Here's a review of the NYTimes' columns for today, January 5, 2006. Today's authors are David Brooks and Bob Herbert. Brooks slams the GOP and offers an agenda to remedy the problem, while Herbert decries the new federal budget's impact on medicaid for immigrants.
Hold on to your butts.
We'll start with Mr. Brooks.
I don't know what's more pathetic, Jack Abramoff's sleaze or Republican paralysis in the face of it. Abramoff walks out of a D.C. courthouse in his pseudo-Hasidic homburg, and all that leading Republiacns can do is promise to return his money and remind everyone that some Democrats are involved in the scandal, too.
That's a great GOP talking point: some Democrats are so sleazy, they get involved with the likes of us.
He goes on to suggest the complete removal of Delay from power, and more radically--perhaps hyperbolically--writes that, "[The Republicans] need to put the entire leadership team up for a re-vote. That's because the real problem wasn't DeLay, it was DeLayism, the whole culture that merged K Street with the Hill, and held that raising money is the most important way to contribute to the team."
Further, he asserts that...
Finally, today--before noon--fire Bob Ney as chairman of the House Administration Committee. For God's sake, Republicans, show a little moral revulsion.
Herbert, whose columns have been so poignant the past year that I believe he ought to win a Pulitzer, slams the impact the new budget will have on Medicaid for immigrants.
He reports that a provision "buried" in the 800-page federal budget bill will make it unnecessarily difficult for immigrants and "poverty-stricken" Americans to "get the health care they are entitled to under Medicaid."
Advocates believe that the provision, which will require Medicaid applicants to document their U.S> citizenship (which means producing a passport or birth certificate), may be especially harmful to poor blacks, most of whom do not have passports and many of whom do not have birth certificates.
There are no exceptions to this onerous provision, not even for people with serious physical or mental impairments, including Alzheimer's disease.
Herbert goes on to quote a spokesman for Bill Frist, who said that the Senate approved the House "proposal because the 'members did not feel it was an unreasonable provision.' He said that applicants in serious need of care would receive it, and that Medicaid officials could accept the documentation of citizenship later."
Compassionate conservatism at its finest.
If there's any desire for me to post reviews and snippets of the NYTimes columns on a regular basis, I'd be happy to do so. Just let me know.