Despite their decades-long record of shaking hands with tyrants whose nations posed an existential threat to the United States, when President Obama shook the hand of one who did not Republicans nevertheless took to the fainting couch. The image of Obama's brief handshake with Cuba's Raul Castro prior to his address at the memorial service […]

On Monday, the federal government announced it had sold off the remaining shares from its $49.5 billion bailout of General Motors in 2009. But the $10.5 billion loss on paper obscures the massive total return on investment for the U.S. economy overall and American taxpayers in particular. As a new analysis from the Center for […]

Over the past couple of days, Jonathan Chait's "12 Years a Slave and the Obama Era" seems to have struck a nerve among the conservative commentariat. In it, Chait responded to the Obama caricature of the National Review's Quin HIllyer depicting the President with "chin jutting out, countenance haughty, voice dripping with disdain for conservatives... […]

As he tries to right the course with the troubled launch of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama finds himself at the mercy to the American insurance industry. And that's not a good place for him--or the American people--to be. After all, while Obama now needs the insurers to work overtime to manually enroll […]

While Republicans and their media echo chamber have been quick to pronounce the Affordable Care Act "dead on arrival" and its troubled launch "Obama's Katrina," polling suggests the American people have reached no such conclusion. A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted last weekend found that 41 percent of respondents approve of the ACA, little changed from a […]

This week's target in the never-ending Republican crusade to sabotage the Affordable Care Act is the Obamacare navigators, the dozens of community groups, hospitals and other non-profit organizations who have received federal grants to help Americans enroll in new health insurance plans. After launching a House probe of the groups and enacting draconian state restrictions […]

In the 1978 classic Animal House, Kent Dorfman (Flounder) is distraught after seeing the damage his frat brothers had done to his brother's brand new Lincoln Continental. In response, Eric Stratton (Otter) famously tells him, "You f**ked up. You trusted us." That scene came to mind as President Obama announced his "fix" to the policy […]

Among the myriad tactics Republicans are using to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, the GOP attack on so-called Obamacare "navigators" is probably the most ironic. After all, the Bush administration similarly dispensed grants to dozens of community groups, hospitals, universities and non-profits to provide enrollment assistance for the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. And […]

It was the biggest health care overhaul in decades. Tens of millions of Americans were impacted by it. And its launch was a fiasco of epic proportions. Let's play "Name That Health Care Debacle": The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled that some of the administration's ads promoting the new program were illegal while others […]

The launch of the biggest health care overhaul in decades--one impacting 43 million Americans-- was a disaster. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled that some of the administration's ads promoting the new program were illegal while others were misleading. GAO investigators also found that the White House illegally withheld data from Congress on the […]