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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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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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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Well, maybe not “over” as in “there will be no legislation passed in this session that contains the phrase “public option.” Perhaps there will still be legislation that has a provision with that label. But it will bear no resemblance to Jacob Hacker’s original design for a public option plan, and it won’t provide a […]

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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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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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In an article by Ceci Connolly appearing in WaPo yesterday, President Obama, in a “pre-holiday call” with a small group of six high-level Democrats from both Houses of Congress expressed concern over efforts by progressive advocacy groups in online campaigns and advertisements to target “moderate” Democrats whose positions on health-care reform have expressed opposition or […]

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Tonight, my loving and lovely wife of close to 43 years told me she was angry. She said it had become just too much for her that both Houses of Congress had “taken single payer off the table.” She knows, of course, that a majority of Americans favor single payer. And she also knows that […]

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This one’s addressed to progressives in the United States. OK, we’ve gotten our bright young President, his lovely family and his team of the “best and the brightest” into the White House. We’ve emotionally invested in him. We’ve celebrated with him. And we’ve trusted him during the opening months of his Administration. Now, what do […]

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