Politics
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Quote of the Day: Joan Walsh
I admire Obama's desire for conversation, consultation and, if possible, bipartisan support for his agenda. But it's been clear since early in his term that the GOP marching orders are to thwart him whenever possible. I didn't really think Chuck Grassley would craft a healthcare bill more palatable to me, but I thought possibly he'd
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Libertarian Takedown
Tristero at Hullabaloo: . . . to the extent that libertarians hold up the individual as primary and fail to recognize that individuals simply cannot physically exist without a social/cultural/environmental context, libertarianism is worthless. To the extent that libertarianism does recognize the complex dialectic between the individual and her/his social and physical environment, libertarianism is
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Obama & Big Pharma (Updated)
Caught between a pivotal industry ally and the protests of Congressional Democrats, the Obama administration on Friday backed away from what drug industry lobbyists had said this week was a firm White House promise to exclude from a proposed health care overhaul the possibility of allowing the government to negotiate lower drug prices under Medicare.
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On Converting the Slaves
Ta-Nehesi Coates has a thoughtful post on the slaveholders' making Christians of their slaves that is worth reading, but I reproduce here a comment by Doctor Cleveland: It's a classic example of how ideology controls perceptions, where the slaveholders (in this case) just couldn't see what they were doing because they couldn't acknowledge some basic
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Fighting for Healthcare Reform (Updated)
It's easier to fight against something you hate than for something you feel ambivalently about, and that's the problem with Dems' healthcare program. It's such an ambiguous mishmash of compromises that's it's hard to get enthusiastic about it or even to develop a coherent argument to defend it–not that coherent arguments would make much difference
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The Second Civil War 2
In February, I wrote a fantasy post in the form of a movie treatment about how a second Civil War might erupt. I was unaware until recently that HBO actually presented a movie with this title in 1997. I finally got around to watching it recently, and it's pretty bizarre, but interesting in the category
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Reconciliation
Both in reference to Obama and as a general observation, David Bromwich gets to the heart of the matter: [Obama's] aversion to strife was plain from his conduct in the primaries and the general-election campaign. But the degree of avoidance we have seen could never have been predicted. Obama's training, one recalls, was in the
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Reform and the Politics of the Lie
There has to be a reason that the US, of all the industrialized nations, the richest country in the world, is so hostile to social welfare programs. There are a lot of contributing factors, not the least of which is our vaunted individualism. But one of the fundamental reasons America is so resistant to programs
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Small-State Senators & Special Interests
From Nate Silver: . . .senators from small states tend to be relatively more dependant on special-interest money — it makes up a larger share of their overall take. Senators from the ten smallest states have received, on average, 28.4 percent of their campaign funds from corporate PACs, versus 13.7 for those in the ten
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Quote of the Day: Digby
Civil rights legislation in the 1960s didn't move forward until the House Rules Committee chair, a segregationist Southern Democrat, saw his power neutered by an expansion of the committee. Process changes often precede policy changes. Sen. Baucus, take note. (Source) We saw some encouraging developments on the healthcare front yesterday–some actual push back from Dems