Go to my new blog at ThePointNews.com.
The following is brought to you by the honorable (?) Senator from Illinois, Roland Burris:
It was the night before Christmas, and all through the Senate
the right held up our health care bill, no matter what was in it.The people had voted a mandated reform
but Republicans blew off the gathering storm. Read the rest of this entry »
He is back. After a few years on the bench (the bench being a relative term in politics, chair of the DNC is a pretty cushy bench), Howard Dean, former Governor of Vermont and 2004 candidate for the Democratic Primary, has made a grand reappearance in the political lime light this week by taking on the Senate’s health care bill — from the left. You may remember Dean from his little scream at a 2004 campaign stop in Iowa, here is the YouTube clip of it.
With the healthcare debate raging I thought I would address the fundamental flaw that I see in the right’s approach to reform. The argument is that choice will solve all of our problems. If consumers just have the choice of what procedure or medicine to get or what doctor to see, then all will be fixed. For the consumer choice model to bring down costs and ensure quality, healthcare has to be a market commodity.
If your like me and like to spend time reading the nonsense the gets posted under the #tcot hashtag on Twitter by neo cons whose pictures are typically some combination of Obama, Soviet symbols and Hitler, you have probably wanted to respond. So, I thought I would take the time and craft a few 140 for character responses to some of the most outragous and, sadly, common Tweets out there.
Education reform is sadly one of those things that every politician says they want to take on but have absolutely no political motivation to actual do so. Democrats are too afraid of Teachers Unions and the Republican approach resulted in No Child Left Behind, a true failure.
In fact, the only real success that we have seen across the country in education reform is in charter schools. Charter schools, nationwide, out preform their district schools in standardized tests and college acceptance rates. Despite these successes, most States still have caps or funding limits on charter schools.
Here is an editorial I wrote for The Point News. Enjoy!
After a summer of brutal town halls, lunatic TV/Radio hosts and angry protesters, it’s hard to say that President Obama’s health care reform effort is where he, or the millions of Americans supporting him, hoped it would be. With three bills, two from the Senate and one from the House, floating around, it looks like the final bill will bring little more than further tweaks to the system, not the broad and comprehensive reform that is desired.
In honor of National Day of Prayer, I thought I would give the top 5 reasons why school prayer simply should not be allowed. This post was inspired by some Tweets I have been reading demanding prayer in schools. By the way, a few of these also work for why we shouldn’t have anything even close to a National Day of Prayer but that is for another post another year.
Let’s first describe what we are talking about and what we are not talking about. We are talking about organized and school sponsored prayer. No one is saying if a student wants to say a Hail Mary before a test that he or she should not be allowed to. However, we are talking about organized school prayer even if it is voluntary.
There is a great scene in the second season of the West Wing where White House Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry (played by John Spencer), and White House Director of Communications Director, Toby Ziegler (played by Richard Schiff), are sitting in the Oval office after Toby got politically beat by the new chief of staff of the Republican Speaker of the House, Ann Stark. It goes like this:
Toby: We have got to get real now. Leo, Ann Stark is a war time consigliere that is why she was bumped up.
Leo: I am war time consigliere too, Toby. I was just hoping it would be peace time a little longer.
I am not sure if there was anyone who did not think that Rahm Emanuel was going to be President Obama’s Leo McGarry but as the Washington Post has recently reported, we have seen a completely different tact taken by Mr. Emanuel.
You might have heard about the “tea parties” that are occurring across the country today. They are, according to their website, “to expose the bankrupt liberal agenda of the White House Administration and Congress. Specifically, the flawed “Stimulus Bill” and pork filled budget.”
I felt the need to comment on these so called “patriotic acts” since the original act (The Boston Tea Party) not only occurred in my home state (MA representin’) but was organized by a group of college students from the then hardly known Harvard College.
