As readers of these posts will recall, I’m not the biggest fan of the Affordable Care Act. My view is that the legislative compromises needed to get the ACA through Congress made it an unwieldy mess; that the bungled roll-out was a logical outcome of its Rube Goldberg structure. The claims of the president’s […]

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(Photo Source: AJAM) It’s sounding again like the drought of 1976-77: “Shower with a friend.” “Put a brick in your toilet tank.” “Fix your leaky faucet.” “Replace your lawn with a cactus garden.” And then the pictures: denuded ski slopes, boat docks resting on the bottom of empty reservoirs, dry brown furrows stretching to the […]

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  Amid 200 pages of predictably and mind-numbingly dry text, the world’s seventh-largest oil company foreshadowed something big. Here are the exact words, which Shell buried in the  report’s “risk factors” section: “If we are unable to find economically viable, as well as publicly acceptable, solutions that reduce our CO2 emissions for new and existing projects or […]

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  George Orwell wisely observed that our understanding of the past, and the meaning associated with it, directly influences the future. And as the unprecedented public feud between the CIA and Congress makes clear, there are still significant aspects of our recent history of state-sponsored torture that need examination before we put this national disgrace […]

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(Photo: Hassan Rouhani | Source: Times of Israel) A six-month diplomatic dance with Iran is underway—each step as dainty as a minuet because any misstep is weighted with danger. The issue is Iran’s nuclear research program and the UN inspections that are taking place as a result. And while each side has its own agenda, […]

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