tales of copper city

Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor

If anyone has foolishly come to the conclusion that racism is not still a huge part of our current politics, and a fundamental polarizing strategy of the modern Republican Party, they only have to attend to the recent outburst of racist outcry regarding the nomination of federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor.

The Republican Party is rapidly falling apart.  At least in the past their racial politics were more artfully disguised.  Now it's right out there, up front.

This is the party of Abraham Lincoln.  Or was.

Obama and Cheney

Kevin Drum has a simple recommendation for the public confused by the media pitching Cheney vs. Obama: read the two speeches.  Decide for yourself who makes the most sense. 

Obama's speech is careful and moderate and cautious. Cheney's speech to the American Enterprise Institute is, well, Cheney, peddling fear and more fear, the stuff of GOP's politics of the last eight years.  I'm sure Cheney got a standing ovation.

Is there any hope for us when our media cannot bring itself to note the difference between a careful analysis and simple fear-mongering, cannot rise above a "let's you and them fight" story line for every issue we face? 

The Republicans and especially Cheney know this, so they keep hammering away, knowing that everything they say will be carried, without analysis.

The exception is McClatchy, always McClatchy.

Good news about health care reform?

Paul Krugman notes the good news out of the White House about health care reform.  He's still worried that the industry groups will use the good will they created with this move to block a public plan in health care reform.

That was my reaction to the news also. 

But there's another possibility.  The public plan could be pegged to the progress in lowering health care costs generally set out in the industry agreements, creating a kind of all payer scenario.

Instead of the public plan along with Medicare bargaining independently to lower rates, the progress in rates payments could be what the public plan offers, eliminating what private insurance terms "unfair competition." 

This could put pressure on blue dog Democrats to go along with a modified public plan.  Of course they will try to argue that with this agreement, which is totally unenforceable, we should take a "wait and see" stance.

Blue Dogs and Republicans will do anything to block genuine progress in harnessing private power for the public good.

It's not the way I would go but I don't have any idea about how difficult this all is. 

When LBJ created Medicare, it would have been so, so, simpler to move the whole nation to a public plan instead of plunging further into the war in Vietnam.

Oh well...we'll see.

Frank Rich on the future of journalism

For an excellent discussion of the turmoil now occurring in print journalism, read Frank Rich's regular Sunday column in today's New York Times. 

Rich argues that whatever format or medium serious print journalism takes in the age of the WWW, we will have to pay for the news we get, and, thus, "we get what we pay for." 

Is the Huffington Post the future of journalism?

If  The Huffington Post is the future of journalism, I worry. 

Sure, Ariana's e-paper contains much that I like, commentators that I support, news about issues that I follow, political views that I share.  But mixed in is the mud-wrestling side of the news business, the blazing headlines, the pin-ups, the gossip, celebrity news---the media that you see on the checkout stand.

If that's what you have to include to get the traffic up and the ads in, we're all in trouble. But until we work out a better model, I will keep reading Ariana's rag, gratefully.

What about newspapers in Europe?

Everyone is wringing their hands over the fate of newspapers.  

What about newspapers in Europe, in England, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway?  Is the same thing happening there? If not, why not?

Why are we always so insular, always so convinced that the experience of other nations have little to teach us?

Health care in Holland

Keven Drum of Mother Jones has a wonderful post about health care in Holland, based on the experience of Americans who lived there for a while.

I was a patient (briefly) in Finland, when on a long trip to the Nordic countries, I had a a crippling back injury that nearly resulted in W.H.O sending me back home from Helsinki.  My experience was that everything was handled quite simply, without a single bill surfacing. 

This was in the late 1970s, and European countries are now more anxious  to collect from U.S. insurers than they were in the past.  Even here, though, U.S. insurers are glad to pay, since the costs are so much lower than the charges for the same procedure in the U.S.

Eat, sleep, read

There's a line in Michael Connelly's novel City of Bones: "Every murder is a tale of a city." 

I love a certain kind of mystery, a mystery rich in the story of a place or time, a story that often serves as an indictment.  

Connelly writes the Harry Bosch series and his books are wonderful tales about a man struggling with himself and a city with its mean streets---Los Angeles.  I'm working my way through his series again and am up to The Closers.

And of course, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.  And the novels of Ross Macdonald, also set in southern California, beginning with The Moving Target. 

I lived in southern California, in Los Angeles County and Orange County, from 1962 to 1967, and, earlier, in Monterey, California, when I was in the Army at the Presidio of Monterey. 

Chandler and Macdonald always take me back. When you read these novels you are transported you to a time or place that you know so well---or  thought you did---and into the worlds of interesting men whose toughness hides a broken heart.

The public plan and health care reform: a rant

And now Senator Specter, (Dem, PA) says that not only will he not support the Employee Free Choice Act to help labor, he will not support the public plan as an essential element of health care reform. 

And every Democrat in DC is welcoming this guy into the Democratic Party?

Offering him chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee in the Senate, in a few months?

Who did he leap over to get that?  Did they know about Souter and they want one more vote?

What were they thinking?  If he didn't give us support for key Democratic proposals, why didn't we let him twist in the wind of the Republican primary a little longer? The New Republic sounds the warning about Specter well.

The public plan and health care reform: what's the debate?

According to Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post, Senator Ben Nelson (Dem., NE) has announced that he plans to oppose the "public plan" as an element of health care reform.  

Nelson says he opposes the public plan because it would be "too attractive" to the public, offering lower insurance rates and ease of use and that, it would harm private insurance companies.  "At the end of the day the public plan wins,"  Nelson said.

My initial reaction to the opposition of Nelson and his ilk is incredulity: We can't permit the public to choose the public plan because it would be liked and widely adopted. We must protect private enterprise even if it provides more costly insurance.

 Only a Senator with a six year term and an inattentive constituency could get away with such a bald-faced "wet kiss" for the powerful insurance lobby.