J. Goodrich

A recent Bloomberg/LA Times poll tells us that those surveyed preferred the health insurance policies of the Democratic presidential candidates over those of the Republican candidates: Americans also back Democrats when presented with specific plans to deal with these issues: Just over half those surveyed say they favor requiring everyone to buy insurance; barring insurers […]

An attempt to relax the FCC rules about media concentration in specific markets is once again alive. The FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin wants to get rid of that troublesome 1970s ruling which barred media conglomerates from owning both a broadcast station and a newspaper in the same area. The Nation‘s Peter Rothberg called Martin’s proposal […]

George Bush is asking the Congress for an additional 46 billion dollars for the Iraq war effort. The sum includes $3.6 billion more for the State Department. This is the same State Department which apparently does not know what happened to an earlier billion-dollar contract: The State Department does not know specifically what it received […]

I’m never going to get the rules of American politics quite right. I have just begun to understand why a live boy in a politician’s bed is equal not to a live girl but a dead girl, and now I have to learn all those intricate rules about how to rank the possible ill-treatment of […]

Kate’s post about the appointment of yet another contraception foe, Dr. Susan Orr, to head the U.S. contraception program made me dig up a poem I once created as a summary of the Republican policies concerning contraception: Condoms fail you; Diaphragms slip. Jellies stain you; And coils can nip. Withdrawal’s willful; Flesh is weak. The […]

This is the message on an anti-abortion bumper sticker. I was reminded of it when reading what the National Review Online has to say about the family of Bethany Wilkerson, a two-year old who has received treatment under the SCHIP and whose story is used as an ad for expanding the program by TrueMajorityAction. Those […]

Politico reports that the Republican party soon will unveil its own universal health insurance proposal to compete with the ones the Democratic candidates have presented. This is exciting. All we know so far is this: “Republicans are working on a plan that will provide access to all Americans to high quality health insurance, make sure […]

A New York Times article tells of the rise of untreated cavities due to lack of access to dentists. Anyone who has followed the debate about what the correct number of physicians in a medical market should be will find this discussion familiar. On the one hand, there is an obvious lack of services for […]

That is how Roger Cohen described the situation in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, to contrast it with the current situation which, according to Cohen, is an “Iraqi hell with hope.” Ok, if Cohen wants to discuss the state of Iraq, let’s talk about the situation for women. As far as I can tell the usual […]

Fred Barnes appears to have an Orwellian Memory Hole in his office wall. How else to explain his recent statement criticizing Barack Obama as not being strong on national security because he was opposed to the Iraq war in 2002, when, according to Barnes, “the entire world believed that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons […]