by Bill Scher | Oct 29, 2013 | Uncategorized
Obamacare Defenders Push Back ThinkProgress debunks NBC report that Obama "knew" that Obamacare would force insurers to cancel certain health plans: "This all sounds very ominous until you consider that the naturally high turnover rate associated with the individual...
by Richard Eskow | Oct 28, 2013 | Budget Talks
The House-Senate budget negotiations, scheduled to begin on Wednesday, are an opportunity for our leaders to finally have a meaningful discussion about healing our damaged economy. That's the discussion Washington should have been having all along, but which it hasn't...
by Digby | Oct 28, 2013 | Economy, Health, Retirement Security, The Sequester
We more or less knew about this already, but this is another version: At the end of a long White House meeting between Senate Republicans and President Barack Obama during the government shutdown, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) threw out a question: Would the president...
by Bill Scher | Oct 28, 2013 | Blog
The immigration reform news of the day is that Sen. Marco Rubio's spokeperson told several news outlets that the senator does not support holding a House-Senate conference that would consider the Senate immigration bill for which, by the way, Rubio voted in support....
by Dave Johnson | Oct 28, 2013 | Making it in America
Did you think manufacturing was old-fashioned, dirty and low-skilled? Have you noticed how when you see a factory in a TV show it's an old, burnt-down building with broken windows? (And then the drug dealers drive in from one side, and the "good guys" from the other,...
by Bill Scher | Oct 28, 2013 | Uncategorized
Budget Talks Set To Begin Budget talks formally begin Wednesday. Time previews: "Democrats will push for increased revenue from closing tax loopholes. Democratic congressional staffers point to a few notorious tax exemptions for corporate jets and the oil and gas...
by Robert Borosage | Oct 27, 2013 | Economy
Congress is now lurching back towards another self-inflicted budget crisis. The new deadline is a budget deal by mid-January to avoid a government shutdown and lifting the debt ceiling by February to avoid default. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell sensibly...
by Sam Pizzigati | Oct 27, 2013 | Blog
America's top execs don't have the time to celebrate. They're too busy waging a corporate holy war against what may be the most promising check yet on executive pay excess. In 1930, an obscure lawsuit against Bethlehem Steel unearthed a piece of corporate data that...
by Richard Eskow | Oct 26, 2013 | Blog
A broad coalition of organizations, including the Campaign for America's Future and Social Security Works, is joining Sen. Bernie Sanders in a petition drive to resist cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. It only takes a few moments to sign; it's that easy....
by Isaiah J. Poole | Oct 25, 2013 | Minimum Wage
Nancy Salgado has been working at McDonald's in Chicago for 10 years, and for that whole time she has been working at Illinois' minimum wage, now $8.25 an hour. As a mother with two young children, that puts her below the poverty line of $19,530. McDonald's says it...
by Bill Scher | Oct 25, 2013 | Democracy
Politico headlined today that "House GOP plans no immigration vote in 2013". However, the story itself is more equivocal, noting that "the dynamics could change. Some, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), are eager to pass something before the end of the...
by Digby | Oct 25, 2013 | Conservatism, Health, This Is The GOP
You'd think that the fact they voted to repeal the whole program 46 times and shutdown the government for two weeks in a quixotic attempt to delay it would make the Republicans just a little bit reluctant to pretend they are sincerely worried about how the Obamacare...
by Dave Johnson | Oct 25, 2013 | Blog
An anti-union letter in my local paper today inadvertently exposes what's going on with the economy. This letter is about the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) transit-worker strike, but applies to working people across the country. (Working people means people who work...
by Bill Scher | Oct 25, 2013 | Uncategorized
Congressional Leaders Downplay Grand Bargain Both Senate Majority Leader Reid and House Budget Chair Ryan say there will be no grand bargain. W. Post: "'If we focused on doing some big grand bargain, like those prior efforts you mention, then I don't think we'll be...
by Emily Foster | Oct 25, 2013 | Jobs and Growth
With the recent government shutdown giving Congress its lowest approval rating in 25 years, this week it appeared many members of the House were scrambling show that when they try, Republicans and Democrats have the ability to work together to pass productive...
by Dave Johnson | Oct 24, 2013 | Blog
Republicans are demanding cuts in Social Security and Medicare if Democrats want to change the terms of the "sequester." I'm sure their Tea Party "base" would be shocked if they understood this. So would most Americans. So is the media giving Americans the information...
by Richard Eskow | Oct 24, 2013 | Health
Republicans who are trying to exploit the difficulties with Obamacare’s rollout for political gain are, as usual, getting it all wrong. Those problems with “healthcare.gov” don’t prove what conservatives think they prove. They're an indictment of the Right’s visions...
by Bill Scher | Oct 24, 2013 | Health
Over at Salon.com, a debate flared up this week between Joan Walsh and Brian Beutler on how liberal opinion journalists should handle coverage of the Obamacare website's initial rollout. Walsh argued "yes, it’s important for Democrats to acknowledge when government...
by Thom Hartmann | Oct 24, 2013 | Current Issues, Economy, The Jobs Challenge
A coalition of public interest groups wants Congress to stop the Trans Pacific Partnership. The groups sent a letter to several ranking members of Congress, asking them to deny President Obama's request to fast-track the T.P.P., and hold on to their Constitutional...
by Dave Johnson | Oct 24, 2013 | Making it in America
The trade deficit figures for August were released this morning by the Census Bureau's Bureau of Economic Analysis. The Bureau reports that "total August exports of $189.2 billion and imports of $228.0 billion resulted in a goods and services deficit of $38.8 billion,...
by Bill Scher | Oct 24, 2013 | Uncategorized
Debug Effort Speeds Up As Hearings Commence HHS details debugging efforts. AP: "Unexpectedly high consumer interest that overwhelmed the system in its initial days. Equipment has been added to handle the load and system design has been improved. More fixes are in...
by Isaiah J. Poole | Oct 24, 2013 | Minimum Wage
Nancy Salgado has been working at McDonald's in Chicago for 10 years, and for that whole time she has been working at Illinois' minimum wage, now $8.25 an hour. As a mother with two young children, that puts her below the poverty line of $19,530. McDonald's says it...
by Richard Eskow | Oct 23, 2013 | Blog
Democrats in the White House are confronted with a dilemma. On the one hand, the clock's ticking on their temporary budget deal with the Republicans. If it runs out and there's no new agreement, we run the risk of a default and the government could shut down again....
by Emily Foster | Oct 23, 2013 | Minimum Wage
Members from the House Democratic Caucus on Wednesday joined with Wal-Mart employees at a forum to challenge Wal-Mart to pay its workers a living wage. While Wal-Mart averages a profit of about $1.8 million per hour, its wages are so low that in Wisconsin, taxpayers...
by Digby | Oct 23, 2013 | Economy, Health, Progressive Vision
Mike Konczal has written a provocative post that is getting quite a bit of play today and is well worth reading. He posits that the rough Obamacare rollout is a direct consequence of misplaced faith in neo-liberal solutions, which he defines in this instance as a...
by Bill Scher | Oct 23, 2013 | Health, Retirement Security
Over at The Week I offered up 5 Other Botched Rollouts of Government Programs" in order to bring a little historical perspective to the current pile-on over the HealthCare.gov bugs. The common thread of all the programs I covered is: stuff gets fixed, people move on....
by Terrance Heath | Oct 23, 2013 | Conservatism, Health, This Is The GOP
Republicans are still targeting the Affordable Care Act, but their answer to the problems health care reform is already solving for many Americans hasn’t changed much from that infamous audience response at the September 2011 GOP presidential debate....
by Bill Scher | Oct 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
HHS Chipping Away At Website Snags Too early to judge, HHS Sec Sebelius tells CNN: "While refusing to give a timetable Tuesday as to when the website will be fully operational, Sebelius insisted 'it's improving every day, and more people are getting through ... and we...
by Richard Eskow | Oct 22, 2013 | Blog
Details are emerging about the House-Senate conference committee charged with developing a new budget. That would presumably head off the continued threat of a renewed Republican government shutdown – a catastrophe that is currently scheduled for January 15 – and...
by Jeff Bryant | Oct 22, 2013 | Education
T.S. Eliot had it wrong. October is the cruelest month. Far crueler than Spring's "lilacs out of a dead land" Eliot wrote about in "The Waste Land" is a harvest season of failed crops. All that work and hope for this? "This" we confront is the empty yield from...
by Isaiah J. Poole | Oct 22, 2013 | Conservatism
People are having problems logging into the website, pages appear to be frozen and the information users are typing into the site doesn't appear to be getting to the right people or seems to disappear altogether. But this isn't yet another story about HealthCare.gov,...
by Digby | Oct 22, 2013 | Health, Retirement Security, This Is The GOP
Ruth Marcus fills us in on what constitutes "reasonable" now that the Republicans have proven themselves asses with their government shutdown. And, you guessed it, it's time for Democrats to compromise and agree to cut "entitlements" in exchange for sequestration...
by Leo Gerard | Oct 22, 2013 | Blog
Republicans characterize the ordeal they just subjected the country to as a war. House Speaker John Boehner said, “We fought the good fight. We just didn’t win.” Sen. John McCain said, “Republicans have to understand we have lost this battle, as I predicted weeks ago,...
by Dave Johnson | Oct 22, 2013 | Blog
Problem: multinational corporations are sitting on a huge lump of money from profits made outside of the US, avoiding hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes. There are four ways to solve this. Three of them create millions of American jobs and bolster American...
by Robert Borosage | Oct 22, 2013 | Blog
The Bureau of Labor Statistics September jobs report summarize the labor market before the damage inflicted by the government shutdown. It shows an economy that is treading water, barely creating enough jobs – 148,000 in September – to cover new entrants into the...
by Bill Scher | Oct 22, 2013 | Uncategorized
Dems Thrown Down On Taxes Dems "to go on offense on raising taxes" reports The Hill: "Congressional Democrats want Republicans to sign off on $50 billion worth of tax increases to eliminate the sequester’s automatic spending cuts ... Democrats say they would not...
by Dave Johnson | Oct 22, 2013 | Jobs and Growth
No more cuts – the public is fed up. Democrats won the shutdown fight. Republicans lost and the public-at-large hates them and their ideas. There is no reason for Democrats to play on their playing field. Here is a guiding message Democrats should use from here on...
by Isaiah J. Poole | Oct 21, 2013 | Retirement Security
The right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council has jumped into the conservative effort to dismantle public pension systems in a big way, making it one of its top 2014 legislative priorities, a public pension advocacy group has warned. The National Public Pension...
by Richard Eskow | Oct 21, 2013 | Blog
Scandal-tainted megabank JPMorgan Chase is losing legal ground in the wake of its multi-year crime wave (if the term "crime wave" seems harsh, we invite you to review the evidence here, here, and here.) But in the wake of its tentative $13 billion settlement with the...
by Dave Johnson | Oct 21, 2013 | Blog
If you think Republicans have learned a lesson from their "defeat" over the shutdown and debt-ceiling hostage-taking, then you're not paying attention to what they’re saying to each other online, on the radio and elsewhere. Here is a quick look around right-wing...
