Politics
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Supreme Court on Free Speech (Updated)
It's becoming clearer now that there are essentially three political realities–Beltway corporate insiders, a broad swath of educated people who care about the public interest, and the populist right. Any hope for the country lies with the middle group, but the people in it are not well-organized nor are they well funded. That's always been
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The Kennedy Seat (Updates I, II)
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that one of the critical questions about the direction of the country concerns whether the left or the right captures and channels growing populist rage. One election doesn't constitute a trend, but this election for Kennedy's senate seat is a disheartening indicator that the teaparty right has the
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Quote of the Day: Patrick Deneen
Without the advantage of a crystal ball, I suspect we will be looking at a New World Order within a decade. Writing at the eve of 2020, we will look back on the first score of the 21st century and see more clearly than we do now that "regime change" was afoot – albeit not
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Chis Hayes & “System Failure”
Chris Hayes of the Nation has a very nice piece that sums up our predicament. It's the kind of thing you can give somebody who just doesn't get it because its tone is irenic and its analogies apt. There are several excerptable grafs, but I'll limit myself to a few near the end: … one
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Corporate Liberalism (Updated)
Jonathan Chait in the New Republic: There is more at work in the progressive revolt than an irrational attachment to the public plan or an executive distrust of private industry. The bizarre convergence of left-wing and right-wing paranoia echoes the forces that brought down the moderate consensus of the postwar era. The GOP retreat into
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Hacker on the Exchanges
The lack of a public option also makes even more imperative tough requirements on insurers to make them live up to their stated commitment to change their business model and slow the spiraling cost of coverage. The most important way to do this is to move away from the Senate bill’s state exchanges and toward
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Obama, the Scam Artist? (Updated)
Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image — a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it).
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Democratic Fault Lines: Corporatism vs. Progressivism
. . . in the health care reform debate, the Obama administration pursued legislation that utilized regulated and subsidized private for-profit health insurers to achieve universal health coverage. This approach was inherently flawed to "single-payer" advocates on the left, who strongly believe that private for-profit health insurers are the main problem in the U.S. health
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What about Kerry’s Work on the Exchanges? (Updated)
Not sure. Ezra Klein criticizes Howard Dean's opposition to the current Senate bill by saying that there will be cost controls through the prudent purchaser limits in the exchanges: What's so strange about Dean's objection is that the exchanges in the Senate bill (pdf) do act as "prudent purchasers," that is to say, they set