By Dave Lindorff

Some years ago, my wife and I, together with our young daughter,
took a circuitous summer train trip through France, Italy, Austria and
Germany. The last leg was an overnight express from Berlin that
deposited us at the Gare du Nord in Paris just at sunrise. Feeling
washed out from the ride, we made our separate ways to the facilities.
I was standing at the urinal with a bunch of other men, relieving
myself, when I heard this awful groaning coming from a stall. The
groaning grew louder and more painful sounding. Some guy was obviously
having a terrible time with his bowels. The agony continued, to the
point that we who were by now washing our hands at the sinks were
looking at each other in puzzlement, wondering what was going on. I
even wondered if someone should ask if the poor wretch if he needed
help.

By Dave Lindorff

When the White House or Democrats in Congress talk about health
care reform, and about wanting to preserve the central role of the
private insurance industry in health care, it pays to look at just what
it is that they they’re so anxious to preserve.

By Dave Lindorff

In an article in the Sunday New York Times, headlined
“Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely,”reporter
Katherine Q. Seelye did her best to damn the idea of government
insurance for all with faint praise.

In honor of Sunday's EMMY Awards, I'd like to give out DEMMY Awards to the best Democrats on TV.

Below are three categories: Pundits, Elected Officials, and Frauds.

We'll open the voting this weekend on Democrats.com, but I'd like to complete the nominations first. So which "TV Democrats" did I leave out?

Pundits

By Dave Lindorff

Liberals are acting all righteous and offended that a member of the Republican opposition, Rep. “Joe” Wilson of South Carolina, would deign to besmirch the “dignity of the presidency” by calling out “Liar!” in the middle of President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday evening.

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

By Dave LIndorff

All you need to really know about the Obama health “reform” initiative is that it is being supported by retail giant Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart, a corporation that was built on the philosophy of treating
workers like dirt (the company famously locks its employees inside its
buildings at night, forces workers who have checked out of their shifts
to continue to serve customers, off the clock, if they are asked for
help on their way out of the store, has bitterly resisted offering any
health benefits, and has one of the worst records of labor law
violations of any company in the country), is now signing on as an
endorser of the Obama health reform effort, saying:

By Dave Lindorff

Reports are starting to appear suggesting that laid-off or
underemployed Americans, and the long-term unemployed, are losing
patience with the Obama administration’s and Congress’ economic
stimulus plan, which thus far has not done anything to arrest the
growth of unemployment, now at close to 20 percent of the US workforce,
at least as unemployment used to honestly be counted in the 1970s and
early 1980s.

While millions of jobs have been lost since the beginning of this
year alone, the number of jobs that have been created as a result of
the Obama administration’s signature $780-billion stimulus spending
package is under 150,000—a far cry from the 3.5 million that were
promised when the bill was being put before Congress.

By Dave Lindorff

If you want to fix the disaster that is called the American
healthcare system, the first thing to do is to clearly point out what
its major failings are, and there are two of these.

The first is cost. America is one of the or possibly the most
expensive places in the world to get sick or injured. The corollary of
that is that it is one of the best places to make a killing if you are
in the medical business, whether as a doctor, a hospital company, a
pharmaceutical firm or a nursing home owner.

By David Swanson

I ran into Creigh Deeds, candidate for Virginia Governor, at the farmer's market in Charlottesville on Saturday. He'd been trailing in the polls for a long time while the two men ahead of him, Brian Moran and Terry McAuliffe beat up on each other. Now Deeds is leading, but only just barely. Essentially it's a three-way tie for the Democratic nomination in the Tuesday, June 9th, primary, with virtually nobody planning to vote and the outcome entirely dependent on who gets their handful of supporters to actually go to the polls.