Richard Kirsch suggests improving the Affordable Care Act exchanges by letting Medicare offer health care plans therein. It would give private health care corporations some much-needed competition, thus reducing premiums, and would be hugely popular with the American people -- so all we'd have to do is navigate the oncoming storm of lies perpetrated by right-wing politicians and their "liberal" media enablers.
When you hear that Harry Reid and Rand Paul have joined forces on a plan to fund the federal Highway Trust Fund using a corporate tax amnesty on profits "repatriated" to America from their foreign tax havens, you could be excused for thinking it's the worst idea ever. And it is up there, or down there: the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that such an amnesty would actually cost our government almost $10 billion annually. The good news? Harry Reid doesn't have pull over Senate Democrats the way, say, Ted Kennedy had.
Mallika Rao introduces us to "Five Chinese Dissident Artists Who Aren't Ai Weiwei," because it's always good to know about more than one. Zhao Zhao's "ruined" policeman statue is probably my favorite, with Yan Zhengxue's painting 89.6!!!! Tiananmen a close second. But you'll be sad to learn that the Chinese government took three of the five artists profiled into custody not long before the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.
CBS has "Republican strategist" Frank Luntz on to "analyze" why Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost Virginia's 7th District Republican primary -- without disclosing that Mr. Luntz's firm actually worked for Mr. Cantor's campaign. CBS said identifying him as a "Republican strategist" was enough, but you might have looked upon his effusive praise for Mr. Cantor considerably differently if you knew Mr. Cantor had paid him for campaign work -- or you might suspect that selling an inveterate right-wing extremist like Mr. Cantor as a deal-builder is how they keep moving the center rightward in America.
Finally, former President George H.W. Bush celebrates his 90th birthday by jumping out of a plane -- in tandem, since Parkinson's has basically confined him to a wheelchair when he's on the ground. Of course he jumped out of a plane when he got shot down in World War II, and who am I to deny folks the opportunity to commemorate the moments that made them?
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