The Story

When I meet someone who says he was in lower Manhattan on September 11, I apply a little test. Yes, I was watching from an office building on West 17th Street, I say. A high-rise. We had a clear view. Where were you, exactly?

If the answer is

The AMA’s slow and begrudged support to the contrary, many physicians seem ambivalent about health care reform. They are holding out for federal tort reform, which they believe is key to lowering their malpractice insurance costs.

The doctors’ perspective was expressed this weekend in th

First, you should know that the FreedomWorks special ops unit that kidnapped invited me to an undisclosed location for discussion has treated me very well. I must say, that sodium pentathol stuff does clear your mind! And now that I’ve agreed to tell the truth about Obamacare, my hosts have

Sometime this week, the last scraps of asbestos and other toxic substances will be removed from the Deutsche Bank building on 130 Liberty Street, lower Manhattan, according to officials. And by early 2010, the ruined building will be entirely demolished, they say.

Yeah, right.

We were also told the

Since Bobby Jindal has about as much hope of being POTUS as I have of being Pope, I hope the insurance industry gave him a good tip for the pack of lies Jindal published in the Wall Street Journal today. He writes,

The left in Washington has concluded that honesty

I’ve used the phrase “default norm” a number of times, so it was nice to see Michael Tomasky (or at least, the headline writer at Comment Is Free) pick it up. Tomasky’s headline is “Because ‘white male’ equal default human ‘normal,’ see?”&n

Is the Roberts Supreme Court hostile to the environment? Court watchers say that since Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court in 2005, the Court has taken a sharp anti-environmental turn. And the term just ending was a particular disaster for environmental cases. The “greens” were s

I wasn’t going to write about Sarah Palin again today. Really, I wasn’t. I was all set to slog into something informative and useful about health care.

Well, maybe later. This is too juicy. ABC News has an absolutely hysterical interview with Palin the Petulant. For example,

Palin

For most of us, everything we see around us is a projection of our inner reality — our beliefs, biases, thoughts, fears, desires, etc. I’m not saying that’s what actually is all around us, mind you, just that that’s what we see. An ability to see things as-they-are is rare

So Gov. Sanford admits to having an affair. Gov. Sanford, I note, was born in 1960, which would make him 50 next year.

I bring up his age because recently we’ve seen the usual drivel from some troglodytes objecting to the nomination of a woman to the Supreme Court because

Last week the American Medical Association came out against the most important part of President Obama’s health care reform proposal — public health insurance that would compete with private insurance plans. Now there are reports that President Obama is considering “reducing malpra

This is an update to my last post, "Where Does Sotomayor Stand on Tort?" At Bloomberg.com, Greg Stohr has an analysis of the voting record of Judge Sonia Sotomayor that should be heartening to supporters of the 7th Amendment right to sue for damages.

There is

During the eight long years of the Bush Administration, Washington bureaucracies were filled with political hires more interested in serving an agenda than in serving the people. The change in administration didn’t make these ideological worker bees disappear, and the results continue to vex u

This week Republicans in Congress stood up for the right of incompetent Wall Street executives to be overpaid and undertaxed. You might GOP legislators were just making fools of themselves and can be ignored. But out of the AIG limelight the GOP was moving on other fronts with faux populist