Obama’s very good at making promises that will appeal to progressives, and terrible at keeping them. Or even trying to.

It looks like the possibility of a strong, state-based public option in Connecticut has been kiledl by the state’s top Democrats, lead by Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy.

If the health care law really is a starter home, then what President Obama has been doing is effectively letting the Republicans rip out the house’s copper plumbing to be sold as scrap for pennies on the dollar.

After watching the news last night, I couldn’t help but think of Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson. When it comes to hardball negotiations with entrenched interests, they sure could give the Obama Team a few lessons.

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.

After the health care law passed, we were promised a massive, $125 million PR campaign staffed with top quality talent that would really sell the new law to the American people. In a fascinating article, Politico found that this promised campaign essentially crashed and burned.

Some of my darkest predictions about the new health care law are coming true. With businesses again clamoring for corporate tax reduction, the go-to in Pay-Go-obsessed Washington are the affordability subsidies for people who will be using the new health care exchanges.

The CEO of the nonprofit Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is going to get a retirement package worth $8.6 million after only six years on the job.

Many of you who closely followed the national debate leading up to the Affordable Care Act of 2010 know about Wendell Potter. He’s the former VP of Communications at health insurer giant CIGNA who resigned his head PR job in May 2008 after he came to believe his job and the industry he was shielding were morally offensive.

I, along with much of FDL, am often painted by both the media and the Obama administration as on the outer-left-wing of political thought—a group of progressive extremists well outside the mainstream.

The reality is both far more boring and sad. Recent polling has caused me to go issue by issue to examine public support for the reforms I care most about. I found almost all of them have extremely broad popular support with the American people. In the traditional sense of the word, my brand of radical progressivism is boringly centrist.