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push a repeal bill through the House and Senate for the first time, reveling in their impending failure to actually achieve anything. Obama just officially ended the party.

"Because of the harm this bill would cause to the health and financial security of millions of Americans, it has earned my veto."

"It’s no surprise that someone named Obama vetoed a bill repealing Obamacare," he said. "But we will hold a vote to override this veto, taking this process all the way to the end under the Constitution."

On Planet Cruz, there is a massive outpouring of public support for a government shutdown over Obamacare and it's scaring the hell out of Democrats.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, the public hates the shutdown, Americans are 20 points more likely to blame Republicans for the shutdown than Obama, the Republican Party is scoring its worst poll numbers on record, Cruz's colleagues in the House and Senate hate him, and they're preparing to cave to the president by reopening the government and funding Obamacare.

When constituencies become aggrieved minorities, seeing themselves as under attack by the establishment, they are vulnerable to hucksters like Cruz, because they disregard outside warnings and evidence that they are being had.

Friday's effort strikes us as a pretty smart, if overdue, campaign strategy to try to make a mark on a term that has undoubtedly entered the lexicon, whether the campaign likes it or not.

why shouldn't they use "Obamacare" to describe the bill? There's nothing immediately or obviously pejorative in the word. In fact, given the bill's very long actual name, we're kind of appreciative for an easily recognized alternative. The problem for Democrats is that conservatives really effectively claimed the term and attached it in the public's mind with negative sentiment. As Kiran Moodley wrote in a piece for The Atlantic last year on the term, conservatives, through repetition, were able to link the idea to  government intrusion and the larger Obama agenda. "Obamacare" became more than an innocent shorthand: It became a rallying cry.

it’s worth pointing out just how completely ideology has trumped evidence in the health policy debate.

I’m talking about the wonks. It’s remarkable how many supposed experts on health care made claims about Obamacare that were clearly unsupportable.

a firm conviction that the government can’t do anything useful — a dogmatic belief in public-sector incompetence — is now a central part of American conservatism, and the incompetence dogma has evidently made rational analysis of policy issues impossible.

What the party really needs, much more than a better identity-politics pitch, is an economic message that would appeal across demographic lines — reaching both downscale white voters turned off by Romney’s Bain Capital background and upwardly mobile Latino voters who don’t relate to the current G.O.P. fixation on upper-bracket tax cuts. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Henry Olsen writes, it should be possible for Republicans to oppose an overweening and intrusive state while still recognizing that “government can give average people a hand up to achieve the American Dream.” It should be possible for the party to reform and streamline government while also addressing middle-class anxieties about wages, health care, education and more. The good news is that such an agenda already exists, at least in embryonic form. Thanks to four years of intellectual ferment, Republicans seeking policy renewal have a host of thinkers and ideas to draw from: Luigi Zingales and Jim Pethokoukis on crony capitalism, Ramesh Ponnuru and Robert Stein on tax policy, Frederick Hess on education reform, James Capretta on alternatives to Obamacare, and many more.

Shares, oil and the US dollar were all under pressure as global financial markets took fright at the prospect that Donald Trump would fail to deliver on his growth-boosting promises.

stock markets in Asia and Europe fell in response to Tuesday’s sharp decline on Wall Street.

Markets have become increasingly impatient with the new Trump administration for failing to follow through on pledges to use a package of tax cuts and infrastructure spending to raise the US growth rate.

Obamacare will, in some form or another, redistribute wealth.

Our upbringing, background, and wealth clearly influence whether we support redistributive policies, but interesting new research shows that, when it comes to supporting social welfare programs, not just our ideologies, but our physiologies, play a role.

past research has actually shown that Republicans and Democrats have striking similar ideas of how wealth should be distributed.

Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them. These metaphors for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those with greater power and those with less

A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.

Taken alone, it would appear both sides share equal blame for the present political paralysis as each shifts to their ideological poles.

while both sides may be guilty of running to their respective corners, one is clearly more liable for putting the kibosh on negotiation deal-making.

one gets more liberal, the more he or she wants elected officials who compromise.

he racial divide is still a defining feature of our political economy, the reason America is unique among advanced nations in its harsh treatment of the less fortunate and its willingness to tolerate unnecessary suffering among its citizens.

let me try to be cool and careful here, and cite some of the overwhelming evidence for the continuing centrality of race in our national politics.

My own understanding of the role of race in U.S. exceptionalism was largely shaped by two academic papers.

President Trump’s decision to cut off critical payments to health insurance companies ratcheted up the pressure on Congress on Friday to take action to protect consumers from soaring premiums, while also adding a combustible new issue to negotiations to avert a government shutdown this year.

It came just hours after he signed an executive order that also undermined the health law by encouraging the development of lower-cost insurance policies not subject to the Affordable Care Act’s rigorous coverage standards.

“Our patients will ultimately pay the price,” said Dr. David O. Barbe