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Today, President Bush vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have dramatically expanded children’s health insurance. Bush’s veto is typical  for a president that is as clueless as a kindergartner on their first day of school.  

The bill Bush vetoed, The Children’s Health Insurance Program, would have provided greater access to health insurance for over 6.6 million people, mostly children. Bush’s rational for vetoing the bill was that he, “believes in private medicine, not the federal government running the health care system.” Problem with Bush’s rationale is that private health insurance systems are not meeting the needs of these people. Because of this, people are unable to go to the doctor regularly and instead use hospital emergency rooms, a move that costs tax payers and the government millions of dollars every year. 

Bush also believes that the Democrats plan is a move toward socialized medicine, an area he clearly doesn’t want to go to. However, if Bush had a clue about the healthcare system in America he would already know that the government provides health insurance for millions of people in states all across the country. 

What Bush didn’t have a problem doing was pushing for billions of dollars for his failed, bloody invasion of Iraq. So Bush’s brain works like this. Spend no money and destroy the health of  a large segment of the population and then spend billions of dollars to destroy an entire country its people and its culture. Sounds like a no brainer to me.

Tim Grieve, Salon, October 1, 2007

In a memoir to be released today, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas equates himself with both Tom Robinson in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Bigger Thomas in “Native Son.”

As a child, Thomas says he was warned by his grandfather “that I could be picked up off the streets of Savannah and hauled off to jail or the chain gang for no other reason than that I was black.” As an adult, Thomas says his 1991 confirmation hearings put him “back into Bigger Thomas’ world, a dark, cramped hell devoid of hope.”

The hyperbole here is breathtaking: Thomas’ rapid rise to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court was interrupted, ever so briefly, by allegations that he sexually harassed Anita Hill; in Richard Wright’s novel, Bigger Thomas is wrongly convicted of raping and murdering a white woman and then sentenced to death for the crimes.

But even if the analogies Thomas makes are somehow apt, what’s incredible is how little he has learned from them.

Writing about Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Thomas says that Robinson, on trial for raping a white woman, “was lucky to have had a trial at all” after having been saved from a “lynch mob’s rope.” Writing a dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld in 2004, Thomas said that the president of the United States has unfettered power to declare a citizen an enemy combatant and hold him indefinitely without charges. “Undeniably,” Thomas wrote, “Hamdi has been deprived of a serious interest, one actually protected by the Due Process Clause. Against this, however, is the government’s overriding interest in protecting the Nation. If a deprivation of liberty can be justified by the need to protect a town, the protection of the Nation, a fortiori, justifies it.”

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Paul Krugman, The New York Times, October 1, 2007

In May 2005 NYSE Magazine featured an article titled “American Dream Builder” — a glowing profile of Angelo Mozilo, the chairman and C.E.O. of Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender. The article portrayed Mr. Mozilo as a heckuva guy — a man from a humble background determined to help other people, especially members of minority groups, achieve the American dream of homeownership.

The article didn’t mention one of Mr. Mozilo’s other distinguishing characteristics: the extraordinary size of his paychecks. Last year Mr. Mozilo was paid $142 million, making him the seventh-highest-paid chief executive in America.

These days, of course, Mr. Mozilo doesn’t look like such a wonderful guy, after all. Instead, he’s starting to bring back memories of other people who used to be praised not just as great businessmen but as great human beings — people like Enron’s Ken Lay and WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers.

So far, nobody has accused Mr. Mozilo of breaking the law. Still, what we’re learning from the housing mess is that the crisis of corporate governance, which made headlines in the early years of this decade, never went away.

At this point it appears that Mr. Mozilo achieved the rare feat of victimizing three distinct groups.

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