This is the reason many people don’t like ObamaCare. It’s also part of why people wind up making fun of the president at state fairs. (On that, everyone should breathe deep and remember, as the noted political philosopher Orson Welles once put it: “It’s the business of the American people to take the mickey out of the president.” It’s not only what we do, it’s what we should do. Welles was speaking on a talk show; it was the 1970s; he was talking about people making fun of some Republican president, Nixon or Ford. So what? They can take it. And they’re not kings.

Yesterday afternoon, ThinkProgress rather predictably added itself to the parade of outlets making offensive and fatuous comparisons between modern voter-ID laws and the era of systematic racial discrimination that stained the largest part of American history. This is from Nicole Flatow’s complaint about North Carolina’s new identification rules: When Rosanell Eaton was 21 years old and living in segregated North Carolina, she became one of the first African Americans in her county registered to vote, after successfully completing a literacy test that required her to recite the preamble to the Constitution.

The scale and brutality of the attack on supporters of the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, was the clearest sign yet that the old Egyptian police state was re-emerging in full force.

With Republicans controlling all branches of the state government for the first time in more than a century, the legislature pushed through a range of conservative change.

Joe diGenova, a former U.S. Attorney and frequent Obama opponent, told a Washington, D.C. radio station on Monday that last week's 19 embassy closures were related to U.S. fears about those missiles and the damage they could cause

The California Supreme Court unanimously rejected an attempt to revive the state's ban on same-sex marriage Wednesday, ending a nine-year legal battle over the rights of gays and lesbians to marry the partner of their choice. The court order came seven weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by sponsors of Proposition 8, the initiative defining marriage as a union of a man and a woman, of a federal judge's ruling declaring the measure unconstitutional. The first weddings took place June 28, after Gov. Jerry Brown ordered all 58 county clerks to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Greg Sargent draws my attention to the latest from Sen. Marco Rubio: I believe that this president will be tempted, if nothing happens in Congress, he will be tempted to issue an executive order, like he did for the Dream Act kids a year ago, where he basically legalizes 11 million people by the sign of a pen. Now, we won't get any E-Verify, we won't get any border security, but he will legalize them. As Sargent mentions, Rubio's latest effort isn't likely to cut much ice with opponents of immigration reform. Rather, it's interesting for what it says about how Rubio views his tea party base. Basically, he's given up on reasoning with them.

Top union officials tell Salon the largest mobilization of fast food workers in U.S. history is about to get huge

Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Janet Yellen is the most qualified and most likely candidate to run the central bank, according to the majority of private economists in a Bloomberg News survey that showed Lawrence Summers trailing by wide margins in both categories. Sixty-five percent said Yellen probably will be President Barack Obama’s selection to replace Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, while 53 percent said she would do the best job, according to an Aug. 9-13 poll of 63 economists. Twenty-five percent said Summers, Obama’s former top economic adviser, would be the nominee, while 10 percent said he would be best.