All Life Is Problem Solving

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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Last night, it occurred to me that the public option idea is a disingenuous approach to health care reform. Here’s the argument. Talking to other progressives, I’ve noticed that they all freely say that single payer will work better than a public option, and that it is the best alternative they know. And then they […]

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For a long time now, progressives have been looking for lines in the sand. They’ve been trying to get progressive members of Congress to commit to vote no on any health care reform bill that doesn’t include a robust public option, and they’ve also been after the President to clearly state his unwillingness to sign […]

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President Obama thinks that the best thing to do for an economy that has yet to turn around on jobs is to wait to see how the stimulus bill works, before seeking a second stimulus. This may seem reasonable, especially in the face of the widespread reports about opposition to a second stimulus from Republicans […]

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This talk by Jane Hamsher to Congressional Staffers on July 8th distills what this American fight for health care reform is about, and what is at stake. It also provides a good feel for the hard slogging that is going on to being forth a bill that will introduce real change and begin to break […]

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Well, the chorus has now started singing “too small, too small” about the stimulus. What was obvious to Paul Krugman, Joe Stieglitz, Dean Baker, Jamie Galbraith, Robert Reich. Robert Kuttner, and a host of other economists is now becoming so clear that the MSM, which not very long ago, wouldn’t even cover the opinion that […]

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Why was bipartisanship possible and successful in earlier times, while it’s unlikely to succeed now? In earlier periods of bipartisanship, margins in the Senate were smaller than they are now, and the legislative and executive branches were often divided between the parties. During the period before the Republican electoral takeover of the South; bipartisanship was […]

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