With sign-ups for private insurance nearing 7 million on the final days of open enrollment for Obamacare, Republicans are once again trying to unskew the polls. While Wyoming Senator John Barrasso accused the White House of "cooking the books," Ted Cruz (R-TX) pretended the number of uninsured Americans is actually rising. Sadly, this conservative whimpering […]

Despite the catastrophic launch of the Healthcare.gov web site last fall, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is on pace to blow past the CBO's most recent forecast of 6 million private insurance subscribers by the March 31 enrollment deadline. All told, at least 13 million people will obtain insurance coverage as a result of Obamacare, […]

Politics, it is said, ends at the water's edge. Or at least it did until January 20, 2009. Sensing yet another opportunity to bludgeon President Obama, the usual suspects on the right have fanned out across TV screens and op-ed pages to blame him for Russian aggression in Ukraine. John McCain, who defended President Bush […]

Last week, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan announced that his party would not offer a "singular alternative" to the Affordable Care Act. For good reason. Four years after they first declared they would "repeal and replace" Obamacare, the CBO concluded the most recent House GOP trial balloon would increase the national debt and cause […]

That Paul Ryan's one-man crusade against poverty has gotten off to a laughably bad start should have surprised no one. After all, his various "roadmaps" and GOP budgets have called for giving massive tax cuts for the rich, slashing non-defense discretionary spending to its lowest share of the U.S. economy in generations, privatizing Social Security […]

Wyoming Republican legislator Troy Mader made headlines this weekend with news that he stands by his 1987 book, The Death Sentence of AIDS: Vital Information For You and Your Family's Health and Safety. Ironically, the very same year Mader called for a quarantine of AIDS victims, President Ronald Reagan publicly rejected that kind of dangerous […]

A hearing this week before the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging shows what happens when Republican obstruction of the Affordable Care Act moves from the ridiculous to the sublime. When Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) tried to demonize the single payer Canadian system by asking Dr. Danielle Martin how many people die on Canadian […]

Last month, Republican House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) introduced his proposal for a major overhaul of the U.S. tax code. But among Republican leaders in Congress, its arrival was about as welcome as an ill-timed fart. Hoping to focus the 2014 midterm elections on Obamacare instead of controversial new tax provisions, […]

Bloomberg News this week offered the state of Washington as a powerful rebuttal to those who claim hiking the minimum wage would kill jobs. Washington, it turns out, has had the nation's highest minimum wage since 1998 and over the past 15 years enjoyed annual job growth well above the national average. New Jersey, too, […]