Economy creates 162,000 new jobs; unemployment rate stuck

The Department of Labor this morning released its employment numbers for March, indicating that the economy created 162,000 new jobs. Yet the nation’s unemployment rate remained stuck at 9.7 percent.

Some analysts see the figures as the first…

Survey finds racial disparities under anti-foreclosure program

Black homeowners are roughly 50 percent less likely than whites to receive help under the largest of the administration’s anti-foreclosure programs, according to a new survey of qualified families.

Medicare payment hitch not addressed in health bill

With President Obama having signed an enormous, $938 billion health reform proposal into law Tuesday, it’s tempting to imagine that the long-drawn and ubiquitous debate over health care legislation is over for a while. If only it were so.

ACORN: Folding but not forgotten

ACORN might be folding, but that’s not enough to convince Sen. David Vitter that the anti-poverty group still won’t find ways to rig the next election. The Louisiana Republican has filed an amendment to the health reconciliation bill…

Obama signs health reform bill into law

As expected, President Barack Obama Tuesday morning signed into law the Senate’s package of health care reforms, a number of which will go into effect this year.

“Today, after almost a century of trying, today,…

Gingrich walks back civil rights comments

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz yesterday quoted Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House Speaker from Georgia, warning that Obama’s support for sweeping health care reform would plague Democrats for decades, much as Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil…

House passes health care reform legislation

Congressional Democrats on Sunday passed historic legislation to extend health coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans, protect patients from the most flagrant abuses of insurance companies, and curb runaway health care costs. All told, the $940 billion reforms represent the most sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system since the creation of Medicare more than four decades ago.

How reconciliation irons out the House and Senate health bills

Democratic leaders pushing health care reform this year like to argue that a vast majority of the proposals represent uncontroversial changes backed by most Capitol Hill lawmakers. And while that might be true, it hasn’t prevented some sharp disagreements between House and Senate Democrats over a handful of high-profile reform provisions.

White House moving away from ‘war on drugs’

Quietly, free of headlines and fanfare, the Obama White House is toning down the bellicose “war-on-drugs” position that has defined U.S. narcotics policy for the last 25 years. In Vienna last week for the 53rd annual United Nations meeting on global drug policy, administration officials shifted from attacking drug use as a crime to be penalized and moved toward a strategy of tackling addiction as an illness to be treated, a number of health and human rights advocates who attended the event said.

GOP lawmakers protest ‘government takeover’ of student lending

A group of Republicans this afternoon will meet with reporters to protest the Democrats’ plans to eliminate tens of billions of dollars in government subsidies to private companies that lend to students. The Democrats’ bill would have students borrow directly from the U.S. Treasury, which makes sense to supporters because it’s the Treasury that currently assumes all the risk for those loans anyway — a boon to private companies that assume no risk. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that eliminating the private middleman will save $67 billion over the next decade, most of which will go toward expanding college scholarships to low-income students.