Word: reformations
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...those awful collisions between public policy and real life, I was in the midst of an awkward conversation about end-of-life issues with my father when Sarah Palin raised the remarkable idea that the Obama Administration's attempt to include such issues in its health-care-reform proposal would lead to "death panels." Let me tell you something about my family situation, a common one these days, in order to illuminate the obscenity of Palin's formulation and the cowardice of those, like Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the lead Republican negotiator on the Senate Finance Committee, who have...
...just getting the mail - as well as a very difficult reality: if he'd had a stroke, I would have had no idea about what he'd want me to do. I had lunch with him the next day to discuss this. (See 10 players in health-care reform...
Given the heinous dust that's been raised, it seems likely that end-of-life counseling will be dropped from the health-reform legislation. But that's a small point, compared with the larger issue that has clouded this summer: How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark? (See pictures of angry health-care protesters...
...power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George H.W. Bush's presidency has been obliterated. The party's putative intellectuals - people like the Weekly Standard's William Kristol - are prosaic tacticians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health-care reform mostly because passage would help Barack Obama's political prospects. In 1993, when the Clintons tried health-care reform, the Republican John Chafee offered a creative (in fact, superior) alternative - which Kristol quashed with his famous "Don't Help Clinton" fax to the troops. There is no Republican health-care...
Washington may get sleepy in the dog days of August, but the airwaves are alive with a political foodfight. From the left and the right, the unions and the corporations, political campaign ads are saturating our television screens with arguments for and against President Obama's health-care reform effort. They feature the staples of political advertising - fear mongering and comedy, comforting background music and ominous voiceovers. Depending on when you tune in, they promise either to cure your ills or turn America into Great Britain. And though the ad war is just getting started, it's time...