Anyone who takes health insurance reform seriously recognizes that universal government-funded health care is the only way to eliminate the abuses of the health insurance industry and control costs to the point that per capita spending on health care in the US falls more or less into line with other developed countries rather than running [...]

The PATRIOT Act was up for renewal this week. Democrats wanted to add some civil liberties backstops to it, but were unable to get it done because, well, they’re Democrats, and the getting done of things just isn’t among their areas of expertise. So they compromised with themselves by kicking the can down the road [...]

Retired general and former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who did much worse stuff but is best known as the guy who appointed himself acting president when Ronald Reagan was shot, is dead. Barack Obama hails him as representative of “our finest warrior-diplomat tradition of those who dedicate their lives to public service.” Jonathan Schwarz [...]

Less than 24 hours after promising to “end the outsized influence of lobbyists” and “do our work openly,” Barack Obama’s White House began quietly inviting lobbyists to join in “a series of conference calls with senior Obama administration officials to discuss key aspects of the State of the Union address.”
The Hill, which publishes from offices [...]

Perhaps the most outstanding achievement of the speech was getting Chris Matthews to forget that Obama is not an Irishman. Seriously: Chris Matthews said that “I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.” Dude. Seek help. Never mind.
The White House web site has a transcript of the speech along with a convenient guide [...]

Stuff worth reading:
The Columbia Journalism Review’s story on the Russian press and Russian journalists. The story cites the Committee to Protect Journalists ranking of Russia as the third most dangerous country for journalists, behind second-place Algeria and the US-created democratic capitalist paradise of Iraq, and describes the gyrations that reporters and writers for independent newspapers [...]

Actually 22 Democrats and one Democratic Socialist, Bernie Sanders, voted against creating a commission that could force cuts to social welfare programs in order to end deficit spending and reduce the national debt. Interestingly, fewer Republicans than Democrats supported the legislation—16 of the former (plus Joe Lieberman, naturally) and 36 of the latter voted in [...]

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg has a story up in his magazine—and simultaneously in Newsweek, as if what he has to say is so important that it had to be said twice—identifying Barack Obama’s “cool, detached temperament” as a drag on his own popularity and that of his party. Weisberg allows as how Scott Brown’s Massachusetts [...]

Former Democratic Leadership Council chairman Bruce Reed takes a predictable lesson for Democrats away from the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts: Run away, run away! He quotes Missouri Senator Claire McKaskill, who reacted to the election by saying that “people out there believe that we are going too far, too fast,” and he opines that [...]

Blogging requires cat-like reflexes. Some subjects aren’t really time sensitive—the stupidity of the US approach to countering those who wish us ill when clearly no one has, has ever had or will ever have any reason for doing so is never out of style or lacking for an example—but some are and if one doesn’t [...]

John Dickerson was responsible for one of the half-dozen or so all-time busiest days on my blog, back in March of 2006. I basically called him a moron, enjoyed brief but universal acclaim for doing so and then felt compelled to apologize a day or two later after he persuaded me that he was, for [...]

Returning once again to Tim Noah, Slate’s point guy on the insurance reform story. A few days ago he wrote a story about the astonishingly brief life cycle of the Medicare buy-in plan, which I remarked on here.
Subsequently, he wrote another story acknowledging that whatever comes out of the Senate will lack all of the [...]

I’ve been remarking for almost two years now that Barack Obama’s insurance reform plan in its original glory is quite similar to, but slightly weaker than, one proposed by Richard Nixon 45 years ago, but upon review I don’t see that I ever provided any concrete details. Behold …

The plan is organized around seven principles:
First, [...]

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg wrote a story yesterday, published under the auspices of an occasional column called “The Big Idea,” explaining how Republicans were never serious about health insurance reform. Slate readers are supposed to be an upscale, well-educated lot so one might assume they’re aware that Republicans recently controlled the White House for eight [...]

I was watching Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show yesterday when she ran a story about ten senators joining together to devise a health care sop for liberals who at this point are like beggars in the desert asking not for a drink of water but only for someone to waft a canteen under their noses.
Which [...]

Ross Douthat has been occupying some of the world’s priciest editorial real estate for a while now, churning out variously incoherent or inane commentary for the New York Times every Monday. He got the job earlier this year when I was lost in a fog so I haven’t paid much attention to him. I think [...]

This blog has seen its ups and downs since October of 2003 debut. It went from approximately no readers in the first year to right around a million readers over the course of 2005, after it became the first blog to field its own semi-regular White House correspondent, the inestimable Eric Brewer, who asked some [...]

I can’t believe anyone believes the CIA when it says that Iran was working toward nuclear weapons for a while but now they’re not. This sounds like they got snookered on the front end and now they’re covering for it. “Oh, shit. They weren’t working on a bomb. What do we do now?” I wonder [...]

Despite running the worst GOP campaign since Bob Dole’s single-shoulder-shrug of an effort in 1996, McCain remains in contention for next month’s election. By which I mean he is still alive and not too embarrassed to show himself in public, the latter of which shouldn’t be any surprise because Republicans, and indeed most Democrats as [...]

As we continue to remind everyone when we write about Wall Street, we don’t know Diddley about finance. Fortunately most stories about Wall Street have way more to do with stupidity and greed than with finance. We know a little something about stupidity and greed.
It’s customary in the US to set aside a small percentage [...]

Due to the theft of my computer I wasn’t able to comment in more or less real time on the much larger if less meaningful to me theft of $700 billion $1 trillion from the US Treasury. Yes, it was an inside job. In fact, everyone is on the inside except me and, maybe, you. [...]

Despite my constant exhortation to readers, it’s very likely, to the point of a lock, that voters will not choose to bring on the revolution by electing John McCain and precipitating the simultaneous onsets of facism and the worst depression since the best one. Almost as certain is that among president Obama’s first orders of [...]

I’m monitoring Barack Obama not by listening to anything he or Joe Biden says, but by tracking the sputtering heads bobbing in his wake. I’m no longer reading blogs that appear to be taking either man or the Democratic party seriously, so when I run across something like Digby’s lament of Joe Biden’s elegiac portrait [...]

You don’t try very hard to please me; with what you know it should be easy … this could be the last time, this could be the last time, may be the last time, I don’t know …
If I had an audience large enough, I’d make “The Last Time”, a pre-punk Rolling Stones anthem of [...]

Wesley Clark is held in almost idolatrous regard by a certain class of Democrats, who are now joining other classes — environmentalists, anti-militarists, secularists, civil libertarians and universal health care proponents among them — in a state of increasingly injured puzzlement over Barack Obama’s position on their issues.
The Clark class includes those Democrats who inwardly [...]

The Washington Post should have a special ethics rule for David Broder: he shouldn’t be allowed to meet anyone, ever, because he simply cannot write anything negative about anyone he has met who didn’t throw a punch at him. Today’s exemplar is the now-indicted senior senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, who, according to Broder, was [...]

“The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want.”
Let’s coin some alternatives. “The main reason al-Qaeda is losing in America is not because there are too few terrorists, [...]

A new poll in the New York Times shows that Barack Obama has inexplicably failed to erase the legacies of slavery in the United States, and further, that he has consistently failed to turn concentrated sulphuric acid into a decent cabernet. Analysts are stunned by this new evidence that Obama is at best a demigod [...]

John McCain said in a Thursday interview with the Kansas City Star that Barack Obama is politically to the left of Vermont’s socialist senator, Bernie Sanders. Presumably McCain was referring to the National Journal rankings, which named Obama the most liberal senator based upon his sporadic votes—he missed 35% of them—in 2007.
Even the National [...]

I voted for Barack Obama in the California primary because I thought that he represented the best chance, albeit a slim one, of electing from the two remaining candidates a president who might experience a Saul-and-donkey moment from which he would wake with a powerful social conscience. Instead, he appears set to preside over the [...]

Blaming our country’s woes exclusively on the people who have most directly wrought them—Bush, Cheney, torture maven David Addington et al—becomes increasingly difficult in the face of the refusal by Democratic party leaders to confer accountability, let alone make any attempt to visit some sort of necessarily inadequate justice, upon the administration.
The party’s presidential [...]

The full quote from Thomas Jefferson reads, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Your job, dear readers, is to decide, using the frame of reference enjoyed by our elected national leadership and presidential aspirants, what constitutes the tree’s [...]

Following on the heels of his courageous stand against the Constitution generally, and specifically the Fourth Amendment, with respect to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and immunity for law-breaking telecommunications firms, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has announced his support for widening the range of felonies subject to the death penalty and discarding [...]

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has followed the lead of House majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-AT&T) and House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Vichy) and endorsed a “compromise” electronic surveillance bill that legitimates the Nixon-Cheney belief that the presidency confers immunity from any law the current holder of it chooses to ignore. Even better, it offers [...]

Back in 1999, then-Slate political correspondent Jacob Weisberg, now the online journalistic Cream of Wheat site’s editor, penned a story called “Why the Press Loves John McCain“. He opened it with a charmingly self-effacing and abashed confession:
Journalists go weak in the knees around the guy. The few who have attempted to write debunking pieces about [...]

A lot of people are facing a tough November. Barack Obama seems certain to be the Democratic candidate for president. He’s a black guy in a country that continues to host a lot of people who don’t like black guys, especially ones that are smarter than they are and can talk rings around them.
John [...]

When Hillary Clinton used the example of Bobby Kennedy’s June 1968 assassination to argue that withdrawing from the Democratic presidential primary contest would be stupid because other primaries have extended to June and beyond, some prominent Obama supporters (and many less so) translated her comments as “Obama could get killed, and I could win” rather [...]

Lots of names are getting dropped as potential running mates for the by no means coronated Barack Obama. Governors Janet Napolitano, Bill Richardson, Kathleen Sebelius and Ed Rendell of Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas and Pennsylvania, respectively, are oft mentioned; so are Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, retired general Wes Clark, and, lord help us, diplomatically [...]

Writing in the London Review of Books, Donald MacKenzie describes a form of gambling masquerading as a sophisticated financial transaction that he describes as the “End of the World trade”, in which an insurer bets that “around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America” won’t go bankrupt, [...]

Barack Obama is the clear choice of homeless people, at least those in the Venice and Santa Monica, CA, environs, for president. Despite polling that shows Hillary Clinton doing generally better among the backbone Democratic constituencies—blue collar workers and the poor, to the extent those are distinct groups these days—almost no one in the parks [...]

By now you may know that top Bush administration officials, with the knowledge and approval of the president, choreographed torture regimens for terrorism suspects held by the US. You probably haven’t heard much about the reaction from Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
That’s because they haven’t reacted. Like most of the press, Clinton [...]

The news that senior Bush administration officials not only approved the use of torture but actually micromanaged the application of it should be the last straw for dithering Democrats in the House of Representatives.
We have known for years that the president and the vice president approved war crimes, including torture, on the basis of [...]

ABC News is reporting that senior Bush administration officials were intimately involved in planning torture regimens for use against terrorism suspects. The officials include vice president Dick Cheney; CIA director George Tenet and his successor, former CIA agent and Congressman Porter Goss; then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice; former secretary of state Colin Powell; former secretary [...]

My own Obama speech moment: as I was walking home late on the night of the speech, I ran across four black teenagers, probably 15 or 16 years old. They started to cross the street as I approached. As we passed in opposite directions I heard one of them say, “You see that Charlie Manson-looking [...]

A recent Barack Obama campaign email carried the tag line “We are the change we’ve been waiting for”, drawn from a speech he made after the February 5th primary extravaganza. The line leaves me cold because my resistance to Obama arises in large part from his inflationary rhetoric, but it nagged at me for several [...]

Colin Powell dropped some hints yesterday in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he’s looking outside the GOP for a candidate to endorse.
Powell, who served as the closer for the Bush administration’s sale of an Iraq invasion with an astonishingly dishonest speech to the United Nations, the world and, most importantly, credulous Washington pundits, [...]

Continuing on my quest to close enough browser tabs for my computer to regain some self-respect and nimbleness, here’s the second installment of stuff I either meant to write but never quite did, or did write but for some reason couldn’t bring myself to part with the web page I used for material. See here [...]

Voters under the age of 35 or so may not recall the most memorable cultural artifact of Hillary Clinton’s doomed 1993 health care reform package. Evidently someone in Barack Obama’s campaign does, and thought it would be clever to resurrect Harry and Louise, an earnest couple concocted by the health insurance lobby to do some [...]

Nearly a decade of investigations, a lurid final report and a concerted campaign for impeachment left Bill Clinton among the more popular American presidents, with the majority of Americans unconvinced of any need to impeach or remove him from office. Nearly a decade of no investigations, with no coherent summary of misdeeds and no institutional [...]

John Edwards made a fine speech in New Orleans yesterday announcing the end of his presidential campaign. He said that he would continue working toward his goal of ending poverty in the United States, and that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton personally promised him they would make that goal an integral part of their [...]