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Hall of Fame basketball player Earvin “Magic” Johnson spoke out on behalf of President Obama’s healthcare law on Monday. “ObamaCare is working. I talk to a lot of CEOs of hospitals. It is working,” he said on MSNBC. Johnson was speaking on "NOW with Alex Wagner" about the NCAA basketball tournament, but he veered into politics at the end of the segment, lauding conservative Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) decision to accept the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. II’m glad that Gov. Scott down in Florida accepted ObamaCare because it will work,” he said.

It turns out we seriously underestimated the central nervous system. It's hard to say what's crazier: the fact that Tufts University researchers spent a year cutting out the tiny eyeballs of tadpole embryos and sticking them back on to the tadpoles' tails, or: the fact that, when they hatched, a few of the tadpoles COULD ACTUALLY SEE OUT OF THE EYES ON THEIR TAILS. As you know, this is not the way vision is supposed to work--your eyeballs are supposed to be connected to a big fat nerve that carries incoming signals back to your brain, which combines the information...

Obama: 'Looks Like I'm Going to Be Spending New Year's Here in D.C.' Daniel Halper December 31, 2012 2:12 PM President Barack Obama tipped his hand today during a speech at the White House ... about how he plans to spend this New Year's Eve. "Democrats and Republicans in Congress have to get this done," Obama said, according to a rush transcript, referencing the ongoing "fiscal cliff" talks. "But they're not there yet. They are close, but they're not there yet. And one thing we can count on with respect to this Congress is that if there is even one...

HOUSTON -- Vice President Joe Biden rallied support for President Barack Obama before the nation's largest civil rights organization on Thursday, telling the NAACP that Obama has the "character of his convictions." Biden drew cheers as he credited Obama for championing a landmark health care law, launching the mission that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and stepping in to rescue the financial system and U.S. automakers General Motors and Chrysler. "He has put country first," Biden said. ... The vice president countered that Romney's policies would hurt black working families, and he outlined detailed differences between Obama and Romney...

Obama tailors election-year message to working womenBy Laura MacInnis Fri Apr 6, 2012 2:56pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama, leading in the polls among women voters, said on Friday he wants to help working women fight discrimination and juggle the demands of motherhood but stopped short of making promises on gender equality if he wins re-election. At a White House event on women and the economy, Obama noted "there has been a lot of talk about women and women's issues lately," a nod to the emergence of contraceptive rights, working women and all-male establishments as heated issues in...

VINEYARD HAVEN, Massachusetts (Reuters) - President Barack Obama has taken heat for taking a vacation when the U.S. economy is struggling, but aides are striving to make clear he is not neglecting the country's finances during his break. On Monday, Obama met with a top economic adviser and spoke to investor Warren Buffett and Ford Motor Co. chief executive Alan Mulally about the economy, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. Earnest also announced that Obama will travel to Detroit in two weeks to discuss the economy on the U.S. Labor Day holiday on September 5, setting up a major address...

Maybe we can call this Generation U — for unemployed. Three decades ago, the US experienced a dramatic shift in culture and economics as women entered the workforce in record numbers, and our economy expanded to meet the labor supply. As USA Today reports, we have now returned to the same working percentage of the population as we had at the beginning of the expansion, an astonishing decline that doesn’t appear to be slowing much: The share of the population that is working fell to its lowest level last year since women started entering the workforce in large numbers three...

IS the gym passé? For all their ads promising to stir motivation, gyms have failed to do so. “Up until the last six years, it’s been relatively easy to sell memberships, and to replace people going out the back door with people coming through the front door,” said Michael Scott Scudder, a consultant who advises health clubs and conducts up to 15 industry surveys annually. “Not so anymore. We’ve come to a point that we can’t sell enough membership in the industry to cover the attrition rate.” Blame the gym’s now-ubiquitous flat-screen TVs and the fact that iPods are de...

Foreclosures, plant closings, offshored jobs, underwater mortgages, miserable rates of unemployment, stagnating incomes: Is there any end to the woes of the struggling American middle? Apparently not, because now comes news of a trend guaranteeing trouble ahead for the more than half of the nation that make up the moderately educated and moderately earning middle — even if the economy improves. That seismic shift, outlined in a new report from the National Marriage Project and the Institute for American Values, is towards more divorce, more out of wedlock births and, ipso facto, fewer kids with a hopeful future. Family breakdown,...

Celebrating LGBT pride month at the White House this evening, President Obama declared that the nation has never been closer to ending the “discriminatory policy” of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and promised to keep working until the bill is signed into law. “We have never been closer to ending this discriminatory policy. And I’m going to keep on fighting until that bill is on my desk and I can sign it,” Obama said in the East Room this evening. “That is a promise I made as a candidate. It is a promise that I reiterated as president. It’s one that...

BALTIMORE (AP) -- Disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff has landed a job at a kosher pizzeria in Baltimore soon after his release from prison. The owner of Tov Pizza, Ron Rosenbluth, said Abramoff began working there Monday. He is learning about the business and will eventually help with marketing. Abramoff is an orthodox Jew. He was released this month from a minimum-security prison camp in western Maryland after serving about 3 1/2 years for fraud, corruption and conspiracy. The former Washington power broker's activities led to the conviction of a congressman.

receive quite a few emails that pique my interest and occasionally I like to share. This one entitled "An American working in Mexico" is said to be written by Tom O'Malley who was a director with Southwestern Bell in Mexico City. It provides us an inside look at the rigorous process a person must go through in order to work legally in Mexico, including corruption and bribes. - - - - - "I spent 5 years working in Mexico. I worked under a tourist Visa for 3 months and could legally renew it for 3 more months. After that you...

BAGHDAD – A U.S. Army company commander here is working to increase security and build stronger ties between various Iraqi divisions so they may better combat insurgents across Anbar and Baghdad. Capt. Guy Girouard, commander of Company C, 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, devised a plan encouraging Iraqi divisions to communicate better and fight the insurgency along the Anbar-Baghdad border as one force. The 1st Iraqi Army Division leads the security effort in eastern Anbar province while the bordering area of western Baghdad province falls under the 6th IA Div.  With the...

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5 / AP) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the federal economic stimulus package is working in her home state despite California's high unemployment rate. Pelosi was joined Wednesday in San Francisco by city government leaders, small business owners and workers to praise the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on its one-year anniversary. Mayor Gavin Newsom said the federal money has created more than 2,900 jobs in the city and saved thousands more.

Yet, they cannot comprehend what would motivate Middle America to distrust its government, for it surely does, as Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal:

Yesterday, Fox News reported the hearings held by Senator Joe Lieberman with cabinet officials concerning a shortage of flu vaccine. I'm sitting in Afghanistan not getting much broadcast TV news. I wanted to find out more, so I searched Google News for related articles. It turns out that as of this writing, the rest of the media is not reporting this event, at least in print. Try this. Go to the Google search page, click on the "News" tab. Now enter "Joe Lieberman".

President Bush has signed into law three tax bills in the past three years; these tax cuts amounted to $1.3 trillion in 2001, $96 billion in 2002, and $330 billion in 2003. Democratic opponents criticized the tax cuts (particularly the first one in 2001) as fiscally irresponsible and weighted primarily toward the wealthy, while Republican supporters claimed that the tax cuts would stimulate economic growth and return money to taxpayers across the board. Major Provisions of the Tax Cuts The 2001 Economic Growth and Recovery Tax Act, by far the largest of the three tax cuts, was intended to provide...

1st Lt. John Reed, a platoon leader with 15th Brigade Support Battalion, attempts to evade Capka, a military working dog, during a demonstration at Forward Operating Base Warrior, Kirkuk, Aug. 1. The demonstration was to not only entertain Soldiers but to educate leaders on the capabilities of the military working dogs. Photo by Staff Sgt. Jason Douglas, 1st Cavalry Division Public Affairs. FOB WARRIOR — No matter how fast the dozen or so Soldiers ran, they couldn't outrun Buli and Capka, a pair of German Sheppard military working dogs, during a demonstration here, Aug. 1. Soldiers from the 15th Brigade...

Skimpy supplies of flu vaccine and public panic are not the only concerns among officials charged with managing a potential pandemic. Some vital caregivers could be no-shows.