TheNextReport

Cracks in the Culture: It's interesting how Michael Jackson's mysterious death seems to have pulverized the emotions of American popular culture. Wall-to-wall coverage on the cable stations has ensured that the strange obsessions of Americans over Jackson's music and bizarre, confused identity will continue to defy easy answers. Turning this sad, and in some ways warped, individual into a Dionysian godhead worthy of ostentatious public worship is as bizarre as the twisted star himself.

Blogging and Social Networking: What a Laugh – At least that’s what I thought a few years back when the phenomenon first arose. There was something vaguely uncomfortable about it – something that reminded me too much of the bubbly predictions about the dot com world a few years prior. The job that I lost as a writer for an online webcast financial news service had taught me that placing billions of dollars on flimsy speculative ventures, on new ideas written on old cocktail napkins, on companies with loads of employees and no revenue, was an exercise in stupidity. It had happened because we were suckers for our own technology; we were so enamored with our own image reflected in the enchanted mirror we created that we made long-term financial assumptions that were extremely foolish and ultimately deadly. Some of the people who made those assumptions were renowned financial professionals, bankers, venture capitalists who were experts in investing. So the idea of another at bat after th...

Who's on the Side of the American People? The upcoming debate over health care bills in Congress should be a clear test of the mettle of the Democratic Party, which swept to an electoral majority last fall. Make no mistake about it. The chance for meaningful health care reform may either live or die with Barak Obama's skills as a leader. As I predicted in a recent blog post, by taking the single-payer health plan concept off the negotiating table at the start, the Democratic leadership has turned the "public option" component of the administration's plan into a convenient target for Republicans to chip away at. The operative question is: Have the Dems learned their lesson from the Republican rejections of the stimulus package, the Obama budget and other critical votes where the GOP overwhelmingly refused to offer any support to the administration? While it is understandable that the White House would prefer a bi-partisan agreement on the shape of the most importan...

Negotiating Health Care Reform For the next several weeks, the Obama administration will be putting the full-court press on Congress to come up with a health care bill that will reflect his vision of reform. Political progressives and a variety of professional medical associations around the country have been ratcheting up the pressure on the Democratic Party and the Senate Finance Committee Chairman Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.) criticizing them for excluding advocates of a "single-payer" system from initial discussions on reform. Single-payer, the system in which the government acts as sole provider and administrator of a national health plan, has broad support around the country. Though it is similar to the type of health plan used in most industrialized countries, the Democratic leadership in Congress announced that it would not consider it for inclusion in the national debate because it was deemed to be "politically unfeasible." This precipitous bit of cowardice...