Tidings of Comfort
Paul Krugman, NY Times
..for all its flaws and limitations, it’s a great achievement. It will provide real, concrete help to tens of millions of Americans and greater security to everyone. And it establishes the principle - even if it falls somewhat short in practice - that all Americans are entitled to essential health care. Many people deserve credit for this moment. What really made it possible was the remarkable emergence of universal health care as a core principle during the Democratic primaries of 2007-2008 - an emergence that, in turn, owed a lot to progressive activism.

The Next Step on Health Reform
Editorial, NY Times
The Senate’s passage of a heath care reform bill over lockstep Republican opposition required every single member of the Democratic caucus to vote to override Republican filibusters. It will take equal political will to fuse the Senate’s bill with the more expansive reform approved by the House and enact a final version. The House bill was approved by 220 to 215, and the Senate bill passed with 60 votes, the minimum needed to defeat a filibuster. The risk is that anything that upsets the balance of compromises in either chamber could doom the effort.

The Obama Way
Ross Douthat, NY Times
President Obama baffles observers because he's an ideologue and a pragmatist all at once. He’s a doctrinaire liberal who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf. He has the policy preferences of a progressive blogger, but the governing style of a seasoned Beltway wheeler-dealer.

Catholic Group Supports Senate on Abortion Aid
David Kirkpatrick, NY Times
Just days before the bill passed, the Catholic Health Association, which represents hundreds of Catholic hospitals across the country, said in a statement that it was "encouraged" and "increasingly confident" that such a compromise "can achieve the objective of no federal funding for abortion." An umbrella group for nuns followed its lead. The same day, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops called the proposed compromise "morally unacceptable."

Hope, hopelessness and faith
Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
..what we really need is not hope. Hope can be the enemy of action. Hope can be a drug that maroons us in cafes in long, satisfying conversations that never lead anywhere but back to the cafe the next night. In hope's place I nominate faith. Not religious faith, but what George Santayana calls "animal faith."..faith in the world: that it is there, that it won't give way underfoot when you take the next step, that you just know which way to turn and how to proceed. It's the faith your hands have and your feet have.....the cat jumps on the tree and starts climbing..The cat has an animal faith in the tree and it loves the tree, loves itself, loves jumping and climbing--no self-examination there, no introspection about belief.

Tumbling Real M3 Promises Intensified Depression; Major Double-Dip Downturn Should Be Obvious by Mid-Year 2010
John Williams, Shadow Government Statistics (subscription required)
This relatively brief Commentary during the holiday hiatus in economic releases is one of the most important pieces put out during the current economic and systemic solvency crises. It begins, using now-available hard data, to lay the base for a severe second downleg in what already is the longest and deepest economic contraction since the first-downleg of the Great Depression in the early-1930s..While consensus forecasters and the hypesters on Wall Street and in the Administration already have pronounced the economy to be in recovery, the best case I can make for recent economic reporting is that broad business activity in some areas has flattened out at a low-level plateau of activity..what lies ahead should be a renewed plunge in economic activity that will be recognized by all.

India mines riches as west’s back office
James Lamont, Financial Times online
Business processing is set to overtake IT outsourcing in terms of revenue as Indian vendors diversify into services such as human resources, payroll management and legal services. Moreover, leading Indian outsourcing companies are themselves opening operations in other countries, such as China, the Philippines and the US..He foresees Indian business laying claim to a rather larger slice of the US in the coming years, in attitude and social mobility as much as business revenues."This Indian industry has carved out a route to the American dream for our workers," he says.

The Copenhagen That Matters
Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times
How long are we Americans going to go on thinking that we can thrive in the 21st century when doing the optimal things - whether for energy, health care, education or the deficit - are "off the table." They’ve been banished by an ad hoc coalition of lobbyists loaded with money, loud-mouth talk-show hosts who will flame anyone who crosses them, political consultants who warn that asking Americans to do anything important but hard makes one unelectable and a citizenry that doesn’t even ask for optimal anymore because it believes that optimal is impossible.

The Bomb at the Heart of the System
John Michael Greer, Energy Bulletin
Behind all of this lies the central political fact of the limits to growth: the reduction of First World nations to a Third World lifestyle that will be the inevitable result of any transition to a postpetroleum world, whether that transition is deliberate or unplanned. Metaphors about elephants in living rooms don’t begin to touch the political explosiveness of this fact, or the degree to which people at every point on the political spectrum have tried to pretend that it just isn’t so. Still, set aside delusions about miraculous new energy sources that show up basically because we want them to, and it’s impossible to evade.