"'I don't want choices, just tax me and take care of health care.'"

I agree. This is where the devil is in the details of Edwards's plan. If the public option in the health markets (which I assume would be your choice) only costs say, $50-$100 a month for an individual making $30,000 a year I think that would be pretty close to what we'd expect from a pure single-payer system. If it goes much higher than that, then I would be much less supportive of this plan. I don't want a car insurance plan.

the cult of "BUT YOU GET TO CHOOSE YOUR PLAN" drives me batty...

it seems like every year my employer changes health plans and I have to go over reams and reams of dead trees comparing and contrasting the minutest of differences in the medical equivalent of legalese.

ENOUGH!

I just want one system that works well, and I will pay extra for it.

Single payer.
seriously.

-C.

Does MyDD pay travel expenses for front page bloggers?  If so, how does it break down (e.g., does MyDD pay for air, meals, and lodging or just tickets a per diem etc.)?

Does MyDD accept travel expenses from outside sources (e.g., candidates, interest groups, etc.)?  If so, how does this work?  Does the organization pay MyDD and then MyDD pays the blogger, or are you all free-agents who get paid directly.

When we make a donation in response to a call for a donation, does it go to MyDD and then MyDD pays out to the person who needs it or does it go directly to the person who needs it?  Or is it case by case?

I've been curious about this stuff for while, so I thought this would be a good place to ask.

Thanks for the post...

Just as long as you can get me the 12 free pints of Ben and Jerry's ice cream that Working Assets owes me, I'm OK.

Seriously, disclosure is always the best policy. Some of the Beltway pundits will no doubt convene a blogger ethics panel, and the freepers will be SHOCKED, but all your friends hope you will make a decent living with full benefits and a 401K.

Matt,

I didn't think you had time to do much more than ban black people and engage in "online apartheid" these days.  Nice to see you're able to multitask. ;-)

I think that there should be a Danny Glover Memorial Award issued annually (or maybe monthly...) for the best example of blogger ethics asininity or obsessive-compulsive disorder.  The award could look like the Golden Globes, only holding a bottle of Ex-Lax or a plunger instead of a globe.

matt - keep it open with full disclosure, including who pays expenses (like travel, as jeff asked)... try to be aware and open about your biases... and all will be well.

btw, congrats on getting the consulting gigs - you deserve it and i'm glad to see you getting paid for your expertise.

If you have anything wrong with you at all under the current system you don't get to choose anything. You either get told you can have this or that nonsense plan or you can't get insurance at all.

Welcome to the freelance world. There are 10 or 20 million of us, and all the proposed employer-based health insurance fixes over the years would have been worse for us than no change.

If they're going to patch the system, let us deduct health insurance premiums as an expense from gross profits, the way corporations can, rather than making us calculate a chunk of credit here and a chunk there.

As a freelancer, consider carefully where you live. In some states, individual health insurance is impossible to buy (or costs more than your gross income) if you have any minor preexisting condition or a suspicious family history.

In short, universal single-payer health insurance or forget about it.

Already asked Chris Bowers, but I will ask you too- I will be emailing you Matt to request an opportunity to to ask you a series of questions that I am doing regarding my research on a law journal article about bloggers and politics. This seems like as good a place as any to mention that to you.

Maybe I missed the initial disclosure on the SEIU stuff, but it really DOES get shady if you don't say that, essentially, they paid for you to interview Andy Stern and put it up on your highly influential website.  I'm not saying you can't DO stuff like that, nor am I saying that you SHOULDN'T, but you've gotta be really upfront about it.  What kind of reaction would newspaper or tv reporters get around here if they did that sort of thing?

Feel free to discuss how unethical I am in the comments.

Thanks, I will tuck that away for a rainy day (not one of these hell freezes like today).

29. Staff members may not accept free or discounted transportation and lodging except where special circumstances give us little or no choice. Among them are certain military or scientific expeditions and other trips for which alternative arrangements would be impractical -- for example, a flight aboard a corporate jet during which an executive is interviewed.

I met with some people recently and Matt Stoller came up as an issue in regards to disclosing who he works for. There was some concern that he may not be fully disclosing his ties to candidates and may be acting as a ghost writer for some people in particular. The big question was how he supports himself and there were some strong opinions regarding ethics. It felt like people were taking potshots at him and I didn't want a part of it.

I don't know if there is or should be such a thing as blogger ethics, especially contraposed to the idea of media ethics (which is a sham). I understand the potential harms of someone influencing the opinions of others based on positions they are paid to advocate without disclosing those ties.

But when did it become okay to trust the Internet?     To put your faith behind what someone says just because they put together a list of the people who paid them money is as silly as having bloggers register as lobbists. There are public relations firms today who have full time bloggers on staff participating in discussions solely to control public opinion of their clients. They don't have to tell you who pays for their lattes. There are elected officials who have staff update their wikipedia entries all the time. They don't have to tell you they are staff. There are government propoganda newsreels in the evening news all the time talking about how great the war is going. The local news does not have to tell you where they got their filler. No one really knows where their news / comment / polemic is coming from and there is no justifiable reason to single out prominent bloggers.

People need to question what they read, hear and see. They need to be less willing to accept something as truth no matter who is saying it. A list does not make someone's opinon correct, unbiased or trustworthy, these are characteristics that mostly come from the reader. I have heard it said that there is so much news to digest no one can pay attention to it all. Maybe we need to just back off for a minute and think instead of digesting.

All power to Matt Stoller for being transparent about where his money comes from and glad to see the Heritage Foundation isn't on the list. But this doesn't really solve anything and the idea of disclosure could actually be creating new problems in terms of credibility. People need less reasons to automatically accept what someone else is saying and more avenues to question what was said.

M