• Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Sunday will mark 10 years since the deadly events of 9-11, Sept. 11, 2001. How many days in American history have had a greater impact on our sense of what America is, or should be, than 9-11? A few, perhaps. But not many. Does the United States matter, and if so, why? Are we confident? Afraid? Whatever your answers, there's no doubt that the last decade was a time of decline for the country and for the world. 9-11 is seared in our minds, as it must be. Ten years later, we bring those memories forward and look to the future.

Commemorative events are scheduled across the Triangle to help us find solace in tragedy. Here are some of them:

** In Raleigh, NCSU Chancellor Randy Woodson will lead a 9-11 Memorial Service, beginning at 2 p.m. at the Bell Tower on Hillsborough Street at the northeast corner of the old campus.

** Earlier, and also in Raleigh, Mayor Charles Meeker will join Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy for a Peace and Solidarity event, including a walk to downtown Raleigh from the Long Acres neighborhood. Start time is 8:30 a.m. The address is 515 Parnell Drive, the location of a house built by co-sponsor Habitat for Humanity of Wake County.

** In Durham, Duke University invites the community to a commemoration concert beginning at 4 p.m. Sunday in Duke Chapel. Rodney Wynkoop will conduct the Duke Chapel Choir, the Duke Chorale, the Choral Society of Durham, and the Orchestra Pro Cantores in a performance of Mozart's Requiem. The music is symbolic of mourning and consolation.

** In Chapel Hill, the Fire Department, Police Department and the Chapel Hill Firefighters Association will host a commemoration ceremony, including a ringing of bells, from 9:45-10:30 a.m. at “The Fire Place”, 301 Meadowmont Village.

Also on Sunday, panels at UNC-CH and NCSU will consider the impact of 9-11 on our politics, culture and sense of national security. The taalks and panel discussions — free and open to the public — are the work of the Triangle Institute of Security Studies and the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security.

** At the UNC FedEx Global Education Center, Arif Alikhan, former assistant secretary for policy development in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will speak beginning at 5 p.m. A panel discussion will follow, including UNC and Duke experts and a representative from the Islamic Association of Raleigh.

** At NCSU, at 2 p.m. in the Brown Room (4114) of NC State’s Talley Student Center, faculty from UNC, NC State and Duke will participate in another panel discussion, “How Did 9/11 Impact the National Security Establishment?” The center is at 2610 Cates Ave; parking is available nearby in the Reynolds Coliseum deck.

Details of the UNC and NCSU events can be found here.

For other events at Duke, visit http://today.duke.edu/2011/08/911roundup.

Mrs. Edwards was diagnosed with cancer as the 2004 presidential campaign was ending. John Edwards was the Democratic candidate for vice president that year.

"I like all the handcuffs and how they go check out the jail and stuff," he said at the time. "I really like it how they do all that stuff."

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• Obama in Raleigh last August

Health care reform? I can't do better than Dickens. It is the best of times, even though -- on the merits -- this is the worst possible bill. But it is a bill, which means it's a start. Paul Krugman, who likes it, is exactly right. So is Firedog Lake, where they hate it and tell us everything we must do now to fix it.

I go back to the Kennedy for President campaign. Ted Kennedy, that is, in 1980. He lost. No HCR. In 1991, running on an all-out platform of universal health care/HCR, Democrat Harris Wofford won a special election for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania against the popular former Governor and U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh (and Wofford won it easily). Bill Clinton was elected president the following year promising to introduce HCR on "day one" of his administration. He didn't, and long story of Hillaryycare short, no HCR. You will note, perhaps, that in between and following these episodes, long periods of Republican ascendance occurred, producing -- no surprise -- no HCR.

Which brought me to last year, when I rode to Washington with the '09 crop of HCR'ers and, once again, breathed deeply the air of freedom. HCR. With a public option. Yes, We Can! That's when I met Rhonda Robinson, the Durham woman who was out of a job and, because of that fact, off the insurance rolls and living in fear with her epilepsy.

I've never forgotten that, whatever else HCR was about, it was about the Rhonda Robinsons whose lives were literally in peril because the United States, alone in the industrialized world, links health care to earnings. Good earnings, good health care. Bad earnings, or none? Your health care line is around the back.

Of all the ways we could've chosen to reform health care, we've chosen the worst. Control remains firmly in the hands of the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex, which overcharges for everything it does in the manner of the military-industrial complex of Dwight Eisenhower fame. On top of that, we not only didn't put a nick in the health care insurance industry, we're now going to require that everybody buy access to the overpriced health care system through the monopolistic and overpriced health insurance industry, adding 20 percent or so to our otherwise out-of-control health care spending. Oh, I know, every good idea for controlling health care costs is in the HCR legislature. Yeah, right.

And yet.

The reality is, this is all we could do. It was the worst, or nothing at all. From the get-go, the Republican Party made the decision to obstruct, oppose and attempt to destroy the Obama presidency by defeating whatever version of HCR that it brought forward. The fact that Obama brought forward a Republican version of HCR, the same kind that Mitt Romney enacted in Massachusetts, was irrelevant.

And on the Democratic side, there was no appetite, in 2009 or now, for using reconciliation to enact a bill with 51 Senate votes, avoiding the need to deal with the likes of Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson et al. There were, I believe, 53 votes in the Senate for a progressive version of HCR with a public option. But there were not 53 votes, or 50, for putting an end to the ridiculous Senate system of requiring 60 votes to end fake filibusters or the equally absurd system of letting every senator blackball, anonymously if so desired, any provision of any bill. (So to this day, a certifiably unbalanced senator like the gentleman from Kentucky, Jim Bunning, can stop a major bill extending unemployment benefits all by himself.)

So, short of Obama calling them out and staking his presidency on the Senate's willingness to reform itself, the Liebermans and the Nelson retained their vetoes, and HCR needed to be reduced to the least common denominator they would accept, which was -- is -- this bill.

And yet.

And yet this bill does establish, for the first time in American history, that everyone has a right to good health care, and that taxes will be used to assure that everyone gets it. Expensively. Crazily, even. Yes, Obama cut a deal and the pharmaceutical industry was paid off. Yes, Obama cut another deal and the AMA was paid off. Yes, Obama cut yet another deal, and the health insurance industry was paid off. (And do read Glenn Greenwald on all this: He, too, is exactly right that it's a dream bill for the lobbyists and special interests.)

I hate it that Obama, right here in Raleigh, lied about being for the public option. Lied, that is, unless being for it meant that it was a nice idea he had no intention of trying to get.

What an awful way to enact universal health care. And yet, it was the only way possible.

For 30 years in my experience, and many more years before that I mercifully don't remember, HCR was impossible because we had no platform of universal health care from which to proceed.

This legislation is the worst possible platform. But it is a platform. From here, progress is possible. Until last night, it wasn't. And until last night, the Rhonda Robinsons of the world were in terrible peril. This morning -- or, at least, no more than six months from now when the first provisions of the bill check in -- their world is better. That's reason to cheer.

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(Update: But the Ghost of Public Option still inhabits the land.)

Even in a swing/conservative state currently under bombardment by anti-health care reform ads from the Americans for Prosperity bunch, the Elon Poll finds broad support among North Carolinians for 1) reform of some kind; 2) reform that goes farther than what's on the table in Washington; 3) a public option insurance plan as part of the current reform package, and 4) a single-payer system of health care, i.e., one run by or at least paid for by the federal government. You mean, the Tea Party crowd isn't a vast majority?

Weirdly, at least to me, the results of this poll were sent to the media by the Democratic National Committee (as well as by Elon).

I say weird because the poll indicates that only about 39 percent of N.C. voters back reform along the lines of the Obama-Congressional plan due for a vote in the House on Sunday. But our voters would get behind adding a public option to the plan by a 53-37 percent majority.

Too bad, because with President Obama's blessing, congressional Democrats dropped the public option, a big reason IMHO why their plan isn't very popular.

Earlier, of course, the President backed the public option -- or said he did -- in preference to a single-payer plan that many Democrats would favor but he, Obama, and such alleged Democrats as Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln, didn't.

And, btw, how would N.C. feel about single-payer? Pretty good, apparently. Elon's respondents split 47-47, with the rest having no opinion, on the question: Would you [support or oppose] a national insurance plan paid for by the federal government that pays most medical and hospital costs for all citizens?

On such a supposed hot-button question, I think you could fairly add the "no opinions" to the supporters as a gauge to public acceptance of the single-payer concept. So, bottom line, 53 percent would be OK with either a government-run health care system or, failing that, a system that includes a government-run option in the mix with private insurance products.

That's 53 percent in North Carolina, folks. We're not talking Vermont here.

But instead of these popular ideas, congressional Democrats are campaigning for "reform" that will require everyone to own over-priced private insurance, like it or lump it. Raise your hand if you think that's a good idea. (Not you, Tea Party folks. The last good idea you guys remember was secession.)

The poll results are here (scroll down past the initial question on a different subject). Elon's press release is below the fold.

What goes around ...

(Update: The link I put up first doesn't work. This one should: click on the "Woman Donates Secret Millions" story).

h/t: Talking Points Memo.



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Consensus of the Washington talking heads: Obama will "move to the center" following the debacle in Massachusetts.

If he does, Obama will go down in history as another Jimmy Carter, a very intelligent and well-intentioned fellow who just didn't get it in his one term as president.

May I recommend some reading this dreary Sunday in January? First, Frank Rich in The New York Times:

The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative.

After that, read this piece on DailyKos about Abraham Lincoln and fighting for a cause. For Lincoln and the Union Army circa 1862, think Democratic Party and its massive advantages circa 2010 -- if only it would use them in the great causes of today.

In the spring of 1862, the vast army of the United States was gathered on the Virginia Peninsula. Landed by a massive and lengthy amphibious operation that was a testimony to the North's military and industrial might, the army had been brought to this swampy ground with the stated intention of "leaping" up the peninsula to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond. The army's commander, General George McClellan, had trained and equipped his troops like no force in history. They were by far the largest, best equipped, best prepared, most formidable army on the face of the earth.

But McClellan (think Max Baucus) didn't want to fight. He dithered in hopes a centrist solution could be found.

So Scott Brown wins in Massachusetts, and all of a sudden the Democrats don't have a filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority in the U.S. Senate to pass health care legislation. Nooze flash: They didn't have one before. Joe Lieberman is not a Democrat. (Google up some video of him at the '08 National Republican Convention).

I haven't written a word about health care of late because there was nothing to say that wasn't going to be disproven within a day by the clusterf--k that is the Democratic party in Washington circa November-January, 2009-10. But now, I think, the dust sh-- is settling in and the truth of the fact that the Democrats have never been in a position (given the ridiculous rules of the Senate) to stop a GOP-plus-Lieberman filibuster is beginning to filter through. Which means nothing worthwhile can be accomplished except by using the budget reconciliation process.

But remember, using reconciliation was always the preferred approach, always made sense, and always was what President Obama should've been doing but wasn't for reasons best known to, uh, maybe Rahm Emanuel? No-drama Obama? Equals No-fair health care.

Using reconciliation, Medicaid can be expanded to cover everyone who's poor or low-income; S-CHIP can be extended to every child; and a Medicare buy-in can be offered to everyone over age 50 or 55 or 45 -- or everybody. What a concept: Cover everybody. Universal coverage! Why didn't anyone think of that?

And later, put a bill in to ban insurers from dodging pre-existing conditions, dumping clients when they're ill, and/or loading on super-premiums (use the limit in the House-passed bill -- no more than double the youth rate for your older customers), and dare the Republicans to oppose it. And/or the House passes the Senate's passed bill after reconciliation supercedes all the bad stuff in it, which is a lot.

It's a formula kicking around out there now. Best short summary is offered by Jon Walker at Firedog Lake.

This thing ain't over 'til it's over, and it's not over until we achieve universal coverage. Obama's stepping back? OK, as long as it isn't for more than the weekend. How about stepping up at the State of the Union?