tales of copper city

Callie

When our retriever Dexter died shortly after we returned to Bisbee, we vowed we wouldn't get another dog, at least not for a very long time.  But then about six months later I was walking with Carole in the Farmer's Market in Bisbee, a block behind our house, and passing the Border Animal Rescue (BAR) stand, I noticed this small puppy sort of cowering under a chair from a group of playful children trying to lead her around with a short leash. For just a moment I caught her dark, mournful eyes---eyes that had seen too much in her short five months of life, as we found out later.

I turned to Carole and said, "We're screwed.  I think I've just seen our next dog."

Three days latter we brought Callie home.  She was frightened, spooked, anxious, suspicious and fearful.

She had been raised in a "hoarder" house in Douglas with as many as 20 or 30 dogs at a time.  She likely never had a moment when she felt secure and safe. And then she was a adopted by an older man who was not nice toward her, and BAR took her back.

She will be a year next month.  She's still nervous but she has grown from 15 pounds to almost 40.  She's happy, playful, and a little manic.  She has gone a long, long way to fill the place in our hearts when Dexter died.  The things we miss about Dexter we still miss, but when we turn, we see Callie, part retriever, part Australian shepherd or Border Collie, and totally tubular joy.

 
 
 
 

The corrupted core of Washington: Congress

Lawrence Lessig in the Nation has written a brilliant essay, "How to Get Our Democracy Back, " on why it is Congress and money that lies at the heart of our political paralysis.

Gratitude

For all my complaining and criticizing I am so grateful that President Barack Obama is sitting in the Oval Office. Here in .pdf format are some wonderful pictures of  The_First_Family that are surely making it around the Internet.

Gracias a Dios.

A striking contradiction

As noted in by Henrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker, a headline in the Village Voice, the day after the Massachusetts election, read like this: “SCOTT BROWN WINS MASS. RACE, GIVING GOP 41-59 MAJORITY.”

And this:  Kevin Drum reports on Bruce Bartlett's response to Governor Pawlenty's likely race for president in 2012.  Bartlett, a former Bush adviser, argues that Pawlenty,

Like all Republicans these days, Pawlenty wants to have it every possible way: complain about the deficit while ignoring everything his party did to create it (Medicare Part D, two unfunded wars, TARP, earmarks galore, tax cuts up the wazoo, irresponsible regulatory and monetary policies that created the recession that created the deficit, etc.), illogically insisting that tax cuts are a necessary part of deficit reduction, and never proposing any specific spending cuts.

Across the border line

I spent the morning across the U.S.-Mexico border at Naco, commemorating two years of operation for El Centro de Recursos para Migrantes, the Migrant Resource Center.  A special part of the ceremony was to dedicate our new toilet, a much appreciated addition by volunteers and migrantes.  The baño was built by some of the volunteers and others who are friends of the Center.

Founded by Cecile Lumer and Peter Young, both of Bisbee, the purpose of the center is to offer food, clothing, water, limited medical attention, a telephone call to family, and, for many, money to return home by bus, if the returned migrants so wish.  

The system is rigged

The State of the Union speech the president gave last night was good, but I'm still concerned that President Obama is not fighting the way he should to defeat our democratic system's built-in advantages for conservatives and the status quo. 

There is no doubt that the president understands how the system is biased against progressive change; yet he shows little tendency to use the resources of his office to fight back against these biases by really getting into the faces of some conservative Democratic Senators or by constantly reminding the public about how the system is stacked in favor of money and power.

I write a lot about how we have two systems of democracy in the U.S.: progressive democracy and conservative democracy that uses the built-in biases of our Constitutional order originally designed to defend the Slave Power (the South) and slavery and ever since to defeat a more progressive democracy.  

"Our wars are killing us."

"Our wars are killing us" is the name of the excellent piece by Tom Englehardt at Tomdispatch.com.  The folks in Massachusetts are worried about the deficit according to one interpretation of the Republican victory.  

One trillion dollars over 10 years seems too much, even if we do cover almost all Americans and get closer to controlling health care spending.

But the voters in Massachusetts aren't worried about the one trillion dollars we will spend in Afghanistan; oh no, that's for our national security, like the two or three trillions we will spend on Iraq.  

Health security no; national security yes.

Of course, our wars are killing them, Iraqi and Afghani civilians who have committed no crime except getting in the way of our national security steamroller. For every death of a terrorist killed by a drone, the Brookings Institution says that we will kill 10 civilians.  (See Tomgram: Droning On."  

And, of course, each one of these death by drones will only help Al Qaeda recruit more young men to get on airplanes with bombs hidden on their persons.

What in the world is wrong with the American voter, anyway?  

What happens after Massachusetts?

Yesterday, I would have wagered that Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts Attorney General and Democratic candidate for the Senate in Massachusetts would in the end squeeze out a victory on Tuesday. 

I was wrong.  And now we will have endless analyses about what happened and what needs to change. Here's mine.

1.  Retail politics.  People everywhere like to be asked for their vote, face-to-face as much as that is possible. Massachusetts especially likes retail politics. Martha Coakley didn't seem to appreciate this fact and even if she did she isn't good at it, and this counts in a state that reveres hands-on politics. 

Actually, I think Coakley knew her weaknesses and she was determined to coast to victory given the overwhelming number of registered Democrats. Why give a political unknown free publicity with a too aggressive campaign? And this angered Independents and some Democrats and energized the Republicans.  

And by the way, where was the White House back when it became obvious that Coakley was running a bad campaign?  Why did they wait until it was too late?

Above all, voters don't like to be taken for granted.  They read that as arrogance.  I saw the same thing happen here in a small town election and it ain't pretty.

2. The divides within the Democratic party. The far more important point is that the Democrats have a huge problem.  The opposition Democrats  face within their own party in rounding up sufficient votes for victory, whether in reforming Wall Street or health care, has not been lost on the ordinary voter, whether Democrat, Independent, or Republican.  

This endless controversy has given the average voter pause. Who is taking their side when they are losing their homes and the banks are thumbing their nose at the Obama administration? And given all the confusion over health care reform, do the Democrats know what they're doing?

Government

I found this entry under government in Frederick Buechner's Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary.

If...governments don't reflect the dreams of the people they govern or serve their wills...you wonder what on earth governments are.  Reading the newspapers you get the sense of them as small, irascible groups within each capital---far more of them men than women---who behave in ways that under normal circumstances would land them in the slammer in no time flat. They seem to have a life and purpose of their own quite apart from the lives and purposes of anyone else. They are perpetually locked in desperate struggles with each other that have little to do with the general human struggle to live and let live with as little fuss as possible. It's we ourselves who have given them the power to pull the whole world down on our heads, and yet we seem virtually powerless to stop them...

About the only objection I have to Buechener's lament is that it is too narrow in scope.  The same powerlessness we feel toward our democracy we also feel toward those gigantic institutions in the so-called private sector who control our lives in ways that we are powerless to prevent.

I have taught government and politics all my life and in my retirement I wonder if in my teaching I had become something of an apologist for a democracy that has simply proved inadequate to our times and challenges, incapable of bringing the powers that be, inside and outside of government, back to the business at hand of helping us live out our days with as little fuss as possible. 

Instead they largely seem interested keeping us on the edge of our seats waiting for the next fresh hell that government should have prevented or prepared us for years ago.

The other plot to wreck America

Frank Rich's Sunday New York Times op-ed piece, "The Other Plot to Wreck America" is crucial reading about the upcoming Congressional hearings on the fiscal crisis beginning with the September 15, 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Listening, again

In hearing or reading about how we as a nation talk to each other---how little we listen and learn---I was brought back to a blog entry I wrote last summer after the Fourth of July about listening.  I wrote about listening in the context of "focusing" a kind of meditation that I fitfully practice.  But "listening" is also central in the writing of another author that I "listen" to: James P. Carse and particularly his book, The Silence of God.  I have written about Carse before.

This book is the best thing I have ever read on prayer, on faith, and on the power of listening and being heard. 

As a former college professor who often described the graduate school setting as "the academic captivity," I now realize its most devastating feature: no one listens.  Professors don't listen to each other and they don't listen to students and, consequently, students tune out professors. And then professors go home with the voice of God in their mouths and there no one listens to them, either. This creates the most incredible loneliness, all the way around: the academic captivity.

At any event, I thought I would run the entry again because it captures so great a weakness that I suffer and should, above all else, seek to remedy. It is the principal spiritual challenge I face.

A very wise economist

I have learned over the years to be careful that I pay attention to the right economists.  Too many of this breed are simply ideologues for free market fundamentalism. But Joseph Stiglitz is one very wise and experienced economist and his article on lessons we should have already learned about markets is well worth reading.  It's in the China Daily, of all places.

Way to go, Harry Reid!

The Senate passed the health care reform bill, 60-39, and if anyone deserve the lion's share of the credit, it's Senator Harry Reid, the Majority Leader.

President Obama also deserves huge credit for making this his number one priority and Speaker Pelosi for shepherding the House bill past the opposition.

Certainly the legislation has serious defects but the simple fact is that we cannot reform health care unless and until nearly everyone is covered. And this first giant step has been taken.   (See Jonathan Chait's wonderful summary in The New Republic of why this bill is hugely important.)

And now undeniably the footprint of the federal government in health care will overshadow the private health insurance industry, making clear that it will be government and democratic majorities who will have the major say in shaping the future of our health care system.

Way to go!!!

A seriously dysfunctional Senate

Paul Krugman, in his latest post on health care reform, argues that our primary goal in the next Congress should be to reform the filibuster rules in the Senate.  It's required reading.  The crucial point is that a simple majority vote when the Senate organizes should be sufficient to overturn the Senate's filibuster rule, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service.  

Hope against hope

The news today about "Joe Lieberman" winning is yet more evidence of how deeply entrenched in our politics is sectionalism and a conservative vision of our democracy.  Conservative democracy remains a force in our democracy in significant part because it can manipulate arcane anti-majoritarian rules in the Senate. 

So many hopes will be frustrated by this setback.  So many moved to Washington to help secure a better America and they must feel betrayed and abandoned by the president and many in their own party.  Some will be tempted to give up hope for the American democracy altogether.

And so I thought it might be time to write about the roots of our hope, about the politics of hope. 

"Evil does exist in the world..."

President Obama is receiving widespread praise for his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  Here is what I see as the key assertion, made after he praised the moral example of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

To equate Al Qaeda's 100 to 300 terrorists and Hitler's armies is simply rhetoric totally out of control. Worse, it is to stretch the doctrine of self-defense beyond recognition, giving the United States permission to invade other countries at will.  

The scary Senate health care reform bill?

Who knows if the outlines of the Senate deal will hold?  The deal, as I understand it, will be to permit individual Americans to enroll in public insurance version of Medicare at age 55, and would also expand Medicaid to 150 percent poverty and would create some version of  a national insurance exchange to enhance competition, the exchange being overseen by either not-for-profits or government.

If the final Senate bill is an expansion of both Medicare (as public insurance, not as entitlement) and Medicaid is signed into the deal, we will have a much higher percentage of health care spending  coming from government sources than have now, perhaps as much as 65 percent.  And that makes the big reform we are going to need---something close to a single payer---much closer to a reality in the next 10 years.

If I were a progressive in the House, and this deal passes the Senate, I would take the deal and send it to the president.

Stupid wars

Barack Obama, while still in the Illinois legislature, said, "I'm not opposed to all war. I'm opposed to stupid wars." 

Well, now we know how wrong he was---about himself.  It turns out President Obama is in favor of stupid wars. 

Within a year many more American troops will be in Afghanistan and many more Americans will die for stupid reasons.  Just as importantly, many, many Afghani citizens,will die, innocent of everything except being in the way of the American war machine.  We even have a term for them: collateral damage.  And we will seldom hear about them except for the work of brave researchers who show us the costs of our inhumanity.

The picture of the President hailing a sea of West Point cadets and smiling from ear to ear nauseates me.  Some in that sea will die for no reason because of this decision made in stupidity.

How to have faith when you don't 'believe' in God

Thanksgiving morning, as we get ready in our small church to serve Thanksgiving dinner to over 200 people in Bisbee, I think it might be a good time to reflect on why I spend so much time in church when in fact my thoughts about faith and God are so, well, unusual.  Besides, politics and health care reform are beginning to drive me totally crazy. So here goes.

I am a Christian.  I have faith but I don't 'believe' in God.

There, I've said it and I'm glad.

But hold on a minute:  the statement "How to have faith when you don't believe in God," does not quite mean what it might seem, at least for me anyway.

How the filibuster has changed....everything

A letter written by a staffer for Lyndon Johnson just after his victory in 1964 explains what the filibuster was like in former times and what it is today.  And, to my surprse and embarrassment, I never appreciated this huge difference, despite a lot of time spent getting a graduate degree in politics from a very fine university.

I found out that the filibuster is today a tool for  a supermajority for almost anything that matters rather than an temporary halt in the Senate's business to try and slow the majority down and arouse the energy and attention of the nation.. 

In other words the filibuster was used in the past to try and halt a vote but not to actually prevent it from ever happening.  But today, with a radicalized Republican party and a Democratic Party asleep at the switch, the filibuster is now used to make anything and everything pass a 60 vote hurdle.

Here is the article by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post relating the analysis by a staffer under LBJ.  The staffer was Mike Manatos and he served as White House liaison to the Senate.  The really interesting part was the vote for Medicare, which was, initially, 55-45.  The vote swelled to over 65 when it was apparent it was going to pass because the Republican Party, in those days, was not a party determined to defeat a president and discredit an entire opposition party at any costs.

That was then, and now is now.  Surely, we can change this, in 2010, when the new Senate is organized.

War and health care reform...and Princeton economists

Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton health care economist, was the big dog during my years in health care reform.  He was witty, informative, and everywhere. 

Reinhardt's no longer everywhere. It must be hard to be seen when another economist from Princeton, the Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, is everywhere and constantly making sense on health care reform. But Reinhardt is still witty and full of insight as this column reveals, comparing health care reform in the U.S. and the war in Afghanistan. 

No, it's not just the annual costs that are similar; it is far more than that. It is the attempt by the U.S. government to somehow wade in and control a nation full of bristling, protective, and corrupt tribal chieftains fighting to protect and expand their turf, tribal chieftains who maintain their home base in the nation's capital.  And so on. It's a wonderful column.

I got this reference from Brad Wright's blog, Wright on Health, which has become one of the best on the web.  Be sure and read it every day.  You will learn a lot.

What day is today?

We watched JFK, Oliver Stone's riveting film last night, mainly because I have started reading JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters, by James Douglass, another (and very good) case for the assassination of Kennedy by groups connected to the CIA and to the Special Ops group within the military, the group that during and after WWII assassinated foreign leader, rigged or stole elections, and overthrew governments.  

Douglass's book focuses on Kennedy's turn toward struggling for peace, ending our involvement in Vietnam, and the growing menace of the CIA and the national security state.  Kennedy was far from perfect but it seems certain he was turning toward nuclear disarmament with Russsia and there were enormous pressures resisting this turning, including many leading generals and the Joint Chiefs who wanted to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia.

Read it and weep

Read Tom Engelhardt on Afghanistan and weep.  Engelhardt offers the speech that Obama is not going to give, the speech that announces that we are withdrawing from Afghanistan on an orderly basis.

Obama simply can't do this, as we all know, not because withdrawal is wrong but because we can't handle the truth anymore in our politics.  The truth will produce an uproar by the right wing and Fox News and we can't handle that.  The right already has moderate to conservative Democrats scared to death on health care reform; that's nothing compared with a "soft on terrorism" campaign.  Think how that will play in Arkansas, or Nebraska, or wherever.

There goes another $100 billion dollars a year in defense spending and here comes a growing Taliban presence, a strengthened Al Qaeda, and yet another endless American war.  And that $100 billion will sail through Congress, unlike the $100 billion annual costs for health care reform.

And we thought we were electing a president and a Democratic majority with courage.

The behind-the-scenes fighting over health care reform in the House

Ezra Klein's interview with Congressman Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, is the best article I've seen about what went on in the House in the final days before the vote.  It's scary how close it really was and how impressive Speaker Pelosi's victory was.  Jim Cooper is so important today because he was a major factor in blocking the Clinton Plan. We owe him a big thanks.

It's not over until it's over

The historic vote last night in the House of Representatives for health care reform is incredibly important. We should all celebrate and thank Speaker Pelosi for pulling it off.  Yet, as most know, the 220 to 215 majority reminds us that the struggle between strong democracy, majoritarian democracy and weak, anti-majoritarian democracy within the Democratic Party is not over, and will likely continue for some years into the future. 

If the Democrats succeed in the Senate and if they make the most of this victory next year by reminding the electorate, time and time over, how historic this shift is, then the future of a stronger, more progressive majority in the U.S. may be in the cards.

Years of magical thinking about health care reform

Olympia Snowe, the Republican Senator from Maine recently said, "The public option would give the government too much power over the health care system." 

For decades now, and for many in Washington in both political parties, this is the mantra that has been used to halt health care reform, despite the mountain of evidence from the other democracies that controlling health care spending will occur only if we give government much more power over the health care system.

Reform is good when government gives the insurance industry more money for more insurance. The industry can, in turn, continue to escalate the costs for health insurance as it sees fit.

This is called "painless progress."  It is seemingly "win-win," at least in the short run. It is a major temptation for modern Democrats. 

Think about the bail-outs of the financial industry.  We have shelled out billions to investment firms, banks and insurance groups without demanding that these industries be placed under stricter government regulation. 

Painless progress.

Frank Rich on Afghanistan: remember Vietnam

Frank Rich of the NYT believes that a military build-up can and must be resisted by President Obama.  Of course, if he does he will be bombarded with leaks to the press from the military and accused of "defeatism" by the neo-cons.  But Kennedy refused a military build-up in Vietnam and kept the U.S. in an advisory role. 

Then came LBJ and what Johnson came to call the most disastrous policy of his presidency:  full-scale war in Vietnam.  This decision ruined the Great Society and LBJ's presidency.

While I think the right-wing outcry would be furious, the public generally would likely respect Obama's deicsion to keep the troop levels low.

This may be the most important decision of the Obama administration.

Why Afghanistan may be inevitable

This article ("Entangled Giant") in the New York Review of Books, by Garry Wills is a brilliant and brief summary of why "national security" has become a prison for our presidents, and indeed, for all of us. 

The creation of the National Security Council, the CIA, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and the Air Force shortly after WWII has led to disastrous consequences.  It has accelerated the Imperial Presidency, it has diminished the role of Congress in foreign affairs and defense, it has led to a militant patriotism, and on and on. 

This brief summary by Wills, one of our leading social critics, is the best explanation of why President Obama will find it near impossible to quickly extricate the U.S. from Afghanistan (even if he wanted to), or leave iraq, or diminish our myriad (perhaps a thousand!) military installations around the world.  

The national security establishment has become a power unto itself and it must be served, no matter who is in office. Nothing threatens our democracy more than this, not even right wing stupidities. The national security state thrives and flourishes on the discovery of ever new dangers and fears to justify its imperial reach.  Others have said similar things; few have said it so succinctly.

Frank Rich on Glenn Beck

Frank Rich's NYT Sunday column on Glenn Beck ("Even Glenn Beck is right twice a day.") is chilling---for two reasons.  Rich points out Representative Joe Wilson's (Rep., SC) anger and outburst during President Obama's speech were not only public; they were in the room.

Wilson, despite the vote against him, got away with a public and angry attack in the presence of the president, and this may just make the Secret Service's job really more difficult. (The media publicizing protesters wearing sidearms in sight of Obama hasn't helped either.)

What are we doing in Afghanistan?

What in the world are we doing in Afghanistan?   When will we have a president who has the courage to look the generals and the right wing in the eye and say, "No more. No more dying for lost causes. Get the men and women home, safe, and do it now."

Voting yes, then no, on reform

Ed Kilgore in The New Republic has a critical article on a procedural issue facing the Democrats:  voting to end the filibuster against health care reform.  As everyone now knows, the Dems are contemplating ramming health care reform through on a reconciliation measure, which is budgetary legislation that requires only a majority vote.  The problem with this procedure is that it puts the whole matter in the hands of the Senate parliamentarian and he may rule that the legislation doesn't meet the standards for budget reconciliation.  

That takes us back to the 60 votes needed to block a filibuster by the Republicans.

If Massachusetts appoints someone to fill the Kennedy vacancy quickly, the Democrats have the 60 votes.  But some Democrats may be intending to vote against reform and will also vote with the Republicans against killing the filibuster. This is totally unacceptable.

Going backwards

Paul Krugman in his NYT column, "Missing Nixon" makes the essential point regarding health care reform and much else: we were closer to a well-ordered policy debate in the Nixon era than we are today. 

That's a shocking point but I think he's right.  He recalls again how close Nixon, Kennedy, and Wilbur Mills (the Arkansas Democrat who was chair of Ways and Means)  were to an agreement on national health insurance that is better than we will get under Obama, 35 years later.  Even the name, national health insurance, has vanished from discussion. I remember that Governor Cuomo refereed to the issue as "national health insurance," and it was refreshing to hear a national leader use the language national reform deserves.

The health care reform flow chart long overdue

Nick Beaudrot of Donkeylicious has produced a flow chart that explains with exquisite simplicity the health care reform process.  Bravo!  The chart can be expanded so that people with tired old eyes like me can read it. Or it can be passed out to friends and neighbors.

(Note: be sure and use the final version of the chart in Beaudrot's piece, which is at the bottom of the article. I worry that a lot of people won't do that.) Here's the Flickr link to an expanded version of the accurate chart.  You will have to paste this link to your Firefox or Safari or Internet Explorer; it's not a live link.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/electoral-math/3831797463/sizes/o/

Also, the flowchart demonstrates with pellucid clarity the minimal size of the public option (s) and the foolish, foolish uproar that has accompanied attacks on it.  This is what the Blue Dogs are afraid of, come election day.

I wonder how many members of Congress understand even one tenth of what's on that chart. 

I also wonder if the White House will find a way to use it to simplify the debate.  If they do, they just might manage to recapture the day.

Of course, almost immediately someone---likely Betsy McCaughey---will produce a different version to prove that this is the road to serfdom.  And the media will put that version up every where because, well, it's edgy and its show biz!!!

The swiftboating of health care reform?

Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic has written an excellent piece on the swiftboating of health care reform.  Like Cohn, when I heard White House officials act surprised at the outrageous claims being made about reform, I was astonished that anyone in the White House would be surprised.

Where have these people been?  Given the birther movement, why shouldn't the White House staff be ready for everything, because everything has already come their way?

Two ways of thinking about health care reform

We all know who are opposed to health care reform: the insurance companies, the drug companies (if it means negotiating drug prices), many (but certainly not all) doctors, and  many hospitals.  We all know why these groups oppose reform---as Brad Wright reminds us: rising health care costs are someone else’s income, often someone very powerful, like insurance companies. Self-interest is a very old, obvious, and accurate way of explaining much of American politics.

But wait a minute, let’s recall something. In the 1970's we had a very different health insurance system. Blue Cross-Blue Shield was prominent everywhere and dominant in many states and Blue Cross was a not-for-profit, community-rating health insurance system. Remember, Blue Cross was started by the hospitals of America.  When I entered the field in the early 1970s, many in the Blue Cross world thought we were moving toward national health insurance and welcomed the shift, because they would likely play a big role as “carriers” for a nationally uniform health insurance.  Today nearly all Blue Cross plans have gone over to a for-profit basis.

Brad Wright's new blog, Wright on Health

Check out Brad Wright's new blog, Wright on Health.

A disclaimer: Brad is a former student and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina where I taught for many years, and for a class or two when we returned to North Carolina in 2005. It was in one of these last graduate classes that I taught that I met Brad. 

His blog is a very good balance between analysis, evidence, politics and imagination, and that ain't easy to pull off. He will soon be cross-listing with Huffington Post  and is beginning to be noted by other prominent political bloggers. We can say we knew him when. 

Let's hope he remembers to finish that dissertation.

Chilling out

Matt Miller's column, "Take a Chill Pill," in The Daily Beast has it about right.  The critics (and that includes yours truly, quite often) need to stop wringing their hands and start acknowledging that we will likely get a health care reform bill this year, probably later than we want but almost certainly this year. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight also agrees and gives detailed reasons why.

As Miller, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress points out, the critical move will come when the Senate finally reports a bill and then it goes to conference between the House and the Senate.  That's when the White House and President Obama will step up with a full court press, marshaling supporters that have been at work for over a year, and hitting the hustings to galvanize public opinion.

Sarah Palin's "death panel" and Rush Limbaugh's, "Obama's a Nazi," and the hubbub at the town hall meetings are the rantings of a core within the Republican Party that's totally out of control and totally out of the picture, and they know it.  And a lot of Democrats in Congress know they can't possibly let this group shout our futures down.

Which is better? The Daily Beast or Huffington Post?

I am more and more looking at The Daily Beast instead of Huffington Post.  I find that Tina Brown's site has   more bite and Ariana's rag  has too many "the baby born with two heads" stories. 

They both have a celebrity slant which sometimes gets on my nerves but I'm not immune to a juicy celebrity story. Well see

Bravo, Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish in the NYT today on the Gates affair is simply wonderful.  Bravo.  

Kudos to the New York Times

I have written recently that no one can be sure what is emerging from the various plans Congress is considering.  That's overstated. If reform passes after the conference between the House and the Senate, we can't be sure what will emerge.  Still, the House is likely to pass a bill whose provisions are fairly well-known. And the New York Times had a long editorial  yesterday (Sunday) detailing the elements of that legislation and stressed that similar details are found in the Senate bills.   

From the uninsured poor to the middle class who already has insurance and to Medicare patients, the Times offers a thoughtful analysis of the key elements of the proposed legislation.

Kudos to the Times.