Ruth Marcus:
I'm not a huge fan of the House measure, but I was glad to see it straggle across the finish line, if only to keep the process going. And, by the end of the long debate, I was cheering for it even more because of the appalling amount of misinformation being peddled by its opponents.
Steven Pearlstein:
Want real reform? Let's start with Congress.
It's gotten to the point now where all it takes to kill something in the Senate is the mere threat of a filibuster, without anyone actually having to mount one. And if you somehow managed to get, say, health reform legislation to the floor, it would take 60 votes to pass a bill that included the public option and 60 votes to pass one without it.
Catch-22!
Harold Meyerson:
The House has delivered. It has done what in American politics today is all but impossible: It has passed a major bill.
Now health care goes to the Senate. The world's greatest deliberative body. The other side of Capitol Hill. Dithering Heights.
Maureen Dowd:
Goldmine Sachs, as it’s known, is out for Goldmine Sachs.
As many Americans continue to struggle, Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, banks that took government bailout money after throwing the entire world into crisis, have said they will dish out $30 billion in bonuses — up 60 percent from last year.
The saying used to be, whatever happens, the lawyers win. Now, it’s whatever happens, the bankers win.
Thomas Frank on regulation:
Let me add another objection: What if some future administration were to install as the chairman of the Federal Reserve—or as chief of whatever agency is made into the One Big Regulator—a man who really doesn't believe in the regulatory mission? What if control of the systemic regulator is handed over to a person who considers 19th-century economic arrangements to be a sort of aspirational ideal? A man who turns out to be a dedicated fan of Ayn Rand, that Nietzsche of the boardroom? A man who blows off warning signs because, in his perfect theoretical universe of rational markets, the only really systemic problem is government itself?
I raise this potential problem because, from 1987 to 2006, that's pretty much the sort of man who headed the Federal Reserve. Had Alan Greenspan somehow been handed the One Big Regulator job back in those days, we might have had no real financial regulation in this country at all.
Thomas Friedman:
We are now losing a tropical forest the size of New York State every year, and the carbon that releases into the atmosphere now accounts for roughly 17 percent of all global emissions contributing to climate change.
Gerald Seib:
One month after the U.S. launched a great diplomatic experiment by talking directly with Iran, the pressure of the effort is opening up some stress fractures.
Some small fractures are showing up in the wall of solidarity the U.S. and its partners have tried to show in confronting Iran over its nuclear program -- specifically over how long to give diplomacy a chance before turning to new economic sanctions.
But the more meaningful stress fractures are showing up within Iran itself.
From Homeland Security Today :
'We have hospitals setting up triage tents on their campuses'
Public health officials on the frontlines of combating the H1N1 influenza pandemic and all its attendant problems are increasingly frustrated and disturbed by naysayers’ claims that the virus isn’t as bad as it appears. Critics of the US government’s response in particular say all the bad news is just so much hype - that H1N1 and its consequences really aren't much different than seasonal flu...
Public health authorities, virologists, and other experts HSToday.us regularly talks to say the naysayers simply "don’t know what the hell they’re talking about," as one put it at the annual International Association of Emergency Managers meeting in Orlando, Florida last week.
The fact is the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus is wreaking much more havoc than seasonal flu.
Fortunately, we never get naysayers here.
If you live in NYC and are a member of a high risk group, the H1N1 weekend vax clinic schedule is here. For everyone else, there's a Google flu shot locator.