The Senate Finance Committee, doing the real work of the people, put together a truly bi-partisan effort, a reasonable compromise.

No wonder Bush is threatening to veto it. He’s not interested in governing and compromise—it’s his way or the highway.

Fratto gives the truly laughable excuse that, “It's clear that [the SCHIP bill] will have the effect of encouraging many to drop private coverage -- purchased either through their employer or with their own resources -- to go on the government-subsidized program."

Anyone who has or can afford halfway decent coverage doesn’t toss it away to go on the “government dole.”

The author and her husband are fumbling, blindfolded, toward notions of parenting, uncertain as to whether or not they shall attain it.

But they're not uncertain. They'd planned to have children in two or three years and did not anticipate any problems getting pregnant. The article did not show a couple that was trying to get pregnant. This is a couple with eyes wide open that got blindsided. If anything, it's the couple who's the pinata being beaten by a baby.

Yes, it’s still a reasonable compromise (read the Senate Finance Committee’s release attached as a PDF in the article). The bill is a bi-partisan effort with each side giving a little to get the bill done. This is what makes it a reasonable compromise.

I think what you’re taking issue with is the notion of sin taxes—taxing “bad things” to pay for “good things.” And it’s not just smokers that are “punished.” We do the same for liquor, gambling and other vices. Sin taxes are nothing new, and politicians can usually get such taxes passed more easily than say, a property tax increase.

If you have no objections to the idea of a sin tax (and reasonable people can have such objections), you should have no objections to the bill on the grounds that, “if this is so important, why isn't the cost being distributed amongst ALL taxpayers instead of just to cigarette smokers?”

I’m always happy to explain things in terms even a moron could understand. But apparently, I was not clear enough.

By “reasonable compromise,” I was referring to the actions of the senators making reasonable compromises with each other regarding costs and terms of implementation. Was the “reasonable compromise” you sought one between the senators and smokers?

YOU KNOW HOW THOSE MEXICANS ARE, WITH THE LOVING PINATAS

That caught my attention, too. About the only thing that could have made it more offensive was to show that “Yo quiero Taco Bell” dog instead of the piñata. Although a scale trying to balance a baby against the Taco Bell dog might have made for a more accurate graphic. And editorial-type comics do by necessity reduce most things to caricatures.

libraryprincess also writes, “they had so many options open to them that that to pretend this was a crisis of unheard of preportions was insulting.” I didn’t get the sense that their situation was being magnified to that effect. However, this was a personal piece, and anyone’s individual crisis is always a crisis for them. Just because they have options doesn’t negate this as a difficult choice. In fact, it’s the availability of their options that makes this so difficult—when you have a lot of choices, you have a lot of ways to choose wrong. If the couple didn’t have any choices that would have just made their situation crappy instead of a dilemma. This was an article about a dilemma.

I guess I’m cynical, too, because I was getting a bad vibe as well. The odds seem decent that husband and wife are going to want different paths once the child is born. But I hope I’m wrong.

3reddogs, I did not intend to be patronizing—not until I received your patronizing post, that is. I did miss the point of your post. Thank you for explaining it further. As I now gather, you believe Congress should have worked for a more dedicated form of funding for SCHIP.

I agree that dedicated, consistent funding is the long-term answer. However, I do not believe such funding 1) could have occurred under the Republican Congress of the past decade plus, 2) can occur under this divided Congress, nor 3) under this administration its disingenuous belief in "small government." As such, if it’s a choice between no funding and sin tax funding, I choose sin tax funding. Which I consider a reasonable compromise. Agree to to disagree.

These folks don't even look real anymore...

No kidding. Many of us know this intellectually but these images still hit us on some visceral level. Although we know the person on the cover doesn't actually even look like the person on the cover, we feel bad about ourselves.

So even though Photoshopping is nothing new, it bears repeating: even the beauty ideals aren't beautiful enough. It's time we stopped buying into these ideals.

DanielGree writes, “Are these the same sort of war games run before the invasion of Iraq? Didn't those war games show the invasion of Iraq would not be as hard as it turned out to be?”

I don’t think the problem was ever with military’s theories of how this war would go. It was the Bush Administration that was the problem. Generals predicted these outcomes in their Spring 1999 Iraq War games Desert Crossing. The report concluded:

• 300,000-400,000 troops would be needed for an invasion, not Rumsfeld’s 240,000
• reconstruction and security would be key issues
• it warned of “fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines” http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB207/index.htm

Generals like Anthony Zinni renewed their Desert Crossing concerns in October 2002. http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2002/10/17/zinni/index.html

Smart people predicted what Iraq would look like today. Bush just ignored them.