The House of Representatives returns to work today. Normally we hurl boos and insults when the House comes back, but they still refuse to pass a FISA bill that would give Mr. Bush the big telecom immunity he so desperately wants, so we withhold the boos and insults for now. I don't believe they'd have done the right thing without our help, but that's how it's supposed to work. And they may continue to need our help. And we ought to continue to provide it.
The Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed legislation last week to help poor folks with health insurance; now H.B. 2005 stands before the body. H.B. 2005 would prevent insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions. If you saw Sicko (as I finally did last week), you saw a woman denied coverage because the corporation decided a freakin' yeast infection was a "pre-existing condition." H.B. 2005 would also force insurers to spend at least 85% of premiums on actually delivering care, versus, say, advertising, or gilding the plumbing on the CEO's yacht. Needless to say I believe these are good ideas, and if you're a Pennsylvania resident, you can contact your Rep using this handy PIRG-provided contact tool.
Public Citizen asks that you support their call to "recycle" EPA head Stephen Johnson -- that is, to get him fired. I remember being vaguely satisfied when Tha Bush Mobb tapped Mr. Johnson to the post, because he'd been an EPA lifer, and thus, presumably, more sympathetic to his co-workers and immune to political pressure. Once again I underestimated Tha Bush Mobb's capacity to wreak havoc! In this very space we've been documenting the many ways Mr. Johnson has turned the EPA into the worst Bush Mobb alphabet agency. Lately he's denied Clean Air Act waivers for 17 states because they want to impose stricter environmental standards. Of course, he's argued that state standards create too much chaos and a good federal standard is best. And that, sadly, describes the state of conservatism these days -- its nominal adherents barely understand what the word means.
In other news, our friends at FreePress made the Washington Post front business page last Friday. I know Friday's a slow news day, but I also know the business pages rarely highlight folks who actually agitate for better media, as opposed to more lucrative media, so I'm still impressed. But objective as she tries to be, the author can't dampen her paper's pro-obscene wealth agenda entirely -- in paragraph 4, she says that FreePress "has generated buzz for its aggressive and sometimes controversial tactics online." Which "aggressive" and "controversial" tactics are these? She doesn't describe one until paragraph 29, and it doesn't prove her point. I would think Comcast's packing of sleepyheads at the Harvard hearing -- a tactic designed, after all, to keep the public out of a public hearing -- more adequately fits words like "aggressive" and "controversial." I could go on about paragraph 10, too, but I'll leave that to the social scientists for now.