Paul Krugman has written the column Vouchercare Is Not Medicare in The New York Times.

Here are some quotes from the column:

Medicare is a government-run insurance system that directly pays health-care providers. Vouchercare would cut checks to insurance companies instead. Specifically, the program would pay a fixed amount toward private health insurance — higher for the poor, lower for the rich, but not varying at all with the actual level of premiums. If you couldn’t afford a policy adequate for your needs, even with the voucher, that would be your problem.

He concludes:

So in voting for the House budget plan, Republicans voted to end Medicare. Saying that isn’t demagoguery, it’s just pointing out the truth.

I think Paul Krugman has come up with the right name for the issue pointed out in the previous post on this blog,   Are They Killing Medicare?

McClatchy news has an article Ryan Medicare plan puts GOP candidates on the spot.

I responded to that one with a couple of comments of my own.

The Democratic plan is to get control of health care costs in all realms including Medicare.

Remember that it was Obama himself who said that the largest issue (and the one that needed to be worked on first was) for future budget deficits was the rising cost of health care.

Lot’s of Republicans were claiming that he should have worked on job creation first  (which he had already done) and left healthcare alone.  Now they are ignoring job creation and want to kill Medicare and replace it with something else.

They scored Obama for cuts to Medicare (actually doing away with the subsidy to private insurance companies called Medicare Advantage)  Now they want to do something a lot worse than what they accused Obama of doing.

Are the people who would vote for a Republican paying any attention at all?  It is just amazing that the GOP thinks that they can get away with all these reverse twists and think nobody will notice.

I noticed something about the Republican’s plans:

There is one consistent theme in everything the Republicans do.  If it hurts the super rich it is bad, but if it hurts everybody else to the benefit of the super rich then it is good.

They thought Obama was awful for taking away the private insurance welfare plan called Medicare Advantage.    Their plan would give even more subsidies to the insurance companies and take it out of the hides of everybody else.

In their eyes Obama’s plan was not bad because it disadvantaged most people.  They thought it was bad because it didn’t give enough to the super rich.  Now they have come up with a scheme to fix Obama’s plan to their liking. They think they can fool the rest of us into thinking it is a deficit reduction plan, when it is in fact a plan to shift more wealth from the majority to those who are already super wealthy.

What will the Republicans do when they have managed to shift 100% of the nation’s wealth to the super wealthy and left the rest of us with nothing?  Will they start asking for arms and legs?

Democracy Now has an article and a video Seymour Hersh: Despite Intelligence Rejecting Iran as Nuclear Threat, U.S. Could Be Headed for Iraq Redux.

Earlier this week, The New Yorker magazine published his latest investigation titled “Iran and the Bomb: How Real is the Threat?” Hersh writes, quote, “There is a large body of evidence, however, including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting that the United States could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago—allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimations of the state’s military capacities and intentions.”

In the interview with Seymour Hersh they ask him about a report in The New York Times that seems to contradict what he is saying. Hersh debunks the spin that The New York Times puts on the report from the IAEA.  So the IAEA report does exist, but it does not say what The New York Times wants you to believe it says.

Knowing the history of how much The New York Times promotes war with stories that are outright fabrications and has done so as recently as the lead up to the war with Iraq, I tend to believe that Hersh’s take is more plausible than the one from The New York Times.

And Richard H. wonders why I harbor such skepticism about the so called reputation that The New York Times has for being THE newspaper of record.

Furthermore, you have to wonder why the Obama administration doesn’t do more to quash this behavior of distortion of intelligence which was so egregious in the Bush administration.  Why would they not want the American people to know the truth?  Who in this administration is still promoting war under false premises, and why doesn’t Obama stop it?

Is there some higher power than the President that prevents him from formulating policy based on the truth?

These are all questions that disturb me very much about the current administration.  The situation may be slightly more leaning toward truth telling in this administration than in the Bush administration, which is the right direction.  It is not a big enough change to make me happy, though.

We supporters of Obama need to demand better from him.  With the obstructionism of Republicans he will not get to have every policy that he wants.  However, he has total control of whether he tells us the truth or not.  For contributing to the coverup of the truth, I feel justified in feeling very disappointed.

ActBlue says about the ad:

Here’s a snippet of the letter the National Republican Congressional Committee and Charlie Bass sent to TV stations running our new ad in New Hampshire:

The Advertisement states, in pertinent part, that “Charlie Bass voted to END Medicare.” This is completely false… a vote in favor of the [Paul Ryan] Budget Resolution was a vote to protect Medicare for future seniors.

We urge you not to ascent to this political ploy… broadcasting stations are not protected from legal liability for airing a false and misleading advertisement…

Is it a lie to say the Republicans are ending Medicare and replacing it with something else?
Or is it a lie for the Republicans to say that the replacement of Medicare with something else is preserving Medicare?

Computerworld has the article Shock: Windows 8 optimized for desktop tablets.  The title is a little misleading and may not immediately convey the import of what is in the article.  The following quote may better show you why the artciel is worth reading:

More importantly, we know how Microsoft is going to manage the jarring transition from second-generation WIMP (windows, icons, menus and pointing devices) computing to third-generation MPG (multi-touch, physics and gestures ) computing.

The Mistake of 2010 is an opinion piece by Paul Krugman.

Somehow it became conventional wisdom that the deficit, not unemployment, was Public Enemy No. 1 — a conventional wisdom both reflected in and reinforced by a dramatic shift in news coverage away from unemployment and toward deficit concerns. Job creation effectively dropped off the agenda.

Beside the substance of Krugman’s piece, which is very worthwhile to understand, I come back to the question of how the “somehow” in the above paragraph came to be.

This somehow comes back to my major complaint about how President Obama and the rest of the Democrats have been handling the key role of a politician, and that is to educate the public about the important matters of the day.  Sure politicians have to make important policy decisions.  However, it would be much easier to make the political decisions if the electorate were strongly and vocally supporting the correct decisions.  The only way for that to happen is to make sure that people are properly educated about which path is the right one and which is the wrong one.

The Republicans may honestly believe that the way to create more jobs and stimulate the economy is through cuts in government and cuts in taxes.  It is the job of the Democrats to make sure that the public understands why such a policy is a disaster as far as promoting job growth.  It is not enough to make sure people know what the Democrats want to do.  It is more important for the public to know why.

With the Republicans lack of numbers in the Senate (and past lack in the House), they have been aware that winning the public debate among the pundits is their best strategy.  The Democrats, except for the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Dennis Kucinich, seem to think that their job as politicians seems to start and stop with their negotiations within the halls of Congress.

During an electoral campaign, the Democrats sometimes seem to understand the need to “educate” the electorate in order to get elected.  After the election they make the mistake of saying “the time for politics is over, now we have to govern.”  A necessary and valuable part of governing is the politics of keeping the electorate educated about the decisions you need to make.  The Republicans, on the other hand, seem to have figured out that politics is something that needs to continue after the election is over.  There is a reason why President Theodore Roosevelt talked about using the bully pulpit that went with his office.

The point about a politician’s job of educating the public was made by Klaus Schwab at the very end of his interview as noted in Interview of Klaus Schwab, Chairman, World Economic Forum.

Rawstory.com is carrying the story Sanders to Obama: Stop selling out.

Sen. Bernie Sanders tore into President Barack Obama on Thursday, accusing him of cowering to Republican “extremists” and failing to standing for progressive priorities.

Please remember that this blog and probably Senator Sanders only say these things in an effort to do what FDR told Harry Belafonte to do for him.  That is to force him, FDR,  to do the right thing.

Read the article Madison Avenue Declares ‘Mass Affluence’ Over to see why:

In a deeply unequal America, if you’re over 35 and your income hasn’t yet topped $200,000 a year, you don’t matter.