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President Obama held a rather extraordinary press conference today, to defend his embattled Obamacare website rollout and announce an administrative fix to the larger Obamacare program of people who have had their insurance cancelled. The big unanswered question after the presser was done: will it be enough?
Wedgie: When a political party's "wedge" issue turns on them and instead of dividing the other party, begins to divide their own.
Usage: "Boy, the Republicans are really getting a giant wedgie on immigration, aren't they?"
Yesterday, the citizens of five counties in eastern Colorado voted to "pursue becoming the 51st state." While seceding was on the ballot in a total of eleven counties, six wound up voting the notion down. But Washington, Phillips, Yuma, Kit Carson and Cheyenne counties all approved the measure. The chances of East Colorado becoming a new state are pretty slim, but maybe there's another answer to their pleas for autonomy.
To put this another way, while most focused on one broken promise from President Obama this week, he actually made good on an earlier promise -- which is nothing short of astounding and deserves a lot of attention.
Even though it took a long time to get to this point, it was an effort worth making. Which is why the nations of the world should now start a new conversation in some internationally-neutral city, with the expressed purpose of defining what is and what is not allowable for the future of warfare (and spying). Three major topics of such an agreement should be: passive cyberwar (spying on communications), active cyberwar (virus and other attacks), and robot warfare (drones and other automated weaponry).
"I will not yield to this monkey court!"
Gallup just released a poll showing a large majority -- 58 percent -- of the American public now thinks marijuana should be fully legalized for adult recreational use. This is somewhat stunning news. The "somewhat" part is that this is really only a continuation of a decades-long trend towards acceptance in public opinion. The "stunning" part is how quickly it is now happening. In fact, it might be fair to say that we may only be a year or two away from marijuana legalization reaching a political "tipping point" from which there will be no going back. I wrote earlier this year that gay marriage can now be seen to be over this "tipping point" -- it's hard to now imagine going back to the days of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the Defense Of Marriage Act. Legalizing marijuana hasn't hit this point of no return yet... but it certainly can be glimpsed on the horizon.
President Obama today addressed the problems with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act's website... kind of. He tried refocusing media attention from just the website's problems, and he promised that the problems would be fixed. But he didn't actually admit what those problems were. Today, to be fair and evenhanded, we're going to take a look at the president's statement extolling the good things his signature healthcare reform law has accomplished, as well as the bad things he couldn't quite bring himself to talk about in detail.
The article below was written in June of 2009, when the public option was still fiercely being debated and the outcome of the health reform effort was not in any way guaranteed (or even, really, in sight -- "Obamacare" wouldn't pass until the following year). Somewhere in my research, I stumbled across what can be said to be Ronald Reagan's first foray into the world of politics.
No, the big point missed in the midst of Senator Ted Cruz's talkfest was the moral of the story he read. By now, most people have heard that Cruz read, in its entirety, the classic Dr. Seuss children's book Green Eggs And Ham -- tucking his own kids into bed, long-distance, via C-SPAN. Cruz then doubled down on his point-missing by comparing Obamacare to the story's green eggs and ham. Cruz really has no excuse for this monumentally idiotic mistake, since (as mentioned) he read the whole story from the Senate floor.