Health

The Game is On, the Tide is Turning

By |

Life is slowly returning to normal after my birthday and my son’s Bar Mitzvah and it is time to turn my mind once again to blogging. I’m going to try something new. For the past year or more, I have been sending brief political analyses out to my New Mexico list serve. I’ve received so much positive feedback about these posts, even from folks who disagree with me, that I’m going to begin publishing them on Tikkun Daily. I am happy to report that I see lights flickering on the health care horizon.

General News

Personal Action: County HCR Resolutions Urge Senate to Act

By |

Thursday afternoon, I presented a resolution to the Board of Rio Arriba County Commissioners urging the President and Congress to speedily pass health care reform. It passed unanimously. I will pdf the resolution and forward it to New Mexico’s statewide papers, and will walk an orginal into the offices of Senators Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall. The Commissioners discussion revolved around the need for our Senators to pressure Senate leadership into passing a sidecar “fix” through reconciliation to their HCR bill, enabling the House to support it. Resolutions are often an excellent means of garnering press attention and telling your Congresscritters you are serious.

General News

Obama Takes on Wall Street (Update)

By |

In a stunning announcement this morning, President Obama unveiled a detailed proposal to heavily regulate big banks (which he called “fat cats”), forcing savings and loans to divest themselves of the investment banks that gambled away taxpayers’ savings, and forcing the largest banks to be broken up. The most heavily impacted financial institutions will be Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and the like. It is probably not coincidental that these are the same banks that caused the near collapse of our financial institutions, sucked up billions in tax funds and then planned to hand the same amount out to top execs as bonuses. Congressional Republicans obstruct this bill at their own peril. It is believed that Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, will make bank regulation an exception to his obstructionist strategy.

Health

Dumping the Pandercrats

By |

After spending most of my day wondering how the Democratic Party managed to pull off the stunning achievement of losing Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat to a far right wing former centerfold model, I am feeling reassured. The dust is settling and the panorama does not look so bad. In fact, the future looks far brighter to me than it has for weeks. Obama has acknowledged that White House bears more than a little responsibility for the loss. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that he has scheduled a press conference tomorrow to announce his adoption of Paul Volcker’s strategy to break up and regulate “too big to fail banks.”

General News

Health Care: Where do we Go in 2010?

By |

I’ve spent the last two weeks in a funk, listening to the debates about the future of health care reform. I am pleasantly surprised by two phenomena: 1] public dialogue around health care is both vibrant and incredibly substantive ; and 2] conservatives have absented themselves from discussion. I grew accustomed to palliatives and drivel during the Bush years. (Remember when plastic sheeting and duct tape were promoted as public health policy? In the event of an epidemic, we were instructed to wrap our homes in plastic!) I am surprised at the enthusiasm and diversity of our civic dialogue.

General News

Time to Fight

By |

I’ve been reading various healthcare diaries from around Left Blogistan searching for a strategy to salvage healthcare reform. The most interesting so far are a pair dealing with polls that surfaced on Daily Kos. fladem writes about the sudden collapse in support for health care reform as measured in the recent WSJ/NBC poll. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll coming out later today will show opposition to the health care bill growing — mainly from disappointed liberals, who are very much disappointed to see the public option getting thrown out. The poll has 47% saying the Obama health care plan is a bad idea, to only 32% who say it’s a good idea…45% say it is not acceptable for a plan to not include a public option.

General News

Send Emanuel a Golem for Hanukkah

By |

Normally I would make this brief post a comment and stick it on the end of my last article entitled,”Send Leiberman a Golem for Hanukkah,” but I’m too spitting mad. I have argued for a long time that an imperfect bill is much better than no bill. However, a useless bill is not. Several blogs including McJoan at Daily Kos, Jonathan Kohn at The New Republic, and Carrie Budoff Brown at Politico are reporting that Rahm Emanuel is pressuring Reid to lose the Medicare Buy-in to quickly cut a deal with Lieberman. The White House, of course, is denying it.

General News

Send Lieberman a Golem for Hanukkah!

By |

I’m considering the possibility that Lieberman is not actually a human. I suspect he is a golem created by the insurance industry to terrorize the general public. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Jewish lore, a golem is a zombie created from clay during times of peril to defend persecuted Jews from Nazis, the Czar, etc. More on this below. After telling Harry Reid that he would consider supporting a health care reform compromise including an expansion of Medicare, our favorite Senator decided to throw a wrench in the works on the Sunday morning talk circuit by announcing his plan to scuttle health care reform.

General News

Health Care Reform Compromise May Actually Work

By |

I owe an apology to all you Tikkunistas out there for my prolonged silence on health care issues at such an important time. My organization has received two new health care grants through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and I am snowed under with work. Coincidentally, I am also snowed under with snow which knocked out my internet and made it difficult to retrieve children from various undisclosed locations. However, I’m back. I hope to blog soon about some of my personal adventures in healthcare reform.

General News

Twitterers Crash Teaparty Organizing Session

By |

ConnecticutMan1 emailed me an unlikely and highly entertaining article posted by Warranted Wiretaps. They have obtained an exclusive mp3 file of a conference call put together by “the national liberty movement” to improve the quality of right wing blogs. Unfortunately for them, their call was crashed by a group of twittering humorists. According to Warranted Wiretaps, Michael Johns, an architect of Bush’s “Medicare Reform” Giveaway to private insurance and pharmaceutical companies and an early proponent of the Reagan Doctrine, helped to organize the conference call. The call was meant to attract participants to a new ultra-rightwing website, 73wire.com.