Yes! We should celebrate the passing of this Health Care Bill in the House. Yes, this is the way democracy has worked from its start in this country with its Declaration of Independence for white men (not women, not slaves, etc.) - pretty much a mess at the start, a...

A few weeks back, a number of my friends sent me the same article from the New York Times Magazine, "The Holy Grail of the Unconscious", by Sara Corbett. It was about Carl Jung's long-suppressed Red Book, finally to be published. The article explains how Jung's family kept the...

I have just finished reading a quite amazing piece in Vanity Fair: "Wall Street's Near Death Experience," by Andrew Ross.

An astonishing piece if only half of it's true, and I suspect much more than half is correct. It chronicles in a very personal way what happened with...

It has struck me (I'm not quite sure why today) that those who are in charge -- from the White House, through the gleaming halls of Congress, around plump Wall Street, in the upper, corner offices of the conglomerates and banks -- all those folks (deep in their hearts) feel...

Okay, I'm over reacting. After all, Ford didn't take any TARP money so it can do whatever it wants, I guess. It can close all the plants it desires in the US and build sparkling new ones in China, as it was proudly announced today. GM and Chrysler have to...

What happened to trying to unravel last fall's financial meltdown, for that matter what happened to the meltdown altogether? The stock market is back to almost pre-meltdown levels. The bonuses continue to be spread around the boardrooms. The high-end restaurants have filled back up to bursting here in LA and...

I was at a young peoples' party the other night (late 20s, early 30s). The Beatles were playing pretty much the whole time -- still fresh, after all these years. It got me thinking about experts, specialists, the elite classes that now pretty much run our country, the "brightest and...

On Saturday the New York Times dropped the strangest bombshell. It was the leading article on the front page. Wall Street is back into the bundling business and this time they believe they've got it right. They're buying up billions of dollars worth of the insurance policies of the sick...

A few days ago a friend of mine agonized over her loved ones from the deep South raging that Obama was a murderer because his health care plan would sanction abortion. She felt an insurmountable gulf between, which seems to have gripped much of the nation as well, a...

I've gotten my wires crossed around the passing of Ted Kennedy and health care, and the dialogue between the parties and in the media hasn't helped me any. I'm going to try to unbundle my thinking here, if I can.

The first question I have to ask myself is do...

Common Sense -- if it was good enough for Benjamin Franklin, it's good enough for me. You Senators and Congressmen know damn well what the best health care plan is -- you've got it for yourselves, and for the Supreme Court and for everyone that works at the White House....

I woke up out of a dream this morning, acutely aware that while I can go to any movie theatre and see America deeply involved in a space program, (the last Star Trek by J.J. Abrams, for instance, was great fun) but the real space program is nearly dead on...

Yesterday I passed a gas station and suddenly the price had jumped another dollar. A month ago it had jumped a dollar as well -- to around $2.50/gallon back then, wasn't it? Now it's $3.50 (give or take a dime or a quarter, which when you collect all that, not...

It's just not fair. He's a scapegoat, a distraction on the world's financial stage where the real sleight-of-hand-Ponzi-magic goes on unabated. Two trillion dollars -- give me a break -- you think this is the end of it? It's only the tip of the real looming Ponzi-scheme-iceberg which Bernie only...

...because I can't imagine a moment in our history when we've needed it more. I mean Bush and company had some pretty fancy arguments for their use of it, but let's look at some hard realities.

After 9/11 the guys who ended up there haven't done any actual damage to...

In 2007 something huge didn't happen. It will never enter the history books. It will more than likely never even get a footnote.

It was the war between Iran and the U.S.

Up until about a month ago that war looked pretty much certain. So many...

I've been wrestling with the strangest daydream since yesterday, the fifth anniversary of 9/11. It came around nine am east coast time and seemed way off point at first, given the date and time. It went something like this: Karl Rove and gang haven't been manipulating those boobs in the...

As Iran's nuclear controversy heats up one thing seems abundantly clear. George Bush cannot be allowed to use nuclear weapons to solve the problem. There is no more pressing issue on this planet, not the civil war in Iraq, not the crises in our immigration laws that have brought so...