexity. In place of it, the right wants to substitute radically simplified fictions, whether about history, or about climate change, homosexuality or the debt ceiling.

Republican overreach is in the air. You can see it, smell it, taste it everywhere, as you have in years past. And the only surprise is that is that it happened so quickly this time around.

While we are indeed currently politically divided and somewhat polarized, this is actually our normal state as a nation -- and on the polarization scale, we're nowhere near the "most divided" we've ever been. Far from it.

To quote the President, and to understate it greatly, I feel bad about what happened Tuesday. Yet official exit polls reveal a few warnings for Repub...

The target may differ, but the Republican tactic is always the same: demonize a group of human beings based on what sets them apart -- skin color, religion, sexual orientation -- and make them objects of derision.

We have intercepted an interoffice memo between RNC and the Hall of Just Us. It reveals the Republicans' Six-Point Plan for Regaining Power!

What else do we call the deliberate inciting of racial bigotry and resentment for the sake of attaining power? It's race-baiting and it's a major component of the Republican strategic arsenal.