All Life Is Problem Solving

Ezra Klein is known as a bright young policy wonk who enlisted in the DC village, by becoming a blogger and correspondent for the Washington Post with a corner on the health care “reform” debate. Many of his writings have been very sophisticated analyses of one or more obscure feature of the House and Senate […]

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Earlier today, I wrote about “sidecar reconciliation” and the difficulty of passing it, and concluded, in light of Lawrence O’Donnell’s remarks on MSNBC about parliamentary maneuvers, encountered a number of times each day, still needing 60 votes to overcome them, that Republicans can block HCR through reconciliation if they want to. I said, further, that […]

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Well, it’s official, or pretty official anyway. Scott Brown has been elected to Teddy Kennedy’s old seat and Martha Coakley has conceded. Some Democrats are blaming Coakley for running an inept campaign, and this may well have accounted for Brown’s margin of victory. But the real question is what allowed him to get close at […]

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Over the past four days two mega-threads appeared at Firedog Lake’s (FDL’s) Seminal web site. The first was created in response to a diary by “realworld” called “Why I won’t be voting for Martha Coakley on Tuesday” received 604 comments, a very large number for that site. And the second responding to a diary by […]

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Here’s Cromwell’s Again Hey, Byron Dorgan and Chris Dodd, while both of you have been doing too little good for my taste, Cromwell’s plea: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” was never […]

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In an earlier post evaluating the House Health Care Reform Bill, I raised the question of the morality of voting for the bill, and argued that voting for it was an immoral act. Now that the Senate bill has been passed and includes many of the same features of the House bill including a “band-aid” […]

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Bill Moyers hosted an interesting conversation the other day among Robert Kuttner, Matt Taibbi, and himself about health care reform, the performance of the Administration to this point, and the relations of progressives with the President. The conversation focused in part on how Taibbi and Kuttner would vote on the Senate’s pending legislation, if it […]

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This is an appeal to all Progressive Senators, whom I, perhaps mistakenly, list as including: Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Russ Feingold, Pat Leahy, Al Franken, Sheldon Whitehouse, Tom Harkin, Ron Wyden, Patty Murray, Dick Durbin, Barbra Boxer, Byron Dorgan, Barbara Mikulski, Ben Cardin, Jay Rockefeller, Chuck Schumer, and Paul Kirk. My apologies to Amy Klobuchar, […]

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The solid front of Democratic Party progressives supporting the Senate’s health care form bill, has now cracked wide open with Howard Dean’s call to kill the Senate bill and start over in the House with reconciliation. Dean’s call hasn’t cracked open the floodgates among the Senate and House Democrats and in recent days people like […]

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Absent a substantial change in direction by Congressional Leadership and the President, I think it’s time to do whatever progressives can to kill the health care reform legislation currently moving through Congress, and then to immediately reset to Medicare for All, single payer. As HR 3962 bill sits now, it’s worse than no bill at […]

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