All Life Is Problem Solving

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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Chris Matthews asks: “What happened to the Obama message machine.” And Dee Dee Myers and Tony Blankley dutiful provide various off the mark answers about fear and insecurity. But, also, it’s clear to all three that Obama’s message on health care doesn’t have the same clarity as his message during the campaign, and they attribute […]

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At Huffington Post a few days ago, Michael Brenner, lamenting the current display of plutocracy in Congress, had this to say: ”We vaunt American democracy as a stellar model for the world. The bizarre spectacle now on display in Washington as the White House and the Congress tussle over health care “reform” is hardly an […]

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This post is a comment on an exchange with Jason Rosenbaum appearing as replies to ralphbon’s blog post entitled “Seniors Already Have A Public Option. Does It Keep Private Insurers Honest?” Here is the exchange: LetsGetItDone: “ralphbon, Thanks for a very good analysis. Jason, in view of Paul Krugman’s recent analysis of the health insurance […]

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