Help

Nation Topics - Conservatives and the American Right

Topic Page

Nation Topics - Conservatives and the American Right

Articles

News and Features

survivalism

Prophecies of government tyranny, financial meltdown and violent anarchy featured on Doomsday Preppers are being absorbed into contemporary conservatism.

Dollar bill

Media-savvy conservative think tanks take aim and fire at progressive power bases in the states. 

Dollar bills

Pete Peterson’s $60 million push to sell corporate America’s ruthless austerity agenda.

Simpson and Bowles

Candidates who ran on slashing Medicare and Social Security lost big in November. But that doesn’t stop Pete Peterson from pushing the fantasy that voters’ biggest concern is the deficit.

The “Fix the Debt” campaign is pure astroturf: corporate cash machinery masquerading as a grassroots uprising.

Dire warnings about the deficit don’t add up mathematically. But then, Fix the Debt is not really about the economy, it’s about gutting Medicare, Social Security and other social programs.

Voters at a polling station

A five-decade bipartisan consensus on this key piece of civil rights legislation has collapsed—right when we need its protections more than ever before.

Rick Perlstein joins Bryce Covert and George Zornick to explore the serpentine shifts and strange bedfellows of gun control politics. 

It’s tempting to let the GOP continue its slide toward irrelevance—but that would deny this country the robust political debate we need.

Farmworkers

Refusing to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, Republicans are leaving rape victims with few options.

Blogs

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has never been as comfortable fighting the culture wars as most conservatives, has endorsed the repeal of the Pentagon's failed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" experiment. This is rather a big deal.

February 14, 2010

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele used to be able to muster a lot of disdain for political players who suggested that criticism of them might be racially motivated. But no more.

February 9, 2010

With a nod to Rick Perlstein, Welcome to Palinland. Atop Palinland's Mount Rushmore are Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater. Palinland's Bill of Rights has been edited and redacted, reordered and revised with red ink: in Palinland, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments that ensure due process and the rights of the accused are merely suggestive measures to be administered based on the emotional whim of a carefully-harnessed fear and a fervently-stoked anger. And in Palinland, the Tenth Amendment's reservation of power for the individual states is paramount, a necessary protection for a people whose government is supposedly hell-bent on destroying them.

February 7, 2010

Sarah Palin fed the Teapartisans in Nashville an appetizer of warmed over one-liners about taxes, spending and deficits that add up to "generational theft." Then she gave the meat eaters what they paid for.

February 7, 2010

How politically credible are the leading figures in the Tea Party movement that is rallying this weekend at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville? Let them Tea Party proclaimers rant, er, speak, for themselves.

February 5, 2010

You know how you can tell the Age of Reagan has ended? Because at his State of the Union address, Barack Obama didn't do any of those ordinary-folks-who-make-a-difference shout-outs to the gallery, as every POTUS (that is, Populist of the United States) has since the Gipper's first SOTU in 1982. But if Obama had called on someone, given the frustrated and hectoring nature of his speech, I bet I know who he would have liked to ask to stand up and take a bow: James O'Keefe, the putative pimp and ACORN slayer.

January 29, 2010

Those of us paid to observe Congress have spent the last two weeks watching, with mouth agape, as congressional Democrats slowly raised a loaded gun to their collective mouths and volubly considered pulling the trigger. But sanity has, tentatively, provisionally prevailed.

January 27, 2010

The House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight met today to discuss issues of sovereignty and stability in Iraq ranging from the country's longstanding financial obligation to neighboring Kuwait to its even longer-standing issues with the Kurdish people. But Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) seemed mostly interested in berating the Iraqis for their lack of gratitude.

September 17, 2009

It's pretty clear to me that Wilson's outburst wasn't calculated grandstanding but a genuine moment of rage and frustration. Just look at the photo. That's a genuinely pissed off dude.

September 10, 2009