Nation-Building

Have you ever had COBRA health insurance coverage? It's the stopgap insurance coverage you get after you leave a job, intended to fill the gap in your coverage until you find a new job (and doesn't last forever, which is why extended unemployment still leaves people uninsured. This in a nutshell why single-payer/Medicare for all is a better system than our employer-provided insurance model, and why since we are stuck with employer-provided insurance, why we need universal insurance coverage reform.) As NPR - exclusively - reminded us today , the "R" in COBRA stands for none other than budget reconciliation, the very process currently being painted as a "nuclear option" by establishment Republicans desperate to stop the health reform train. In fact, as it turns out, budget reconciliation has a long history of being used for health care legislation : health care and reconciliation actually have a lengthy history. "In fact, the way in which virtually all o...

This is a pretty depressing assessment by Joel Rubin at Democracy Arsenal, who just returned from the Herzliya conference in Israel (the premier security summit attended by all major Israeli politicians). It was clear, after attending this conference, that the weight of a decade of American neoconservative failure in the Middle East had brought Israelis neither security nor peace of mind. This situation is problematic for Israeli political elites, who are also concerned that President Obama, unlike his predecessor, will not indulge conservative Israeli politicians in their greatest self-destructive behaviors anymore, especially when it comes to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Compounding this dilemma is the irony that the population supports a hard-line government, despite being frustrated by the policies that it is advancing. For example, the citizens of Tel Aviv loathe settlers, whose representatives hold sway over the Netanyahu government. While settlers hold on to thei...