At the height of the recent budget impasse, Republican cries of “Shut it down! Shut it down!” filled the air. Call them the voices of the anarchist wing of the GOP. Anarchism: the doctrine urging the abolition of government. If that sounds extreme, it is, but none other than than the patron saint of the [...]

Republicans who endorsed the party’s plan to undo Medicare got an earful when they met with constituents during the recent congressional recess. If the lawmakers paid attention, they learned that Medicare isn’t just an impersonal government insurance program. When seniors talk about “my Medicare,” they express a sense of kinship based on warm feelings usually [...]

Paul Ryan, the GOP budget guru, argues tirelessly that Medicare costs are unsustainable and must be reined in. Not all of his objections to Medicare are fiscal. A piece Ryan wrote last year for the New York Times shows a deep dislike for government-run health care in general and for Medicare in particular. To Ryan, [...]

Recently I attended a sales pitch for health insurance sold by United Health Care, the country’s largest private health insurer. I went to the session in response to an ad by AARP touting the meeting. The ad mentioned, in small type, that “UnitedHealthCare pays a royalty fee to AARP for use of the AARP intellectual [...]

Frank Rich’s column in the March 12 New York Times explaining why it is his last Sunday piece for the paper confirms my conviction that regular columnists have among the toughest assignments in journalism. Rich cited William Safire who compared column writing to standing under a windmill: “No sooner did you feel relief that you’d [...]

Jane Mayer’s piece in the Aug. 30 New Yorker, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama,” has continued to generate an unusual amount of buzz. It turned the under-the radar bothers, Charles and David Koch, and their privately held conglomerate, Koch Industries, into familiar names synonymous with how super-rich ideologues [...]

Common Cause has undertaken the monumental task of undoing the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, the ruling that gives corporations and the wealthy unprecedented clout in U.S. elections. The self-described people’s lobby is zeroing in on two high court justices in the majority, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and [...]

It was all over the news when Federal Judge Henry E. Hudson of Richmond, Va., ruled unconstitutional a key part of the recently-enacted federal health care law. The mainstream press was a lot less diligent in reporting Judge Hudson’s connection to an outfit, Campaign Solutions, whose favored candidates worked to defeat the law. The multiple [...]

Once upon a time I was elderly. I called it quits with that demographic after learning from The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki about the anti-social antics of my former cohorts. Surowiecki wrote that the mid-term election results might accurately be called the “revolt of the retired”. The elderly not only turned out in unusually large [...]

In my work secrecy was a no-no and the right to know sacred watchwords. So when my wife had emergency surgery and the pathology report revealed untreatable cancer, why did I want the truth kept from her? Because she was not an abstraction but a complicated person with anxieties who would be far better off [...]