Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson Co-Directors of Social Security Works have written an article called “Has Obama created a Social Security ‘death panel’? In the article they raise questions about the composition, process, and intentions of the President’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform and say:

”We write to raise questions and encourage press inquiry now, before the commission reports, at which point its recommendations could be on track and moving fast.”

And the questions they raise include:

”Q. Have the members of the Commission made up their minds, at least with respect to the broad outlines, making the whole exercise simply an effort by elected officials to escape political accountability?
Q. Why is the Commission apparently working so closely with billionaire Peter G. Peterson, who served in the Nixon administration and who has a clear ideological agenda?”

For some time now discussions have been going on in the blogosphere about the filibuster and whether or not to get rid of it. Nowhere have these discussions been more frequent or intense than at Firedog Lake, where you’ll find them here, here, here, here, and here. Over time, two positions on what to do about the filibuster have developed. One held by many at FDL, including myself, is that the practice of the filibuster in any form should ended. The second is that the present filibuster procedures should be ended, but that the classical filibuster should be restored because it really would not introduce intolerable delays into the legislative process, and it also would provide a needed focus for open debate in a Congress currently dominated by “ruthless” “top-down” party perspectives.

This is an update on my previous diary trying to identify members of the Medicare for All sub-community at Firedog Lake.