By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Oct 31, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET  We often confuse our primary task to be our ability to make the “right” decision …and avoid at all costs making a “wrong” decision.
But life doesn’t really work that way. We don’t live in a world that deterministic, like playing the game show “Let’s Make a Deal” with Monty Hall and we have to choose behind one of three doors to determine if we go home with a brand new car or ragged looking Billy goat.
In the real world the important thing is to make a decision —and then “make it right.” It’s what we do “after” the decision is made that matters most. Not the decision itself.
Oh, and one other thing. If a decision and your efforts don’t pan out, nobody said you can’t change your mind. And then change it again. Just remember if you do, the new decision is only the starting point not the final destination.
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Oct 29, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET You know that feeling early in the morning …..that sinking feeling that something isn’t quiet right?
That something isn’t working….something feels worrisome and troublesome….but you just can’t put your finger on exactly what it is?
And then you rack your brain to pinpoint the cause of the general disease you are feeling…
You try to figure out the reason for this vague sense of impending doom. And you realize that these discomforting and disquieting feeling you are experiencing stem from the realization that “you” are are again–for another day–still involved in your life.
And just aren’t sure how to say to yourself…. to politely suggest that you, just, ahem, you know…kind of…try to…..well…. lie low today in your own life and not screw things up again?
And you wish you could slink out door without yourself noticing and wanting to tag along?
You know that feeling?
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It is important to make the most of each day….and hope to have at least one life moment each day that is worthy of the highlight reel.
Why?
Think about it. What if we get to the end of our lives and it’s our time and up rolls our life’s highlights before our eyes…..you know, those flashes of our the precious, thrilling, sacred and fabulous moments from our life….and what if instead of lasting for the usual 30 seconds, ours only lasts for, say, 17 seconds? And then stops.
Well, I’d be really ticked and spend my last 13 seconds wishing I’d done more exciting stuff when I was younger.
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Oct 28, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET The older I get the more I realize that the most important purpose of longevity isn’t being given the opportunity to accomplish more so I may want less —but rather being given the opportunity to forgive more so that I might judge less.
Life experience disappointingly fails to provide us with a growing insight into how uniquely superior we are to others.
And instead instructs us about how very …similar we are to those around us –and how capable we are of doing ourselves the things we fear the most and disdain most loudly.
This awareness is usually diverted before it arrives and we write it off as something foreign and separate from us.
If we can instead embrace these seemingly unsavory parts of ourselves and learn from them we are then able to replace shame with wisdom –and judgment with understanding.
And anxiety with joy.
By Mona Tailor, on Fri Oct 25, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET From the New England Journal of Medicine:
 “Shocked” wouldn’t be accurate, since we were accustomed to our uninsured patients’ receiving inadequate medical care. “Saddened” wasn’t right, either, only pecking at the edge of our response. And “disheartened” just smacked of victimhood. After hearing this story, we were neither shocked nor saddened nor disheartened. We were simply appalled.
We met Tommy Davis in our hospital’s clinic for indigent persons in March 2013 (the name and date have been changed to protect the patient’s privacy). He and his wife had been chronically uninsured despite working full-time jobs and were now facing disastrous consequences.
The week before this appointment, Mr. Davis had come to our emergency department with abdominal pain and obstipation. His examination, laboratory tests, and CT scan had cost him $10,000 (his entire life savings), and at evening’s end he’d been sent home with a diagnosis of metastatic colon cancer.
The year before, he’d had similar symptoms and visited a primary care physician, who had taken a cursory history, told Mr. Davis he’d need insurance to be adequately evaluated, and billed him $200 for the appointment. Since Mr. Davis was poor and ineligible for Kentucky Medicaid, however, he’d simply used enemas until he was unable to defecate. By the time of his emergency department evaluation, he had a fully obstructed colon and widespread disease and chose to forgo treatment.
Mr. Davis had had an inkling that something was awry, but he’d been unable to pay for an evaluation. As his wife sobbed next to him in our examination room, he recounted his months of weight loss, the unbearable pain of his bowel movements, and his gnawing suspicion that he had cancer. “If we’d found it sooner,” he contended, “it would have made a difference. But now I’m just a dead man walking.”
Click here for the full piece.
By Artur Davis, on Wed Oct 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET In one rosy scenario, the self destructive streak of Ted Cruz and House Republicans burns out without a default, with Barack Obama incurring his share of the national disgust, and with the public’s frustration over the Affordable Care Act eventually cancelling out memories of the shutdown itself. And in that same optimal place, Republicans absorb their lessons with something like the synthesis that Ross Douthat writes about in his Sunday column:
“..Republicans need to seek a kind of integration, which embraces the positive aspects of the new populism—its hostility to K Street and Wall Street, its relative openness to policy innovation, its desire to speak on behalf of Middle America and the middle class—while tempering its [nihilistic] streak with prudence, realism, and savoir-fare.”
As good as Douthat has been in outlining during the last few weeks why the shutdown strategy is painfully flawed, from even a right-leaning perspective, he is engaging in his own bit of wishful thinking about the lines of a Republican comeback and its worth taking some space to say why. First, as I suggested in my last column, the shutdown is best understood not as some bridge too far from the populism he describes but a pretty natural outgrowth of it. The reality is that the right’s populism has had a consistent unifying principle since the spring of 2009: it is that the federal government is posing an unprecedented threat to liberty, and that it presents an existential danger to a particular ideal of American society. That apocalyptic claim has played out in any number of contexts, from suspicions about Barack Obama’s citizenship, to cries of socialized medicine, to the painting of liberalism as a subversive scheme. It’s not the sort of rhetorical tendency that distinguishes between programs based on their relative effectiveness or which weeds out obtainable goals from unrealistic ones. It’s absolutely a worldview that has made any approach to Obamacare other than all out obstruction or resistance seem like unprincipled softness.
Is there a middle class friendly legislative vision waiting to burst of all that anti government zeal? Not so far at the grassroots level, and not inside the rarified air of various conservative conferences. And as Bobby Jindal’s swift fade from prominence since last winter, and Marco Rubio’s slippage from “can’t miss” status to the mid tier of 2016 contenders indicate, the more potent currency in conservative settings has not been an appeal to more policy creativity or substantive rebranding on issues like immigration, but the fundamentalism offered by Rand Paul and Ted Cruz: and as Douthat himself has pointed out, their message is either decidedly vague on details (Cruz) or a rehash of conventional top heavy tax cut plans that shortchange the middle class (Paul).
 The “integration” between populism and reform that Douthat pines for is not a fantasy: the conservative populism of the Obama era has opened a window to the alienation downscale whites felt through the last decade of American politics, when Bush Republicans seemed indifferent to wage stagnation and Obama Democrats seemed incapable of reversing the erosion of working class security. But the right’s most conspicuous rising stars have expended virtually no capital on building or selling any type of actual policy framework to activists: even a conservative with an authentic record of engaging topics like inner city poverty and educational inequality, Ben Carson, has seen fit to downplay that history in favor of diatribes equating slavery with Obamacare.
I’ve written that the populist right’s tilt toward radicalism isn’t likely to be self-correcting and requires a much more forceful counter-argument from the center right. And unlike Douthat, I have become skeptical that it is a simple matter of a candidate with “movement credibility” combining the right’s passions with a more tenable market oriented reform vision. The more plausible fact may well be that a reform vision is temperamentally and substantively at odds with right wing populism’s intense distrust of public institutions. Breaking through that tension might not be a pipe dream, but it is hard to imagine without a sustained case about what public (and conservative) purposes can legitimately be accomplished through government.
And without question, the kind of accommodation and outreach that builds coalitions is discredited when conflict has been over-dramatized into a clash between freedom and darker impulses. Is the antidote what Douthat describes as declaring war on the GOP base? Not at all, but given the base’s demonstrated inability to strengthen the party’s electability, there is a distinct need to challenge that base’s grip on the meaning of conservatism and its monopoly on defining legitimacy within the party. I’ve come to the mindset that the challenge will require more toughness than politeness.
By RP Staff, on Tue Oct 22, 2013 at 4:30 PM ET Last night, Kentucky hall of fame journalist Bill Goodman and his guests on “Kentucky Tonight” discussed the federal budget and debt ceiling. Scheduled guests: Jonathan Miller, former Kentucky state treasurer and former chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party; Brad Cummings, former chair of the Jefferson County Republican Party; John Heyrman, political science professor at Berea College; and Stephen Voss, political science professor at the University of Kentucky.
Click below to watch:
By Michael Steele, on Tue Oct 22, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Look ma, no federal government!
At some point the entire BS that is the government shutdown sinks in and we have to deal with reality: We have elected a bunch of children to run our government.
One reality that must not change about America and the free enterprise economy is that the root of America’s success has always sprung out of the hard labor of its entrepreneurs: the men and women who risk it all on a dream. Government doesn’t do that; government can’t do that. When a job is created by a small business owner they make an investment in people in a way that government can’t match. So when those same business owners have legitimate concerns about government policies that affect them, elected officials must listen in order to preserve the conditions that allow small businesses to thrive.
 The fact that politicians in Washington have lost sight of that tells me we can longer trust them to do this by themselves. Each one of us must be prepared to help set the nation’s priorities for the immediate future. We must decide what price we’re prepared to pay for a strong national defense and better schools; how much are we truly ready to spend for our children’s healthcare and to secure our nation’s borders? Which programs are we prepared to cut in order to get our financial house in order, and by how much? While these are difficult questions, they are not either/or choices, but rather complementary opportunities.
The White House and the Congress need to take a time out from the silliness of politics and the drama of blaming one or the other for shutting down the government—both political parties, the White House and Congress are to blame. Stupid lives at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in this mess.
Read the rest of…
Michael Steele: We Have Elected a Bunch of Children to Run Our Government
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Oct 21, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
I have found that, as a general rule of thumb, people usually have to “feel the heat” before “they see the light.”
Nothing seems more conducive to the attainment of wisdom than the receipt (or threat of receipt) of a painfully humiliating lesson.
Which means that, as a general rule of thumb, the wisest among us are also the ones among us who have accumulated the highest number of painfully humiliating lessons in the course of their lives.
So, if you want to be a wise person, ask yourself What painfully humiliating lesson am I pursuing today?
Or perhaps experiencing right now without even knowing it?
By Artur Davis, on Mon Oct 21, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Count me as skeptical that for all of the damage Republicans have incurred from the failed shutdown, the lesson has genuinely been learned. Not when there is an emerging narrative that the House GOP simply picked the wrong fight (allegedly, either draconian cuts to income support programs , or perhaps, a balanced budget amendment would have been more costly for Barack Obama to reject); not when a majority of the House GOP caucus still voted to perpetuate the shut-down; not when critics inside the party are framing the scope of the party’s dilemma almost entirely in terms of one specific faction, and therefore limiting their solutions to well funded primary interventions against the Tea Partiers.
Some of the “what if” shadow dancing mimics the misreading of public opinion that has haunted the right since the successes of the 2010 midterms: conservatives have consistently confused swing voter angst over Obamacare with a broad based rejection of a government “power grab” over healthcare as opposed to a notably specific distaste for aspects of the law: from scaled back coverage dictated by the “Cadillac tax” on high value policies; to diminished consumer autonomy to enroll spouses in employer plans; to the pressure on small businesses to pare their full-time workforce to avoid mandates. And the shift from declaring the Affordable Care Act so toxic that it would validate the shutdown strategy to suggestions that a softer political target like low income groups or a “support that is a mile wide and an inch deep” variation like the balanced budget amendment would have paid Republicans more dividends? The haziness of wishful thinking, overshadowed by a deeper failure to appreciate that shutdown itself validates the obstructionist label, the impression of being too inflexible to govern, that so threatens the party nationally and is even starting to creep into red states like Georgia and Louisiana.
There is a different kind of miscalculation driving the…take your pick..more responsible, more establishment, more centrist…wing of the party (which, as the one silver lining of this fortnight, seems finally emboldened). It is the assumption that mobilizing to downsize the Tea Party is an endgame by itself. The 144 Republican no notes that emerged in the House may be minimized as “throwaways” who were trying to forestall primary contests and could do so with the knowledge that their votes were not essential: but that misses the reality that such a sizable portion of the party’s elected representatives, well more than the 40 to 50 members of the Tea Party Caucus, felt so constrained politically, and evidence that the sensibilities behind the shutdown have much greater currency in the party than Republicans are comfortable acknowledging.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: Lesson Learned?
By RP Staff, on Fri Oct 18, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET The RP’s column this week for The Daily Beast was his most popular ever, blowing up the Internets. Here’s an excerpt:
Politics in my old Kentucky home has, for centuries, been awash in irreconcilable contradictions.
We stuck with the Union in favor of our favorite son, Lincoln, but then joined in common cause with the Confederacy after the Civil War had ended. A century later, we boasted some of the nation’s most progressive civil rights laws; yet, to this date, we still feature many of America’s most segregated societies. And while Kentucky’s been one of the largest beneficiaries of the New Deal/Great Society welfare state, the dominant strain in our politics remains a fierce anti-government, anti-tax worldview.
Kentucky’s perplexing and hypocritical aversion to big government has been exploited brilliantly by our senior senator Mitch McConnell, who’s capitalized on our cultural resentment of elite interference to transform the Bluegrass State into a deep-red citadel in federal elections. More recently, our junior senator Rand Paul catapulted McConnell’s vision much further than Mitch intended, placing Kentucky in the crosshairs of the Tea Party revolution. But while these two political icons and their surrogates clash over the depth of government slashing, they’ve been steadfastly united behind one common vision: the defeat, and, more recently, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
It’s no coincidence then that Obamacare is beginning to expose the political fault line that divides the two Kentuckys. The GOP’s effective—and quite misleading—messaging plays into the anti-establishment populace’s greatest fears about out-of-control outside interference: the myth of a government-run-health-care system, engineered by a President with socialist tendencies (and whose skin pigmentation and exotic name frankly heighten popular anxiety in some of the nation’s least educated counties). And yet, when you wade through the propaganda and understand the law’s true impact, Kentucky needs the Affordable Care Act…desperately. It’s a state consistently ranked near the bottom of nearly every national health survey, where one out of every six citizens remains uninsured.
With our long-standing tradition of timid politicians fearful of incurring the wrath of the anti-government mobs, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see Kentucky join much of Red America and reject both Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion to the working poor, as well as its option of establishing a state-run health benefit exchange to provide affordable health care to the remaining uninsured.
But in a delicious irony, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul’s home state may ultimately serve as the proving ground of Obamacare’s success. That’s due to the political chutzpah of one man: Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear.
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