alias Bruce.

The fatal flaw in the Obama health care mandate is not its constitutionality.

Sure, one can argue that it is constitutional on the grounds that mandated health insurance, similarly to mandated car insurance, is necessary to avoid unfair distribution of the cost of illness. Or one can argue that the health mandate is unconstitutional in placing an undue burden on people to buy something, since one can choose not to drive but no one will be exempt from the health law.

But constitutionality is not the real problem.

The real problem is that the Obama health mandate forces people to buy from a completely unworkable private health care system – in a purported attempt to spare people the unworkability of the very same private health care system. It's absurd, of course. But that is how a corporate-financed electoral system works: only ideas considered tolerable by the corporate sector stay on the table. That is why Obama, after arguing eloquently for a public option during his presidential campaign, dropped it and fled the issue after taking office when he met resistance from his sponsors (and from the even more shameless corporate shills across the aisle).

And so our president, under the watchful eye of the health care industry, offers his version of health care reform: force Americans to buy it from the very mechanism that broke it. This at a time when so much of the industrialized world has evolved to the basic realization that public health care is the most economically logical and humanly fair approach.

Yes, there is good in the Affordable Care Act. Expanding eligibility for coverage is good. Forbidding the savage denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions is good.

But the entire Act is built upon a flagrant lie: the assumption that the American corporate health insurance system can deliver care affordably and efficiently to all Americans. This is a fantasy that only corporate-financed politicians – and some gullible citizens seduced by the hallucination of mega-corporate market "freedom" – can believe. It has forced Obama into a box where he is staking his claim of full access to health care on the pointless premise of forcing people to buy health coverage in a rapacious private-ruled market. And, ironically, even this laughable version of "reform" may very well be trashed by a Supreme Court that sometimes seems nostalgic for Dickensian capitalism.

So the grand question that the top court in the land will now decide for us is: Shall we remain free to suffer without health insurance, or shall we be required by law to suffer the cruel price of purchasing it from our masters?

So let's say you were super-rich

and you and your buddies controlled the money that controls the American electoral system.

And let's say you needed a way in 2012 to keep voters away from dangerous ideas like nationalizing health care and reining in routine clandestine government snooping on citizens.

What would you do?

One really effective way would be to enable a procession of radical rightie presidential challengers, including a bona-fide religious fascist who wants to criminalize contraception, to shift the entire campaign debate so far to the right that the incumbent president – a guy who supports assassination of U.S. citizens and who has used the Espionage Act to punish government whistleblowers more than all other presidents combined – can pose himself as a centrist.

Pretty nifty. If you wanted to guarantee that whoever is elected in 2012 would be much friendlier to a corporate security state than the wishes voters express in polls, this scheme would be a brilliant way to accomplish that.

Just saying.

A theoretical Constitutional amendment

is making its way around the Internet. You may receive an email urging you to send it to everyone in your address book. Before you delete it, take a closer look. It shines a searing spotlight on the ways in which congresspersons and senators personally evade the suffering that their policies inflict upon the rest of us. Me, I'd vote for it. Here it is:

Congressional Reform Act of 2011
 
1. Term Limits. 12 years only, one of the possible options below.
A. Two Six-year Senate terms
B. Six Two-year House terms
C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms
 
2. No Tenure / No Pension.
A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
 
3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.
 
4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
 
5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
 
6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
 
7. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
 
8. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/2/12.
The American people did not make the current contract[s] with members of Congress. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.
 
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

Thanks to Steph.

Here's the good news:

Vermont has voted to create the first single-payer universal health care system in the nation. The state legislature overwhelmingly approved the plan. The governor supports it. It will go into effect by 2014 at the earliest and 2017 at the latest.

Wow. An outpost of civilization. And you don't need a passport to get there. Yet.

The problem with nuclear power

is that its inherent danger – radiation – is simply too great a liability for it to be a viable long-term source of energy.

To be sure, no energy source is immune to natural or man-made disasters. Earthquakes happen. So do floods, tsunamis, accidents, malfunctions, human errors, fires, and terrorist and military attacks.

The difference between nuclear power and other major energy generators, though, is this: When a coal or hydroelectric or wind or solar plant blows up, there is a conflagration and a loss of power and perhaps an awful loss of life in the immediate area. But when a nuclear plant blows up or melts down, there is a threat to life for a radius of potentially thousands of miles affecting possibly millions of people for decades or longer.

A disaster with non-nuclear energy is a terrible thing. But for all practical purposes – as the jewelry ads once said about diamonds – a nuclear disaster is forever.

No matter what the nuclear industry and a corporate-corralled President Obama tell you about the "necessity" and the "safety" of American nuclear power, you should know that when some awe-inspiring calamity wrecks a nuclear facility in New York or Michigan or California, we will fare little better than Japan, and perhaps worse. Any gambler knows to never put more on the table than you are prepared to lose. Nuclear power, by its very nature, puts more at risk than we are actually ready to give up. It sets up consequences that we are unwilling to live with, and it, foolishly, props them up against forces we cannot control. It is a classic case of the worship of pure luck.

If we continue to significantly rely upon nuclear power, the question of a true nuclear disaster in America is not if, but when.

Two more questions to ask about Justice Clarence Thomas.

The first and less interesting (if more judicially pressing) question is why Thomas has so far refused to recuse himself from an upcoming Supreme Court argument regarding the constitutionality of health care reform in which he has a clear conflict of interest, since his family has financial connections to organizations lobbying against the reform legislation. The answer to that question is obvious: Thomas, judging from his history, is a boorishly cynical and self-interested man.

The second question, though, is more provocative. This excerpt from a February 13 New York Times story sets the stage:

A week from Tuesday, when the Supreme Court returns from its midwinter break and hears arguments in two criminal cases, it will have been five years since Justice Clarence Thomas has spoken during a court argument.

If he is true to form, Justice Thomas will spend the arguments as he always does: leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, rubbing his eyes, whispering to Justice Stephen G. Breyer, consulting papers and looking a little irritated and a little bored. He will ask no questions.

In the past 40 years, no other justice has gone an entire term, much less five, without speaking at least once during arguments, according to Timothy R. Johnson, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. Justice Thomas’s epic silence on the bench is just one part of his enigmatic and contradictory persona. He is guarded in public but gregarious in private. He avoids elite universities but speaks frequently to students at regional and religious schools. In those settings, he rarely dwells on legal topics but is happy to discuss a favorite movie, like “Saving Private Ryan.”

The Times piece goes to say that Thomas's only utterances on the bench are when he announces majority opinions rote from written text, relying on Latin and formal legal terms and, unlike most of the other justices, providing no explanations for laypersons in the courtroom. The article also cites the reasons Thomas has given for his silence on the bench: he is self-conscious about his country Georgia accent; he is being polite to petitioners; he thinks the justices talk too much.

So what gives with The Justice Who Has Nothing To Say?

I have never met Clarence Thomas. But it seems to me that all of his explanations for his behavior make a sad kind of sense. Everything I have seen of Thomas from the Anita Hill hearings onward is consistent with his being insecure, uncomfortable with his origins, and intimidated by his peers – and therefore overly formal, pompous, and defiantly reticent in a sneering, adolescent kind of way. That is the way people act when they feel they don't belong where they are. And if we know one thing, it is that Clarence Thomas has never belonged on the Supreme Court.

Clarence Thomas is the rare African-American man who is over- instead of under-employed. He is under-prepared and under-qualified for the position he holds. He was shoehorned into his job – in one of President George H.W. Bush's cannier political moves – in a Faustian bargain that gave Thomas an undeserved appointment in exchange for Thomas's shilling for right-wing ideology and using his blackness as a defense against opponents of his confirmation. I remember those hearings well: how Thomas called criticism of his qualifications and well-founded accusations of sexual harassment against him a "high-tech lynching;" how senators folded rather than reject an unqualified Supreme Court nominee who happened to be black.

Justice Clarence Thomas is the Republican Party's robed whore. And I believe he knows it. And having that self-knowledge has really got to suck.

It's enough to make any man surly, self-loathing, defensive, and uncommunicative.

This is great to hear:

Wendell Potter was the top spokesperson for Cigna Insurance. Then he got tired of lying. Now he is a whistle-blower who writes and speaks about the corrupt, anti-human culture of the health insurance industry. Listen to him in this interview on an NPR talk show. Check out his website as well.

Nothing can kill truth. One way or another, it will out, no matter how much time and sacrifice it takes. It's one of the beautifully indestructible realities of political physics. It may save us yet.

This photo provides some Bible education for Tea Partiers:

It's from the Wall Photos album of the Americans Against the Tea Party site on Facebook. Go and take a look. There is plenty there to make you think, hard, about what the roots of fascism actually look like.

Thanks to Cat.

The unnamed depression behind the recession is happening largely at

the state level, with unemployment in some states well into the double digits and a public conversation now emerging about allowing states to declare bankruptcy. The state casualties are high: layoffs and furloughs, sharp cuts in services, and budgets that are often impossible to balance without curtailing or eliminating things that voters take for granted as essential.

One of the most publicly volatile of these is the current slashing of mental health services in some states, which reverberates with this month's awful events in Arizona. In some ways Arizona is a nightmarish microcosm of the national problem: Governor Jan Brewer, who has a schizophrenic son, has overseen major mental health care cuts even while acknowledging the crucial importance of these services.

But in truth, the nation's mental health crisis got rolling decades ago, when Reaganomics-inspired disinvestment in government turned huge numbers of mentally-ill people out onto the streets. They became, and still are, a significant portion of America's homeless population. And, from Susan Smith's 1994 murder of her two young children to Jared Loughner's arrest for this month's Arizona shootings, lack of mental health counseling has figured prominently in a slew of spectacular tragedies.

It's true that we often can't anticipate what an unbalanced person will do. And we cannot force everyone who needs mental health care to get it. But if we as Americans don't care enough to make mental health services affordably available to everyone, we are in no position to comfortably shift blame to "loose-cannon lunatics" when they do crazy, violent things.

Meanwhile, the House and the Senate fiddle and quibble about spending. And the states burn.

Credo has a campaign daring anti-reform Reps to cancel their own generous federally-supplied health coverage.

For years it has been a source of blazing chutzpah that alleged conservatives who oppose "socialist" federally-supported health care happily accept such taxpayer-funded coverage when they are elected to the House or the Senate. Moreover, their gold-plated coverage is worlds beyond the bare-bones federal health care help meekly proposed by President Obama for citizens.

So Credo has a link by which you can email your anti-health-care-reform congressperson the actual form they can use to cancel the "socialist" federal health coverage they now enjoy. Click it and let them put their health where their mouth is.