Taxes

It didn't take long for CNN to expose its bias against President Donald Trump's 2005 tax returns. At the top of the first hour of CNN's New Day on Wednesday, reporter Suzanne Malveaux said, "The release of President Trump's 2005 taxes raises more questions than answers like whether he skipped out on paying his fair share of taxes more recently."

Late Tuesday evening, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow sent out an enticing tweet declaring that she would expose newly authenticated copies of President Donald Trump’s 2005 tax returns. As her show aired and the White House put out their official statement, it became clear that the hype was much to do about nothing. The revelation that Trump made roughly $150 million and paid $38 million in taxes fell so…

On Tuesday night, one of the crazier news nights since Election Day occurred when MSNBC host Rachel Maddow failed on a level akin to Geraldo Rivera and Al Capone’s vault when she falsely claimed to have a bombshell exclusive (that wasn’t hers) in the form of President Trump’s 2005 tax returns.

Separatist and secessionist talk has burgeoned in 21st-century America. The day after the 2004 presidential election, sulky liberals began circulating a map that represented pro-Kerry regions of the country as part of the “United States of Canada” and pro-Bush regions as “Jesusland.” Grouchy conservatives weren’t sure they belonged in a nation that elected and re-elected Barack Obama. Now comes…

What everyone knew would happen as a result of Philadelphia's 1.5 cents-per-ounce soda tax began materializing on Wednesday, as Pepsi announced that it would lay off roughly 20 percent of its workforce there over the next several months. Coverage at both Philly.com and Associated Press allowed the city to engage in fantasy by claiming without meaningful challenge, or even clarification, that…

How is Donald Trump “not a normal Republican”? Let New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait count the ways. Trump is “crudely ethno-nationalist,” wrote Chait in a Tuesday post, and he’s “personally ignorant and undisciplined in a manner that sets him apart not only from traditional Republicans but most human adults.” That’s pretty much it for Trump’s deviations from orthodoxy, according to Chait, who…

In June, the City of Philadelphia, in what was hailed as a "historic moment for public health," passed a deliberately misnamed 1.5-cent per ounce "soda tax." What anyone with a lick of sense could have predicted would happen is happening, and the national press is mostly ignoring the tragic results.

CPAC, currently going on just outside the Beltway in National Harbor, Maryland, has changed along with the conservative movement, believes Matthew Yglesias. Old-school CPAC, Yglesias contended in a Wednesday piece, was philosophically driven, populated by the sort of activists who “helped [Ronald] Reagan mount a primary challenge to incumbent President Gerald Ford.” In the past fifteen-plus years…

Columnists and editorial boards of national news outlets hope President Donald Trump will institute taxation of carbon dioxide, citing “prominent” Republican support for such “climate action.” In February, The New York Times editorial board, a Washington Post columnist, Time magazine and a CNN.com opinion columnist all ran pieces endorsing a carbon tax. Post columnist Robert Samuelson cried “two…

John McCain’s 2008 campaign slogan, “Country First,” does not describe the worldview of Republicans, suggested Pierce on Monday. For them, the Esquire blogger implied, it’s more like “GOP über alles.” The peg for the post was chit-chat in the political and media worlds about whether President Trump is of sound mind, or, as Pierce put it, about “the possibility that the presidential trolley has…

At the Associated Press, George P. Shultz, James A. Baker III and six other formerly despised Republicans and business leaders have suddenly become "GOP senior statesman." What accounts for this instant transformation? The group is pushing what it calls a "Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends.” In a Tuesday evening Wall Street Journal op-ed, Shultz and Baker advocated "a gradually increasing…

Appearing as a guest on Friday's All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, liberal Slate columnist and recurring MSNBC guest Michelle Goldberg asserted that Republicans are being "traitorous" by support President Donald Trump, and that they were giving their support so that they can get in return "tax cuts, voucherized Social Security, and forced childbirth." She also found Trump to be a "madman" and a "…

“The most important development of the last half-century in American politics,” believes New York magazine’s Chait, is “the Republican Party’s embrace of movement conservative ideology.” In a Thursday post, Chait cited six books, none of which was written by a conservative, that “help elucidate” this phenomenon. Among Chait’s choices: E.J. Dionne’s Why the Right Went Wrong; Richard Hofstadter’s…

Some liberals were disappointed by the result of the presidential election. Others were devastated. Former Fox News Watch panelist Gabler is in the latter group. “The anguish of Nov. 8 has not subsided,” wrote Gabler in a piece that appeared last Thursday on Salon and originally ran at BillMoyers.com. “We think of the election almost as a kind of death -- the death of the America we thought we…