President Barack Obama said at his press conference today that the most important health care reform is reducing costs. Mr. President, do I have a plan for you. There’s actually one in the Senate that answers your criteria that includes kind of a public option, a hybrid, one could say. For more than a year, the U.S. Senate has had a universal health care reform plan before it that could be revenue neutral...

My two friends (surely they can’t be described as “socialists” by any stretch of imagination) have come out in full support of the US government’s SINGLE PAYER HEALTH INSURANCE scheme. However, they are amazed at the misinformation that is being spread regarding the scheme in the US media and the ads. Shyamal Bagchee, PhD, FRSA, Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta,...

SHOULD WESTERN FIRMS SELL SPYWARE TO IRAN? Unquestionably, it’s pretty shameful for Nokia and Siemens to help the Iranian government monitor dissidents online. It’s one of those rare cases where private firms really should forego profits in the name of the public good. On the other hand, the sale of monitoring capabilities may have lulled Tehran into believing it had the situation under it control,...

After eight years in a Bush coma, Congress is busy “working” again and proving it doesn’t work. The health care debate is a classic of evasions, non-sequiturs, empty rhetoric and lobbyist lies to patch together reform that will look like a Frankenstein monster with a Dr. Strangelove deception at the heart. Despite public support for a government insurance plan, House and Senate members are...

It sounds like a routine alarm, but the things are getting serious. The question being asked in this part of the world is: Who would grab Pakistan’s nuclear weapons first…the Al Qaeda or the USA? To this speculation one may add an Aesop’s fable: Would it be the “monkey” India/Israel combo snatching the nukes away from the Al Qaeda/USA “cat” ? Here is a categorical...

Our linkfest taking you to sites of varying viewpoints all over the Internet. No Matter What Happens In Iran, Will The Uprising Have An Impact Throughout The World? Simon Rosenberg believes so: Much has been written about the how events unfolding in Iran are crossing some kind of internal Iranian Rubicon. Fareed Zakaria has a new essay to this effect. But there is a strong argument to be made that the world...

White-collar job opportunities are just drying up. A former scholar Matthew Crawford, a PhD. in political philosophy from University of Chicago who after his studies became a motorcycle mechanic, says “The trades suffer from low prestige. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience.” Crawford writes in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft (and excerpted...

There has been an interesting exchange between Freddie deBoer and Mark Thompson over at League of Ordinary Gentlemen on how conservatives approach health care reform. It’s been fascinating because I think it explains why the conservative arguments against major change doesn’t ring very true to the larger public. I don’t always agree with Freddie, but this has been on of the few times that...

Obama, GM’s new Chairman by Scott McKain If my very future depended upon selecting a single person to sink just one basketball shot, I’m picking Michael Jordan. If my life hung in the balance, and one individual from our history had to present an oration that would determine my survival, I would beg Martin Luther King to speak on my behalf. So, why in the moment of its greatest trial would General...

People that have read my musings/alarms/rants over the last half year will know that I anticipated that the economy would pause in its downturn in the spring/summer (although in February I was starting to get doubtful it would) and then plunge far worse in the fall than it has thus far. My reasoning was simple and twofold. The first was that I thought there would be a very similar pattern to the Great Depression,...

My fascination for bus rides and backpacking/trekking has remained intact. I was delighted to learn that even among the car-loving Americans, bus travel is now becoming popular. Well, this may cause a social and economic revolution in the USA!!! People are more “loath to get into their cars.” The Federal Highway Administration says Americans drove 81 billion fewer miles in the year ended January...

Several polls show that the honeymoon is ending for President Barack Obama but, five months into his term, he remains highly popular personally. The bride still loves the groom — but she’s now beginning to seriously question his judgment and ability to be a good provider. Even so, Republicans shouldn’t be smiling: polling suggests the party is at an all time low and one analyst wonders if...

Nationalized Health Care: The Tax Shuffle by Michael Reagan Last week I wrote about the serious risks which older Americans and those seriously or terminally ill face in the so-called “efficiencies” which President Obama and congressional Democrats say will fund a large part of their health care plans. These “efficiencies” can only refer to reallocating doctors, hospital care, drugs and surgeries away...

President Obama should study the tough political wheeler-dealers, horse-traders, and consummate arm-twisters that preceding him in office: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), and Ronald Wilson Reagan (RWR). They may have been all smiles for public consumption but they were top politicians behind closed doors who left policies and legacies that continue to influence America today. ...

According to a new poll from MSNBC the public is getting increasingly concerned about the amount of debt that is being incurred by the administration. As mentioned in the MSNBC article this may be a sign we are moving past the honeymoon phase to where the public starts to split between how they feel about the person and how they feel about the policies. It’s actually pretty common for a President to be...

After five months in office, his whirlwind presidency is taking a toll on the President in more ways than one. Worrying about the economy “keeps me awake at night,” he told an interviewer yesterday. At the same time, signs of Obama Fatigue are showing up among his own party in Congress over the massive muddle of health care reform. His tireless cheer-leading has failed to paper over Democratic differences...

The year was 1987. Ronald Reagan was President, Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man were tops at the video arcade, Michael Jackson was only slightly odd and NASA launched the Buck Rogers on the last of America’s deep space probes (well maybe not that last one). However one other thing that happened that year was the California legislature failed to pass a budget on time and they have repeated that failure every single...

Taxes are the means through which we pay for the infrastructure of civilization. While I can’t exactly say I’m happy to pay them, I understand, expect and accept that I will always pay a big chunk of my wages out in taxes each year. I believe in community, taxes come with it. Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has a piece on the NYTimes’ Economix...

Springtime is time for graduations and, of course, for those rousing and sometimes not-so-rousing commencement addresses. It is the time when presidents and vice presidents are invited—and sometimes disinvited—to congratulate, praise, motivate and encourage the new graduates as they go into the “real world.” This spring, that “real world,” with our economy in a full-throated recession and...

Efficient Nationalized Health Care? Not So Fast… by Michael Reagan President Barack Obama has undertaken the expansion of health care to the roughly 45 million Americans who do not currently have health insurance. Having about one American in seven with no health insurance is undeniably an undesirable situation which deserves our attention and concern. This is not just a matter of compassion either, but also...