The perfect isn’t the enemy of the good. The “good enough” is.

Watching the fallout after the attempted Christmas terrorist attack, I couldn’t help but think of one of my childhood hobbies: building dams. I loved going down to the creek behind my best friend’s house and backing up the water with whatever rocks, sticks, and mud I could find.

With no place to go for refuge from corporatist entrenchment, populist opposition from the left and right will continue to have no choice but to work together in order to oppose it. No doubt the demonization for doing so from party loyalists on both sides who don’t want their control of the kleptocracy to be challenged will only get more fierce.

Only now, 45 years after Medicaid was created, has the Federal government finally put it on a path that might fix its inherent flaws and have it live up to its potential. It will begin nationalizing most of the funding, requirements, and benefits. Imagine how much better the last 45 years would have been, if not for the very bad compromise of making Medicaid a state/federal partnership instead of a true federal program. Progressives must not let this health care reform effort suffer the same fate.

Nancy Pelosi has been intimating that she could pick up some votes for the health care bill from conservative Democrats and Blue Dogs when it comes out of conference. I don’t see how the dynamics which led those Democrats to vote against health care on the first pass have changed to any degree to free [...]

I appreciate having a discussion based in facts and details. . . the point I’m trying to make is that this plan does not solve the health care debt problem middle class families are experiencing now–and will still experience under the Senate plan. This plan is not affordable for the middle class. And since we’re talking about mandating these costs, we ought to be having a discussion about what is affordable.

Paul Waldman’s piece about the differences to be worked out in the House-Senate conference committee on health care is a pretty nice recitation of the issues we’ve been discussing for several weeks. He offers ten specific issues. . .

DeLauro’s office has been peddling weasel words since this whole thing began. No reason to think the flow will stop now.

DeLauro’s office numbers: New Haven 203-562-3718, Middletown 860-344-1159, Naugatuck 203-729-0204, Derby 203-735-5005

Since we still seem to be having a national freakout over some loser who got on a plane with a bomb in his underwear, which was apparently worthy of a presidential address, probably might be a good idea to put the actual danger posed by terrorist attacks in some numerical perspective.

Our health care system is unbelievably more expensive than any other first world nation. On a per capita basis, we spend over 50% more on health care than the second most expensive nation, Norway. As a nation, we spend more than twice as much per capita on health care than first world countries like Germany, Denmark, Belgium, France, Sweden, the UK, or Australia. If we actually got real health care reform that brought our health care costs down closer to the rest of the industrialized world, their would be no need to grant affordability tax credits on the new exchange.