Surprise! Health insurance went up again this year , at many times the inflation rate. A family of four now must spend more than $15,000 for health insurance. By the time deductibles and co-pays are factored in, who but the rich can afford it if they aren’t getting it from their employer? Other countries have [...]

I’m still stunned, appalled and deeply disturbed by the last debate among the candidates for the GOP nomination for president. Not by the candidates themselves (although there was plenty there to dislike), but by the crowd, which cheered lustily when the number of people Texas has executed since Rick Perry has been governor was announced, [...]

Once upon a time, Republicans could have original ideas, could differ from others in their party on substantive issues, and could come up with creative pragmatic solutions to problems. That was then. Now, it is required that all candidates adhere to the right wing dogma of the day. Policy has become religion, and one dare [...]

Readers commenting on my blog postings recently repeated two phrases that I hear a lot these days, sayings that have always seemed absurd to me in their simplicity and in their disregard for the way a society actually functions. You want ME to pay for YOUR healthcare? This is one of those stock questions that [...]

The NRA and their allies have so completely cowed our legislators and the public that the few desperate calls for serious gun control in the wake of the Tucson shootings have been barely audible in the partisan shouting match that followed. This, despite the obvious fact that a lunatic like Loughner should never have been [...]

End of life counseling is back as a political issue after the president decided to add it to Obamacare by executive fiat. If you remember, this was one of the things that led to Sarah Palin’s infamous “death panel” fiction that caused such a furor over the summer. What is proposed, in the real world, [...]

With job creation at the top of the economic wish list as the nation slowly recovers from the deep recession, and with the Afghanistan decision made, Obama last week convened a jobs summit. The truth is, and everyone knows it, there’s little more that can be done to create the millions of jobs needed to [...]

I shouldn’t be any more, but I’m still surprised when people argue vehemently against their own self-interest. The health care debate has taken this disconnect to new levels. The states that seem to have the strongest polling against health care reform are those where people would be helped most by the reforms. The arguments I [...]

My first sketch for this cartoon had the health care bill as an adult with an arm and a leg already cut off, hobbling from the House surgical unit to the Senate surgical unit. In some ways it may have been more accurate, given how butchered the plan already is, and how much more will [...]

Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst during Obama’s address to Congress was a perfect illustration of just how much the public conversation has deteriorated in recent years. I suppose that it was inevitable that the deliberate rudeness of the town hall meetings held this summer would not end there. Although Wilson immediately apologized, he didn’t recant his [...]