All Life Is Problem Solving

This morning, Michael Shear and Ceci Connolly at WaPo, with contributions from Anne Kornblut and Lori Montgomery, tried to get us to believe that the Administration was taken by surprise by progressives’ insistence on a viable PO being included in the Health Care Reform bill. This is an interpretation beyond naive, and also beyond imagination, […]

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For the past few days, I’ve been trying, by e-mail, to get the participants in the Northern Virginia Move-on Council to take my advice about the best way to get a good, strong, public option. Namely, to abandon the public option advocacy in favor of all-out support for “Medicare for All,” and specifically for HR […]

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Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I kept an appointment we’d made through Organizing for America to see an aide to Jim Moran’s (D-VA) in order to discuss health care reform. When we walked into the Congressman’s office, one of his aides, a gentlemen by the name of Andy, was talking with another constituent, who, as […]

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Of course, all of us have heard about one of the President’s favorite maxims, “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” with its implication that practicality most often calls for us to forego our attempts to reach a hard to achieve or impossible ideal, in favor of acting to achieve a good result that, […]

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For some time now, I’ve been hearing what Kip Sullivan calls the “yes, but” position on health care reform. That position says roughly that yes, Medicare for All, is the best available solution for the problems besetting our health insurance system; but, unfortunately, Medicare for All is not “on the table” right now, so we […]

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The politics of health insurance reform is a great example of reflexivity. Reflexivity is the idea that acceptance and assertion of our beliefs about reality, has an effect on how we act, which, in turn, has an effect on reality, and to some extent creates it; and, equally, reality influences what we think about it […]

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My critique of Soros’s ideas on reflexivity in my two previous blogs on this subject, and my distinction between sequential and simultaneous reflexivity, was in no way a criticism of his application of the notion of reflexivity to various public issues in his Open Society, The Age of Fallibility, and The Crash of 2008. In […]

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Over the past weekend, Ceci Connolly of WaPo contributed a classic example of modern MSM journalistic writing, a piece that looked like it had been written by tying together a bunch of index cards with a minimum of prose, a “clop-clop style,” and a near absence of any semblance of logic or transition from one […]

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In an earlier post on fixing Obama’s message machine, I argued that his primary problem was one of content. The vague public option and insurance exchange idea associated with the plan isn’t something that people easily understand. And progressive cadres that do understand it don’t love it because many of them see “Medicare for All” […]

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