"When I say if you have your plan and you like it," President Obama explained about the Affordable Care Act during a June 2009 press conference, "what I'm saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform." Employers and insurers, unfortunately, are another matter. After all, the share of […]

This weekend, NBC News offered viewers a heartwarming portrait of Alice Walton and the Crystal Bridges art museum she opened two years ago in Bentonville, Arkansas. Heartwarming, that is, until you recall more about the woman behind the $1.2 billion complex and its $500 million collection of American art. After all, the $20 billion Alice […]

To be sure, the launch of the Affordable Care Act's new insurance marketplaces has been plagued by a variety of problems. But in its Friday segment titled "Medicaid enrollment spike a threat to Obamacare structure?" CBS News highlighted an issue that isn't a problem at all. While several states have been very successful in their […]

The Affordable Care Act, Republicans and their right-wing water carriers warn, is the worst thing to happen to America since slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act. But for Congressional Republicans in general and Paul Ryan in particular, Obamacare also happens to be the love that dare not speak its name. After all, Ryan's dangerous and […]

During a June 23, 2009 press conference, President Obama made a very specific promise about what would become the Affordable Care Act the following March. "When I say if you have your plan and you like it," Obama explained, "what I'm saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health […]

Conservatives, the joke goes, believe life begins at conception and ends at birth. Now, anti-abortion forces and their Republican allies in Ohio are doing their best to show that jest is true. As the Columbus Dispatch reported Tuesday, a group of Republican state legislators is suing to prevent GOP Governor John Kasich's move to accept […]

President Obama held a public event on Monday to address the serious problems plaguing the federal online health care exchange serving the 34 states which refused to create their own. Echoing former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pronouncement that the web site difficulties are "unacceptable," Obama insisted, "There's no excuse for these problems" hampering the launch of […]

On April 7, 2009--less than three months after Barack Obama first took the oath of office--the Daily Show's Jon Stewart perfectly summed up the red-hot, right-wing rage that hasn't cooled since. "I think," Stewart explained to frothing at the mouth Tea Party supporters, "you might be confusing tyranny with losing." Nevertheless, just days later thousands […]

This most miserable of weeks for the Tea Party did offer one ray of sunshine for the GOP's hardest of the hardliners. They rejoiced at the findings of an analysis by Yale professor Dan Kahan which revealed that Tea Baggers "appear to be slightly, but solidly more scientifically literate than non-tea party members." Unfortunately, basic […]

While Stephen Colbert was roasting Cardinal Timothy Dolan at Thursday's Al Smith Dinner in New York, the organization Dolan heads was quietly confessing that it got burned by the Republican Party's hostage-taking of the federal government and U.S. debt ceiling. In the opening paragraph its press release, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (UCCSB) "welcomed […]