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Last week, 11 European nations forged ahead to create a new tax while American Republicans walked backward into a no-new-tax trap. On Jan. 22, the European Union gave 11 member countries – including economic giants Germany and France – permission to institute a...

Tim Geithner left office on Friday and the revisionism's already underway. By any objective measure except one, Geithner's tenure failed to achieve its goals. And that one success, in rescuing the mega-banks of Wall Street, may prove to be the undoing of Obama's legacy.  If bank misdeeds cause another crisis, which is very possible, he may be remembered for little else.

It now looks like the Senate on Wednesday will pass the "no budget no pay" version of the debt ceiling increase that has already been adopted by the House.

This will be the third GOP budget miscalculation, misstep and mistake in a row.

The problem with the no budget no pay plan is that, while the Senate will likely pass its own version of a congressional budget resolution because of the law, will not spur any real action on budget issues. The ultimate result, therefore, will be that the GOP talking point will be gone -- after all, the Senate will have adopted a budget -- but Republicans will have gotten nothing real for allowing the debt ceiling to rise.

Here's why.

Chris Bowers caught the Very Serious Man of Integrity Paul Ryan in a slick little sleight of hand. Now it does sound as though Ryan is outright lying doesn't it? But he isn't exactly. In fact, both times he's actually just being cleverly misleading but in different ways, misdirecting the listener into thinking he's saying something different than he is. Today he wants the audience to think the president only says deficits are caused by health care spending because he wants to further expand government programs in order to deny people their health care benefits. (This is bizarre but seems to have some internal logic to the right wing brain.)