Cynthia Tucker

Ah, the hypocrisy.

Many of the critics of health care reform have insisted that they’re fighting Obama’s plans because, among other things, the legislation would interfere with and restrict patients’ personal choices. They claimed people who like their insurance should be able to keep the coverage they have.

Well, that argument doesn’t seem to apply when it comes to abortion coverage. The Stupak amendment, passed last week and added to the health care bill, will lead to restrictions on health care policies covering abortion. Even if women (or their husbands) currently have policies that cover abortions, they are likely to lose that coverage.

When the House narrowly passed the health care reform bill on Saturday night, it came with a steep price for women’s reproductive rights. Under pressure from anti-abortion Democrats and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, lawmakers added language that would prevent millions of Americans from buying insurance that covers …

Continue reading Abortion: More hypocrisy on health care »

You can usually see the warning signs with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, of course. So it is with Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan, who allegedly went on a killing spree at Ft. Hood, Texas last week, mowing down dozens, killing 13.

Now, after he has already killed many and maimed others, investigators are finding evidence that Hasan was, at the very least, deeply troubled. Perhaps the most obvious sign was a lecture he gave a year and a half ago, in which he warned that Muslims soldiers should be allowed to duck out of fighting against fellow Muslims to avoid “adverse events.”

“It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims,” he said in the presentation.

The first thing to note is this: Many Muslim Americans who are serving courageously in the U.S. Armed Forces disagree strenously.

Some of the thousands of Muslims in the U.S. military worry that one burst of violence could …

Continue reading Part II: A bad man, not a bad religion »

It has been seven years since spree killer John Allen Muhammed and his then-17-year-old accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, terrorized the metropolitan area of Washington, D.C. by targeting people randomly, firing at them from the trunk of their car. Authorities believe that Muhammed and Malvo killed 15 people — including Million A. Woldemariam 0f Atlanta — in a coast-to-coast homicidal rampage that lasted from Feb. 2002 until they were caught in Oct. 2002.

Now, survivors await the execution of Muhammed, scheduled for  9 p.m. tomorrow at the Greensville Correctioal Center in Virginia. I am no fan of the death penalty, but if there is to be one, it is tailor- made for the likes of Muhammed, a vicious psychopath. (Bcause the U.S. Supreme Court decided, rightly in my view, that minors should not be executed, Malvo is serving a life sentence.)

According to The Washington Post, several surviving family members of the deceased — including Marion Lewis, whose adult daughter was …

Continue reading Relief for families in execution of Beltway killer? »

The Iron Curtain — like legally mandated segregation — is one of those things that’s hard to explain to the young folks. It’s hard to explain the Soviet axis, with policies which forbade citizens to leave their country. It’s hard to explain East Germany and the dreaded Stasi, the secret police, who forced people to spy on their neighbors.

It’s hard to explain the decades-long battle between two superpowers that were armed to the teeth with enough nuclear weapons not only so that each could assure the destruction of the other but enough that, if they engaged in all-out nuclear war,  would have destroyed the entire planet. It’s hard to explain growing up with that fear.

So it’s worth remembering the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago today and the triumph of the West over Communism. The battle between open and free nations and closed totalitarian regimes was the defining conflict of the 20th century, and the West won. There are lots of reasons why — including …

Continue reading Explaining Berlin Wall to young folks »

It’s the economy, stupid.

James Carville’s old mantra rings as true now as it did when he tacked it to the wall of the Clinton war room in 1992. The results of last week’s gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey can be largely explained by three words: jobs, jobs and jobs. Exit polls from both contests show that voters rated the economy as their top concern.

Health care reform is a vital issue, as is climate change. (Carville’s sign also had a third bullet point: “Don’t forget health care.”) President Obama was right to press ahead with legislation to improve the dysfunctional health care system and regulate carbon emissions.

But nothing is more central to the immediate anxieties of voters than the economy, which is still raining pink slips. Job-seekers outnumber job openings six to one, and the official unemployment rate now stands at 10.2 percent. According to some economists, the government jobless rate minimizes actual unemployment, which may be closer to 15 or …

Continue reading Voters thinking about jobs, not Obama »

Sen. Johnny Isakson, Republican from Georgia, considers himself a fiscal conservative, but he spearheaded a wholly unnecessary, red-ink-swelling giveaway to the affluent with his expanded tax credit for homebuyers.

I wasn’t crazy about the idea of a tax credit for first-time homebuyers, but in this wretched economy, it wasn’t the worst idea to come down the pike. But Isakson, who used to head a large real estate agency, talked his colleagues into expanding the tax credit to people who already own a home.

To qualify, the home must be no more than $800,000. The program also restricts eligibility to individuals who make no more than $125,000 annually and couples who make more no more than $225,000. Anyone who collects the tax credit but sells the home within three years of buying it must return the refund.

Folks in that income bracket don’t need the help! As the conservative Heritage Foundation put it:

As the United States Senate recently surveyed the wreckage of the economy in …

Continue reading Johnny Isakson panders to the well-off »

The news out of Ft. Hood is simply devastating: 13 dead, 30 wounded (according to the most recent reports) — all casualties inflicted by a fellow soldier. And not just any soldier. The man identified as the shooter, Nidal M. Hasan, is an Army psychiatrist, specifically charged with offering therapy to other soldiers overwhelmed by the stresses of combat and family dislocation.

When soldiers return from the battlefield — more or less in one piece — they should be able to expect that home territory is a refuge, a place of calm, order and safety. That’s the least they deserve. Hasan’s rampage was a betrayal of the highest order.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, Hasan, according to published reports, is a devout Muslim. That slice of biography  will certainly permeate reporting and commentary and influence broader perceptions of the mass murder at Ft. Hood.

Let’s not get carried away by that news. There are many devout Muslims in the U.S. Armed Forces who have served …

Continue reading A bad man, not a bad religion »

You may have missed this development because of all the election-related coverage, but House Republicans have, at long last, introduced their own health care reform bill. As one might expect, it doesn’t do much.

It’s an amalgam of GOP talking points — allowing insurers to sell insurance across state lines, capping noneconomic malpractice awards and expands the use of tax-sheltered medical savings accounts. The Republican bill does not include a mandate for all Americans to buy insurance — a requirement that most experts agree is necessary to contain costs. (If healthy younger Americans are in the insurance-buying pool, insurers are better able to spread the costs of insuring the sick.)

Nor does the GOP proposal prohibit insurers from denying people coverage with pre-existing conditions. It doesn’t contain subsidies to help working class Americans purchase insurance, though high cost is the main reason people don’t have it.

“What we’ve learned over many, many years is that …

Continue reading House GOP health care “reform” plan »

Around the country, Republican strategists are doing a victory dance over an easy victory in Virginia’s gubernatorial race — as well as down-ballot wins in Old Dominion — and a more surprising win in New Jersey’s gubernatorial election. Last night, U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, House Minority Whip, was relentlessly on message: A referendum on Obama! Voters don’t like Obama’s policies! A referendum on Obama!

Yesterday’s elections were no such thing. According to exit polls, President Obama still has approval ratings in the high 50s in New Jersey, where voters nevertheless threw out the Democratic incumbent, Jon Corzine. In Virginia, the Democrat Creigh Deeds, a very weak candidate, had run away from Obama himself — a stance that made the White House less than enthusiastic in its support of him.

If Republicans want to fool themselves into thinking their troubles are over, they should pay more attention to the upstate Congressional race in New York, where Democrat Bill …

Continue reading A referendum on Obama? Not likely »

With a run-off, will the Atlanta mayor’s race become overtly racial?

To the credit of all the candidates, the mayor’s race hasn’t sunk, so far, into blatant racial appeals. Yes, there was the infamous memo, written by two Clark Atlanta professors, which declared an urgent need to keep a black person in the mayor’s office. But, to their credit, the top candidates all disavowed it.

Now, however, the race could get sharper and meaner. Both Mary Norwood and Kasim Reed will need to whip up supporters to energize them to return to the polls. Since whites are still a minority in the city, Norwood cannot afford to alienate black voters with appeals to whites.

But what about Reed? He’s not been the kind of legislator who resorted to racially-coded tactics, but the stakes are higher for him now. Will he or his surrogates be tempted to run, say, radio commercials on urban music stations that appeal to racial pride?

Perhaps Reed can prove that both he and the city are more mature than …

Continue reading Here’s to a run-off on issues, not race »