Bill killed.

Nominating Barack Obama for a second term, the former president brought to bear the full weight of his political experience and forensic skill Wednesday night, on behalf of a man who was once his adversary. Rewritten up until the final hour before he took the podium, this was among his finest campaign speeches, even surpassing the address he delivered at the last Democratic convention in 2008. Clinton presented an exhaustive argument for Obama (and against the Republicans) with four key elements:

A lesson in presidential economics delivered in professorial style, acknowledging complexity while at the same time presenting issues in an understandable and even simple style. There has been no political leader since FDR with Clinton's capacity to perform this rhetorical magic, and there is none today who can match him. He possesses a singular authority to discuss employment, spending and debt, having proved his GOP opponents wrong so decisively in the past that they now attempt to cite him as a model.

Calling him out that way — as both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have done in recent weeks — was a woeful mistake. He repaid the cynical compliment by "scoring" them and their party on budgetary arithmetic and job creation, an exercise from which they did not emerge unscathed.

Republicans have ruled the country for more presidential terms than Democrats over the past 53 years, noted Clinton, but they have overseen the creation of only 24 million jobs, compared with 42 million credited to Democrats. He extended that theme into the present campaign, praising Obama for 250,000 new jobs in the restored auto industry and castigating Romney for his advice to bankrupt the industry, which would have created "zero" jobs (and probably caused the loss of millions). And the "country boy from Arkansas" did the sums that show why the ...

A well funded network of right-wing extremists wants to make it socially and politically impossible to express the ideals that made this country great. One of those extremists appeared on their billionaire-funded network this week to attack Elizabeth Warren, and anyone else who isn't on the far right, as a Communist.

How retro, you may be saying to yourself. They haven't pulled that trick since the Eisenhower era.

That's the strangest part of all this: They seem to think "Eisenhower era" is a euphemism for "Bolshevik control."

Mainstream vs. Extreme

Displaying her customary gravitas, here's what Sarah Palin had to say on the FOX News channel this week:

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Many conservatives who stylize themselves as defenders of small government lean precariously on Reagan-era platitudes when pressed to justify their affections. Though Reagan’s alluringly demagogic 1981 decree that “government is not the solution to our problems [but rather], government is the problem” is easy to chew, its arbitrary application has led to a number of misconceptions about the role, size, and scope of “government.”

Time and again conservatives characterize those of us on the left as “large government loyalists,” as “tax and spend liberals” who “support the growth of an inefficient and parasitic public sector.” Unfortunately, the tales that conservatives use to vituperate those of on the left are as shallow as they are tall.

Let’s take a few minutes to debunk three common conservative critiques lodged against supposed “big government” sympathizers.

Myth #1: President Obama has created a “spending inferno.”

Did not Harvard Business School teach you anything, Mitt? In FY 2009—the last of George W. Bush’s presidency — federal spending rose by 18 percent from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. Then, in FY 2010—the first budget overseen by President Obama—federal government outlays fell by nearly 2 percent. In FY 2011 spending rose 4.3 percent to $3.60 trillion and in FY 2012 spending is scheduled to rise 0.7 percent to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) most recent budgetary estimates.  Finally in FY 2013 — the final budget of President Obama’s term — spending is ...

Once again a Democrat's letting the Right set the terms of the debate. This time it's House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who's undercutting her party's tax policy in an odd way: by redefining "middle class" so that it includes people making a million dollars a year.

Pelosi's proposal would be great for millionaires - and bad for everyone else.

It hurts the nation economically by depriving the government of revenue when it should be providing more stimulus funding. It also muddies her party's messaging, and reinforces the unpatriotic idea that taxes are punishment rather than a fair exchange. Nancy Pelosi is better than this.

How good is her proposal? Let's take a closer look.

The Upper Upper Upper Upper Upper Middle Class

President Obama has proposed ending the Bush tax breaks. That would, among other things, raise the tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent for income above $250,000. But since he's keeping taxes where they are for income below $250,000, that would preserve a tax break for millionaires too!

After all, you can't earn a million dollars unless you earn $250,000 first.

Nevertheless, Minority Leader Pelosi sent a letter to her Republican counterpart, House Speaker John Boehner, demanding an immediate up-or-down vote on a very different proposition: letting the tax cuts expire for income above a milliondollars.

To make matters even more confusing, Leader Pelosi described the proposal as an "extension of the middle-class tax cuts." While opinions differ on what constitutes a middle-class income, this appears to be the first time in history that a million-dollar income was characterized as "middle class." The average personal income in the United States as of the last survey was $39,959 and, as