What Are the Real Drivers of Health Care Costs?

Informative blog post from Ezra Klein concerning the true drivers of increasing health care costs...for those who prefer actual reality over the alternate reality of the Wingnuts' parallel universe.

Lest We Forget

There are lots of Google links to be found about the Iraq War now that the tenth anniversary is upon us.  There are a couple videos on this link at Huff Post, one highlighting who got it wrong (it's chillingly laughable to watch this one) and--a bit further down the page--one showing who got it right.  Conventional wisdom seems to have it that there was almost unanimous consensus on the necessity of this war, but that is simply not the case.  There was plenty of opposition from well-known people of both parties.

The list of who was wrong is more familiar, and it contains notables from both sides of the aisle.  Here's a partial list:

• George Bush
• Dick Cheney (and the entire clan)
• Donald Rumsfeld
• Hillary Clinton
• Condoleezza Rice
• Colin Powell
• Joe Biden
• Thomas Friedman
• Paul Wolfowitz
• John Edwards
• John McCain
• Joe Lieberman

The list of some notables who had it right includes:

• Paul Wellstone
• Al Gore
• Barack Obama
• Hans Blix
• Tammy Baldwin
• Ron Paul
• Dennis Kucinich
• Ted Kennedy
• Jesse Jackson
• Robert Byrd

Stealing Worker Pensions

For all the Wingnuts who think that terrible union workers wear black hats and benign corporations wear white, here's an article from Bloomberg to consider.  I am waiting for Rick Santelli, Jack Welch, Joe Kernen, or any of other the corporate shills out there to express their outrage.  Just the other day I heard Santelli's typical rant about how awful it is to reward bad behavior.  Apparently it only applies to people whose mortgages are underwater thanks to the economic policies of the gang Santelli, Welch, Kernen, et al.  Hypocrites....

Other People's Children

I stole the title to this post from Paul Krugman's tweet....Matthew Yglesias has a pretty good take (here's the link) on Sen. Portman's welcome change of heart on gay marriage.

From Daily Kos

Here's the  link to a post on Daily Kos .  No further comment is necessary.

Drones

Most liberals oppose Obama's use of drones (cf. The Nation magazine over the last few years).  The only difference between us and the Republican Wingnuts is that we also opposed them when GW Bush was president.  Of course, when W was president, such opposition was un-American and traitorous.  Now it is the height of patriotism.

It's all pretty typical.  Bush did it and it was tough national defense.  Obama does it and it's a constitutional crisis.  Of course, there aren't many things Obama can do without the Wingnuts invoking a constitutional crisis--probably including eating his breakfast.

Market Update

Returning to a theme I have posted about several times before, here is a brief stock market update...

The Dow is up a little over 80% since Obama took office.  (And a reminder:  the Dow actually went down 22% during Bush II's eight years.)

Now, I will be the first to admit that a president can't take all the credit nor suffer all the blame for the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average;  but, still, this is not quite the disaster Jack Welch, Ken Langone, Joe Kernen, and all the other Obama haters predicted.

Just sayin'....