Need some talking points about Scott Brown?  See the web site RethinkBrown.com.  The front page has a slide show and related videos for each slide.  Below is just the first video.

Ellen Brown has written a very revealing article Oh Canada! Imposing Austerity on the World’s Most Resource-Rich Country.  The summary of the article is:

Even the world’s most resource-rich country has now been caught in the debt trap. Its once-proud government programs are being subjected to radical budget cuts—cuts that could have been avoided if the government had not quit borrowing from its own central bank in the 1970s.

Let me see if I can capture the most damaging part of the story in the following quoted paragraphs:

The debt shot up only after 1974. That was when the Basel Committee was established by the central-bank Governors of the Group of Ten countries of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which included Canada. A key objective of the Committee was to maintain “monetary and financial stability.” To achieve that goal, the Committee discouraged borrowing from a nation’s own central bank interest-free, and encouraged borrowing instead from private creditors, all in the name of “maintaining the stability of the currency.”

The presumption was that borrowing from a central bank with the power to create money on its books would inflate the money supply and prices. Borrowing from private creditors, on the other hand, was considered not to be inflationary, since it involved the recycling of pre-existing money. What the bankers did not reveal, although they had long known it themselves, was that private banks create the money they lend just as public banks do. The difference is simply that a publicly-owned bank returns the interest to the government and the community, while a privately-owned bank siphons the interest into its capital account, to be re-invested at further interest, progressively drawing money out of the productive economy.

Actually, I have failed.  There is even worse stuff in the article, but I can hardly quote the whole thing here.  You’ll just have to follow the link to the article, and read it yourself.

The Los Angeles Times has the column A telling GOP defection by columnist George Skelton.  The subheadline is “Loss of Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher should be a wake-up call for party in California.”

While this is about California politics, it might be a spreading phenomenon.

Fletcher says his frustration is aggravated by the war experience.

“Any combat veteran wrestles with a sense of survivor’s guilt,” he told me. “I wasn’t any better a Marine than those who didn’t survive. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That gives me a real sense of obligation.

“You shouldn’t waste your life. It is a gift, and you ought to do something of meaning…. I just have a lower threshold for some of the pettiness and silliness that goes on. If the [Democratic] speaker of the Assembly has a good idea, we shouldn’t oppose it just because somebody says he’s the enemy.

“I know what an enemy is. I’ve watched people die. I’ve been to car bombing scenes and seen little sandals where children were killed. I don’t see the other side [in politics] as the enemy just because we disagree.”

Also, he continues, “in the Marine Corps, if you have a mission, you just have to get it done. When I came into elected office, I had that same sense of obligation. I feel that’s missing in the current environment. It’s good to have some on the ideological extreme. But we need more people who want to be pragmatic and figure how to make it work.”

The tipping point for Fletcher came last fall when he negotiated with Gov. Brown to eliminate a corporate tax break that rewarded companies for not building facilities and creating jobs in California. The $1-billion savings would have provided tax breaks for small businesses, buyers of manufacturing equipment and income tax payers who don’t itemize. Republicans blocked the bill.

GOP colleagues told Fletcher, he says, that “‘it may be the right thing to do, but we can’t let Jerry Brown get a win,’ which is just dumb.”

There comes a time when good politicians figure out what it is they really want to accomplish.  They realize that political games just for the sake of the game is not why they got into politics.

This blog post is meant as an antidote to the collective amnesia that is running rampant throughout the country.  The disease is particularly acute in The Supreme Court.  One might expect this convenient amnesia from the conservative Justices who had already decided their conclusion before the Obamacare law was even challenged.  What I find amazing is that among the Progressive Justices and even with the Solicitor General who is supposed to be presenting the case for Obamacare, there seems to be this amnesia.  The fact that the newspapers cannot remember what was in their own pages less than 10 years ago does not surprise me at all.  So why is a senior citizen with failing memory the only one who seems to remember?

From the article Newt Gingrich is no conservative we have the quote:

In 2003, Gingrich stumped hard for President George W. Bush’s prescription drug bill, which has added about $17 trillion to Medicare’s unfunded liabilities. “Every conservative member of Congress should vote for this Medicare bill,” Newt urged.

From WikiPedia:

Beginning in 2006, a prescription drug benefit, called Medicare Part D, was made available. Coverage is available only through insurance companies and HMOs and is voluntary.

From the Medicare web site:

What Is the Part D Late Enrollment Penalty?

The late enrollment penalty is an amount added to your Part D premium. You may owe a late enrollment penalty if, at any time after your initial enrollment period is over, there is a period of 63 or more days in a row when you don’t have Part D or other creditable prescription drug coverage.

Medicare Prescription Drug Coverage (Part D)

Medicare offers prescription drug coverage to everyone with Medicare. If you decide not to join a Medicare drug plan when you’re first eligible, and you don’t have other creditable prescription drug coverage, or you don’t get Extra Help, you’ll likely pay a late enrollment penalty.

To get Medicare prescription drug coverage, you must join a plan run by an insurance company or other private company approved by Medicare. Each plan can vary in cost and drugs covered.

Does this sound voluntary to you?  If you don’t volunteer, you pay a stiff penalty, sort of like Obamacare.  So much for the dependability of WikiPedia.

The Boston Globe is carrying the Associated Press story Many health care mandates already exist in US.  The article  cites many precedents and yet fails to mention the Bush plan which is most similar to the Obamacare plan.  So much for the credibility of The Associated Press.

My real find is Star Talk Radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson.  In The Space Between Your Ears episode, he suggested doing a Google search on “Moon O’Reilly”.  This search led me to the video below.

Apparently there is a lot of empty space between Bill O’Reilly’s ears.

Truthout has the story Is There More to Sen. Snowe’s Resignation Than Congress’s “Crumbling Center”?

Snowe’s announcement she will not seek another term in the Senate may have little to do with “civility” or “loss of the center” within contentious politics and more to do with the fact her husband is knee-deep in controversy over an educational for-profit college chain know as Educational Management Corporation or Wall Street ticker (EDMC).

I am sure there must be room for inventing another of Greenberg’s Laws here, but I just haven’t figured out what it is yet.

If there isn’t a law in this story can we at least conclude that resigning from Congress because of a “lack of civility” is about as plausible as wanting to “spend more time with your family?”

I found the Robert Reich column, Reich: Political jujitsu to save health care law, at SFgate.

If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the new health law, private insurers will swarm Capitol Hill demanding that the law be amended to remove the requirement that they cover people with pre-existing conditions.

If this happens, Obama and the Democrats should say they’re willing to remove that requirement – but only if Medicare is available to all, financed by payroll taxes.

So I suppose I ought to withdraw my previous post Conservative Supreme Court Justices Inadvertently Make Case For Health Insurance Mandate before the justices realize that they have shot themselves in the foot.  Now we’re supposed to want them to knock out the mandate so we can get our Medicare for all just as we really wanted.

Reich also notes,

Those who are opposing the law say a requirement that individuals contract with private insurance companies isn’t regulation of interstate commerce. It’s coercion of individuals.

Commentary: Case is not about Trayvon Martin’s hoodie by Leonard Pitts Jr. in The Miami Herald does an excellent job of clarifying the issue.

This, then, is what killed Trayvon Martin, the fact that we are so stubbornly convinced of that redundancy that a boy walking home carrying nothing more threatening than Skittles and iced tea can become a source of terror sufficient for a George Zimmerman to stalk him and to kill him.

It doesn’t matter if he wore a hoodie.

It doesn’t matter if he punched Zimmerman.

It doesn’t matter why he was suspended from school.

What matters is that he is unavailable for comment about those things, and always will be. What matters is that none of them changes the essential truth of what this is about.

Though innocent of any crime, Trayvon Martin was gunned down by George Zimmerman. He was sacrificed for all our fears.

When people are armed with lethal weapons and they have stereotypical assumptions about the motives of a certain class of people that they meet, then it is almost inevitable that a situation like this one will occur.  What can we do to lessen the chance that the people who are subject of this type of stereotyping will be needlessly put in danger, and what can we do to lessen the chances that people who hold these stereotypical beliefs will end up taking actions that they will regret for the rest of their lives?

If we can have the Etch-A-Sketch presidential candidate, why not Etch-A-Sketch Senators? Or perhaps we ought to vote for Elizabeth Warren instead.

McClatchy has the article On Day 2, Supreme Court health care arguments center on mandate.

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. presented the case for the Obama administration’s side.

Unconvinced, conservatives pressed Verrilli for what limits might be imposed if Congress were permitted to impose the insurance mandate. Roberts asked about requiring cellphones to call emergency services, Alito asked about mandatory burial insurance, and Scalia asked about compulsory broccoli consumption.

I must admit, that before reading this article, I did wonder the how insurance mandate could be justified under the Constitution in the face of arguments like this.

Verrilli stressed throughout his hour at the lectern that the 40 million uninsured Americans posed what he called “an economic problem” that Congress is empowered to fix.

I then realized that the obvious answer to the conservative judges’ questions is that unlike the health care issue, a cellphone mandate, a burial insurance mandate, or a broccoli mandate would not be an effort to try to solve a national emergency situation that is on track to bankrupt the country if it is not solved.

I looked up the topic of The Constitution is not a suicide pact on WikiPedia.

“The Constitution is not a suicide pact” is a phrase in American political and legal discourse. The phrase expresses the belief that constitutional restrictions on governmental power must be balanced against the need for survival of the state and its people. It is most often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, as a response to charges that he was violating the United States Constitution by suspending habeas corpus during the American Civil War. Although the phrase echoes statements made by Lincoln, and although versions of the sentiment have been advanced at various times in American history, the precise phrase “suicide pact” was first used by Justice Robert H. Jackson in his dissenting opinion in Terminiello v. Chicago, a 1949 free speech case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. The phrase also appears in the same context in Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision written by Justice Arthur Goldberg.

In the face of certain bankruptcy of the Federal Government and the country, surely the Congress is empowered to enact reasonable measures to save the country. I doubt that the framers of the Constitution imagined that the document should be construed as restricting the government from reacting to an existential threat to the country.

Here is my letter to the editor of The Boston Globe that was published on March 29, 2012.

For those with access to The Boston Globe here is the link to my letter to the editor.

In case my letter left any doubts, here is a picture that explains my idea of where the threat of exploding health care costs sits in relation to the boundary of permissible federal regulation without explicit enumeration in the constitution,