There’s plenty of interesting data in the latest Newsweek poll, and while the general focus has been on what it had to say about President Obama’s standing, the generic congressional ballot, and the economy. Sam Stein highlights a tidbit from the results that may have been overlooked.

A majority of Republicans believe that President Barack Obama “sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world,” according to a survey released on Monday.
That figure, buried at the very end …

When thinking about what to expect from a Republican takeover of Congress, different scenarios come to mind. Sure, any hopes of advancing meaningful legislation are effectively off the table, and the prospect of a government shutdown seems fairly realistic.
But it’s the endless investigations that would get tiresome. Politico reported the other day that Republicans “are planning a wave of committee investigations targeting the White House and Democratic allies if they win back the majority.”
Paul Krugman explained today that it’s …

Jane Mayer has written a thorough and engaging piece about the Koch brothers for the latest issue of the New Yorker. While some have quipped that it falls short of penetrating the veil of secrecy that David and Charles prefer to operate behind, it is nonetheless required reading for anyone interested in the men behind Americans for Prosperity, a primary benefactor to the Tea Party movement and a group that plans to spend millions on behalf of Republican candidates in the upcoming election cycle.
While the …

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), for all of his faults, tends to be a pretty consistent Libertarian. He has a specific worldview — one I happen to find hopelessly misguided — but Paul generally tends to be intellectually honest enough to stick to that worldview.
With that in mind, it was heartening, though not necessarily surprising, to see Ron Paul issue a fairly strong condemnation of his allies for their ugly demagoguery related to the proposed Park51 community center.
The debate should have provided the conservative …

Back in April, CNN Rick Sanchez had an unfortunate moment on the air in which he said Iceland is “too cold to have a volcano.” He may have been kidding — it’s hard to tell — but it obviously wasn’t one of Sanchez’s best moments.
Yesterday, deranged media personality Glenn Beck aired the months-old clip of Sanchez’s mistake, using it as evidence to argue that Sanchez is “the dumbest man ever on television.”
For the record, Sanchez generally isn’t my cup of tea, and his volcano …

No one should be surprised. Rove has been lying to voters, just as a matter of course, throughout his career. For a campaign operation organized by the activist/hatchet-man/media-personality to base its work on playing voters for fools is entirely predictable.

But as Rove’s lies go, this one takes some chutzpah. It was Rove’s White House, after all, that crafted and approved irresponsible tax cuts — which failed miserably in their stated goal — and put an expiration date on them. It wasn’t Obama, and it wasn’t Democrats…

It takes an awful lot to force a conservative talk-radio host off the air, but as it turns out, there are apparently some limits. Just ask Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
If you haven’t heard, a woman called Schlessinger’s show last week with an upsetting problem. The caller is in an inter-racial marriage — she’s black, her husband is white — and is offended when her husband’s friends and family members make racist remarks. Schlessinger blamed the woman, telling the caller that …

News Corp., which owns Fox News and the New York Post, gave $1 million to Haley Barbour’s Republican Governors Association this year, according to the RGA’s most recent filing.

The company’s media outlets play politics more openly than most, but the huge contribution to a party committee is a new step toward an open identification between Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and the GOP. The company’s highest-ranking Democratic executive, Peter Chernin, recently departed…

What’s the difference between mainstream Republican leaders and the Tea Party extremists that have been winning Republican primaries across the country?

The main difference is the willingness of the Tea Party gang to say what they believe out loud. This, of course, is driving Republican political consultants crazy. Republicans have never gotten elected by laying out to the voters the core components of their economic agenda. When they have been successful it has generally been by soft-pedaling or sugar-coating the things that mattered most…

Major media outlets continue to give him a pass, but the ongoing FBI investigation into Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) took an interesting turn recently when the scandal-plagued Republican started begging for cash for his legal defense fund.
Ensign, at the center of a humiliating sex/corruption/ethics scandal, registered his legal defense fund as a tax-exempt 527 political organization, which itself was a bizarre move. But this week, the right-wing senator sent out his first appeal to help pay his …