The August recess by Congress will make or break the healthcare insurance reform plans as advocates on all sides will make their pitch to the people. The battles will be fought primarily in town hall meetings and media commercials. I forecast a major glitch in this scenario. Opponents will stack the town hall meetings and those who should listen most likely will be on vacation. As far as I can tell, the Obama...

Wall Street has changed the way I view the world. And I must admit, for the better. Things that used to bother me or make me sad now make me happy. My previous problem was in not seeing the bright side of almost anything. Take the weather where I live. It has been hot. Really hot. Today it reached 105. But since the three weather forecasters on local TV stations were predicting 107, the 105 beat expectations...

I would suggest must reading of Ian Shapira’s story in today’s Washington Post for those of us who use the Internet to write articles and opinion pieces plundered from reliable properties such as WaPo, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist and others of that ilk. Shapira said his ego was stoked when the snarky cultural website Gawker cherry picked the best lines from his 1,500-word...

On a recent Thursday company bus ride taking a group of my fellow seniors to shop at local grocery stores, Rosa announced how shamed she was because President Obama was born in Kenya and wanted to kill the elderly to save medical costs. “What gives you that idea?” I asked. “It’s true,” Rosa said. “It’s all over TV and radio. My neighbors John and Mary said the same thing....

Iran is pushing ahead with its covert nuclear weapons program while Israel bangs its head against a wall because of a change in Washington’s security posture that is already taking place. Hilary Clinton’s so far informal offer of a security, including nuclear, umbrella, to its friends in the Middle East is an admission that Washington is unsure of stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It is becoming...

This may make sense if you’re Jewish: Gail, as you know, I begin and end my days by reciting Congressional Budget Office reports. I even put on tefillin, just to make it seem holy. FYI, Wikipedia has a pretty good description and photo of tefillin. Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

Are we committed to nation-building, or are we just going to take out Al Qaeda? Here’s Obama announcing his new strategy in March: I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. Here’s how the Pentagon described our objective in its...

That sucking sound you may have just heard was the government’s billion dollar “cash for clunkers” slush fund drained in a week as consumers stampede new car malls for once-in-a-lifetime deals. The highly publicized stimulus program has caught the public’s imagination in a fad not seen since the land and gold rush days of the last 150 years. The House acted quickly today in a 316-109...

At the time of this writing the Dow is again on the rise. Why? The U.S. economy shrank 1 percent in the last quarter, beating analyst expectations (now there’s a surprise!). But let’s forget for the moment that our economy has been shrinking for four straight quarters, the first time this has happened since records started to be kept on such things; and that the only reason this latest 1 percent...

The great philosophical issues of the day are best discussed by cartoon roaches.

Let’s see if I got this right. According to The Washington Post, a $636 billion military spending bill scheduled for vote by the House today or tomorrow contains about $7 billion in new ships, planes, helicopters and armored vehicles Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Pentagon does not need. The waste Gates decried as “business as usual” represents about 1% of the House’s version...

Now that members are beginning to announce their votes we can start tracking the total votes. The current count of yes and no votes are as follows, the remainder being undecided. Obviously we can assume most or all Democrats will vote yes but until they announce I won’t list them. We’ve also got a pool going in the replies. Feel free to chime in. YES: 22 votes (16D, 6R) NO:  24 votes (all R) Democrats...

I normally don’t pay much attention when high-profile conservatives such as Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin label President Obama a racist for sparking the national debate over the black Harvard professor arrested by Cambridge police. That is, until I read a story that made me wonder if there really is a cause and effect between what people as Beck and Malkin propagate and the nuts out there who carry this...

Coming up shortly, I’ll be one of the guests on The Rick Moran Show to discuss the birther movement and the state of health care reform today. For those of you here screaming at me recently on either of these issues, you can stop by, call in, and scream in person if you wish. Follow the link for details. See you on the radio!

How can six senators who all come from overwhelmngly rural states — Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Iowa, and Maine — come up with health care reform legislation that addresses the needs of Americans living in large metropolitan areas? You will not even see that question asked — much less answered — in this New York Times article, titled “Health Policy Is Carved Out at Table for 6,”...

We may have recently elected a President who is a young, mixed-race natural-born U.S. citizen, but the political and economic power of this country still rests with a few thousand rich old white guys (ROWGs) born well before 1960. If one looks at the U.S. Senate, less than a dozen of these guys are making most of the decisions on how to run the U.S. – all the while principally representing the wealthiest...

I will come right out and say it. No federal funding for abortion procedures should be stipulated in the healthcare legislation now being deliberated in Congress. It pains me to say that because on principle I am pro-choice. The decision should rest with the doctor and the woman, the father, perhaps the pastor and definitely not the government. I realize this position is contradictory because it penalizes women...

There are many problems with writing for a living, the most obvious being that it’s a lousy way to make a living. You not only have an endless need to justify to others why you are not only caging a free meal from them as a prelude ot asking for a loan, you have the equally difficult task of explaining why you think the projects you are currently working on have a good chance of making you as solvent as,...

The Senate Judiciary Committee has voted 13-6 to send the nomination of Justice to Be Sotomayor to the full Senate. Democrats votes 12-0 in favor while Republicans voted 6-1 against. Sadly it seems that the trend which prevailed in the Roberts and Alito nominations is continuing. A full track of all announced Senators can be found here.

One of the steps in the civil rights movement was the elimination of literacy tests for voting. These tests had been used improperly by racists to deny minorities the right to vote. However when I see a video like this I start to wonder if maybe we need to bring them back

An interesting article about the problems being faced by the Democrats and the liberal versus moderate wings of the party.

It’s no secret I am not a fan of conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. That does not mean I don’t respect the guy for the millions he has earned milking the political juices from his loyal following. Hell, I don’t even own a radio so I obviously don’t listen much. The “listening” comes from snippets of video clips mostly his enemies play on MSNBC-TV. Usually they...

Screw health care. The national discussion is our racial divide. So let’s discuss the match which ignited the latest fire. Keep in mind not all the facts are in. I’m extremely curious to hear the 911 and police recordings of the Cambridge, Mass., incident. The scene is a quiet residential neighborhood in which renowned Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. returned from a trip and found himself...

President Obama said he invited Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley to the White House for a beer, presumably to have a laugh about this racial and/or class flare-up about wrongful arrest and hissyfittedness in Cambridge. The more important question than whether this will result in some racial breakthrough, for beer connoisseurs at least, is: What Kind of Beer Will They Drink? (UPDATE: Gates...

It pays not to always believe health care providers when they say “no” to paying for services. On Tuesday I lamented my case in which California’s MediCal system because of budget cutbacks no longer paid for my test strips used to monitor my blood glucose which for a diabetic is essential as breathing. Today I struck gold. After 45 minutes plowing through the automated phone tree of Health...