Recently in Politics Category

Much is being made of the historic nature of Tuesday's election. It was historic, but it was fairly predictable. The best candidates won. That they happened to be African-American was not a big deal to voters -- at least the ones I talked to.

Kim Bracey, I think, will be a fine mayor. She certainly has her work cut out for her. Her victory reminded me of the headline the satirical Web site The Onion ran last year when Barack Obama won: "Black man given worst job in the nation."

The most surprising thing that came out of the election is that Chuck Patterson, one of our new judges, is 60 years old. He doesn't look it.

York City will make history on this election day, electing the first black mayor.

Amazing that it took so long for this to happen, but considering York's history with and its troubles reconciling the issues of the past, maybe it should be surprising that it took so long.

York, as you all know, is a very traditional place and by traditional, I mean it takes this town a long time to accept things that are taken for granted elsewhere.

Let's hope this election is step toward getting away from that.

WGAL's Ron Martin snagged an interview with former Mayor/murder defendant Charlie Robertson.

Nothing really insightful, but it's Charlie. He always seemed to have lack of self-awareness.

He did say, "You never get over it," regarding his arrest for murder in his alleged role in the 1969 race riots in town.

Well, yeah, getting arrested for murder, that would seem to stick with you.

Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans support having a public option when it comes to health insurance. Consistently.

So how come some elected officials and the press continue to ignore that. Beats me.

But here's a good article from Slate that explains some of the bullflop being sold to Americans by conservative about the public option.

Read it here.

Another good one from New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.

Today he's writing about China's monetary policy. I know, monetary policy is the Ambien of political and economic issues. What it has to do with anything is puzzling to a lot of laymen.

But Krugman lays it out in a way that both makes it understandable and puts it into context of our current economic woes.

A couple of things: China's monetary policy played a role in the housing bubble and its collapse and it results in jobs flowing overseas.

Interesting stuff.

Read it here.

A headline in the Washington Post says it: "Poll: Most Americans support public option."

So why doesn't Congress support it?

Could it be that unlike Congress, regular working people who have had been screwed over by insurance companies don't receive huge campaign contributions from that industry?

Read the story here.

It doesn't matter that perhaps some innocent people have been put to death. It doesn't matter that in many death penalty cases, defendants don't have adequate legal representation. It doesn't matter that the death penalty raises some sticky ethical and moral issues, mostly how demonstrating that killing is wrong by killing people.

What will end the death penalty in this country is cost.

A study by the Death Penalty Information Center concludes that many states simply can't afford the death penalty anymore, that the additional cost of pursuing the ultimate penalty takes limited resources away from law enforcement and crime prevention programs.

Now, in some cases, the death penalty can seem to be the only option. But the argument used for its prosecution is specious, that it serves to deter violent crime. It doesn't. And it's too expensive.

The moral and legal questions, though, may lose out to the fact that it cost too much money to kill people.

That's what we call priorities.

Here's a story about the study.

The New York Times' Paul Krugman writes about the right-wing's reaction to Chicago being stiffed for the Olympic games.

It begins:

"There was what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment last week, when the International Olympic Committee rejected Chicago's bid to be host of the 2016 Summer Games.

"'Cheers erupted' at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine's staff, with the headline 'Obama loses! Obama loses!' Rush Limbaugh declared himself 'gleeful.' 'World Rejects Obama,' gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.

"So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

"But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation's two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they're against it -- whether or not it's good for America."

Very good point. Rather than trying to do something for the good of the nation, these clowns are cheering for bad things to happen to America.

It's unpatriotic.

Even when the country was ruled by Dubya, liberals did not hope for him to fail and did not hope that bad things happened to the country just to make Dubya look bad. He was fully capable of that on his own.

But this kind of we-win-when-America-loses attitude...it's sad.

And as Krugman writes, it infects the debate over health-care reform to the point where the only reform we'll ever see will be to further enrich big insurance and pharmaceutical companies, at our expense.

Read all of Krugman here.

Then read this.

It begins:

"The South Carolina Supreme Court has ordered an insurance company to pay $10 million for wrongly revoking the insurance policy of a 17-year-old college student after he tested positive for HIV. The court called the 2002 decision by the insurance company "reprehensible."

"That appears to be the most an insurance company has ever been ordered to pay in a case involving the practice known as rescission, in which insurance companies retroactively cancel coverage for policyholders based on alleged misstatements - sometimes right after diagnoses of life-threatening diseases."

This kind of thing happens all the time.

And yes, it is reprehensible.

Sen. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, unveiled his health care reform legislation yesterday.

Apparently it was written by insurance company lobbyists. It contains loads of gifts for the insurance lobby and pretty much guarantees that health care will be more expensive for the middle class.

So far, Republicans hate the bill. Democrats hate it.

So who likes it?

Let's see.

The New York Times reported: "Shares of U.S. health insurers rose broadly on Tuesday on hopes a health reform bill would not include a government-run option, which has drawn strong opposition from insurers who fear it would destroy the private marketplace.

"The S&P Managed Health Care index of large U.S. health insurers closed 6.5 percent higher.

"Aetna rose 12.6 percent, Coventry was up 12.7 percent and Cigna was 7.7 percent higher, all on the New York Stock Exchange. Centene rose 7.9 percent."

That should tell you all you need to know about Baucus' bill.

An activist judge is, by definition, one whose opinions you disagree with.

That said, federal Judge Clay Land of the Middle District of Georgia is about to be tarred as an activist judge by the wingnuts who are known as "birthers," people who believe that President Obama was born in Kenya, or on Saturn, or whatever.

The case, filed by Orly Taitz, who, when she's not being a narcisistic psychotic on TV, is actually a lawyer, was about an Army doctor who was refusing to be deployed to Iraq because she claims Obama is not the president.

The lawsuit defied any logic. The doctor had no problem serving her commander-in-chief while stationed stateside. It was only when she was going to be sent to Iraq that she objected.

Besides, the lawsuit made tons of allegations that had no basis in any known reality.

The judge tossed it.

He wrote, "Plaintiff's complaint is not plausible on its face. To the extent that it alleges any 'facts,' the Complaint does not connect those facts to any actual violation of the Plaintiff's individual constitutional rights. Unlike in 'Alice in Wonderland,' simply saying something is so does not make it so."

Wow.

This judge must be some kind of liberal activist.

He was appointed to the bench by George W. Bush.

From the Washington Post's review of Moore's new film, "Capitalism: A Love Story":

"In building his indictment against the ill-fated marriage of Wall Street and Washington, Moore zeroes in less on GOP string-pullers than he does on White House economic adviser Larry Summers, Clinton-era Treasury secretary Robert Rubin and Sen. Chris Dodd. Especially Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Moore gets an on-camera interview with the mortgage officer who handled the special VIP loans provided to Dodd and other big names, an issue that has dogged Dodd's reelection bid.
ad_icon

"The film also maintains a delicate ambivalence about President Obama, casting him as a change agent and depicting joyous images of his victory last November, but also implying that Wall Street had showered money on Obama's campaign in an effort to buy him. The question of whether Wall Street succeeded in doing so is left more or less unanswered."

Moore said, "One of the important things to recognize in my films is that I always went after whoever needed to be gone after."

Good for him. There are lots of people who need to be gone after.

Here is the president of the United States calling Kanye West "a jackass."

OK, so what's the problem?

We're paying more for less, when it comes to health insurance.

That's the conclusion of three studies cited in a report on the Wall Street Journal's Web site.

An excerpt:

"Americans with job-based insurance can expect to pay more for less next year. Hit by the recession and rising health-care costs, employers are cutting a larger chunk than usual out of their health-care budgets, new national surveys show.

"In 2010, nearly two-thirds of employers plan to shift more of the cost of care to workers and their families through higher premiums contributions, deductibles and copayments. One out of five companies plans to cut out higher-cost health plan options in favor of less generous coverage, according to the preliminary findings from a survey by the consulting firm Mercer LLC."

Read the whole thing here.

Slate.com has more analysis here.

A passage from the story:

"But because of the peculiar way the health industry has evolved in the United States, it's nearly impossible for most people to know how much they're paying even for something as simple as a health insurance premium."

What's that argument against health care reform again?

Todd Platts does it again, getting his photo taken with the president before a big event. That's an Associated Press photo. Todd also appeared in the photo on the front page of Thursday's New York Times.