Steve Benen

Today’s edition of quick hits: * Deadly violence in Iraq: “A suicide bomber blew himself up next to a large group of Shiite Muslims on a pilgrimage Thursday, one in a series of apparently coordinated sectarian attacks that killed at least 72 people in southern Iraq and in Baghdad. Security officials said the bombings in […]

Now that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a director, it can get to work on some long-overdue priorities. For America’s middle class, that’s terrific news. The new director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday outlined a vigorous oversight and enforcement agenda, saying that companies that take unfair advantage of consumers of financial […]

John McCain talked to Chuck Todd this morning, and acknowledged his party’s “problems” with a certain constituency. (via Jenee Desmond-Harris) Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy For those who can’t watch clips online, Todd asked the Republican senator if the state of Arizona is “in play” in 2012. After […]

George Will has struggled for quite some time when dealing with climate policy, but his latest piece, arguing that global warming is part of an elaborate collectivist plot, is really out there. Because progressivism exists to justify a few people bossing around most people and because progressives believe that only government’s energy should flow unimpeded, […]

Nicholas Kristof presents an argument today that I’ve heard before, but which I struggle to understand. As the NYT columnist sees it, Mitt Romney was a “moderate and pragmatic governor,” who, his metamorphoses notwithstanding, may flip “back to his old self” in 2013. The reassuring thing about Mitt Romney is that for most of his […]

It has quickly become a standard talking point for Mitt Romney: during his tenure at Bain Capital, he created “over 100,000 new jobs.” Campaign officials have been reluctant to back up the claim, and fact-checkers haven’t been able to substantiate the claim in any way. But that changed this week, when Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom […]

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that won’t necessarily generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * Though it certainly looked as if Rick Perry would quit the presidential race, yesterday the Texas governor reiterated his commitment to his campaign. “This wasn’t a hard decision,” Perry told reporters, […]

It’s far too soon to say with any confidence who’ll win the 2012 presidential election, but it’s hardly unreasonable to believe a Republican victory is a distinct possibility. But while there’s going to be all kinds of coverage, here and elsewhere, about the horse race, what matters most is the public understanding the consequences of […]

When it comes to Mitt Romney’s background at Bain Capital, we tend to think about the layoffs in the abstract. Romney orchestrated leveraged buyouts, flipping companies quickly for large profits, at the expense of thousands of workers who were considered collateral damage. But the story has a greater impact when we shift away from the […]

If you were in Washington in the 1990s, you may recall that the left spent a considerable amount of time and energy focused on intellectual infrastructure. Progressives looked at the kind of operations conservatives had put together — think tanks, activist organizations, foundations, conferences, etc. — and realized the left needed to play catch-up. And […]