Paul Ryan’s Republican budget proposal “saves” the government money on Medicare by replacing it with a voucher to buy private insurance, but these vouchers will be too small to actually buy a similar level of coverage to what  Medicare traditionally provided. It shifts the burden of paying for the rise in health care costs for [...]

The Obama Adminstration announced today it intends to move to Congress a NAFTA-style trade deal with Colombia (better known as Colombian “Free Trade”). The hold up for the last five years has been the little issue of union members being assassinated in Colombia. Specifically, 2,850 trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia in the last 25 years, including 52 murdered in 2009.

Good news! The Obama Administration and Colombia have agreed to an “Action Plan” to reduce those assassinations in the next 3 months before Congress ratifies the NAFTA-style trade deal. As Marcy Wheeler noted, those checkpoints are essentially “assassination stress tests” – a meaningless series of goals without real enforcement, and without a requirement that the number of murders is actually, you know, reduced.

Paul Ryan’s Republican budget plan would privatize Medicare and dramatically slash Medicaid over time. The result: senior citizens, poor children and the disabled paying dramatically more for care, getting worse health insurance coverage and/or losing coverage altogether, according to a report by the CBO. Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their [...]

There are two very simple, straight forward things you can do with Medicare if you want to make a big reduction in the deficit: you can either destroy Medicare, or vastly expand it. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has stepped forward for the Republican Party to endorse the “destroy Medicare” solution as the best way to [...]

In a debate last night in the United Kingdom’s House of Commons, British Foreign Office minister Henry Bellingham said that the UK Government will renew its pressure on the US State Department concerning the abuse of PFC. Bradley Manning. Bellingham also confirmed that Bradley Manning can be considered a British citizen.

Right after President Obama took office, one of his very first promises was to close down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which had become known internationally as a shameful mark against the US. This promise has yet to be fulfilled. I have been led to believe this broken promise isn’t really Obama’s fault [...]

Rep. Paul Ryan has released his 2012 budget proposal (PDF), and in it, he has endorsed the truly terrible idea of eliminating Medicare and replacing it with a voucher to buy more costly private insurance on an exchange. Future Medicare recipients will be able to choose from a list of guaranteed coverage options, and they [...]

It was one year ago today – April 5, 2010 – that Wikileaks released a video it titled “Collateral Murder,” that the organization described as “shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers,” and the injury of two children. None of us had heard the name Bradley Manning one year ago. Indeed, 365 days ago, PFC. Manning was in Baghdad, serving as an Army intelligence specialist. Today, Manning sits in almost total solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Brig, having been charged with allegedly leaking the Collateral Murder video and other documents currently in Wikileaks’ possession.

Recent polling has already shown that the American people are fairly divided about our war kinetic military action with Libya, but if you introduce the issue of the operation’s huge price tag likely voters overwhelmingly believe it isn’t worth the cost. A new poll from the Hill finds that, by a by a two-to-one margin, [...]

Yesterday, to a decent amount of fanfare, the Department of Heath and Human Services released its draft regulations for the establishment of accountable care organizations (ACOs). The idea is that they will save money by having individuals on Medicare get treatment from a highly integrated team of health care providers. The hope being to reduce [...]