In their latest attempt to turn the tide against the public plan, some Republicans have begun trying to appeal to gay Americans to join their anti-government crusade. As The Hill notes today, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn has co-authored an op-ed blasting “government-run health care” for The Advocate, the leading LGBT magazine. Together with his co-author, GOProud’s Christopher Barron, Coburn rails against the Ryan White CARE Act for forcing AIDS patients onto waiting lists to receive life-saving drugs from a government program. “These bureaucratic inefficiencies and mismanagement have literally cost lives,” Coburn and Barron write. What’s the lesson learned for the gay community? To push for health care reform that avoids “creating an inefficient and expensive government program,” the pair concludes, championing Coburn’s private-insurer-friendly Patients’ Choice Act as an alternative to the Democratic plan.
Coburn doesn’t explain, of course, how the private market or his own reforms will succeed in making expensive AIDS drugs more affordable than the current Ryan White programs, other than repeating the line that insurers shouldn’t be able to discriminate against those with pre-existing conditions. But what makes the argument even more difficult to take seriously is the fact that Coburn--one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate--has a long history of vicious attacks on gay rights, the gay community, and “the gay agenda.”
As far as the atmospherics of Bill Clinton's trip to North Korea go, I think it's worth noting that this may be the best day the man has had since Hillary won the New Hampshire primary some 20 months ago. Before the 2008 campaign, thanks to his foundation work on AIDS and malaria and the like, Bill Clinton had a sterling reputation as a global statesman and do-gooder who floated above the fray of common politics. But during the campaign he wrecked that image in a flurry of red-faced outbursts and ill-advised (if sometimes distorted) critiques of Barack Obama.
Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, doesn't come up in the news very often. And why would it? There's no war or ethnic strife. The city is poor, but not outlandishly so--in fact, thanks to a stable government and a lucrative mining industry, Botswana is one of Africa's rare economic success stories. All the same, Gaborone has a problem: What was once a town of 17,000 people in the 1970s has ballooned into a city of 186,000 today, and is expected to swell to 500,000 by 2020--a staggering increase by any measure.
I.
The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
(HarperFlamingo, 546 pp., $26)
