Americans die younger and spend more years disabled than our counterparts in Canada and Europe. Our infant mortality rate is higher, too. And yet, even though the most common objections to nationalized health care from its opponents in the U.S. are that it’s too expensive, too restrictive and too inefficient, we spend way more money [...]

I’ve seen Michael Moore’s Sicko, and liked it. He had a couple of points to make — lots of people in the U.S. suffer from inadequate or no health care, and the impact of our system has a repressive effect on more than just our health — and he made them effectively.
I’ve since read [...]

The Washington Post takes a long look at the waning years of Bush’s presidency today. Writer Pete Baker notes, among other things, that Bush is on course to set a record for sustained unpopularity—his approval rating has been under 50% for two and a half years, and barring some extraordinary reversal of character, it’s going [...]

Today at the White House press briefing, I got into a somewhat heated (on my part) dispute with John Gizzi, political editor of the right wing web magazine HumanEvents.com. It happened like this…
Earlier in the briefing, the press was asking Tony Snow some pretty good questions about Bush’s commutation yesterday of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence. [...]

At Slate, Timothy Noah has written a defense of Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s jail sentence that is riddled with errors, fallacies, and non-sequiturs. To wit:
1. Noah says that Libby “probably didn’t understand that Plame’s identity was a government secret.” In fact, in Libby’s indictment, we read that:
Shortly after publication of the article in The [...]

Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathon Swift: B
Candide, by Voltaire: B+
Here are two classic satires, both good, both from the eighteenth century, and both inspired by two of my favorite bloggers, both of whom deserved better than my first drafts of these reviews. (You can find out more about my ‘project’ at my own blog, but [...]

David Ignatius is sort of the farm team Tom Friedman, regarded by his admirers as an astute and sophisticated observer of world affairs. When Friedman fell off the turnip truck and concussed himself on the road to Baghdad, only the lack of Friedman’s gift for incoherent analogy and metaphor kept Ignatius from replacing Friedman as [...]

Senator Lindsey Graham returned from Iraq recently to announce that the The Surge in Iraq “is working beyond my expectations.”
Graham says that although the Iraqi government has made no progress whatsoever toward resolving the political issues that in the more secure environment that The Surge was meant to create — Graham says he hinted to [...]

A couple of days ago, Eric Umansky wrote that “a month ago, I was speaking with Karen Green at NYU’s Center on Law and Security, who [said] something about Gitmo that’s stuck with me ever since: Time and again prisoners at Gitmo have insisted that they are innocent and asked the tribunals there to [...]

Check out this fascinating combination of articles in yesterday’s Washington Post ‘Outlook’ section:
Getting the CIA we need, by David Ignatius
Our clueless intelligence system, by Amy Zegart
Who runs the CIA? Outsiders for hire, by R. J. Hillhouse
Ignatius thinks that the CIA is something of a rogue outfit, because it doesn’t have sufficient oversight from the White [...]

Richard Cohen wrote what may be his most pathetic column ever in the Washington Post yesterday, entitled “They Honor Us With Their Hate.” It’s not an original idea, echoing to one degree or another formulations such as Bush’s “they hate us for our freedoms,” or similar statements from anyone who celebrates antagonism to what they [...]

11-15-02 [dates are linked]: The FBI announces that Al Qaeda may be planning “spectacular attacks” in the United States that will cause “mass casualties” and “severe damage” to the economy.
3-19-03: One of the real ones.
3-2-04: Fox News reports that in February 2004, U.S. officials released what they said was an intercepted letter written by Jordanian [...]

Bob Woodward, whose reporting, or “reporting,” depending upon the circumstances, has long proven a reliable measure of establishment Washington’s rectal temperature, has a revelatory story in Thursday’s Washington Post describing the utterly pessimistic testimony of CIA director Michael Hayden to members of the Iraq Study Group during a session in November of last year. Hayden [...]

The chairman and chief medical officer of Aetna took to the pages of the Washington Post on Tuesday to offer their perspective on health care reform. They were motivated, they said, by the increasing number of Americans going without health insurance, a concern presumably unrelated to SiCKO, Michael Moore’s new and very popular film on [...]

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill today that sets an April 2008 deadline for withdrawing (in theory) most combat troops from Iraq. The bill passed by a margin of 223-201.
In reality the bill would have little effect even if president Bush signed it, since it allows for troops necessary to protect the [...]

USA Today has obtained an Army report implicating Iraqi police in a January, 2007 insurgent raid during which four U.S. troops were captured and later slain. The story notes that the new Pentagon spokesman in Iraq, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, gave a briefing last week blaming Iran for the attack but neglecting to mention the [...]

This site’s new spam blocker, which keeps the comments section from being overrun by links to everything from porn sites to closet organizer merchants, was installed on June 26. As the graphic below shows, it has blocked more than 460,000 attempts to post comment spam since then. That’s about 1,000 per hour. If we could [...]

I’m puzzled. When Karl Rove finally spoke in public about the Plame Affair last week, he said that Armitage was the one who “used her name.” But didn’t Novak look it up in Who’s Who?
Aha. I see you subscribe to the immaculate leak theory of Plameogenesis.
It’s true that Novak started making that claim after the [...]

Susie Madrak at Surburban Guerrilla neatly illustrates the educational clout blogs bring to the masses when she links to this post at Boing-Boing, which explains the genesis of the Bush-Cheney policy toward Iran. The vice-president, under the bedsheet, with a flashlight …

The Guardian published a story on Sunday detailing concern about Afghanistan among Britain’s military, [...]

Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson top the list of named candidates in the latest Associated Press poll on GOP presidential preferences, but they’ve both fallen behind “none of the above.” The AP story on the poll says that “23 percent [of Republicans] can’t or won’t say which candidate they would back, a jump from the [...]

Democrats got the headlines they wanted from Tuesday’s Republican filibuster of an amendment aimed at restricting US troop commitments to Iraq, but Republicans got near unanimous support for an amendment that recommends against the passage of any such legislation.
Only six Democrats didn’t vote for the Cornyn amendment to the defense appropriations bill, a “sense [...]

As calls for the Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives to impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney are growing louder and more common, opponents of impeachment are getting louder and more impassioned on their own behalf.
At the center of the largely intramural argument is House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pronouncement, echoed by other top [...]

70 House Democrats have told the president that they will not support any appropriations bill that includes funding for military operations in Iraq other than “for the protection and safe redeployment of all our troops out of Iraq before you leave office.” The Congressional Progressive Caucus informed the White House of their decision in a [...]

It’s classic MBA Presidency stuff (btw, Why aren’t all the MBAs in the nation rising up and calling for Bush’s impeachment? Hasn’t he singlehandedly devalued the stock of an MBA sheepskin forever?): “What’s good for GM is good for the nation.” When was the last time that flag got hoisted in public? [...]

If you haven’t yet seen this last Saturday’s LAT lead editorial, it’s a real winner and sign of just how much the Emperor’s Clothes Era is still with us.
What a sad and embarrassing editorial, embarrassing for those of us who have been LA Times readers all our lives [There's a photo of me [...]

For those who don’t watch Fox News or read Daily Kos, the 800-pound gorilla of Democratic blogging communities, a brief recap is in order. Daily Kos consists of a few regular writers, who get front page exposure on the site, and thousands of diarists, who get to post their own thoughts and chat amongst themselves. [...]

Veteran CBS News reporter Mark Knoller interviewed Dick Cheney at the White House today. He asked few substantive questions and religiously refrained from following up on the vice president’s shallow responses to the ones he did ask. One question did stand out, though.
What do you make about the extent to which you and the President [...]

one night I dreamed about the waterfalls – in reality they were a mile away, visible from my yard – as they had been in real life for many weeks, the dream falls were just narrow threads of white falling three thousand feet down the vertical face of the mountain, their usual summertime state, barely [...]