Texas-Style Tort Reform: Rick Perry’s Texas Health Care Hoax
In his quest to win the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is perpetuating a convincing hoax: that implementing Texas-style tort reformwould go a long way toward curing what ails...
View ArticleEric Cantor Is A Hypocrite On Disaster Relief Spending
Buried in this Saturday’s Washington Post Metro section was a short piece about the request from conservative Virginia Republican Gov. Robert McDonnell for $39 million in federal disaster relief for...
View ArticleWith The Death Penalty, “Probably” Isn’t Good Enough
The death penalty is a barbaric anachronism, a crude instrument not of justice but of revenge. Most countries banished it long ago. This country should banish it now. The state of Georgia was wrong to...
View ArticleWhy Swing State Republican Governors Will Get President Obama Re-Elected
The other shoe in the saga of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting crusade dropped last week, and it landed with a ton-and-a-half thud. That’s the literal weight of the more than 1 million...
View Article“The States Are Not An Alternative America”: Republican Control Of...
There are two perpetually silly memes going around the commentariat these days in connection with the very limited but loudly expressed self-examination of the Republican Party, both involving the...
View Article“So Far, So Feeble”: GOP Governors Have A Problem; The Ways They Govern
Even as Republicans boast of their chances to take over the United States Senate come November, their party’s governors across the country are facing dimmer prospects. From Georgia to Alaska,...
View Article“Governors As Mini-Presidents”: Being A Governor Is Not The Same As Being The...
In a Sunday Show appearance mainly given notice as indicating his apparent eagerness to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, Martin O’Malley did something that is sadly...
View Article“A Juicy Target For Budget Cutters”: To Balance Budgets, Governors Seek...
Governors in nearly a half-dozen states want to cut state spending on colleges and universities to help close budget shortfalls, often sparking vehement opposition among state lawmakers of both...
View Article“Same Dynamics Of Polarization And Bad Ideology As Anybody Else”: No,...
For a professional political writer, nothing’s more fun than identifying a cliche your less esteemed colleagues are using that never made sense or has stopped making sense and just blowing it up. One...
View Article“Products Of Today’s Republican Party”: The Only Way GOP Governors Can Run...
Given that there are currently 31 Republican governors, it’s natural that more than a few of them would be both successful enough and ambitious enough to run for president. Two more governors are about...
View Article“Governor For President? No Thanks”: Challenging “Broder’s Law” That Says...
Let me declare the end of an era: the governor-era in presidential elections. It was mostly nice while it lasted. Senators seem be in, for those who are actually politicians. For years, pundits felt...
View Article“Shaping The National Conversation”: President Obama Sends A Signal To...
Last Friday I noted that President Obama had commuted the sentences of 95 federal prisoners – mostly non-violent drug offenders. It turns out that “mostly” was accurate because two of them didn’t fit...
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