Whenever health care reform is talked about, Republicans respond in an almost Pavlov-style manner. Immediately we start talking about the evils of the Canadian and British healthcare systems and about the loss of American freedoms. Some even go a step further and claim as blogger John Vecchione writes in a recent post, that there is no health care crisis and when nations make universal health care a goal it also makes conservative parties unconservative.

Such claims amount to sticking one’s head in the sand and defending a system that really is undefendable.

At long last someone had the temerity, or is it courage, to tell the truth about Walter Cronkite. Writing for his blog, the redoubtable Cliff Kincaid, notes that the “voice of God” – as Mara Liasson referred to him – embodied every liberal and radical idea on the political waterfront and to some degree, had had a baneful effect on the news and public opinion.

If there is one notion emerging from the George W. Bush administration that has been excoriated from the left and the right, it was the effort to democratize tyrannical states. The left viewed this stratagem as a manifestation of arrogance, a form of imperial assertiveness. The right (at least some on the right) characterized democratization as utopianism, an unrealistic exercise in overreaching.

When spokesmen for the Obama administration are asked to comment on various aspects of foreign policy, they invariably resort to an incantation which begins and ends with reference to engagement. “We are engaged in discussions…” are the first five words employed in every area of foreign policy from Iran to North Korea.

By Herbert London

In Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward the principal character is mesmerized and put to sleep for decades. When he awakens, the world has changed; the socialist impulses of Bellamy and his technological predictions (quite accurate it turns out) are very much on display.