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.
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.
