That Republicans despise unions is not exactly news. It's kind of a core feature of their extremely pro-corporate philosophy. Right to Work laws exist explicitly to hurt unions. Wherever they can, Republicans have broken unions and they've been doing it for decades. Yet, cops ...read more
Ted Cruz's victory over Donald Trump last night was a spectacular coup for the senator from Texas. While it doesn't mean he is a shoo-in for the nomination, the psychological effect it will have on the Republican electorate cannot be underestimated. As Chez Pazienza pointed out ...read more
You might remember that, a few weeks back, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) was riding high in the Iowa Republican presidential polls when national frontrunner Donald Trump began to press the attack on Cruz's eligibility to run for president based on his foreign birthplace. Cruz was ...read more
Ben Carson may be fading from the Republican presidential field, but he's still going strong at saying weird, dumb shit. While delivering a pep talk to students at a Christian school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa Thursday, Carson asked the assembly who was the "worst student" in the ...read more
While the eyes of the world are on Pope Francis' first visit to the United States, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has quietly been having a pretty good week. On the heels of a CNN/ORC poll that showed Hillary widening her national lead over Bernie Sanders, a new poll ...read more
Not that the Democrats need the help after the House of Representatives made an ostentatious display of passing their Fuck the Hispanic Vote bills last week, but Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) did their part for the Dems by producing some great campaign ...read more
Iowa Republicans are in the news for all the wrong reasons right now. That would include Republican Rep. Steve King, who on CNN's New Day on Wednesday said something so bizarre, it's literally unbelievable that host Chris Cuomo didn't ask him just what the hell it was that he ...read more
If the U.S. Senate race in Iowa between state Sen. Joni Ernst (R) and Rep. Bruce Braley (D) has one defining feature, it's not that polls show a statistical dead heat, but it's that one of the candidates is straight up off her rocker in a way that Sarah Palin couldn't even begin ...read more
We're all familiar with the caliber of insane politicians in states like Florida, South Carolina and Texas. But it appears as if Iowa is making a concerted effort to field its own array of wackaloons in addition to, of course, the token crackpottery of Rep. Steve King (R-IA). ...read more
The Republican Congressman from Iowa tweeted this: The House passed a King amendment to nullify President Obama'sExecutive Order that has stopped the deportation undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children. He also opposes the Senate's bill and blames it all on ...read more
Obama is holding on to his commanding lead in Ohio – he’s up by 4 points. Richard Adams at the Guardian points out, for Romney to win, he has to take Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado. Romney's increasingly narrow path to the Presidency To get the ...read more
On any given day in the fall of 2007, John Edwards could be heard preaching his populist prose to Iowa voters who eagerly packed into lumber barns, VFW halls and Culver restaurants across the state. His message was less about the two Americas of his 2004 campaign -- the haves ...read more
Not surprisingly, Republican robot candidate Mitt Romney won the New Hampshire primary last night. Through a mixture of relentless ambition and stacks of GOP cash, Romney took a commanding lead, making him the very clear favorite going forward. From the NY Times: MANCHESTER, ...read more
The major problem with mainstream political commentary in America is that it is basically completely meaningless. There is an entire industry built around the horse race - tracking who is up and who is down, which candidate sounds the most presidential and who has the best ...read more
The NYTimes looks at the emerging art of using old videos to go negative: It is the attack-ad technique of choice for the 2012 election: anything you have said or done on film will be held against you. And its prevalence has helped make the Republican primary campaign a ...read more
If you add up all the things that Ron Paul believes are unconstitutional, there would literally be no reason to have a government at all: Why on earth this man is viewed as being a serious candidate is anyone's guess, but then looking at the rest of the GOP field, it isn't that ...read more
Paul Krugman on the down side of Ron Paul's ideological consistency: Unfortunately, Mr. Paul has maintained his consistency by ignoring reality, clinging to his ideology even as the facts have demonstrated that ideology’s wrongness. And, even more unfortunately, Paulist ...read more
Juan Cole rips into Rick Perry and the alternate universe he resides in: It used to be that political divisions were about the different methods proposed to deal with social problems by persons with different political philosophies. Nowadays, politics is about which ...read more
Bob Cesca on the alarming prospect of a Republican field so crazy that Newt Gingrich is considered a moderate: In a world in which someone like Gingrich, one of the most divisive figures in politics of the last two decades, is seen as not sufficiently right-wing, there is ...read more
Some interesting data on Obama's on the ground game in rural America like Iowa and Wisconsin. My sense is that this is far more important, as I'm sure the Clinton campaign can testify to, than John McCain getting the cable news pundit circuit to declare that you've "won" the ...read more
