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The student loan deal is badly needed. It should have just been extended - duh! But the 1 percenters took it hostage and demanded their pound of flesh before We, the People can preserve even this little bit of what we do for ourselves. So as part of the "sweetener" for those 1 percenters there is a corporate pension giveaway in the deal that has nothing to do with student loans.

Economists Paul Krugman and Richard Layard, the latter of the London School of Economics, today posted a "Manifesto for Economic Sense" that lays out a sound framework for reviving the global economy.

The Supreme Court's narrow decision today that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional is a victory for all of us who defend the right of Americans to join together to impose new rules on the private health insurance industry—to require that they cover all applicants and not disqualify people with preexisting conditions.

In plain English, from Scotusblog:

Amy Howe: In Plain English: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance.

However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters.

Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn't comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding.

This is just the upshot. There's a lot in there that needs to be parsed by the legal beagles. More later as I read around the tubes.

Meanwhile, if you want to have some fun, watch Fox News this morning ...

The hubby and I were channel surfing last night and ended up watching Frontline. The feature story was "Dollars and Dentists".

The more I watched, the more stomach churning it got. If the Supreme Court does a number on health care reform, this model could be waiting in the wings.

No wonder conservatives don’t have a plan to "replace" health care reform. They don’t need one. Private equity firms are already test driving a "market-based" solution.

The House on Thursday voted to continue surface transportation programs for an additional 90 days, punting to shortly before the Democratic and Republican conventions the question of what our longer-term transportation policy should look like.

As the Senate prepares to take up a well-intentioned, if sorely inadequate, transportation funding bill this week, the Associated Press distributed a "news" story Monday that offered little "news" but much in the way of ideological framing for the opponents of fede