As I wandered around and observed all the work, more than anything, I reflected on what it means to live in a country which treats healthcare as a privilege not a right. Here I was standing in the middle of a MASH tent in a major American city–this would undoubtedly be the last hope for many of the people we’d meet the next day.

How very convenient that the Senate Tora Bora report arrived in the news today – just in time to help build the case for bowing to Gen McChrystal’s demand for a bigger war in Afghanistan. All reports forecast an Obama decision to send 30-35,000 additional troops coupled with a lot of talk telling Karzai he [...]

The House has already passed a landmark food safety bill. The Senate passed it out of committee. We’re closer than ever to food safety reform. Here’s what you need to know about it.

The worst is the folks at the Fed clearly believe the bogus stress tests were a meaningful exercise. That alone should disqualify them from getting a bigger role in bank supervision. And if you read their pronouncements, they plan to continue to use them, and have the process run by….a monetary economist! Help me! Bernanke also conveniently ignores the fact that the rally might also have a wee bit to do with the fact that he threw a bit over $1 trillion at the markets, as announced in mid-March.

I could go on, but you get the picture. The Fed seems to believe its own PR.

A war surtax would really give Republicans trouble, in addition to being the right policy, to show the real cost of war, instead of living in this fantasy world where our actions abroad have no effect on our actions at home. But Democratic threats have been proven to be so idle over the years that nobody accords them a smidgen of respect. And thus we have a failure to govern.

In his memoir about life in the Clinton White House, George Stephanopoulos recounted the mini press corps revolt that erupted when he decided to shut the door leading from the press room to the press secretary’s staff quarters-thereby barring what had been routine access by reporters to the communications staff. “Helen Thomas led the charge…I may have been working for the new president, but she was part of the institutional presidency. “

Dan Pfeiffer has become something of a blogger/communications director at the White House, often posting rebuttals to various commentaries or news items. Today he took aim at a Charles Krauthammer column which criticized the health care reform bills, and in so doing touted some really pernicious elements of them.

Talk about burying the lede. The NYTimes has run a story which purports to be about the plans by the Treasury Department to pressure banks to do more to renegotiate delinquent mortgages. It has all sorts of blather from Treasury about using “embarrassment” as tool to get bank to do what they were given $75 Billion dollars to do under the federal Making Home Affordable Program.

The real story though, does not come out until the very bottom of the article. The real story is the continuing fraud being perpetrated on both the Government and consumers by the banks and other “mortgage servicers.” Predatory lending has an ugly tail end.

Some lawyers who defend homeowners against foreclosure assert that mortgage companies are merely stalling, using trial loan modifications as an opportunity to extract a few more dollars from borrowers who would otherwise make no payments.

Jon Meacham is reliably vapid, but this is a new low, even for him.

Large single issue organizations are dependent on grants from huge foundations and other wealthy donors. They can ignore the concerns of their small donors. The politicians and big media assume they speak for huge numbers of people because they have a lot of donors. But all they really do is crowd out the voices of huge numbers of citizens.