Archive for December, 2009

Senate Passes Health Care Reform

Posted on: December 24th, 2009 by Kyle. | No Comments

In the first Christmas Eve session since 1963, the United States Senate today passed a historic overhaul of the nation’s health care system. The final vote was guaranteed days ago as key Democrats cast procedural votes in favor of passage. Today’s 60-39 vote in favor of extending health insurance to 30 million Americans currently without health insurance was the culmination of over 70 years worth of work trying to achieve (near) universal insurance coverage dating back to FDR and the New Deal.

Democrats passed the measure without a single Republican vote, including Olympia Snowe (R-ME), who voted for the bill in committee. Snowe had previously said that she would not vote for the bill if it included a public option – which of course was stripped at the demands of Joe Lieberman. Despite this, Snowe didn’t keep her word. She instead complained that Democrats were rushing the bill. Apparently spending the better part of a year crafting the legislation, debating it and voting on it is not enough time.

When Congress returns from its Christmas recess, the House will have to decide on whether they will accept the language (highly unlikely) or send the process to a conference committee to reconcile the House and Senate bills. The two bills have substantially different language. The House version includes a public option, pays for low to middle income subsidies to purchase insurance with tax increases on the top 1% of income earners and has more restrictive language on abortion. The House version also costs less and reduces the deficit more in the long run. The Senate version does not include a public option, pays for subsidies by taxing “Cadillac” insurance plans and ultimately will cost more than the House version. Both versions ban insurance companies from discriminating against people based on a pre-existing condition.

While I certainly have a good deal of concern over the effectiveness of the Senate version, I am a believer that extending coverage to 30 million people is a significant step that our country should not pass up. The House needs to fight to include a public option in order to keep costs down for consumers. It is one of the more popular elements of this whole reform effort. Moving away from a for-profit health care system should have been one of the main goals all along. I thought it was, but apparently some members of the Senate (i.e. Joe Lieberman) have other interests in mind. At any rate, this is the best Christmas gift that someone without health insurance could possibly wish for. A majority in the Senate and the Democratic Party put the interest of the people ahead of petty politics. Merry Christmas everyone!

The Slavery Debate in 19th Century America

Posted on: December 15th, 2009 by Kyle. | No Comments

The United States has come a long way. It was only a century and a half ago that we still had slaves plowing fields, picking cotton and doing the daily chores of their master. Today, we have an African American president named Barack Obama. I think that it is important to not just understand the history of our country, but also the thinking behind these events. Did slaveholders find moral justification for their actions? What moral claims did abolitionists make? Was the American Civil War inevitable? These questions are answered in the words of people that lived during the period of slavery in my book The Slavery Debate in 19th Century America. Below is an excerpt:

Slavery is an issue that the United States has had to deal with since the early British colonies. As Frederick Douglass remarked in 1850, “The first spot poisoned by its leprous presence, was a small plantation in Virginia. The slaves, at that time, numbered only twenty. They now have increased to the frightful number of three million.” The moral, cultural, economic and political impact of slavery in the United States is profound in its magnitude. Slavery shaped the way our nation was formed in everything from political decisions regarding territory to legal recognition and rights of the nation’s inhabitants. This paper will venture to better understand the thinking behind both pro-slavery and abolitionists in the period before the American Civil War.

You can purchase The Slavery Debate in 19th Century America at Amazon.com for Kindle and at Smashwords for iPhone/iPod Touch, PC, Sony eReader and other formats. You can also find my other e-books on Amazon.com as well, including International Political Economy: Free Trade or Fair Trade? and Detroit: A City on the Brink. If you are a publisher looking to potentially publish my work (either a hard copy or a digital service other than Amazon), feel free to send an e-mail to kyle.bell @ gamefreaks365.com.

Houston Elects First Openly Gay Mayor

Posted on: December 13th, 2009 by Kyle. | No Comments

Yesterday, Houston voters elected city controller Annise Parker as their new mayor. Current mayor Bill White is running for governor of Texas. Usually an election of this nature would not make headlines, but Annise Parker is not your usual female politician. She is an openly gay woman in a state known for its conservative politics.

“Tonight the voters of Houston have opened the door to history,” she remarked, standing beside her of 19 years and with their three adopted children. “I acknowledge that. I embrace that. I know what this win means to many of us who never thought we could achieve high office.”

With all of the votes counted, Ms. Parker defeated her Democratic opponent (both candidates were Democrats) with 53 percent of the vote. Her six point runoff election win was triggered after she failed to win a majority of the vote in the November general election in which she lead the pack against numerous other candidates.

Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States behind New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Her election makes Houston the largest American city to elect an openly gay politician mayor. Other cities, many of them much smaller than Houston, have recently done the same. Cambridge, Mass., Portland, Oregon, and Providence, Rhode Island have all elected gay mayors.

GOP Becoming Party of Crazies

Posted on: December 11th, 2009 by Kyle. | No Comments

The Republican Party is moving far to the right, as was expected following the exit of independent voters in 2006 and 2008. The Tea Party wing of the party is clearly winning out. Two polls confirm the radical thinking of the few remaining members. The polling firm PPP asked respondents whether Barack Obama won last year’s election legitimately. According to the poll, “a 52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately.”

President Barack Obama won the election by 10 million votes. Not only did he win traditional swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, he also carried states that traditionally leaned Republican such as Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina and Nevada. For an organization with very limited resources, Republicans seem to think that ACORN has the ability to steal elections even in states with Republican governors (such as Indiana, Florida and Nevada) running the show.

A poll taken in September found that “42 percent of Republicans believe that President Obama was not born in the United States, while 22 percent still remain uncertain of his birthplace origin.” Finally, a third poll showing just how crazy the Republican Party has become asks respondents whether the president should be impeached. While only 20 percent of Americans support such action, 35 percent of Republicans believe that President Obama should be impeached.

The only grounds for impeachment, according to the Constitution are for “high crimes and misdemeanors”, something that arguably could be used against say – President Bush for ordering the use of torture and misleading the nation into a war. What exactly President Obama has done that constitutes a high crime – other than enact policies that the country voted for – I’m not quite sure.

These types of beliefs don’t mesh well with mainstream America. Believing that our president is not only illegitimate, but a secret Muslim born in another country is considered loony – even in most conservative circles. The Tea Party movement is clear in what they want to do. “Our goal is to take over the Republican Party,” Matt Kibbe said on Hardball. If the Republican Party does not get their crazy elements under control, a year in which they could make inroads, 2010 may end up seeing more Democrats getting elected to Congress.

Mayor: Obama Muslim Intent on Blocking Christmas Specials

Posted on: December 9th, 2009 by Kyle. | No Comments

Add this to the growing number of crazy right wing conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama. The mayor of a Memphis suburb not only believes that our president is a Muslim, but that he recently gave his Afghanistan troop surge speech in order to – you guessed it – prevent ABC from airing A Charlie Brown Christmas.

“We sit the kids down to watch ‘The Charlie Brown Christmas Special’ and our muslim president is there, what a load… try to convince me that wasn’t done on purpose,” Mayor Russell Wiseman of Arlington, Tennessee wrote on his Facebook page. It was picked up by CBS affiliate WREG.