Author Archive
Health Care Postscript
There’s been some discussion on liberal blogs lately about the true meaning of the recent health care reform victory that has reflected some of my own thoughts. It is a great progressive acheivement, and yet the legislation itself is pointedly centrist, even Republican. This has struck me as quite a contradiction. But over at Jon [...]
Read moreA Socratic Dialogue on Senate Sausage Grinding
Jeremy Pilaar: “Kill The Health Care Bill! Start Over!” – Howard Dean Robbie Bruens: Yeah, because if we start over now we’re not going to end up waiting another decade or two. Killing a bill does not mean we will get bolder reform in the future. It means we will get less bold reform in [...]
Read moreNo More Compromises
The word out of the developed world’s most dysfunctional national legislative body is that there is going to be some kind of grand compromise suckdown on the public option of the health care reform bill next week. Here is my message to every Senate Democrat except Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown and Roland Burris (!), the [...]
Read moreFire This Clown
I’ve long been concerned that Doug Elmendorf has been a less than fair referee on health care reform, but what he said about global warming makes it clear that he’s a clown unfit to fill Peter Orszag’s shoes: “Most of the economy involves activities that are not likely to be directly affected by changes in [...]
Read more“A Cancer Growing Inside the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body”
This weekend’s House vote to pass historic health care reform legislation sends President Obama’s central domestic policy priority sailing towards the legislative end zone. In addition, the House passed major energy/environment legislation earlier this year, another major Obama agenda item. Both bills now await consideration on the floor of the United States Senate. As we [...]
Read morePolitics as Sport
Imagine that politics is baseball. Following from that, political junkies are baseball fans. And elections are the World Series (debates are the play-offs). But here’s where the metaphor gets tricky. Baseball fans expect that they will get to watch the World Series every fall. After the mother of all elections last fall which created innumerable [...]
Read moreA Call to Action
Last Friday, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize as a call to action rather than a reward for prior accomplishments. If you haven’t watched his remarks yet, you should. While he takes some measure of credit for his work towards ending the Iraq War, he appears uncomfortable when speaking about Afghanistan. This is a [...]
Read moreCongratulations, Cal Democrats: Feinstein Signs Letter to Majority Leader Reid Supporting Public Insurance Plan
Via Eva Chrysanthe, Talking Points Memo reports that Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio has sent a letter to Harry Reid strongly calling for the inclusion of a public insurance plan in the Senate health care reform bill. 29 other senators signed Senator Brown’s letter including… …our own Senator, Dianne Feinstein. So congratulations, Cal Democrats! Only [...]
Read moreWorking People in Poverty at the University of California
The University of California employs thousands of people to keep the business of educating California’s young people running smoothly. These people work every day to keep the ten campuses that make up the UC system clean and safe. They are also responsible for feeding students, faculty, administrators and campus visitors. These people work hard every [...]
Read moreRyan Lizza Should Spend Less Time Worshipping Larry Summers’ Tumescent Brain and More Time Asking Hard Questions About Obama’s Economic Policy
Note: The original version of this post has been censored. If you would like to see the original version, go here. I’m working on a longer post about the current status of the U.S. economy, but I want to quickly note that Ryan Lizza’s article for the New Yorker, though impeccably written, is really quite [...]
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