California’s disappearing health care reform

Thu, 02 May 2013 18:54:00 +0000

A VERY STRANGE THING HAPPENED to the California single payer health care bill this year. It disappeared.

This disappearance was no small thing. Single payer has actually passed both California legislative branches — twice — before being vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The bill hasn’t exactly been obscure, if only because its initial sponsor was Senator Sheila Kuehl, famous long ago as Zelda on the television show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Yet, where Vermont begins the year progressing toward its version of a single payer system and Pennsylvania unveils a study of how much money a similar system might save its people, the largest state in the union has no such legislative vehicle, despite the millions who will remain uncovered by “Obamacare” and reports of drastic health insurance rate increases to come.

How owners are ruining the games we love

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 19:22:00 +0000

INSTEAD OF YELLING, “Kill the umpire,” as they supposedly did at nineteenth century baseball games, Dave Zirin’s Bad Sports, in its thoroughly reasonable rant against team owners, suggests a twenty-first century chant of “Jail the owner.” He could have lifted a subtitle from George Bernard Shaw and called it The Intelligent Sports Fan’s Guide to Socialism were it not for all of the flacks currently muddying the waters by claiming that Barack Obama is a socialist. Just as some once thought the target audience for Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism was not up to the subject, there will be some who doubt today’s sports fan’s ability to ponder questions deeper than clutching or choking. Unlike those who see the ritual attachment to groups of athletes in matching uniforms as a sign of mental deficit, Zirin insists that within every sports fan there exists a rational kernel. For he is one of us. And his socialism, by the way, is that of the Green Bay Packers.

Salon.com > Tom Gallagher

California’s disappearing health care reform

How owners are ruining the games we love