It’s gone a bit overlooked today amid the textual analysis of particular buzzwords in Rose Garden speeches, but a key moment in last night’s debate came when George W. Bush, who apparently spends his time these days painting pictures of puppies, reappeared on the political scene at an inopportune moment for the Republican Party. Here [...]

Yesterday, the Supreme Court shut the door on a legal odyssey that lasted over six years, when they refused to reopen a case attempting to hold private telecommunications companies accountable for their participation in the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. The justices, without comment, declined to review a lower court’s December decision (.pdf) dismissing the [...]

Eleven years after the attacks on 9-11 and the subsequent Ground Zero volunteer cleanup that left thousands sickened, the federal government finally added cancer to the list of illnesses linked to the attacks. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health approved the additions to the list of illnesses covered in the James Zadroga 9/11 [...]

Today is the day in our quadrennial orgy of political campaigning where the two sides lay down their arms and grow silent in commemoration of 9/11. Ads get pulled, candidates lay wreaths, the military gets praised. Therefore, it took serious guts for the New York Times to publish an op-ed from Kurt Eichenwald, based on [...]

I’ve already made myself clear about our glorious post-fact universe, and I don’t really think these examples of the traditional media supposedly meeting their obligations relative to Paul Ryan’s convention speech fit the bill. These examples come from the segregated “fact-check” organizations and the opinion pages of the large newspapers and media outlets. The facts [...]

One problem with talking about the “Bush tax cuts” is that they incorporate much more than just the individual income tax marginal rates. Among other things, you have the changes to the estate tax. And so today, House Democrats plan to introduce an estate tax measure that would freeze the tax at 2009 levels. In [...]

A new trove of Clinton and Bush-era documents from the CIA have been released to the National Security Archive, and they show that the CIA had a bead on Osama bin Laden a year before 9/11, but did not receive adequate funding from the Bush White House in the early months of his first term [...]

I probably should have warned you before posting that video of George W. Bush, speaking today at the George W. Bush Presidential Center. His remarks came in conjunction with a conference called “Tax Policies For 4% Growth,” put together by such luminaries as James Glassman, the guy who wrote “Dow 36,000.” I don’t have strong [...]

A recently declassified memo from 2006 shows that Philip Zelikow, then a state department aide on terrorism issues and previously the executive director of the 9/11 commission, dissented from an extreme opinion by the Office of Legal Counsel that CIA interrogations at secret prisons in foreign countries were free from international treaty constraints against torture. [...]

An interesting new study from political scientists Keith Poole and Christopher Hare at the University of Georgia finds that Barack Obama is the most conservative Democratic President of the modern era. Using a modified version of DW-NOMINATE scores, the duo find that Democratic Presidents have gotten moderately more conservative over the past several decades, while [...]

Conservatives are pushing very hard to punish the White House over loan guarantees they made to the now-bankrupt solar energy company Solyndra, and by association to damn any investment in green technologies whatsoever, to keep the dirty energy economy paramount. The latest claim is that the White House tried to rush the $500 million loan [...]