The public option is back on the table; an amendment is being offered in the Senate Finance Committee next week. Though the amendment's sponsor, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), acknowledged it will go down in defeat, proponents want a public recording of support and opposition.
 
Over on the House side, notice that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) comments on a government health program have become stronger, not weaker, since the president himself backed off the necessity of the public plan in a final healthcare bill when speaking to a joint session of Congress. When asked this week about whether a public option with a trigger would garner more support from the center and right of her caucus, Pelosi said a trigger "is an excuse for not doing anything."

A couple of weeks ago was the week of outrageous outbursts, from an unknown South Carolina congressman’s rude interruption of the president’s speech to Congress on healthcare to tennis star Serena Williams’ crude meltdown at the U.S. Open. It also is the week when tennis star Jack Kramer died at 88. There is a connection between these seemingly disparate tennis events, and it makes an interesting story.

What should we make of the news that, barely a year after the big bubble burst, Europe's largest economies are already well ahead of us in shaking off the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression?

And what of the fact that economic growth in China, which had taken a huge hit when its No. 1 customer had to cut short a 25-year spending spree, has just been been revised upward for 2009, from 6.5 percent to 7.5 percent? Some economists think China's growth will gallop back toward 10 percent next year.

President Obama, Monsieur Sarkozy and the dour one, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, held an impromptu press conference this morning, announcing that they were shocked, shocked to find that the Iranians were building a nuclear weapons facility, and if those nasty bums didn’t stop immediately (or by November) we were going to hit them with some really tough sanctions.

No word if the Chinese or the Russians are on board. It was also interesting that the Germans were nowhere to be seen.

Financial crises have a way of focusing the mind on price and value, especially on those things where the price has risen sharply and curiously without benefit. The health reform debate is partly about finding a way to curb the cost of rapidly increasing healthcare costs. In the Washington Monthly, Kevin Carey looks at the future of universities where, “even as the cost of educating students fell, tuition rose at nearly three times the rate of inflation.”

The Dalai Lama, bumping fists in Louisiana this week, found good and heartfelt friends there. But not likely in Pittsburgh. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, cheerful, positive and encouraging when traveling in China as first lady when the Central Committee was pulling middle-aged and elderly ladies from a Taoist sect off the streets by the thousands, never to be heard from again by their families, has assured them resolutely again that there would be no pesky human rights issues to impede our first and most essential friendship with the one-party state that is China. That one party being the Chinese Communist Party.

We are all friends now. Obama, who sees the world as a college dean does, wants to be friend to all. We are all one people in Oprahworld. Especially now that China is taking the lead in environmentalism. It sort of evens out the kidnapping of the child monk, the Panchen Lama, and the thousands of Buddhist monks tortured and murdered in Tibet by the Chinese government. Only Sarah Palin brought it up this week in her speech in Hong Kong.

China’s welcome initiative on environmentalism is modeled after marketing strategies of the old New York groups, venerable now, forerunners of firms today like Crips and Bloods Inc., entrepreneurs out West. If you throw a basketball game as a charity event for poor children and single moms you can get away will all kinds of other stuff, like dealing heroin to the same children and moms. Your marketing will amplify itself. There will be 10, 20 stories by the happy-face liberal press (what Stalin called “useful idiots”) about the good you are doing for the poor. It will make people happy and deny the more difficult issues. We want to be happy and we want to look nice. Because we’re all one people in Oprahworld; Obama, Hu Jintao, Levi Johnson, Octomom, Mackenzie Phillips, Mao Zedong — high fives all around. Makes no difference in the Land of the Free if you’re rich as the Rockefellers or born with a tail. Such a long ride from Germany and Bach’s cello suites in the time when people were all different. Better now.

The temptation of totalitarianism is never far away here in the greater cities of the Northeast. Ancient memory possibly, because so many of us up here come not that long ago from Euro-realms dominated by one Rough Beast or another. But this quote from New York Times celebrity columnist Thomas Friedman on Sept. 8 sent a chill through the live-free-or-die types with a few generations in the woods up here in New Hampshire:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

I expect Friedman will be in Pittsburgh this week egging them on. I am certain he will not be in Tibet for the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, because no foreigners will be allowed in the country. As Diana N. Rowan, a writer and activist who has written for The Atlantic and The Christian Science Monitor, has written of that moment the Chinese called “peaceful liberation” or “reuniting Tibet with the Motherland,” "more than 1.2 million Tibetans have died in wartime violence, by execution, the effects of long imprisonment, torture, starvation or suicide. Forced abortions and sterilization were once a policy. There are vast areas now, particularly in Kham and Amdo, where most Tibetan families lack any male members over the age of 35.”

It may in time be seen as the great abomination of our period that we enter into full relationships with a government that is clearly totalitarian. Both parties now have the one approach, in fact, that Friedman so seeks. But as the few and the brave are stepping up in states like New Hampshire, Vermont, Texas and Wisconsin, possibly there is a states-rights defense against entering into full commerce with states without freedom. Not to fight fascism, as we did when we entered into alliance with Stalin, but just to make a buck.

Visit Mr. Quigley's website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who until this month was a major player in the healthcare debate, is feeling the political plates shift beneath his feet.
 
Back home, according to the Des Moines Register, his support is tanking because of his role in the bipartisan negotiations on healthcare. What was a 75 percent approval rating in January, his norm as he has been an enormously popular figure, is now down to 57 percent. Conservatives are mad at him for working with Democrats on healthcare reform, but the voters he is losing in significant numbers are the independents and Democrats who changed their minds after Grassley suddenly joined the "death panels" brigade in August. What seemed an abrupt reversal for someone like Grassley — who has worked on major bipartisan legislation and never been one to demagogue — damaged him with voters outside his party but seemed to have fended off a primary challenge from the right ... at least for now.

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

The Baucus healthcare bill provides for a tax on “gold-plated” health insurance policies. But, as with the Alternative Minimum Tax, once slated to be imposed only on the wealthy, inflation will make most Americans liable to pay the 40 percent tax in a few years.

The tax applies to all individual policies with premiums above $8,750 and families of four whose premiums exceed $23,000. But the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the average health insurance premium for families of four will reach $25,000 by 2018. The average premium should pass the thresholds in Baucus’s bill by 2016.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) wins the award for why Republican favorable numbers on healthcare are barely above 20 percent. Mr. Cantor was recently asked what a woman with stomach cancer should do if she did not have the insurance to pay huge medical costs.

Here is the Cantor plan for middle-income Americans who may have lost their health insurance after being laid off by a company whose CEO might be making a million dollars a year. First, she should sell all of her lifetime possessions to desperately pay humongous medical costs, with the side benefit that this would make her poor, and therefore qualify for health programs for the poor that many Republicans don’t support. If this fails, Mr. Cantor advises the woman to do this: beg.