... he should take away their money. Letsgetitdone writes:

In my other life, in the field of Knowledge Management, I sometimes work on the idea of reflexivity, a favorite notion of George Soros’s, and also on complex systems, a field having to do with the rise, maintenance, and fall of various types of systems, including human organizations of various kinds. Both of these notions are closely related to the idea that to some degree at least we make our own realities, or, as some in systems theory put it, we constantly "bring forth our world."

Burlington Free Press

Sanders, an advocate for a more radical, single-payer solution to the nation’s health care problems, said he will offer an amendment calling for a single-payer system even though he knows it has no chance of passage. A single-payer system is one in which the government is the sole source of financing for health care services.

“It will lose,” he said in an interview. “What I am trying to do, and we have language in the bill to provide the option to states to go forward so they can consider a single-payer system. ... As long as you get the waivers that are necessary to go forward, that’s all I want.”

Crossposted at ZBlogs, Firedoglake and TPMCafe

How can we get repealing bans on first cousin marriage on the US legislative agenda?

I think it would clearly help in getting started to consider why it has not already been raised as an issue, given facts like that no other Western country prohibits it and that the genetic arguments have been shown to be hollow.

I can see at least two big reasons why it's been neglected:

Who knew? But it's nice to see it all put together:

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Because it’s not the best we can do. It mandates people purchase private insurance. It is a $70 billion giveaway to private insurance companies and locks in this system that’s the problem, not the solution.

I know, you're shocked. Ian Welsh:

The last couple weeks have been very revealing as to what various people, including politicians, ["]progressive["] bloggers and activists, are really willing to fight for, and what their bottom line really is.

This is a transcript of the chat I had with Matthew Kerbel about his new book celebrating the "netroots," including groups like Daily Kos and Open Left which he considers to be part of "the Left." In this chat I tried to pin him down more specifically about what he meant by "the Left" and "progressives." First I'll post the Firedoglake summary so you can get more of an idea of what his book is about, and then the chat.

Guess Who's Going To Administer Any Public Option? Insurance Companies.

Via Raw Story, some news that really isn't such a big deal. Third-party administrators are already a cash cow for the insurance industry, but my guess is that this contract will have a lot of built-in cost controls:

Simon Johnson:

Competition between banks is good – on this ["immaculate regulation" advocate Charles] Calomiris and I agree. We differ with regard to whether allowing large quasi-monopoly banks to dominate the landscape (e.g., Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase today) is helpful to competition in any sense.

We should also throw into the mix three additional considerations.

Surprise! If the pollsters ask about the public option that's really on offer (the switch) instead of the public option that lying pony-infested groupthinking "progressives" have convinced themselves is or might be on offer (the bait), people think it's shit.

Group Pickets Health Care Provider in 9-city Protest
WellPoint locked the lobby doors and police stood on guard. The protest was peaceful but pointed -- with participants blaming the insurance companies for current problems and accusing the president of breaking his campaign promise to bring real reform.

I, too, have been irritated by the administration's failure to take a stand against "progressive" bloggers!

[Cross-posted to OpenLeft. Feel free to add comments over there, too. --lambert]

The blogosphere is all atwitter over Alan Grayson's powerful rhetoric on health care insurance reform -- and don't get me wrong, I'm all for effective rhetoric.* Grayson said:

44,789 Americans die every year according to the Harvard study. and you can see it by going to our website at grayson.house.gov. That is 10 times more than the number of Americans who have died in Iraq and who died in 9/11. but that was just once. this is every single year. That's right. every single year.

Take a look at this. Read it and weep. And I mean that, read it and weep, because of all these Americans who are dying because they don't have health insurance. Now, I think we should do something about that and the democratic health care plan does do something about that. It makes health care affordable for those who can't afford insurance and it saves these peoples' lives.

Leave aside the fact that co-authors of Harvard study Grayson cites are single payer advocates; we're used to the public option crowd stealing the good stuff. The more the merrier!

What really gets me is that Grayson's wrong on one very obvious and important fact: