Monday punditry. Now get to work.
NY Times editorial:
Congressional committees heard a lot this month about the devious schemes used by health insurance companies to drop or shortchange sick patients. It was a damning portrait — and one Americans know from painful personal experience — of an industry that all too often puts profits ahead of patients.
Paul Krugman:
So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.
But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.
And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.
Ross Douthat: Are we romance-less and sexless? Let's let dysfunctional Republican elected officials answer that one on our behalf. And let's avoid topics of substance while I have this column space.
EJ Dionne:
The first is the absence of substantial Republican support for comprehensive change. Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has done everything short of making ethanol a reimbursable prescription drug to win the heart of his good Republican friend from Iowa, Chuck Grassley...
The key is that no compromise should be allowed to undermine the long-term goals of covering everybody and containing costs. Concessions made for purely political reasons could produce an unworkable monstrosity of a bill.
Michael Barone: Govt. is always expensive and private is always efficient. Don't let Enron and the banks fool you, and pay no attention to the hearings on the Hill about the insurance company methods for turning a profit. There's a monster under the bed, it's called socialism, and it will eat you if you look.
Fareed Zakaria: No velvet revolution for Iran. And Obama is handling it the right way.