The US must recommit itself both to ensuring adequate funding for assistance programs in the area of Iraq, and to maintaining support for resettlement as a durable solution for the most vulnerable refugees.

When contemplating American politics today, it’s hard not to think of Yeats’s line from the Second Coming:

”The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

In the health care reform legislative process, the progressives held true to the slogan that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” and they forgot the maxim that “if you stand for nothing, you’ll end up with nothing.” So, here we are with worse than nothing, with two immoral bills, that do more harm than good, and with every prospect that an equally bad compromise between them will be presented to both Houses for final ratification.

That immoral compromise needs to be defeated. Health Care Reform must be sent back to the Leadership for further work. If Congress is not immediately ready for true health care reform ending the fatalities, bankruptcies and foreclosures within a years’ implementation time, then, at least, a bill must be passed that ends rescissions, denials of coverage or price discrimination based on preconditions, and that limits insurance premium increases to the annual rate of inflation, effective immediately.

From now until News Year’s Eve, the Watercooler will be counting down the top five news stories of the 2000′s. #5 comes from March 19, 2003, the night that the United States launched it’s offensive into Iraq.

Try as they will, Conservatives have not really been able to make a good argument that Obama, by moving away from the failed foreign policies of the Bush Administration, has in reality made America less safe. Instead they have responded with a series of knee jerk reactions aimed at the obstruction and rejection of anything and everything that Obama has either done or proposed.

Bush Administration Al Qaeda ‘source’ Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi committed suicide in a Libyan jail. If only local liars were capable of shame…