The Voices

washingtonpost.com — Democrats have some thinking to do after Tuesday's elections, but Republicans don't have time to think. They're too busy trying to survive the party's internal purge and avoid being shipped off to political Siberia.

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motherjones.com — The anti-health care reform rally in Washington indicates the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement are increasingly one and the same.

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places.designobserver.com — The collapse of fracture-critical designs like the I-35W bridge warns us that we need to replace such structures with designs that are less connected, less efficient, more resilient. But we’ll need to change more than the design of our bridges. Fracture-critical design epitomizes all the postwar systems vulnerable to sudden failure. The bridge’s collapse warns us that future catastrophic events will surely occur. The I-35W Bridge is both metaphor and omen.

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voices.washingtonpost.com — A House Republican health care reform bill won't stop health insurance companies from denying sick people insurance. And it won't stop prevent insurers from dropping people who become seriously ill. On the bright side, the Republican bill would allow insurers to base themselves in whichever state has the weakest regulatory standards and then sell policies built around those rules nationwide. If you've ever thought that your insurance was too comprehensive, too straightforward, and contained too few loopholes that you didn't learn about until you feel terribly ill, then this is the plan for you!

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tomdispatch.com — If you can't find any swine flu vaccine for your kids, it won't be for a lack of positive thinking. In fact, the whole flu snafu is being blamed on "undue optimism" on the part of both the Obama administration and Big Pharma. But let's stop a minute and also ask: Who really screwed up here — the government or private pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, and three others that had agreed to manufacture and deliver the vaccine by late fall?

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guardian.co.uk — What do these strange, odd-year elections — suddenly so feverishly important, now that America's excitable right-wingers from Rush Limbaugh on down demand that they be — tell us about Barack Obama's political health? Not very much, really.

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inthesetimes.com — If you want to have a compliant populace, what could be better than to say that everyone has to think positively and accept that anything that goes wrong in their lives is their own fault?

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huffingtonpost.com — Senators representing a small segment of the nation have thwarted not only health care reform but also renewable energy policy, sensible automobile mileage standards, cuts in subsidies for oil companies, tougher campaign finance reform, Congressional oversight of national security and war, and more.

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thenation.com — The GOP is now, as Richard Viguerie says, the party of "the Tea Parties and their candidates." The question, of course, is whether a GOP defined by "the Tea Parties and their candidates" can compete not just in New York's 23rd district — where the party has always won — but across the great expanse of a country where the party has in recent years been losing.

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washingtonmonthly.com — The House Republican leadership "guaranteed" that they would offer an alternative health care reform bill. If my count is right, that was 134 days ago. Republicans started putting together their health care reform proposal in June. They've had plenty of time to meet behind closed doors and craft the superior plan that will prove the seriousness with which the GOP takes this issue. What's the holdup?

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