Category Archives: Current Events

Jacob Weisberg reminds us that most of the prominent Republicans who now find the Democrats' Health Care bill so horrifying and potentially destructive were adamant just a few years ago about passing the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit which did a lot less to help people than the current proposal…and cost a lot more. The bill Chuck Grassley championed then even paid for end-of-life counselling…you know, the kind of "death panels" guys like Grassley are now trying to warn people about.

Atul Gawande writes about how the current Health Care Reform proposal would get coverage for a lot of people but how it doesn't do much, if anything, to bring down the cost of medical care in this country. So it's kinda solving half the problem. Thanks to Steve Oelrich for calling this article to my attention.

Retired surgeon John Gary Maxwell spent an awful lot of years dealing with the health care situation in this country. Here's his take on what's wrong with it. He thinks it's silly for people to fear the "socialization" of medicine. He thinks it's already socialized…but with a large chunk of its revenue diverted into profits instead of on healing the sick and the injured.

Matt Yglesias has a criticism of the Taibbi piece that seems much more on-target than the others to me.

If you're following the debate over Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece, you're going to want to read his response to the first rebuttal to which I linked. I'm not sure who's right here on the main thesis but I think Taibbi's right that some of the specific errors cited are either not wrong or do not impact that thesis.

Andrew Leonard does more correcting and disagreeing with that Matt Taibbi article.

Tim Fernholz believes to have found many an error in Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece — the one to which I linked a little while ago here. So if you read Taibbi, read Fernholz.

Fred Kaplan liked the speech Barack Obama gave when accepting the Nobel Prize. So did a lot of people except, of course, those who are determined to find fault with everything the man does.

Another Matt Taibbi article. This is a longish piece for Rolling Stone that argues that Barack Obama has sold out supporters who thought he was going to clean up Wall Street.

Our pal Bob Elisberg discusses the belief, widely held among some females, that all men are jerks. This, of course, is not true. There are men who are not jerks. For starters, there's Bob and there's me and there's…hmm…

Matt Taibbi doesn't much like the current Health Care Reform bill. I don't either — for pretty much all the reasons he enumerates — but I think it's probably one of those "better than nothing" deals.

So what's the deal with these stolen e-mails that some claim prove Global Warming is a hoax dreamed up by evil scientists who are eager to see industry collapse due to having to curb emissions? Professor Peter Kelemen actually studies the data and explains it for those of us who are in over our heads.

It's Fred Kaplan time again, people! I keep hearing Republicans say that the President's wartime policy should just be to give "the generals" whatever they want and let them plan our strategy. The problem with that is that in Afghanistan, "the generals" seems to denote General Stanley McChrystal…and General McChrystal says things like, "There is much in Afghanistan that I do not understand." There's a confidence builder.

Ezra Klein makes a point about Health Care Reform that is easily overlooked. In addition to causing people to die and/or go into bankruptcy, our current and inefficient system is also costing people an awful large chunk of their paychecks.

I've been wondering here how much of the opposition to the current Health Care Reform proposal is because people think it will bankrupt us and kill Grandma, and how much is because people think it's been watered down to less than it should be. Kurt Busiek (thank you, Kurt) sent me this link to Nate Silver's analysis of a poll that begins to answer that question.