If you thought seniors fighting phantom cuts in their Medicare benefits at those town hall meetings were angry, wait until the first of the year when it dawns on all of them they’re getting no cost of living increase for the next two years. In fact, six million of Social Security’s 50 million recipients will suffer a pay cut and all will pay more for drugs. I say “phantom” cuts because...

I always make a practice of buying and reading the local newspaper(s) when traveling. Today’s Los Angeles Times had an interesting, timely and probably controversial Op-Ed, titled “Just the ‘facts’ fails us all.” Naturally, it deals with the current healthcare debate, but it also discusses a broader, more complex issue: The media, journalism and “the truth.” I am not a journalist—I did take...

On CNN today, Sen. Joe Lieberman embraced the incremental approach to health care reform (emphasis in original):

All thanks to Big Government. Thomas J. Sugrue writing in the WSJ: In 1934, F.D.R. created the Federal Housing Administration, which set standards for home construction, instituted 25- and 30-year mortgages, and cut interest rates. And in 1938, his administration created the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) which created the secondary market in mortgages. In 1944, the federal government extended...

The Forbes list of the world’s 100 most powerful women is out. The top honour goes to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the leader of the world’s fourth-largest economy. She has won this honour for the fourth consecutive year. “In assembling the list, Forbes looked for women who run countries, big companies or influential nonprofits. Their rankings are a combination of two scores: visibility...

Polimom wrote an excellent post just a few hours ago titled “Health Care and Insurance: A Lost (and Crucial) Distinction.” It is generating some great, instructive, civil discussion on a subject that I had not given much thought to. I highly recommend you go there and partake in the discussion. I have been there and learned a lot. But I also learned something new when reading the New York Times today....

Back when I was young, Kris Kristofferson warned us all of the dangers of the silver tongued devil… the person who would come off as a charming fellow and say things you want to hear, then turn around and do you wrong. If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the running series of comments from both President Obama and Congressional Democrats on matters of spending, the deficit and the national...

Mixed Messages Sent On Public Option by Jon Wells One day after HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and President Obama both said a public option wasn’t essential to health care reform, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said a public option needs to be a part of the health care overhaul. She said there was strong support in the House for the public option, joining Rep. Maxine Waters and Sen. Jay Rockefeller in a...

A quickly emerging question on the political scene is now this: are the Democrats going to do it again? Are they really going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? It certainly seems like it’s headed in that direction. Although events — and political takes — in our increasingly hyperactive political culture can suddenly change the calculations, it seems several factors are at work. But...

Suzanne White, my favourite Chinese astrologer, is an American with a no-nonsense approach that’s a hallmark of her style even when she writes on non-astrology subjects. Here I am referring to her two posts: “Why Do Americans Fear Socialism?” and “Don’t Speechify. Teachify.” White’s first post, and here it goes: “I don’t want to ‘become a socialist’...

WASHINGTON — Try a thought experiment: What would conservatives have said if a group of loud, scruffy leftists had brought guns to the public events of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush? How would our friends on the right have reacted to someone at a Reagan or a Bush speech carrying a sign that read: “It’s time to water the tree of liberty”? That would be a reference to Thomas...

It’s unfortunate that what I brought online yesterday was colored by some distracting background noise, and I very much regret that I allowed a defensive reaction to intrude on the larger point I was trying to make. Since that point got lost in the shouting and attacks (and with the acknowledgment that I may have some hitherto unrecognized masochistic pathology), I’m going to try again. Let’s...

Rep. Barney Frank batted down a heath care reform protester who not only asked him a question suggesting he supported a Nazi policy (Barack Obama’s healthcare reform) but also held a Hitler-like doctored photo of Obama. And Frank did what a politician needed to do: confront this toxicity of polemics head on: The Los Angeles Times’ Tim Rutten deals with the issue of the legends about Obama and...

Remembering Robert Novak — Interview by Bill Steigerwald Conservative columnist and CNN “crossfire” host Robert Novak died Tuesday at age 78 after a year-long battle with brain cancer. Known as the “Prince of Darkness” – by his friends – because of his pessimistic persona, Novak was a tough political reporter from the old school who caused more than his share of bipartisan trouble for the...

The last 48 hours have served as a clarifying moment in the health care debate. First, the White House sent out trial balloons this weekend on abandoning the public option. Progressives were not amused and organized intensely for the first time this summer. Finally the left is matching the intensity of the right – and it took a perceived betrayal by the White House to do it. Second, just as progressive...

In the morass of new and old media, a big media story has been breaking — or, rather, a story that would have once been a big media story. It’s not as big as it once would have been — and isn’t being played up the way it would have been even 5 years ago — because the subject of this story has gone from being a powerful media giant to more of a weakening relic from bygone big media...

A new NBC News poll reflects that Americans remain skeptical about the Democrats’ health care reform plans. For example, “a plurality” believes that the Democrats’ health plan would worsen the quality of health care; a result that, according to MSNBC.com, “is virtually unchanged from last month’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.” Fair enough. The president and the Democrats...

I had a dream. It took place in the White House. At the dining table was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sipping a glass of California sherry and nibbling on one of those dainty sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid stared at his plate of fried zucchini and glass of iced tea. Vice President Joe Biden was telling stories of his youth in Scranton while talking with his mouth full of...

It has been widely stated that housing prices are at all-time lows and getting worse. The reality is that this is not true. Absolutely, compared to the artificially inflated prices of 2005 – 2007 created by the irrational interest rate behavior of the Federal Reserve, housing prices have dropped precipitously. This has of course hurt those who invested at the time, but those who buy high and then sell...

First, the math. Have you seen any article that puts in context how many consumers are the beneficiaries of the Cash For Clunkers program? I haven’t. And I know that most of us feel our eyes glaze over when we think about billions. You may be surprised to learn that all the ink (digital and otherwise) and air time (TV-delivered and otherwise) has masked an important fact: the initial $1 billion helped...

One Option Is To Go On Offense by Eugene Robinson Washington Post Columnist WASHINGTON — It’s true that politics is the art of the possible, but it’s also true that great leaders expand the scope of possibility. Barack Obama took office pledging to be a transformational president. The fate of a government-run public health insurance option will be an early test of his ability to end the...

When Barack Obama was elected President in November many commentators suggested that besides the Republicans he was going to likely wind up doing battle at some point with another chunk of American’s polity: his own party’s progressive wing. And that is precisely what seems to be happening now, as the debate over the ‘public option” in health care reaches a fever pitch. Will he or won’t...

On Memeorandum right now, there is an avalanche of commentary about the White House’s signaling that it’s ready to cave on the public option. Because there is so much progblog analysis, and because there are so many distinct issues involved with this legislation, I’ve decided to organize the progblog analysis by the talking points.

In the past, we literally had to sell our house to pay a huge hospital bill. The hospital sent the bloodhounds. My husband had just lost his job. I was near death. Afterward, anything related to that crisis was big red lettered ‘pre-existing condition,” by any and every insurer we’d ever had… and although undertaking scrupulous selfcare (dont drink dont smoke, dont do illegal drugs, dont...

President Obama may or may not be a lame-duck after the 2010 Midterm elections and be swept from office in 2012, but such prognostications are really a waste of time because greater forces will dictate what happens to the U.S. both politically and economically. The reasons behind his moving so fast on so many fronts may be that he senses the ephemeral nature of political power in a deeply divided country with...