The Samaritan’s Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor?
by Deborah Stone
Nation Books, 2008
292 pages
Notes & Appendix

In her 1993 speech on health care, Hillary Clinton argued that America needed a new a “politics of meaning,” and was roundly criticized as being some kind of left wing, new-age kook. While then First Lady Clinton backed away from the phrase, almost twenty years later Deborah Stone is calling for the same thing.

Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney sent an Email around on Sunday in which she wrote:

"[I]t has just now come to my attention that a 'journalist' who suggested that I be lynched was actually being paid by our own government to say that. Now, when I reported it to the FBI, how in the world was I to know that he was at that time on the FBI's payroll?"

"Hate blogger" Hal Turner's lawyer said last week, and prosecutors agreed, that Turner was "trained by the FBI on how to be deliberately provocative" and "worked for the FBI from 2002 to 2007 as an 'agent provocateur' and was taught by the agency 'what he could say that wouldn't be crossing the line'."

Turner is being charged with making death threats against Connecticut legislators and Illinois judges and is apparently going to claim that his actions were legal because he did the same sort of thing when employed by the FBI:

This story has been written up by Wired and by The Southern Poverty Law Center, but without the McKinney angle.

The protests against health insurance reform has laid bare the war between the oligarchy (Ruling Class) against the citizenry. Obama should have described the health insurance problem as class warfare in order to focus the debate. Now, the corporate powers have unleashed a barrage of attacks, most of which are simply false (death panels, abortion payments). The ruling class media eliminated the single payer debate at the outset, and has since limited the discussion from the necessary step of a public option. By the time you read this the public option will be a dead issue. Instead the propaganda machine (TV) is focusing on the false debate created by industry and the ruling class resulting in an apparent fight between right and left, when the fight should be against the ruling class.

The upcoming health insurance vote is so important to me personally, first as a moral issue, and second as a practical matter (after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease), that I intend to hold all Democrats -- from President Obama to those Democratic Legislators who vote "yes" through those Democratic Legislators who vote "No" -- responsible INDEFINITELY into the future, if the final reconciled bill does not include at least a "public option" for health insurance. To be clear, under the conditions i just outlined, i will not vote for any Democrat for anything. I'll stay home on Election Day if the choice is between a Democrat and a Republican--or vote Green if that choice is available.

Maybe Ralph Nader was right, even in this past election, in saying that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the Democrats and the Republicans? Clearly, there isn't much difference between voting "no" like a Republican, pro-insurance company lackey and voting "yes" for insurance company approved bill like insurance company shill, Senator Max Boccus, took his pieces of silver to support. As I have no direct leverage over the senator from the great big state with