I sure hope Matt Taibbi is wrong…

Matt Taibbi, who has been one of the best writers out there writing about the crash of our economy and the resulting recession, has a pretty pessimistic post today about the health care reform situation.  And while I hope and pray that he is wrong, I fear that he is right… The monied interests entrenched against any serious reform have basically bought off all of the republicans and enough idiot democrats that I despair for any serious reform.

I wonder when we’ll really figure it out, and see that every other first world country achieves better health results for a fraction of the money we spend, and manage to cover EVERYONE.

America’s Health Insurance “System”

A great catch by Digby, who notices that we’ve become like Soviet Russia in one way… although we don’t have lines to buy bread, we have lines to get health care.

As those opposed to health care reform in this country say, at least we don’t ration care! *sigh* Of course, the truth of the matter is that in other, civilized, countries, they ration care by how sick you are.  In this country, we ration care by how much money you have.

The REAL rate of unemployment

The recent rise in the “official” unemployment rate to 9.5% has created a lot of concern, especially since it unemployment has grown faster than the Obama administration predicted.  This in turn has led to calls for a second stimulus (unfortunately, most people don’t realize that there were a great many economists calling for the first stimulus to be even larger… why they don’t know this is thanks to our wonderful traditional media, who parrot every right-wing talking point as if it were the sermon on the mount).

However, as Charles Lemos points out at MyDD, the official unemployment statistics bandied about severely undercount the numbers of people out of work.  The actual numbers of people who are unable to work at all, or who are working part-time when they would rather be working full-time, is 16.5%, and there are several states where the numbers are 20% or higher.  Even worse, those numbers are still going to go up.

Thanks, Dubya!

A reasonable football playoff proposal…

The folks over at Football Outsiders have come up with a pretty good playoff proposal for Div I FBS College Football.  It incorporates all the conference champs, 5 at-large teams, and allows for the continuation of the current bowl system.  The only things that are dealbreakers are probably the elimination of the conference championship games, and the removal of the 12th game of the regular season.

But overall, I think it’s a very workable proposal.