At the end of the health care debate, when Obama was desperate to get the final bill passed in the House, he agreed to make a deal with Bart Stupak (D-MI) on the issue of abortion, by offering an executive order that restricted the availability of insurance coverage for reproductive health. The right to abortion [...]

It is theoretically possible that Obama will only call for applying the payroll tax to incomes above $107,000–that being the only “fix” to Social Security supported by the American people and would give the program near infinite solvency–but I highly doubt it. Most likely, our deficit-hawk-in-chief is going to call for some form of cuts to Social Security benefits.

As last week drew to a close, the Republicans that control only the House of Representatives clearly bested President Obama and the Democrats that control the Senate in the budget fight.  Speaker John Boehner, despite controlling only one third of the relevant institutions in the budget fight, was able to get the President to agree [...]

SEIU came out against the Colombia “free trade” agreement today, slamming the deal as a product negotiated by George W. Bush with an “action plan” that does nothing to actually reduce the number of assassinations of union members in the country.

At this point, since it seems the absolute best case scenario for Democrats in this budget fight is that, by the end of today or the beginning of Monday, Congress passes a budget containing around $38 billion in immediate cuts to domestic programs over the next few months, but is free of any major policy [...]

Not only is Republican Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan using basically the same general premium-supported exchange design that Obama’s health care revision does for the uninsured under 65, but both Ryan’s budget and “Obamacare” are nearly totally reliant on almost the same pathetic accounting trick of using poorly indexed caps on federal health care spending [...]

Seven Eight Democratic Members of Congress spoke out against the Obama Administration’s proposed Colombia “free trade” agreement and its onerous assassination stress tests. They were joined by the United Steelworkers Union, the first major union to speak out against the deal after the AFL-CIO labor federation. Each centered their opposition on the laughable “Action Plan” to [...]

There are two negatives that stop a hostage taker from shooting a hostage. One is that once the hostage is dead, they lose the leverage to make demands; the other is that without the hostage, the police will come at them without restraint and with the intent to punish them even more severely. Thanks to [...]

Government officials and Quantico Marine base have blocked official visits to PFC. Bradley Manning by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Amnesty International, and the UN Special Rappateur on torture.

The AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka comes out swinging against the NAFTA-style Colombia trade deal and its Assassination Stress Tests, rightly suggesting that, “we have no doubt that if 51 CEOs had been murdered in Colombia last year, this deal would be on a very slow track indeed.” Oh, snap. Good for the AFL-CIO for coming out [...]