Tab dump

Hold on a minute...where's my witty, weekend based comment?

Ok, I'll give it a go...

Ezra would like to wish you a good weekend but Bart Stupak introduced an amendment to stop us spending our own money in the way we wanted, so he couldn't. The Senate are working on this at the moment and Ezra hopes normal service will be resumed next week.

Sorry Ezra, not as good as yours normally are but I hope it'll do for now.

Keep up the good work.

Dan from the UK.

How can you support any of these horrible bills and then say you would accept the Dutch or Swiss systems? That's like saying you are a vegan but you eat free range beef.

I don't know where the comment about Dutch and Swiss systems came from. The progressives in this country never really tried to engage anyone in a discussion of *universal* coverage. They whined because Single-payer was "off the table" then went to the "public option" insurance plan.

I have yet to read anything from the public option supporters that acknowleges the fact that a separate public plan is antithetical to the notion of *universal* care. Universal care does not fragment the citizenry into myriad programs; it puts everyone in the same program.

Adding yet another fragment to an already fragmented coverage scheme doesn't equate to universal care, it's just more of the same.

Singapore would be vastly better than any of the plans we have on the table-- or any of the European plans.

That anti-Stupak memo may be the dumbest yet (well, let's set aside the rants that the amendment is somehow "theocratic").

To wit: it opens, as the commenter above does, by complaining that people can't spend their own money on abortion insurance. That's of course a blatant lie, and contradicted just down the page, where the "riders" are discussed. But, ah, we are told that people won't buy the riders (with their own money) because, after all, pregnancies that end in abortion are usually unplanned, so who would buy insurance for them? How can so-called health care experts and wonks peddle such nonsense? The whole point of any sort of insurance is to protect against the unplanned and unpredicted. People can buy riders if they want to, with their own money.

So the whole paper is a dishonest farce, labeled "moderate" or "third way" or not.

Poached eggs in red wine sauce was the most memorable dish I ate during my trip to France this summer.