Hold Fast

Judd Legum used to write for ThinkProgress. He’s currently running for state legislature in Maryland and is a prime example of how this young generation of political activists are moving away from advocacy, writing, and organizing and towards seeing public service as an outlet for their commitment to change. Judd really is the first A-List [...]

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John Aravosis of AmericaBLOG reveals how hell isn’t other people, just dealing with your private health insurance company. Someone remind me how the greatest concern people on the right have now is that a government official might come between a patient and their doctor, but none of these people seem to give a rats ass [...]

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Shorter David Brooks: Based on rigorous polling of myself, Democrats are failing just like Republicans failed. So there. DougJ at Balloon Juice rightly points out that Brooks failure to mention Iraq as being pretty important to the history of the Republican Party’s failure during the Bush years. Implied but unmentioned by DougJ is that Brooks’ [...]

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Via Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo, I really like the stand President Obama made this weekend on including the public option in healthcare reform legislation. [A]ny plan I sign must include an insurance exchange: a one-stop shopping marketplace where you can compare the benefits, cost and track records of a variety of plans – [...]

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Progressive writer David Sirota has a must-read column on China in his regular space at the San Francisco Chronicle. Sirota highlights the massive economic disparity that exists in China as a result of Communist Party rule. He aptly describes the CCP as “an extreme version of the Republican Party that couples Genghis Khan’s intolerance with [...]

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Glenn Greenwald’s interview of the Beltway Conventional Wisdom Chuck Todd is pretty extraordinary. It’s hard to imagine a more vivid illustration of two world views colliding: that of someone who believes in the rule of law and someone who thrives in the Beltway petri dish of insiderism and self-congratulatory hackery. Todd dismisses upholding the rule [...]

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Sometimes the extent to which Beltway reporters and the Republicans spinning them don’t get it is mind-boggling. This is from Robert Pear and David Herszenhorn of the New York Times, on the party line vote on healthcare reform legislation that passed out of the HELP Committee yesterday: But the partisan split signified potential trouble ahead. [...]

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Health Care for American Now is running an ad thanking Senator Chris Dodd for his work on the HELP Committee to put forward legislation that includes a public health insurance option. HCAN will have even more to thank for, as the HELP Committee has just passed  their version of the bill out of committee. Jonathan [...]

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Philip Bowring had an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday on the uprising in Xinjiang and the sympathetic response East Turkestan’s Muslim Uighur population has received from other Asian and Muslim nations. I have some problems with his essay, including his glossing over of the invasion of East Turkestan by the Mao’s PLA in [...]

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Obviously I’m no fan of Rick Lazio, Hillary Clinton’s 2000 opponent for Senate in New York (post-Giuliani). But the problems he identifies with the New York State Assembly and Senate sound an awful lot like the problems we have in the federal House of Representatives and Senate. IS it any wonder that nothing gets done [...]

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