Sorry for the lack of SOTU coverage on my end; because a seemingly endless series of random January illnesses culminated in mysterious but excruciating foot pain, I just caught random snatches while waiting for x-ray results, going to the pharmacy, etc. What I was thinking...
health care
Union-busting, health care reform-opposing, global-warming denying John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, has come up with a super idea for cutting his health insurance costs: giving his employees extra discounts.
The wife and I were push-polled moments ago by a Family Research Council. As best I recall these were the questions:Do you support taxpayer funding of abortions?Do you favor the 50% cut in Medicare that is part of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi health care plan?Do you think...
I've been puzzling over the same questions Rob has -- that why both the White House and the Raul Grijalva set among House progressives seem publicly committed to positions that.
Although I'm hardly a rational choice purist, I tend to think that political actors operate according to logics that are essentially intelligible, and that they more or less respond to.
Glenn Greenwald has a nice catch here, on Matt Welch's egregious hackery. Calling a document traditionally labeled a report a report 'lying' is pretty rich, but the larger issue is, as Greenwald demonstrates, Welch and Reason's writers are perfectly happy to cite CBO "reports" as...
I think Nate Silver's decimation of the reconciliation dodge is definitive. Granted, I roughly share his ideological priorities, and as a result I don't think there's a very serious argument.
Jon Chait has an interesting piece in TNR on the sclerotic condition of contemporary conservative free market dogma, as it tries to parry the Obama administration's response to the financial.
On the one hand:(1) No single payer(2) No public option(3) No expansion of Medicare(4) People will be forced to buy insurance they don't want (btw about 17% of drivers on any given day have no car insurance although it's legally mandated).On the other:(1) In theory,...
Ezra Klein argues that Joe Lieberman is willing to "cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people" for no better reason than to settle some old political scores.This has.
Ezra is, of course, completely right about the filibuster. While there may be individual exceptions in the long sweep of history, legislative gridlock is far more beneficial to reactionary than.