Forums: Herbert Nitsch

There is a middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate’s version of President Obama’s effort to reform health care. The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare on Christmas Eve would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it’s a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care. Which is exactly what the tax is designed to do. The tax would kick in on...

The big question on the domestic front right now is whether President Obama understands the gravity of the employment crisis facing the country. Does he get it? The signals coming out of the White House have not been encouraging. The Beltway crowd and the Einsteins of high finance who never saw this economic collapse coming are now telling us with their usual breezy arrogance that the Great Recession is probably over. Their focus, of course, is on data, abstractions like the gross domestic product, not the continued suffering of living, breathing human beings struggling with the nightmare of joblessness. Even...

Larry was like a father to me. We spoke on the phone several times in May just before his death. Larry told me he was in the tent when Patton slapped that soldier and that he came over to Larry and Patton spoke to him. Larry said he wasn't sure if Patton was going to yell at him too and he was a bit afraid. I don't know the html to post a picture here so I'll just post links to 3 photos of Larry. God Bless Larry and all the other WWII Vets to die before him. http://www.rhyner.com/photos/lhb/larrybloedelbronzestar.jpg http://www.rhyner.com/photos/lhb/va_hospital.jpg...

Bob Herbert is now far into the fever swamps of kookland. Byron York: I know it's been commented on elsewhere on the Web, but this exchange from MSNBC's "Morning Joe" is quite striking. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert was on to explain why he thinks the McCain "Celebrity" ad is racist. "The first thing you see are a couple of images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, right? And we see an image of Barack Obama right after that," Herbert explained. And then he continued: "Do you remember any other startling images right there at the beginning? All right....