You name the problem, Tom Friedman's got the answer: raise taxes on gasoline. Looks like Tom Brokaw's caught Friedman's gas-tax raising fever.

On today's Morning Joe, Brokaw proposed, as part of fighting the war on terror, raising gas taxes by five cents per gallon. Brokaw argued that it is wrong that the burden of fighting falls on just 1% of Americans, and that the result of his tax increase would be that "every time you go to the pump you have to think about what's going on elsewhere."  For liberals, any event is a good excuse to do the thing they love best: raising taxes.

The federal government kicked off fiscal 2016 yesterday by reporting that its October deficit was $136.5 billion, 12 percent higher than the $121.7 billion shortfall seen in October 2014.

Single-month comparisons can be tricky because of timing differences, but the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger noted that analyzing the results from this October and last October is an apples-to-apples proposition when he wrote that "In both years, Nov. 1 fell on a weekend, which required the government to mail out November benefit checks in October." But instead of diving into and comparing the two Octobers, the AP reporter devoted the vast majority of his writeup to virtual cut-and-paste regurgitations of previously published news about the 2015 fiscal year and projections for the next two years. He wrote just one sentence directly comparing any of the details in two October statements, and buried it at the end of his report.

Appearing as a guest during the 5:00 p.m. hour of CNN Newsroom with Poppy Harlow on Sunday, liberal CNN political commentator Marc Lamont Hill declared that "the greatest lie in American history is the myth of the self-made person" as he answered a question about why GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson is so popular with white Republicans.

The No Fun League apparently isn’t merely confined to the N.F.L. On NBC’s Sunday Night Football, Al Michaels made a joke about taxes. In the video, Michaels talked about how Bill Belichick made a paltry $25 dollars a week while coaching for the Baltimore Colts in 1975.

Asked to name something that stands alone, a lot of people would say, “The cheese.” To New York magazine's Jonathan Chait, another reasonable answer is “the Republican party,” at least in regard to global warming specifically and hatred of government in general.

Chait’s main point is that the GOP is extremist not only in an American context but also by international standards: “Of all the major conservative parties in the democratic world, the Republican Party stands alone in its denial of the legitimacy of climate science…The fervent commitment to supply-side economics is also an almost uniquely American idea. The GOP is the only major democratic party in the world that opposes the principle of universal health insurance. The virulence of anti-government ideology in the United States has no parallel anywhere in the world.”