The Affordable Care Act a few weeks later

So, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed the House on March 21st and now it's all a matter of implementation. How is that going? Well, in an entirely predictable and in fact, widely predicted move, the private, for-profit health insurance industry is working very energetically to find all the possible loopholes and fuzzy definitions and anything else they can use to defeat the whole purpose for passing the ACA to begin with. That this was going to be a problem became clear on the 25th, less than a week after the ACA was passed in the House

President Obama endured some mockery from the press corps when his answer to a single constituent question stretched all the way to 17 minutes, but the blogger writing about it was cheered by the fact that Obama defended the whole idea of activist government that picks up where private enterprise leaves off, where private enterprise simply can't do the necessary job.

On the other side of the aisle, right-wingers are absolutely miserable about it. They feel America is becoming "indistinguishable from the Canadians and the Europeans" and, wonder of wonders, they consider that to be a bad thing. Looking at the comments on the Inky's letters page one would get the impression that the tea partiers were not screaming, tantrum-throwing, out-of-control wingnuts, but were instead just cheerful, earnest, honest citizens who were outraged about out of control government spending, which of course, didn't bother them the slightest under the last president. Fortunately, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) doesn't appear to think that there's much chance that the ACA will be repealed, even as Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) appears to be pining for the "good ol' days," which doesn't sound like he means just the pre-Obama era, but appears to share with many other right-wingers a desire to return to the "Gilded Age" of the 1880s. A major problem with that, of course, is that the Republican Party is caught between a rock and a hard place where spending on specific projects is actually quite popular, even if spending in general is theoretically frowned upon.

Oh, and encouraging words on interrogation practices from the head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service

And both I and a fellow progressive wrote about the problems the Roman Catholic Church is having with the Pope and pedophilia.


And no, I'm very unimpressed with the Vatican's pushback published in the Inky.


Update: Digby is the blogger who came up with the term "The Village" with which so many describe the traditional media press corps today. It's funny how "The Villagers" do these cute little anthropological-type expeditions out into "The Real America" and always seem to find right-wingers. They never appear to run across any liberal or non-white groups and they have a tendency to focus on small, yes, villages, to focus on. Hmm. Very interesting how that happens.