For the record, Florida State is a publicly-funded university. This isn’t the first time that the Kochs have pushed their way into academia: the Mercatus Center at George Mason University is a fully-funded Koch creation, pumping out right-wing economic memes for the masses. But at least that’s a private institution. This is a college funded by taxpayers, though critically, it’s underfunded. So when they had an opportunity to get $1.5 million, they signed away the right to vet their own instructors.

Given the incredible structural similarity between the Massachusetts health care reform law signed by Mitt Romney and the new national Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama, the release of the annual physician workforce survey from the Massachusetts Medical Society has generated a lot of attention. But I would caution everyone involved that on issues like the impact ACA will have on ER use or physician availability, what has happened in Massachusetts might be a very poor guide to predict what will happen nationally.

The President’s remarks on immigration reform, delivered last hour from El Paso, Texas, reflect a return to promises made during the 2008 campaign, with the experience of a Presidency that has focused on border and workplace enforcement and deportations more than building the coalition for reform.

Used to be, when you vanquished your enemy, you declared victory and went home.

In actuality, the life expectancy at age 65 has increased to the extent that Social Security is paying out more benefits for a grand total of 3 years, after 70 years in operation. This is why the system endures, with minor changes (the retirement age has already increased to 67), because the people who designed it built in the flexibility and buildup of benefits in the trust fund to account for any population pattern shifts. About the only thing they didn’t expect was the massive, rampant inequality that made the payroll tax cap lead to a far lower collection in revenues than expected. That can be altered and the program saved with relative ease.

Look, I know it costs a lot of money to mount a national presidential campaign, but this looks absolutely terrible.

Overall, 52 percent of Americans would like to add a third major political party, while only 40 percent feel Democrats and Republicans do an adequate job representing the American people, according to the latest Gallup poll. The interesting finding of this poll is that it found across the political spectrum, liberals, moderates and conservatives, all equally felt the need for more than the two parties.

John Boehner gave his economic address in Manhattan last night, and as we saw from the excerpts, his list of demands is pretty hard line.

Alan Simpson doesn’t like “the Catfood Commission people.” In a testy interview with Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim, the chair of Obama’s deficit commission questioned Grim’s stated facts about Social Security, speculating that Grim’s information came from “the Catfood Commission people.”

We know that Wisconsin Republicans are scrambling to pass every right-wing bill they can think of before the recall elections in July, when they could lose control of the state Senate. Among the first of those efforts is a voter suppression bill that would disenfranchise many Wisconsin voters.