John Kerry Sponsors 7/31 Faneuil Hall Health Care “Dialogue”

US Sen. John Kerry is sponsoring a health care dialogue at Boston’s Fanueil Hall on July 31 at 12 noon.

I can’t find any information about this at the John Kerry site, but if you go, please post about your experience.

John Kerry’s Democratic opponent, Ed O’Reilly has endorsed a single payer system.

Edit-
In Health Care Reform, Massachusetts Shows How Not To Do It  Read more 

La dolcé vita

My girlfriend and I recently visited Rome. While there, a stray cat attacked her. The injury was bad enough to need a doctor, so we visited a hospital’s emergency unit and waited under an hour for care. The doctor wrote a prescription and gave my girlfriend a shot to ease the pain. We had no idea what to expect in respect to cost: Italy has a universal health-care system, but we were not citizens. In total the doctor visit cost us nothing, and we paid $50 for medicine.  Read more 

It seem John Kerry is going to get a primary challenge. The Massachusetts Democratic Convention gave Ed O’Reilly enough support to put him on the ballot. I don’t live in Massachusetts and don’t know anything about this, but O’Reilly supports single payer.

Kerry Gets Slapped  Read more 

I haven’t found continuous (no edits) video, but this is the most complete I’ve seen so far, giving the context of the student’s full question:


Story here.

I’ll grant that the guy’s somewhat obnoxious, but the police hassle him not only excessively but almost as soon as he starts a pointed question.

Update:

I should add that “obnoxiousness” would only have been justification for one of the event organizers to ask him to pick one question, get to the point, and let the guest speaker answer.

On what basis did the cops get in the business of hurrying up the guy’s answer almost from the get-go? Because the student was merely impassioned?

And on what basis did they drag him off? For verbosity?

Further, the AP’s characterization does not jibe with what the video shows:

A University of Florida student was Tasered and arrested after trying angrily and repeatedly to ask U.S. Sen. John Kerry about the 2004 election and other subjects….

He is zealous about the issues that concern him, but there is nothing threatening in his demeanor, and he speechifies a little and tries to ask three questions when one is the usual protocol, but he does not appear to have anything more violent in mind than waving a Greg Palast book around. So why was he dragged off and tasered?

Read Bob Geiger on Kerry vs. Sam Fox, the Swift-Boat bankroller who’s nominated to be Ambassador to Belgium.

Kerry: Why would you give $50,000 to a group you have no sense of accountability for?

Fox: Well, because if 527s were banned, then it’s banned for both parties. And so long as they’re not banned…

Kerry: So two wrongs make a right?

Fox: Well, I don’t know, but if one side is contributing then the other side…  Read more 

Update: Edited for clarity, and misatkes, and please note, it was Juan Williams, not Juan Cole, who “represented” liberalism on yesterdays All-Star panel.

Let me begin by clarifying the title of this post; it is not aimed at John Kerry, who, according to the SCLM was a has-been before he was a wanna-be and ultimately successful contender for the Democratic 2004 Presidential candidacy.

Still, it was hard to dispel thoughts of had-beens when confronted by the pairing of John Kerry and Newt Gingrich as Chris Wallace’s only guests, outside of the Fox All-Stars, of course, and it seemed that Chris was meant to be taking the pulse of two politcal dead-man walking to illustrate Gingrich has escaped the hangman, while Kerry clearly won’t be able to.

Speaking for those of us who are not fans of Fox News, I can report the hour didn’t work as planned; oh, that depressing musty odor of hasbeenery was present through-out the hour, but it attached itself to Chris Wallace, himself, the Fox all-stars, and Newt, too, and even the very idea of the Fox News Channel as we come to know and loathe it.  Read more 

At Orcinus, Sara Robinson (via) makes some great points about how to beat the bullies of Beltway High.

If I may nitpick, I think she’s a tad over-optimistic when she says: “it won’t take too much conscious effort to make our spokespeople look like serious grown-ups by contrast.”

IMHO, it’s an enormous challenge because, to the general public, Republicans — despite their petulance, naïveté, and incompetence — own all the imagery of paternalistic adulthood.  Read more 

Have we established definitively yet, that this gang of four isn’t just insane? It would certainly explain a lot.

Piggybacking on Lambert’s post Halliburton’s permanent presence in Iraq, , Reuters has a chilling story that illustrates just how unwilling the majority Republicans are to provide congressional oversight for Bush’s policies in Iraq, no matter their attempts to suggest otherwise.

You may remember that when panic set in among Republicans about the impact of the Iraq war on 2006, an amendment to a supplemental bill to fund our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan was passed unanimously that stated clearly none of the money was to be spent on permanent US military basis in Iraq.

Behind our backs, in a late-night Friday conference committee session, the language of the amendment was removed by Republicans.  Read more