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This is excellent reading. I would only add a couple of things here. Under "Health care", I would also add a tax incentive to insurance companies for devising affordable plans for pre-existing conditions. Under "Social Security", I would absolutely add means-testing for those with private retirement incomes over $50,000/year. These folks don't need social security assistance. I would also add tax incentives for those workers who opt for a private retirement account.

All of the politics, posturing, and punditry in Washington surrounding sweeping healthcare reform fail to consider one sad, yet important, fact: you can’t legislate common sense and customer service. Give away health care, hand out free prescription medication, provide total access to every living human being on the planet, and you’ll still have people and processes that fail to do the jobs for which they’re paid or for which they’re designed. And that’s because you can lead healthcare providers to reforms, but you can’t make them think. A recent incident placed me in the overlapping positions of unhappy customer and...

ROME – Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe used the U.N. summit on world hunger Tuesday to lash out at the West and defend land reforms blamed for plunging his people into starvation. Addressing the summit hosted by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, Mugabe said the policy under which thousands of white-owned commercial farms were seized in 2000 was a quest for "equity and justice." He blamed the subsequent meltdown of Zimbabwe's economy on "hostile interventions" by "neocolonialist enemies" that have imposed sanctions on his regime. Western countries have slapped travel bans and asset freezes on Mugabe and his...

MIAMI – Immigrants and their families began gathering at rallies across the country Friday to push for changes to U.S. immigration policy, but as a swine flu outbreak continued to spread, attendance at some events was smaller than what organizers had hoped. The area hardest hit by the swine flu is Mexico, also the native home of many rally participants. .. ... Organizers are seeking to channel the political muscle Hispanics showed last fall in support of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. ..

During the budget vote-a-arama, Sen. DeMint offered an amendment to the budget resolution that would have prevented Congress from passing legislation violating the President's reforms by creating a 60-vote point of order against any bill that is not in compliance with them. The Democratic run Senate rejected the amendment 28-69.

Spell me embarassed. Embbarrassed? Embrassed. You and two thirds of the nation can't do it, prompting some to suggest we dumb down the language and spell um like we say um.

State Rep. Lois Kolkhorst said it’s time for Texas transportation officials to talk about real reforms to address the public outrage over the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor. The Brenham Republican’s reaction followed Thursday’s actions taken by the Texas Transportation Commission. The panel adopted a set of guiding principals and policies which will govern the development, construction and operation of all toll road projects on the state highway system and the controversial Trans-Texas Corridor. Bob Colwell, Texas Department of Transportation public information officer for the Bryan district, said the adoption of the guidelines does not reflect the final approval of Interstate 69...

Setting the stage for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Year of Education," a panel he appointed has proposed a sweeping set of reforms that will help define the debate, including performance-based pay for teachers, universal preschool and full-day kindergarten. A blueprint of the recommendations obtained by the Mercury News also calls for: • Billions more to be spent each year to educate English learners and other low-income students who are lagging behind more affluent peers. • A sophisticated new data system to better track students' successes and failures. • A school "inspection system" similar to those used in New York City and...

Space advocates are cheering reports that the federal government is planning to revise the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, rules they say have unintentionally hampered business while trying to prevent critical technologies from falling into the wrong hands. Joseph Rouge, associate director of the National Space Security Office, told a recent gathering of space industry officials that the federal government is in the process of adjusting the rules, referred to as ITAR, and that reforms could come as early as this spring. Rouge made the remarks before the annual Transforming Space Conference in Los Angeles. "The military critical technology list...

In a letter posted at Congress.org, a constituent praises Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-Ariz.) for his "brilliant intellect." As evidence, Mitchell's admirer cites the congressman's vote for the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007.The margin by which the act passed—411 to 8 in the House, 83 to 14 in the Senate—takes some of the shine off Mitchell's brilliance. Still, he's probably smart enough to realize what his colleagues evidently understand: Congress's new honesty and openness are not what they're cracked up to be.The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act requires that special appropriations added by individual legislators be listed...

AUSTIN – State Transportation Commission Chairman Ric Williamson is proud that he can still work a bulldozer, a skill he learned early on the ranch and in the gas fields. Others would say he still drives it at meetings, committee hearings and town hall gatherings. Mr. Williamson, 55, is one of the most influential men in Texas. He has the ear of the governor, with whom he speaks almost daily. He is the architect behind the state's road plan for the next 25 years. He is smart, studious, self-made. And critics, who seem as endless as a West Texas highway,...

PARIS, May 23, 2007 (AFP) - French Prime Minister Francois Fillon pledged on Wednesday that his government would move at a racetrack pace in rolling out reforms designed to kickstart France's economy. "France is a Formula One car. We need to drive it at full capacity to beat the international competition, while looking after its engine and making sure it doesn't go off the road," Fillon -- an amateur racecar driver -- told French radio Europe 1. "We need to move very fast because France has fallen far behind," he said. "We don't really have time to think, there's no...

Could Nicolas Sarkozy turn out to be the French Margaret Thatcher? In certain parts of London there was jubilation Sunday night as Sarkozy easily swept past Socialist Segolene Royal to win the French presidency. "France is on course for a Right-wing revolution," the Daily Telegraph proclaimed. "France's Only Hope for Reform Triumphs," chimed in a blogger for The Spectator. For Thatcher's heirs, it is self-evident that France needs a strong dose of privatization, tax cuts and union-smashing to revive its sclerotic economy, and they see Sarkozy as the man to deliver the medicine. Sarkozy may well turn out to be...

Iran Press Service - A Persian proverb says: “everything which can be rotten is salted, but what about when the salt itself if rotten?”. It seems that even the regime does not believe its own economic statistics? Can you tell us in which situation is Iranian economy? Dr. Fereydoun Khavand – It seems that you are referring to statistics published recently by the Majles’ Research Centre, one of the regime’s most credit worthy research institutes, about the rate of inflation in Iran, statistics that are really shattering. The role of this Centre is to update and brief Iranian lawmakers about...

Traditional values have paid off, says Michael Woodhead in Frankfurt AS a boy, Jörgen Hambrecht was taught by his grandfather that picking apples demanded a certain technique if the tree was to remain fruitful. A good tree will continue to flourish if you pick each apple in a precise manner. Hambrecht has found the principle works for him as chief executive of BASF, the German chemicals giant. The fruit of his labours is the best set of corporate results in BASF’s history: record turnover of €52 billion (£35 billion) and record profits of €3.2 billion. On the day the results...

Jeffrey Sachs is a complicated guy. His first claim to fame was as the doctor who administered "shock therapy" in Bolivia, Poland, and Russia. Now he's Bono's traveling companion. Bono wrote the intro to Sachs's latest book ("My professor.... In time, his autograph will be worth a lot more than mine"), and Sachs gushes all over Bono in the text ("Bono brilliantly brought the AIDS tragedy to the attention of several key leaders of the religious right..."). [...] UN's Millennium Development Goals (on which he is an advisor to Secretary General Kofi Annan), which were agreed to by 147 heads...

The most consequential event of the second half of the twentieth century took place surreptitiously fifteen years ago at a secluded hunting lodge in the Belovezh Forest near Minsk. On December 8, 1991, heads of three of the Soviet Union's fifteen republics, led by Boris Yeltsin of Russia, met there to sign documents abolishing that seventy-four-year-old state. Reactions to the end of the Soviet Union were, and remain, profoundly different. For the overwhelming majority of American commentators, it was an unambiguously positive turning point in Russian and world history. As the Soviet breakup quickly became the defining moment in a...

Benefits agency closes 309 offices The Swedish Social Insurance Administration, which handles all Swedish pension and sick benefit payments, plans to close 309 of its 330 offices. Customers are to be encouraged to use the Internet and telephone to communicate with the organization. "Many of our customers have been dissatisfied with long telephone waiting times and long waits for their cases to be dealt with," said Maivor Isaksson, production director at the organization, known in Swedish as Försäkringskassan. It is planned for Försäkringskassan to cooperate with other state authorities in many 280 communities in Sweden, in order to provide some...

Today, Republican gubernatorial candidate Lynn Swann highlighted the urgent need to end pay raise politics in Pennsylvania during his statewide tour to Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Scranton, Erie, Johnstown, and Pittsburgh. “The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Ed Rendell’s midnight pay raise is just another example of what is wrong with Harrisburg,” said Swann. “The politics of pay raises and backroom deals are getting in the way of delivering results for hard working Pennsylvanians. This Governor squandered his bully pulpit by doing more to raise the pay of Harrisburg insiders than providing tax relief for the rest of us,” Swann continued....

As Vladimir Putin nears the end of what he insists will be his last term as president, analysts can not help but notice how different the country is today from the one he inherited from his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in 2000. Most critics have focused on the way the Kremlin has increased its control of the media and eliminated regional gubernatorial elections. There have also been far-reaching changes in the ownership and management of several of the country's largest and richest energy and metals companies, however. Here, too, the Kremlin once again has begun to play a more intrusive role....