I argued in my last post that we should stay the course and make the final bill as good as possible. This mostly means replacing some provision in the Senate bill with provisions form the House bill in four areas. I’ll discuss them and then turn to some good features of the Senate bill we want to keep. Continue reading
I want to report to you on where the health care bill is as of this moment. The news is not as good as I hoped it would be. But there is every reason to keep working hard to make this legislation as good as possible. Continue reading
I wrote this about three weeks ago as an op-ed for a local paper. But, by the time the editor got to it, the public option was in trouble in the Senate where it remains. It might be dead this year. But let’s not forget that the House voted for it. And a House-Senate conference committee will have to figure out how to merge the two bills. As we move closer to that moment, the public option, which has been counted out more than once before, may make a comeback. And the fundamental reason is that it just makes sense. That’s why public support for the public option remains high as 60 and 65 percent of the public think it is a good idea. Continue reading
We don’t yet know much about what’s in the compromise the Senate 10 has come up with. But what I’m hearing does not leave me enthused. Rather it leaves me worried. Continue reading
Lou Agre is a friend of mine and someone who has supported my issue campaigns and my campaigns for political office. I’d be inclined to support him in whatever he does politically. But it’s not just a matter of friendship. There are a number of very good reasons for every progressive to back Lou in his race to replace Kathy Manderino in the State House. Continue reading
What part should sex have in our lives? I want to defend one answer to that question, suggested by Tantric sexuality, that says that sexuality of a certain kind can be something that enriches our lives as a whole. (One very important caveat to what follows: I’ve long had some interest in Tantric sex, but have not studied or practiced it in any systematic way. So I don’t want anything I say here to be taken as a serious interpretation of this set of theories and practices.) It has struck me that one way to take the goal of Tantric sex is this: it’s about making sex last. Sex is a human practice, something that we can spend a little time doing every once in while and in a way that brings us pleasure but has little carryover to the rest of our lives. The goal of Tantric practice is not just better… Continue reading
1. Genesis and Exodus 2. Plato The Symposium 3. Plato The Republic 4. Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics 5. Machiavelli, The Prince 6. Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience 7. Wordsworth, whatever book includes Tintern Abbey 8. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 9. J. S. Mill, On Liberty 10. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents 11. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 12. Richard Wright, Black Boy 13. Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur 14. Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire 15. Charles Taylor, Collected Papers 16. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 17. David Mayhew: Congress: The Electoral Connection Continue reading
I sent this as an email to 15,000 of my closest friends, the health care activists in Pennsylvania, this morning. Dear Friends, We have another day or two until the Senate takes up health care reform. Before that happens I want to give you an update about where our campaign is going and what you can do to move it forward. Where we are At this point in our campaign, the most important thing I want to say is that we progressives have to learn how to win. It’s been a long time since we have enacted major legislation that dramatically improve the lives of working people and the middle class. And while, we have built a huge movement and made a lot of progress this year, I’m still not sure we know how win. In saying that we have to learn how to win, I mean to say a… Continue reading
Members of the HCAN coalition are divided about the Stupak amendment to HR 3962. Some are pro-life. Most of are pro-choice. As a organization, however, we are working to remove the Stupak amendment from both the Senate bill and the bill that comes out of the conference committee. What’s Wrong With The Stupak Amendment In our view, the Stupak amendment is not about federal funding for abortion. It is much broader than that. It prevents millions of women from getting insurance coverage that covers abortion services and that is widely available now. Continue reading
Introduction I want to set out why, after over twenty five years of thinking and writing about health care reform, and two and a half years as a health care activist, I’ve always been ambivalent about single payer. That ambivalence is well known to progressive activists in the state. To judge by what they say to each other in emails that friends forward to me, let alone from what they’ve said out in the open, I’ve been public enemy number for single payer advocates in Pennsylvania for a long time. Partly that’s because I’m the leader of HCAN in Pennsylvania, and we have created the largest issue campaign in Pennsylvania history behind the Obama health care plan, a plan that has a very good chance of being enacted this year and that embodies our principles not those held by advocates of single payer. But that’s by no means the whole… Continue reading