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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recap: This is the third post in a series. Part I explains that “tort reform” — an idea being pushed by conservatives as the cure for many economic problems, including high health care costs — has never delivered the promised results, yet conservatives keep making the promise

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

As we approach another 4th of July weekend, there are news stories about veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who are suffering terrible diseases because of exposure to “burn pits.” These burn pits are not some fiendish enemy weapon. They are the creation of contractors hired to

(This is the second post in a series. For the first post, see “The Truth About Health Care and Tort Reform, Part I“)

In 1992, tort reform found its poster child in a product liability suit — Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants, more commonly known as the McDonald’s Coffee

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

It turns out that Frank Ricci of Ricci v. DeStefano fame is a serial lawsuit filer, the sort of guy the Right usually hoots at as being a “lawsuit abuser.” According to Dahlia Lithwick,

• Ricci filed his first lawsuit against the city of New Haven in 1995 for

Tort reform is an issue continually raised by conservative pundits and angry anti-health reform hoards. Indeed, if you do a news google for "health care reform" you will no doubt find a bounty of recent editorials, like this one in the Nevada Appeal, and on Sarah Palin's Facebook page, thundering

This is from the December 15, 2003 issue of the American Conservative, by James Bovard:

When Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up “free speech zones” or “protest zones” where people oppo

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