Obama speaking Live at White House on 7.1 million signups. Watch.
Conservatives are finally getting to the point where they’re starting to admit that a straight repeal may not be a great idea. Sahil Kapur goes through some of the more prominent conservative wonks’ warnings.
Key architect of both Obamacare and Romneycare says the process of enrollment is far from over.
Daniel Strauss has a great piece on Sen. Elizabeth Warren, senior senator from Massachusetts, as a fundraising powerhouse for Democrats in trouble.
It’s not often that we get someone like Jonathan Gruber — the intellectual powerhouse behind what became the Affordable Care Act — to write for TPM, but here we are. Gruber writes with Vanderbilt School of Medicine Assistant Professor John Graves on how enrollment is far from over, and how Obamacare offers a key piece of the social safety net.
Michele Bachman has said she’s not running for re-election. Someone should tell that to the PAC that’s still raising money for her “campaign.”
Republicans rage against the dying of their favorite anti-Obamacare memes.
Sahil Kapur points out the hypocrisy of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) revised budget, released today, that includes the very Medicare cuts the GOP has been campaigning against.
About 15 years ago I wrote a controversial article in The New Republic arguing, on very hard evidence, that it simply wasn’t true that Americans were more supportive of the death penalty than nations in Europe. Mainly the issue was that European political systems were less responsive to populist support. It’s probably a mix of structural (parliamentary) and cultural differences (less populist). But the decline of violent crime, not surprisingly, has rapidly reduced Americans’ support for the death penalty. Look at this chart.
Let me just say it: No, no, no, no!
We’re hearing this morning – intentionally hearing, since these reports are clearly trial balloons of some sort – that the US is again considering releasing convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. To review, if you don’t know the backstory: Pollard was a civilian working for US Navy intelligence who was arrested and convicted for passing copious classified information to Israel. The fact that Pollard was a Jew spying for Israel made the case extremely charged, for good reasons and bad. Not surprisingly, the Israeli government has been lobbying for decades to get him released. No big surprise there. We try to get our spies released too. But if the White House is seriously considering using Pollard as a bargaining chip at this stage of the negotiations they’ve totally lost their minds.