Montanans are a special breed of Americans. They are fiercely independent and, in general, quite conservative. However, one thing that most folks from Montana have no patience for is when outsiders come into their state, run down their elected officials, and try to tell them how to vote. That’s exactly what the Koch brothers corporatist front group Americans for Prosperity […]

“It is as if the government had developed the economic policy equivalent of smart bombs, except these bombs carry payloads of cash for their carefully selected recipients,” Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson write in Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Those carefully selected recipients are the richest 1 […]

It’s good to be know the king… Alan Gocha Jr., attorney for the maker of 5-Hour Energy drink got himself in trouble back in 2007 when he crossed the center line while driving drunk and landed in jail. He appealed the conviction but, after running out of appeals, decided to go for a gubernatorial pardon instead. This past week, Michigan […]

Special enrollment period through April 30 is available for people who learned of penalties on their 2014 tax return. It shouldn’t have been news to anyone that if you don’t have health insurance, you’ll have to pay a penalty unless your income is so low you can’t afford coverage. But since 2014 was the first year the Affordable Care Act […]

Ultra far right wing conservatives Todd Courser and Gary Glenn took steps this week that show beyond a shadow of a doubt that their views on education have more to do with people in the 18th Century than they do with any modern views on education today. In a Facebook post this week that he has since deleted, Courser describes […]

My post yesterday, “Anti-trans* woman uses Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act to sue Planet Fitness for terminating her membership” (which I cross-posted at Daily Kos) provoked a response from the so-called “Christians” at RenewAmerica.com today. The piece is written by Ellis Washington, a founding board member of Salt and Light Global, and is titled “Salt and Light Global targeted for […]

Last week Ted Cruz showed us why we need another season of Cosmos. On Late Night with Seth Meyers, he was presented with a chance to explain why the world is on fire but it isn’t getting hotter — and he took it. It was as if the world’s greatest internet commenter had crawled into the news and started spraying […]

Instead of being tied to a job for the insurance benefits, Americans have the freedom to pursue their dreams. Ever since he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 10, Shawn Dhanak says he worried about what he was going to do when he was no longer covered by his parents’ insurance. He remembers his grandmother telling him, “You […]

Today’s guest post was written by my new friend Sally Tyler. Sally lives in Washington, DC. and is a public policy analyst for a national labor union, who spent time in Wisconsin in 2011, and who occasionally reads poetry. She writes today about Philip Levine, a U.S. Poet Laureate who died last month. Levine is best known for his poems […]

These are only five of the millions of Americans whose lives have been changed for the better thanks to the ACA. Call it Obamacare, call it the Affordable Care Act or the ACA. Whatever you call it, you have to call it a success — because it is. March 23, 2015, marks the fifth anniversary of President Obama signing the […]

Back when Pete Hoekstra was running against Rick Snyder for governor, Ben Padnos registered PeteHoekstra.com and proceeded to use it to support Hoekstra’s opponents in his gubernatorial and Senate campaigns. Padnos explained why he was doing it in January of 2010: Here’s the ranking Republican Member of the House Intelligence Committee failing to do something as simple as registering his […]