Republicans are sad and bewildered at their ongoing failure to convince millions of Americans that the scant crumbs left over from the massive tax cuts they bestowed upon billionaires is actually a feast: More than three months after the passage of the GOP’s tax-cut law, new ...read more
Republicans know their days controlling Congress are numbered (235 days to the midterms as of this writing). With a string of special elections loses turning into a noose, they can clearly see the writing on the wall. So as their final act as the party in power, they're going on ...read more
Someone must have slipped something into the water at the Washington Post to erase their collective memory. It's the only possible explanation for this idiocy: Republican lawmakers in 2011 brought the U.S. government to the brink of default, refused to raise the debt ceiling, ...read more
The Banter Long Read: The current common wisdom is that the Democratic Party doesn't actually stand for anything other than running against Trump. The right wing says it. The Purity Left says it. The "liberal" media says it. So many people say it just has to be true. Except for ...read more
Do you know what the Laffer Curve is? It’s a graph that represents the relationship between a given income tax rate and the government’s tax revenue. It would be the one set of data you absolutely needed before deciding to pass a multi-trillion dollar tax cut. Pulling the ...read more
While the left is still reeling from the abominable tax plan just passed by the Republican Party, NY Mag's Jonathan Chait points out that in the long term, this is about the best thing that could have ever happened to the Democrats. Why? Midterms, midterms, midterms. The policy ...read more
Paul Krugman is fun to read because he doesn't have to worry about offending the people who run MSNBC or CNN (and he really doesn't care about offending Fox). That means he doesn't have to pretend the Republican Party isn't a bunch of lying weasels so he can speak his mind, like ...read more
Jonathan Chait asks a very simple but important question: The Beltway Media has the astonishing habit of reporting exactly what Republicans want them to report regardless of what the rest of the country actually thinks. In this instance, as Chait points out, Americans are all ...read more
Paul Krugman, like all of us here at the Banter, cannot believe that the Republican Party that once impeached Richard Nixon is sitting on its hands while Trump engages in a sloppy and hamhanded cover up: For generations, Republicans have impugned their opponents’ patriotism. ...read more
The Trump administration has gone to great pains to explain to the public that the president was sacrificing "mightily" to be in office, and we should all be very grateful for the work he is doing on behalf of the little guy. "The political motivators for many typical ...read more
Central to Donald Trump's ideology is that the American public can have its cake and eat it. They can get huge tax cuts and massive infrastructure spending. They can vote for a man who will reduce the federal government to rubble and still have amazing education, a great ...read more
After having what can only be described as an apocalyptically bad week, Donald Trump attempted to rebound and rebuild his rapidly sinking popularity by introducing his economic plan for America. Unsurprisingly, Trump's plan delivered at the Detroit Economic Club yesterday, was ...read more
In an extremely interesting interview with New York Times Magazine about his economic legacy, President Obama delivered a stinging assessment of current conservative economic ideology and trashed the economic platforms of the Republican candidates running for president. After ...read more
In yet the latest example of Republican governance giving a big middle finger to America's collective intelligence, Wisconsin governor and terrible person Scott Walker is planning on skipping $108 million in debt payments to cover a $283 million budget shortfall caused by his ...read more
It's been five years since the official founding of the tea party movement. Weird, it seems like much, much longer, but there it is. Five years since tri-corner hats with dingle-dangle tea bags glued to the brim became the national symbol of incoherent, far-right outrage over ...read more
By Bob Cesca: If you haven't seen the stellar political documentary, The War Room, which follows James Carville and George Stephanopoulos during the 1992 Clinton campaign for president, you should absolutely check it out. There's one scene in particular that popped into my ...read more
The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From TPM: Newt Gingrich called out Mitt Romney on Sunday for backing off his promise to cut taxes on the wealthy after winning the Republican nomination. “I think it’s clear he changed,” Gingrich said on NBC’s “Meet The Press” roundtable, ...read more
By Bob Cesca: Throughout the last 24 hours, Republicans and Romney surrogates have been scrambling to twist their walnut brains around their candidate's remarkably wrong/misleading/stupid hidden video remarks. Some of them have desperately pointed at the president's 2008 ...read more
