News from around the blogosphere Paul Krugman, reprinted from the NY Times on the official campaign website.
What a difference two years makes! At this point in 2005, the only question seemed to be how much of America’s social insurance system — the triumvirate of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — the Bush administration would manage to dismantle. Now almost all prominent Democrats and quite a few Republicans pay at least lip service to calls for a major expansion of social insurance, in the form of universal health care.
Funny thing about it, more and more people go without insurance every year and so the interest in universal health coverage in practically the only economically wealthy country without it increases as well. Conservatives hate the idea of the government paying for anything other than an obscenely large military, and you all know what the result of that is. It's time we try this a different way and see how it works, because believe me when I say that even if it fails, it won't be the end of life as we know it. Conservatives really need to stop fearing new ideas.
Greenwald on the "controversy" that wasn't, and the rise of the scandal obsessed culture. Read this.
For the last 15 years or so -- since the early years of the Clinton administration -- our public political discourse has been centrally driven by an ever-growing network of scandal-mongers and filth-peddling purveyors of baseless, petty innuendo churned out by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, various right-wing operatives and, more recently, the right-wing press led by Fox News. Every issue of significance is either shaped and wildly distorted by that process, or the public is distracted from important issues by contrived and unbelievably vapid, petty scandals.
I read Drudge a couple of times a day because that's where the news is and despite what other people think, it seems to me that Drudge's only crime is one of it's virtues: it lets people decide what the big new controversy is. It's a price you pay be only as long as you let it effect things.
If anything disqualifies John “The Hair” Edwards from the presidency of the local Kiwanis club — let alone the United States — it’s his decision this week to keep on bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan.
Yes, it's his decision on keeping a couple of bloggers rather than his plan to revamp health care to provide guaranteed coverage to every citizen in the United States. It's not his interest in getting us out of an illegal war, or in helping 30,000,000 America's poor get out of poverty. Nah, it couldn't be for a substantive reason related to the actual job of being President, it has to be about two writers to occupy a small part of a campaign that will likely go back to their day jobs when the elections are over.
Good grief, do people like this not understand the real issues swirling around the early campaign fracas like the war, or do they simply not care? I wonder if this person has any intention of even voting. I swear to whatever God you may believe that I desperately hope people like this just butt out of the elections in '08. This country has enough trouble with stupid candidates and politicians, we don't need stupid voters too.
More on the manufactured controversy from tiara.org.
At some point, people need to call out so-called “Christians” on their involvement in politics while still happily claiming 501(c) status as non-profit, non-political organizations. I fully support your right to worship in any way you want. But legislating religious morality on others, such as the display of the Ten Commandments, outlawing gay marriage, promoting abstinence-only education and campaigning against the HPV vaccine, goes far beyond personal spirituality.
A couple of people have raised the point that Donohue was likely flaunting federal laws prohibiting tax-exempt churches from interfering with political campaigns, and in fact by calling for the Edwards campaign to fire Marcotte and McEwen, he seems to have done just that. Of course you don't hear about that from the other side, but "that's not the point." Sure it isn't.
Now I'm sitting here reading this post on the official campaign blog and I'm wondering after all the flak they've taken over Marcotte and McEwen why they would allow someone to say this on the campaign site, much less on the official blog.
Among others. They are demanding a specific response to assholes who do not merit a response.
BUt it is our job as the Senator's supporters to go out and defend him. So go to these posts and let it be known that the Edwards campaign cannot be bullied by either side and will act when it is appropriate.
This kind of untargeted rant serves no purpose, nor does the swearing or the lack of proof reading. There is something to be said for keeping your mouth clean when you're speaking to the public from the official website of a presidential campaign, and I'm quite bothered that they aren't doing a better job with this. Maybe I'm being as pointlessly nitpicky as the red stater's are, and maybe this just a 140 uneducated rant by one of the "angry leftists" that we're being labeled as.
Maybe they're right, because this kind of crap doesn't need to be on a campaign blog.
The so-called News Commentary from the Statesmanjournal.com on John Edwards health-care plan.
Edwards would repeat the mistake that was at the heart of Hillary Rodham Clinton's misadventure in trying to fix a health insurance system that was then, and is now, so out of whack that it manages to cover fewer and fewer Americans at higher and higher cost. [..]
He wants insurers to cover everyone, no matter how sick and expensive they are. He wants employers to continue to carry on their ledgers a cost that is ever more burdensome to them and to their workers, onto whose shoulders more of the health-insurance tab is being shifted.
I still haven't read the plan myself so I don't know how true this interpretation is, but I'm not sure I see the problem here. Big changes take big sacrifice, and if getting every human being in this country medical insurance takes dismantling the private insurance industry, then it was what was broken in the first place, not our federal system. Our system has been contorting itself for so long to appease greedy insurance companies that the time to put them back in the box and see how things shake out. With all of the corporate tax breaks that Republicans have been dumping on America over the past twelve years, I think they can probably afford to take a couple of hits right now.
And honestly, the other side of "fixing" this system had its chance to "fix" it when they had complete control over Congress, and they came up short. Risks or not, it's time to try something else.
This stupid stuff over John Edward's house also needs to stop. The man is a trial lawyer, all of those guys are filthy rich. So what? Almost every member of the Senate is a millionaire. President Bush is rolling in money, so I say again, so what? The tax cuts that Bush has been pushing his entire federal political career benefited people like Bush, like Edwards. Do you think Jon Tester, the farmer from Montana who beat Conrad Burns for a Senate seat last year benefited from those cuts? Laughable. If you want to know someone for being unapologetically rich, look to Bush, who cut his own taxes every year he's been in office.
This person said it best.
"Stuff like this comes with the territory," said Jennifer Palmer, an Edwards adviser. "It's all a part of the game of the presidential campaign. I don't think that voters are that interested."
Finally a bit of actual news from the Washington Post, wondering about just how much support Edwards can expect from trial lawyers this time around.
In the last presidential election, John Edwards had the powerful support and deep pockets of the nation's trial lawyers behind him. But when the lawyers gather for their winter conference today in Miami Beach, it will be Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) delivering the meeting's keynote speech.
Edwards, a trial lawyer who became a senator and now a presidential candidate, will be there, too. But the North Carolina Democrat no longer has a lock on the backing of the lawyers. This time around he will be battling it out with others in the Democratic field, who are seen as sympathetic to plaintiffs and their attorneys.
Nothing wrong with that, people should always consider all of their options.
It's also likely to attract and scare Americans in equal numbers -- with a price tag of an estimated $120 billion per year that will be paid, in part, by an elimination of Bush tax cuts for those making more than $200,000 a year and a number of reforms guaranteed to draw opposition from every interest group with a stake.
So yeah, some of the people paying for this will be the ones making over $200,000 per year. They can afford it, and it benefits sick people who simply cannot pay to get better on their own. Forced humanity sucks, but it's better than no humanity at all.
I lied, this is two days in news. The rest is mostly about the blogging stuff and I'm done with that crap. Adios.
