Tag: Affordable Care Act

Is Government Inept or Sinister?

The image of a bumbling government, fumbling the Healthcare.gov rollout, clashes with the image of NSA running a terrifying Big Brother dystopia. But these sharp contrasts often reflect the viewer’s opinions or political needs more than the shaded realities, says ex-CIA…

Obama’s Not-So-Terrible Year

Exclusive: Official Washington is giving a big thumb down to President Obama’s performance in 2013. But his diplomatic breakthroughs in the Middle East and even some of his troubles with Obamacare and the NSA could ultimately make the year a historic…

Tea Party and ’12 Years a Slave’

Exclusive: Some on the Right like to compare the Affordable Care Act to slavery, apparently to get under the skin of Barack Obama, the first African-American president. But the glib talking point also reveals a callous disregard for slavery’s evils,…

The Tea Party’s Confederate Roots

For “branding” purposes, the Tea Party pretends to reflect the views of the Constitution’s Framers but it actually follows the Slave South’s hostility to the strong federal government that the Framers created. That historical link to the Confederacy is crucial…

Dick Cheney’s Heartless Hypocrisy

Exclusive: Dick Cheney’s new book about his life-saving heart transplant has drawn much fawning coverage. But little attention has gone to the hypocrisy of the ex-vice president accepting expensive government-funded surgeries while endorsing the Tea Party’s campaign to deny health coverage…

Why Right’s Lemmings Don Suicide Vest

Exclusive: The government-sabotaging fervor of the Republican Right likened by one GOP congressman to “lemmings with suicide vests” can only be understood from inside the right-wing bubble where a distorted view of the Constitution prevails and actual democracy is disdained, writes…

GOP’s Mad Health-Care Vendetta

Republicans and their Tea Party allies are plotting one more frenzied assault on the Affordable Care Act by disrupting congressional townhall meetings and possibly holding the full-faith-and-credit of the United States hostage. But the madness may just expose how crazy…

Is the Constitution Still Relevant?

Exclusive: The U.S. Constitution has become part of today’s political battlefield, with the Right claiming to be its true defender and the Left questioning why the old parchment should undercut democratic choices in the modern age. But neither side seems very…

The Revolving Door on Healthcare

Washington is a place where behavior friendly to the rich and powerful is rewarded lavishly and other behavior hostile to those interests can make you a pariah. That reality is reinforced when public officials make trips through the revolving door,…

The Battle over the Constitution

Claiming to speak for the Constitution, the Right has convinced many Americans of an upside-down account of what the Framers were doing and timid historians have let these false impressions harden into conventional wisdom. Beverly Bandler says a vigorous and…