Those Americans who refuse to plunge blindly into the maelstrom of European and Asiatic Politics are not defeatist or neurotic. They are giving evidence of sanity, not cowardice, of adult thinking as distringuished from infantilism. They intend to preserve and defend the Republic. America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.
Too bad it's only now we're seeing people loudly challenge the right-wing assertion that defending detainees' rights means being "soft" on terrorists or on security in general.
I take a backseat to no one when it comes to protecting the country from terrorists," Dodd said in an e-mail statement yesterday. "But there is a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this. . . . In taking away their legal rights, the rights first codified in our country's Constitution, we're taking away our own moral compass, as well.
After an increase sought for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing rapidly — by more than 10 percent in many years — White House budget documents assume consecutive cutbacks in 2009 and 2010 and a freeze thereafter.
And finally, economist Paul Krugman weighs in saying that John Edwards' health plan "Gets it Right" After a discussion of how Edwards' Plan is similar to others out there, he points out what he sees aas its defining strengths.... The scheme he formally unveiled yesterday is far more sweeping than the one he trotted out four years ago, starting with the fact that it would actually bring insurance to every American. And it seems even more grandiose if you focus on the details, which open the door to a far more comprehensive makeover of American health care than the mainstream analysis in the press suggests. All of this is good--very good, in fact.
Still, there's a caveat. The new Edwards plan is not as far-reaching as some plans now circulating in Congress including plans that call for remaking the health care system top-to-bottom by creating a single-payer system modeled on Medicare. Precisely because the Edwards plan comes from the candidate positioning himself as the voice of working-class populism, that makes the final product just a tad disappointing...
Mr. Edwards goes two steps further.People who don't get insurance from their employers wouldn't have to deal individually with insurance companies: they'd purchase insurance through "Health Markets": government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public's behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills - not the function of granting insurance in the first place - outsourced to private insurers.
Why is this such a good idea? As the Edwards press release points out, marketing and underwriting - the process of screening out high-risk clients - are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies' overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.
Better still, "Health Markets," the press release says, "will offer a choice between private insurers and a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare." This would offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper than anything the private sector offers right now - after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan's low premiums, or lose the competition.
U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton in Washington said the Military Commissions Act, signed into law in October, has left him unable to consider whether the detainees can challenge being held at the Navy facility in Cuba.
An appeals court in Washington is considering whether civilian jurists can rule on those cases. Until that issue is resolved, Walton said, "it is this court's view that it lacks the authority to take any action in these cases."
"The major law firms in the country ... are out there representing detainees," Cully Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said in a Federal News Radio interview Thursday, available online.
"And you know what, it's shocking," he said.
"I think quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms."
