Minnesota Lawyer

A bipartisan effort led by the Coalition for Impartial Justice is proposing a system of judicial review and retention elections to avoid the highly charged, politically explosive contests common in Wisconsin, Texas and other states.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: As chief executive officer of AOL Inc., Tim Armstrong shouldn’t have stood up and blamed proposed changes to the company’s 401(k) plan on two discrete and, to many AOLers, recognizable medical catastrophes. Armstrong’s specificity — he blamed high medical costs stemming from two “distressed babies” of employees — was unnecessary, cruel and dumb.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s recent scandals won’t impress anyone who has read Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson. In the fourth volume of Caro’s biography, he tells the story of Margaret Mayer, a Dallas Times Herald reporter who was investigating the television station LBJ owned. Johnson had his aides call Mayer’s bosses and let slip that if Mayer kept investigating Johnson’s business, Johnson might sic the Federal Communications Commission on the Dallas Times Herald’s businesses.

There’s a simple way to tell whether the Republican Party’s newfound commitment to fighting poverty is more than rhetoric: Follow the money. Follow the trail in the party’s recent budgets and what you find are deep cuts to programs for the poor.

Documentarian Michael Moore greeted the introduction of Obamacare with an admission many liberals will cheer. “Obamacare is awful,” he wrote.

As of Jan. 1, more than 2 million people had signed up for insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplaces — the vast majority of them in December. That’s less than the 3.3 million the administration had projected would sign up by the new year.

When the Barack Obama administration realized that its HealthCare.gov website was fundamentally broken rather than merely glitchy, aides called former management consultant Jeff Zients to fix it.

Let’s agree that 23andMe Inc., the Google-backed company marketing a $99 genetics test that assesses your risk for more than 240 health conditions, didn’t manage its relationship with the Food and Drug Administration well.

On May 20, 2009, four Republicans — Reps. Paul Ryan and Devin Nunes and Sens. Richard Burr and Tom Coburn — unveiled their alternative to the health care plans then being considered by congressional Democrats. “We have introduced a comprehensive health care reform bill, the Patients’ Choice Act that, we believe, will bring us far closer to the goal of universal coverage than the Obama plan,” they wrote in a joint essay.

The flip side of the conservative desire to believe Obamacare’s problems are much worse than they actually are is the liberal desire to believe they’re much less severe than they actually are. One refrain that’s become particularly popular, perhaps because President Barack Obama uses it, is “Obamacare is more than just a website.”