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Dems: Virginia Station Won't Air GOP Climate Change Ad, Citing Factual Errors (VIDEO)

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:53:05 -0500

Congressional Republicans were dealt a setback Thursday in their attempt to punish Democrats in swing districts for voting for climate change legislation in the House last week.

WDBJ-TV, a Roanoke television station, will not air a National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) ad attacking freshman Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.), citing factual inaccuracies, according to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee communications director Jen Crider. A source familiar with the station's decision confirmed Crider's account; WDBJ general manager Jeff Marks confirmed that the ad would not run, but declined to say why.

"The ad is not running, be we have not characterized why that is," said Marks. "We don't characterize why an ad is not running. We looked into the complaints [from national Democrats], but other than saying that, you really need to find out from the NRCC."

An NRCC source said that Democrats are mischaracterizing the station's decision. "One station has temporarily pulled the ad. The station manager has also informed us that he plans to notify the DCCC about their mischaracterization of what exactly has transpired. The ad is still set to run on the other stations in the local market," said the source.

Marks said the station has made no public statement saying that it rejected the ad for factual reasons. He confirmed that he notified Democrats that he had made no public statements about the ad. He did not reject the assertion that the ad was pulled because it was inaccurate, declining to comment instead.

Earlier, the nonpartisan organization FactCheck.org called the ad "wrong."

Adjudicated FactCheck:

The ad says the bill will result in lost jobs and cost "middle class families" $1,870 a year. That sounds pretty dire, until you consider that this week we posted an item about the Office of the Republican Whip Eric Cantor's claim that the same bill would "impose a national energy tax of up to $3,100." So is the cost of the legislation going down? Did the NRCC make a mistake in its math?
Hardly. While it may seem curious that House Republicans would flog two different cost figures for the proposed legislation, it is indicative of the difficulty in determining how a cap on carbon emissions could affect Americans' electricity bills. The NRCC ad credits a Washington Times editorial for its claim that the Waxman-Markey bill would make electricity prices "skyrocket," costing families $1,870 a year. But the NRCC is wrong.

Here's the ad:

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Obama's AP Interview: Michael Jackson, Gitmo, Affirmative Action And More

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:45:18 -0500

Highlights of President Barack Obama's interview Thursday with The Associated Press:

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

The nation's first African American president said a recent Supreme Court ruling in favor of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., doesn't close the door on thoughtful efforts at affirmative action aimed at maintaining diversity in the workplace or in college admissions. He cautioned that affirmative action "hasn't been as potent a force for racial progress as advocates would claim, and it hasn't been as bad on white students seeking admissions or seeking a job as its critics have said."

GUANTANAMO DETAINEES

Obama said he's open to the idea of detaining certain Guantanamo Bay terror suspects someplace else for prolonged periods, but it may turn out that he won't be comfortable with any proposals to do that. Obama said some detainees aren't a good fit for prosecution in the United States or under international law. "How we deal with those situations is going to be one of the biggest challenges of my administration."

ECONOMY

As the nation struggles with escalating unemployment, Obama said, health care reform and an increased focus on clean energy are two critical areas that can be exploited to boost the economy. "If we're weatherizing every building and home in America, if we are creating windmills and solar panels and biofuel facilities, that is a huge promising area not only for jobs here in the United States, but also for export growth."

RUSSIA

Obama said Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin "has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new." Obama, who plans to meet with Putin when he travels to Russia, said the former Russian president must understand that the Cold War approach is outdated and that the U.S. is not seeking an antagonistic relationship, but wants to partner on issues including energy and counterterrorism.

AFGHANISTAN

The president said he will reassess the possible need for additional U.S. troops in Afghanistan after the Afghan national elections in August. The narrow national security goal, he said, is to ensure terrorist organizations are not acting with impunity. To that end, the U.S. must help build the Afghan army and encourage Pakistan to shore up its borders, he said. "I think those goals can be achieved without us increasing our troop levels."

MICHAEL JACKSON

Obama said he has Jackson songs on his iPod and is glad to see that the entertainer is being remembered for "the great joy" that he brought to people with his extraordinary gifts. But he said that brilliance was paired with a tragic and sad personal life.

Chuck Grassley: If You Want Good Health Insurance, Work For The Government (VIDEO)

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:35:27 -0500

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has a brilliant plan for fixing the health care system: If you want quality coverage, "go work for the Federal government."

At least, that was the answer that Grassley offered up at a town hall meeting in Waukon, Iowa on Tuesday after a constituent asked the senator why he is unable to find good, affordable health insurance like the kind senators get.

Despite the fact that Grassley himself enjoys the benefits of the federal government's excellent public insurance policy, the senator has been avocal opponent of including a public option in any health care plan.

Grassley's stance, incidentally, flies in the face of the opinions of his own Iowa constituents, a majority of whom say they would like to see a public health insurance option.

After sharing his family's personal struggle with the burden of high health care costs, an audience member asked, "My question is... why is your insurance so much cheaper than my insurance and so better than my insurance?"

The question made Grassley cranky.

He responded, first, by suggesting the questioner "go work for John Deere," since they "don't pay anything" for their insurance plan.

When the questioner refused to let the senator wriggle out of answering the question, Grassley revealed how little he knew about his own insurance plan.

Another audience member had to help the senator out by describing the details of the plan. After she finished, the original questioner again asked, "Okay, so how come I can't have the same thing you have?"

Grassley's response: "You can. Just go work for the Federal government."

WATCH:

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Kay Hagan, Key Senate Democrat: "I Support" Public Plan

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:15:37 -0500

One of the Democratic senators who was on the fence when it came to backing a public option for health insurance coverage is coming out in support of the measure.

On Thursday, Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) offered her support for the health care overhaul proposal put forth by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, of which she is a member. In the process, she issued a statement that removed any doubt about where she stands on a publicly run insurance option.

"My colleagues and I on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee have been working on a plan to reform the health care system in this country," Hagan's statement read. "We have crafted a plan that will stabilize health care costs and includes a Community Health Insurance Option, which I support. It is a backstop option for people without access to affordable coverage. Health care providers will not be required to participate, payment rates will be set in a competitive fashion, and the community health insurance option will compete on a level playing field with private health insurance plans in the gateway."

The public plan portion of the proposal, known as the Community Health Insurance Option, would be overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, but follow the rules set forth by the private market. At the same time, it would lower the costs of health care by pooling the purchasing powers of its participants and it would drastically lower the administrative costs customary to private providers. In short, one source on the committee said, it is the robust proposal that progressive wanted. And now Hagan, as her office confirmed to the Huffington Post, supports it.

For days, even weeks, the North Carolina Democrat had been pinpointed as a possible roadblock towards getting a strong public option out of the HELP committee. Progressive groups were running advertisements in her state to compel her to support the provision. Local pressure on the Senator was intense as well as it was widely believed that she was trying to water down the public option during the committee's drafting process.

In the end, Democrats say, Hagan was much more solid on the idea than media reports were letting on.

"The Left is wrong about Sen. Hagan on this," said a Senior Democratic staffer. "For others to attack her as standing in the way of progress on public choice just isn't right. She worked right up to the wire with other Democrats on the Committee. In the end, it will be plan they created together that will pass the Senate, guarantee access to affordable coverage for those who don't have it and preserve the options of those who do."

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Reese Schonfeld: SNAFU: Truck You, Detroit, or Tanks for Nuttin'

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:10:50 -0500

Last month, InsideDefense.com informed us that the Joint Requirements Oversight Council of the DOD had "approved a new requirement" for 5,244 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected All-Terrain Vehicles (MRAPs) for troops deployed in Afghanistan. "The original RFP [Request for Proposal] indicated the program could grow to include as many as 10,000 vehicles." The article added that "In May, the Army and Marine Corps awarded contracts for three production-representative vehicles to BAE systems, Oshkosh, Navistar and Forced Dynamics--a Forced Protection and General Dynamics Land Systems Team." Last week, InsideDefense reported that the Army awarded Oshkosh a separate $1.1 billion contract for 2,244 lighter weight MRAPs for use in Afghanistan. You will note that none of these companies is based in Detroit.

During World War II, Detroit was called the Arsenal of Democracy--GM, Ford and Chrysler stopped making cars and instead turned out tanks, cargo/troop carriers, ambulances and trucks; Willy's stopped making automobiles and invented Jeeps and America rolled to victory on Detroit wheels. But, in the late seventies, the Army told Detroit to "truck-off" after deciding that its militarized trucks could no longer meet the Army's needs, and went off on a search for new vendors.

In 1979, the Army chose American Motors and its AMG subsidiary to develop the High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV or Humvee) and then, in 1981, awarded AMG a contract for 55,000 of those vehicles. They were designed to carry troops and/or cargo and worked fine in Panama and in the first Iraq war. However, they were unarmored and, in 1993 in Mogadishu, proved unable to protect the soldiers they carried. (The movie was called Blackhawk Down.)

So, in need of a vehicle capable of withstanding small arms fire, the Army and the Marine Corps went back to AMG to develop the M1114, another Humvee, but this time with an armored cab and bulletproof glass. It failed to consider that in the next war, a new enemy might introduce Claymore mines, Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), rocket propelled grenades, or anti-tank missiles. Due to that lack of foresight, hundreds of soldiers and marines were killed, and thousands severely injured by mines, IEDs and RPGs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Detroit was building fewer and fewer cars, closing more and more factories and laying off more and more qualified assembly line workers. Even as Army generals pleaded for more Army vehicles, the DOD did not turn to GM, Chrysler or Ford. In Iraq, soldiers searched through scrap heaps to find steel plates to "up-armor" their personnel carriers. "Up-armor" vehicle kits requested in 2003 were not delivered until mid-2005.

As far back as the late nineties, according to The New York Times, "The Pentagon was warned by its own experts" to "move beyond the Humvee" because "it was built for the Cold War." But the armored vehicles cost far more, and the DOD without as far as I know, getting any quotes from Detroit, "resisted allocating money for more expensive vehicles." So, in 2003 in Iraq, "the military ended up largely dependent on Humvees- a vast majority of which did not have any armor- in both combat and non-combat operations in the war." The Times quoted from a 2002 memorandum to Congress by Assistant Army Secretary Claude M. Bolton, Jr. that, "'The decision is based on budget priorities'...Existing vehicles, he added, can be used instead 'without exposing our soldiers to an unacceptable amount of risk.'"

As the risk in Afghanistan proved "unacceptable", the Defense Department began sending AMG Humvee chassis to a relatively small Ohio Company, O'Gara-Hess and Eisenhardt, for "up-armoring". The Times reported that when the war with Iraq began O'Gara "had 94 people armoring one Humvee a day." As late as June of 2005, "The Marine Corps [was] still awaiting [the delivery of] the 498 armored Humvees it sought" from O'Gara the previous fall. I am sure Detroit would have done better than that.

By that time, O'Gara had received more than $1 billion in military armoring contracts. That money might have been better spent in Detroit, where assembly lines were standing idle and experienced workers were losing their jobs every day. It might have even saved us some of the billions of dollars we are pouring into General Motors for which we receive not armored vehicles, but pieces of paper.

In 2004, the DOD decided that it was perhaps time to acquire a new more protective troop-carrying vehicle, "the Cougar." The British had been using Cougars since 2002, and was obtaining them from a small South Carolina production company Force Protection, LLC. According to The New York Times, the Marine Corps decided that "To help defeat roadside ambushes" it would "buy 122 Cougars whose special V-shaped hull helps deflect roadside bombs." At the time the contract was awarded to Force Protection, the company "employed only 39 workers, and had never mass produced the vehicles." The results were predictable--prototype failures and delay after delay.

The Times quoted company officials as saying that "a string of blunders has pushed the completion date to June...A dozen prototypes shipped to Iraq had been recalled from the fields to replace a failing transmission. Steel was cut to the wrong size before the trucks' design drawings were perfected. Several managers have left the company...'It is what it is, and we're running as fast as we can to change it,' Gordon McGilton, the company's Chief Executive said..."

In the meantime, O'Gara-Hess and Eisenhardt were falling behind schedule, and when the Army requested that they permit other companies to "up-armor" the AMG chassis, but again quoting The New York Times, "O'Gara-Hess and Eisenhardt, has waged an aggressive campaign to hold on to its exclusive deal even as soaring rush orders from Iraq had been plagued by delays...In January [2005], when military officials tried to speed production by buying the legal rights to the armor design so they could enlist other venders to help, O'Gara demurred, calling the move a threat to its 'current and future competitive position,' according to e-mail records obtained from the Army."

To quote The New York Times once more, "The Pentagon decided against asking Detroit automakers like General Motors, which makes the Humvee's civilian version, the Hummer, to start making armored Humvees because they would need too much time to set up new assembly lines." I wonder who at General Motors told them so. O'Gara did not expect to be able to armor the necessary 550 vehicles a month until late in the spring of 2005. I bet General Motors could've done better than that.

As to Force Protection and the Cougar, the company ran into more and more difficulties. It has been sued by its investors, and LegalRadar reports that it settled a federal law suit claiming that "the company used advanced payment 'for purposes other than that to which the United States government had intended'" for $1.8 million. Its stock has fallen from a high of over $30 to $5.38 a share, as of today. The latest blow to the company's future was last week's award to Oshkosh of the contract for the new MRAP vehicle.

It seems to me that the military has fallen upon hard times. No longer does it seek the best available weapons, but rather looks for the most affordable. The Brits afforded Cougars in 2003 but we stuck with Humvees until 2005. Humvees could've been "up-armored" in 2003, but the DOD rejected requests from at least one field general, and an understaffed O'Gara couldn't reach proper production levels until the spring of 2005.

For two years, soldiers and marines who should have have been better protected were killed and maimed because our military procurement system was in great disorder. One cannot blame this entirely on the Pentagon; Congress makes sure that most members' districts get some share of the defense industry pie, and contracts are often awarded on the basis of location, rather than performance.

Despite the fact that President Obama had insisted during his campaign that he would change the emphasis on the war in Iraq to the war in Afghanistan, despite the fact that General Petraeus had repeatedly stressed his concerns about Afghanistan and his plans to send more troops there, and an earlier joint operational needs statement from military commanders in Afghanistan, the Army did not put out an RFP for the new vehicles until December of 2008.
Then delays were caused by protests from a contractor. Navistar, one of the competitors for the contract cited a "technicality" about definitions in the evaluation process. InsideDefense reported that, "The company [Navistar] withdrew its protest after the Army and Marine Corps quickly amended the request for proposals to clarify the definitions of 'hull' and 'hull breach.'" For whatever reason, it took the Army seven months from the RFP to the award of the contract.

On July 2nd, The New York Times reported that, "Almost 4,000 United States Marines pushed into the volatile Helmand River valley in southwestern Afghanistan early Thursday morning to try to take back the region from Taliban fighters whose control of poppy harvests and opium smuggling in Helmand provides major funding for the Afghan insurgency...The operation is described as the first major push in southern Afghanistan by the newly bolstered American force." The Times also mentions that, "improvised explosive devices...are the most feared weapon."

Obviously, the Marines are not yet equipped with the new safer "Mine Resistant Ambush Protected All-Terrain Vehicles", that InsideDefense mentioned in its report. These are specially designed "lighter MRAPs for Afghanistan," and Oshkosh is just going into production. InsideDefense did not report when the vehicles will be shipped, but the Marines do not now have access to weapons specially designed to meet their needs as they launch an offensive that portends some of the deadliest warfare yet. It is a certainty that some Marines will die because they have not been properly equipped.

Detroit, a once great city is dying, too. It has been delivered unto poverty. Last Sunday, The Times reported that 23% of Michigan's blacks are unemployed, and the number is likely to go higher. A city, a state, which once gave decent, middle-class wages to assembly line workers, is now attempting to find jobs for hundreds of thousands of unemployed who will probably never find jobs that good again. And Detroit is not the only city facing devastation. GM plants from New Jersey to California have shut down; Chrysler has closed plants in Michigan; St. Louis, Ohio, Delaware and elsewhere. A lot of the $25 billion that we have advanced to GM and Chrysler would have been better spent if we had paid it to them in return for building MRAPs and ATVs and other military vehicles.

Our military procurement system is a mess. Our automobile industry is a mess. We might have helped both if we had gotten them to agree to build the next generation of military vehicles together. We seem to have never considered that possibility. At the risk of sounding like a "socialist", I suggest that somewhere in the White House or in the Cabinet there might be someone coordinating our defense needs and our industrial capacity. The current version of the military-industrial complex has proved inadequate. It's time for a change.

Carl Pope: Wild America Creeps Back

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:04:01 -0500

For eight years under George Bush, America's wilderness faced a systematic assault from the federal government. By the end of the first Bush term, more than 100 million acres that previously enjoyed federal protection had lost it.

Since last November's election, the Bush legacy has been unraveling, and the progress on this front has been encouragingly swift. Last month the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) issued a biological function that will require fundamental changes in how the government operates California's water system. The biologists concluded that salmon, steelhead, green sturgeon, and killer whales all would be at risk unless the amount of water that remains in the rivers and deltaic systems is increased -- which means less diversion for irrigation.

"What is at stake here is not just the survival of species but the health of entire ecosystems," said Rod Mcinnis, administrator of the NMFS Southwest Regional Office. In addition to mandating a reduction in irrigation supplies by another five to seven percent a year, NMFS made other suggestions: The boldest is to open up the Red Bluff Diversion Dam on the Sacramento River to allow Chinook salmon and sturgeon unimpeded passage upriver.

Given that this decision comes in the middle of a serious drought that is hammering both farmers and fisheries, this announcement was yet another sign that science is back in Washington!
Then this week a U.S. District Court here in the Bay Area threw out what, I believe, is the last tattered legacy of the Bush-Mark Rey attack on the National Forests.

Pre-Bush versions of the forest-planning rules contained enforceable standards that protected wildlife, water, and forests. The earlier rules also provided opportunities for public involvement and required analysis of environmental impacts of forest plans on the national forests, impacts that result from plan decisions regarding logging levels and other extractive uses of forest resources. Bush and his USDA undersecretary Mark Rey simply threw out the idea of enforceable environmental standards -- the Court was not amused:

[C]ourts have rejected USDA's argument that the programmatic nature of the plan development rule necessarily means that it will have no effect on the environment or protected species. The USDA has simply copied those rejected legal arguments in a new document and called it a 'Biological Assessment.' This is not sufficient to satisfy the [Endangered Species Act]'s requirements....Because the EIS does not evaluate the environmental impacts of the 2008 Rule, it does not comply with [the National Environmental Policy Act]'s requirements.

It will take years to undo all the damage from the past eight years (and some places that we lost will never recover) but we're only five months in to the new administration, and the contrast could not be starker.

ABC News Reporter Tweets That Iranian Detainees Are Being Waterboarded

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:57:30 -0500

[h/t; The Daily Dish] From ABC News' Lara Setrakian, comes this tweet:

Tehrani source close to those detained says some have been beaten heavily and waterboarded with hot water #iranelection

In my younger years, I would simply expect this news to be greeted with universal outrage, knowing that the techniques being described had long been deemed to be well across the Bridge Too Far. Now that I've lived through the Bush administration, however, I am forced to contemplate the possibility that Iran is merely taking legitimate steps to obtain critical information in their nations' vital national security interests. One mustn't preclude the possibility that many of those being waterboarded are privy to information about "time bombs" that may, at this moment, be "ticking."

The whole matter could be investigated, I suppose, but I'm also forced to consider that once Iran is through this rough patch, it would be better if everyone involved just looked forward, not backward.

Anyway, I guess everyone's really playing follow-the-leader on this nation's innovations in the area of what our press calls "enhanced interrogation techniques." Pop champagne.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

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Doug Stanton: Taking It To The Streets

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:55:45 -0500

Of all the places I've been while talking to audiences about the U.S. Army's 5th Special Forces Group and their story in Afghanistan, one of the most rewarding was an appearance before the 5th Group soldiers themselves at Ft. Campbell, their home, and the place from which they had launched their historic mission in Afghanistan in 2001. I was returning to the source of the story. Colonel Mark Mitchell, with whom I would later appear on stage in several different places to talk about the story, and the Special Forces soldiers' deployment in Afghanistan in 2001, had helped arrange the visit. Back in 2001, Mitchell was a major in Fifth Group; this year, he will take command of it.

At Ft. Campbell, Fifth Group Deputy Commander Colonel Kevin "Duke" Christie introduced me to about 150 soldiers in a small auditorium-- it resembled a college lecture hall. The soldiers sat dressed in their battle dress uniforms, alongside some of the helicopter plots and crew of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment-- the same pilots featured in Black Hawk Down. These guys did incredible things flying into Afghanistan, and I'm sure they are doing equally amazing things today, as I write this, as fighting heats up in southern Afghanistan. These are soldiers who do not normally talk to reporters.

I wanted to give them my civilian's perspective about the parts of their story that resonated with the larger American reading public, many of whom had never given soldiers or soldiers' lives a second thought, or even any thought at all. Women, especially, had written me that liked the book, a group of readers who may not generally pick up a "war book."

I should point out that I had never thought of Horse Soldiers as being a "war book" but rather a dramatic story about survival, and about men at work-- doing the work of staying alive-- while back at home their wives and children are engaged in a self-same kind of battle against worry, work and school schedules, the bits and pieces of daily life that can seem so commonplace (but are not) when contrasted to the drama of combat.

As Dean Nosorog, one of the Special Forces captains in the book, said to me, "This is a book about relationships-- between the men themselves, and with the Afghans, and with their families back home."

We had been sitting in a coffee shop in a big city, Dean dressed in sandals and hiking shorts, looking very different from the hard-core and highly educated soldier whose face had populated so many of the pictures on my desk as I wrote Horse Soldiers. After the 2001 battle in Afghanistan, Dean had gone on to teach in a counter-terrorism program at West point. I thought this was an astute point from Dean-- that this was a story about relationships. I hadn't actually thought of the book in this way.

Before Ft. Campbell, I'd addressed the officers and NCO's at United States Army Special Operations Command at Ft. Bragg. You never know when you write something, how the people involved will respond, and you can't worry. You need to be honest and true-- you need to burrow down to the heart of the story and if you write it true then the people will see themselves, and while they might not like it, they will appreciate the honesty. In this case, the soldiers had told me I'd gotten it right with Horse Soldiers. So far, the reach of their story has surprised even me.

At Ft. Bragg, I presented Lieutenant General John Mulholland with a copy, and spent an hour talking about Afghanistan in 2001 and today, 2009. Much of the credit for the first campaign should go to Mulholland, and to his then commanding officer, Major General Geoffrey Lambert, now retired, for getting it off the ground. At Ft. Campbell, I asked the soldiers to raise their hands who had been in high school when 9/11 happened. More than a few hands went up, surprising some of the older soldiers in the audience -- the men who had taken part in the 2001 campaign against the Taliban. Deputy Commander Duke Christie had asked me to come to Ft. Campbell and talk about the book because so many of the of the new Special Forces soldiers didn't know much about what their older colleagues had done eight years earlier, to oust the Taliban. That was hard to believe at first, until you realize that history is also handed down by newspapers and books, even to the soldiers who are making it. That is the power of story-telling, and of history.

Sen. Sherrod Brown: Health Reform That Works for Every American

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:44:07 -0500

This morning, millions of people all over this country woke up hoping today isn't the day they get sick. Millions of Americans went to work wondering whether today would be the last day they get paid in a while. And millions sat up late last night at the kitchen table, to try to balance the family budget as health care bills piled higher and higher.

Access to secure, affordable health care is one of the brightest lines dividing our country. When the system works, it's at worst inconvenient. When it doesn't - and too often, it doesn't - it can leave families, businesses, whole communities devastated.

There has to be a better way. We have to do better than 47 million uninsured, and millions more teetering on the brink. We have to do better than 100,000 people dying each year from avoidable medical errors. America can do better than this.

That's why for the past several weeks, Senate Democrats have worked hard to craft a sensible, comprehensive health care reform that will begin to reduce costs for families, businesses, and our government; protect people's choice of doctors, hospitals and insurance plans; and offer affordable, high-quality health care for every American.

Our reform upholds President Obama's promise: if you like the health care you have, you can keep it. But for the many Americans who want different choices - or don't have health insurance at all - we also offer a new, public health insurance option. The Community Health Insurance Option will be a national plan, administered by the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and available in every state and territory. It will offer benefits that are as good as those available through private insurance plans - or better. The Secretary will negotiate provider payment rates to encourage doctors and hospitals to participate, and individuals who need financial help purchasing coverage will receive it. Local advisory councils will assure the plan receives community input.

Overwhelmingly, Americans agree that healthy competition and a broad range of choices will help keep costs down and insurance plans honest. Our Community Health Insurance Option will be a clear, affordable alternative to for-profit insurance companies.

Your health insurer should be your advocate - not your adversary. The Community Health Insurance Option will invest in prevention, so that when you're healthy you stay that way. It will invest in care management and coordination, when you have a chronic condition. And it will fight for you, not with you, to get you get the best possible care with the least possible hassle.

Some people will try to scare you into thinking that having a public option will drive all private health insurers out of the market. But we all know the truth: the only place the public option will drive private health insurers is back onto the straight and narrow. Your health insurer should never deny you coverage because you've had a heart condition. Your insurer should never carve out your diabetes from your coverage. Your insurer should never deny payment for the MRI they didn't pre-authorize because in the haze of your breast cancer diagnosis, you hadn't read the fine print.

They'll also try to scare you into thinking that our plan will put the government between you and your doctor, and ration your care. The truth is just the opposite. Private insurance rations care by ability to pay - and puts insurance company bureaucrats between you and your doctor. Our plan rejects this failed system - because every American deserves the very best care, no matter what.

The HELP Committee's plan is the right path for our country as we work to reform our health care system - and we look forward to the day when it's available to millions of Americans desperately in need of comprehensive, low-cost, high-quality coverage. This should have happened long ago.

The writers are Democratic U.S. Senators representing Ohio and Rhode Island, respectively. They are members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee.

Gay Marriage in Washington, DC: Coming Tuesday at 12:01 am

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:41:51 -0500

The D.C. Council has passed a gay marriage recognition bill . Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has signed it. The Board of Elections and Ethics has rejected a referendum effort aimed at overturning it. A Superior Court judge has upheld that decision . So, barring intervention from the D.C. Court of Appeals —and, according to a court spokesperson , no appeal was filed by close of business today — gay marriages will very soon be legal in the District of Columbia . Brian Flowers , th

James Zogby: Iraq: What Must Now Be Done

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:40:25 -0500

On June 39th, in keeping with the timetable set by the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, the US redeployed its combat forces out of major Iraqi cities--the first phase of a plan that should lead to a complete US withdrawal from Iraq by December 31, 2011.

The Iraqi government declared this move a victory and set June 30th as "Sovereignty Day," a national holiday. In the US, a Washington Post writer stated that Iraq "is no longer an American war," (certainly, I must add, not the view of the Obama Administration). Nice words, but more dangerous exaggeration than a depiction of reality. Victory has not been won, nor has America's responsibility ended.

It is good that the US has redeployed and it is equally important that the Iraqi military and government must now find a way to assume primary responsibility for internal security. But there will be difficult days ahead with dangers on many fronts. These must be faced squarely.

Of principle concern, of course, is the absence of internal political reconciliation. Tensions remain between the government and other factions within the majority Shi'a community. There is also the matter of the still unresolved integration of major Sunni groups into the government and its institutions.

Probably the most immediate danger will come from the north where Arabs are fighting against what they feel is a Kurdish overreach in the Kirkuk and Nineveh Provinces.

As one of its closing acts, the outgoing Kurdish Parliament passed (some say, unconstitutionally) a new draft constitution extending the borders of their region to include Kirkuk and parts of Nineveh. This is to be voted on July 25th when the Kurds hold regional elections. Passage could be a spark that ignites a major conflagration. Concerned with continuing violence in this region, the US requested that its military remain in Mosul beyond the June 30th deadline. This request was denied.

An additional problem, that has been ignored for too long, is the situation of the refugees and internally displaced persons (more than 2 million of each) who represent roughly 1/5 of the Iraqi population. Many of these fled because of the hardships of war, while others were "cleansed" for ethnic or sectarian reasons from their neighborhoods or communities. As long as these groups remain in "limbo" in Syria or Jordan, or other parts of Iraq, itself, a deep wound continues to fester.

It is difficult to see how any of this constitutes "victory," or how any American writer can declare the US absolved from responsibility for the mess that remains.

I have long argued that what matters is not the date the US sets for its departure, but what is done between now and that date that will ultimately determine success or failure.

One of the key recommendations of the Iraq Study Group (the most discussed, and yet least read or heeded book of the decade) was the need to establish a regional contact group that would help both to create a regional security framework and to support efforts to promote internal reconciliation.

There can be no doubt that all of Iraq's neighbors have legitimate concerns in the country's future and stability. Some like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have been directly harmed in the past. Iran fought a long and costly war with Iraq, and both Turkey and Iran share with Iraq the need to address legitimate Kurdish concerns. Syria and Jordan have borne the burden of sheltering Iraq's refugees, while the rest of the GCC countries remain deeply concerned lest the continued instability in Iraq spill over, threatening regional security.

All of these countries have concerns, and, to some degree, competing interests and visions for Iraq's future. And some, like Iran, are continuing to play a meddlesome role seeking advantage to promote their interests.

The only way forward is to invite all of Iraq's neighbors, as well as all of Iraq's internal factions and groupings to participate in a contact group--creating a situation where they are forced to lay their cards on the table instead of under the table. As urgent as this approach was when the Iraq Study Group proposed it in 2006, it is more so now, given the tumultuous events in Iran and the dawning of the beginning of the end of the US military presence in Iraq. The longer the US waits to create this regional framework, the less leverage we will have and the greater the danger that Iraq's internal dynamics or external factors may cause the situation to spin out of control. This, in turn, could create a new crisis drawing the US back into the fray, making the achievement of full sovereignty and reconciliation more difficult to achieve.

Daniel Cubias: The Great American Melting Pot (?)

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:39:54 -0500

You will not catch me dissing Schoolhouse Rock.

Like all good Gen Xers, I grew up with the infectious tones of the Saturday morning series permeating my brain. Before I could stop it, Schoolhouse Rock told me how a bill becomes a law, informed me that zero is my hero, and explained how an interjection shows excitement or emotion (and starts a sentence right!).

Kids of the last twenty years have matured with a serious gap in their educational and cultural knowledge. Plummeting test scores and rampant student apathy will not end because of laws like No Child Left Behind. For that, we need the immediate return of Schoolhouse Rock.

However, despite its emphasis on objective facts and wholesome entertainment, the series thrust itself into controversy on occasion. Well, actually, on just one occasion, and even then only in retrospect.

I'm talking, of course, about the segment titled, "The Great American Melting Pot." As we celebrate Independence Day, let's take a look back at this dash of 1970s patriotism set to a soul groove.

One of the lesser known segments of Schoolhouse Rock, the segment features a pitch-perfect spokesinger extolling the virtues of immigration (no, really... she does), who then explains how America is a mixture of different races and ethnicities. The singer also belts out uplifting lyrics that praise liberty and the fact that any kid could be president.

Watching it now, however, one has to wonder about the accuracy -- and even the appropriateness -- of "The Great American Melting Pot."

Is it a call to racial harmony and an appeal to the common roots that ninety-eight percent of Americans share (i.e., immigrant forefathers?) Or is it a trite, jingoistic anthem created in troubling times that is even less relevant now?

Of course, this isn't about Schoolhouse Rock. The big question is whether the great American melting pot ever existed. And if so, were the perimeters of this ethnic kettle -- in reality -- confined to Europeans, the occasional Russian, and Jews who changed their last names?

The answer that one gives, and the passion that he or she conveys while giving it, says a lot. What really makes it interesting is that the question doesn't lend itself to easy left-versus-right debates. Both liberals and conservatives can praise or criticize the melting-pot metaphor, based upon their perspectives.

Some liberals love the melting pot for illustrating the quest for equality and the concept that every ethnic group, no matter how recently arrived or troubled, contributes to the American Dream. Or they hate it for its simplistic demand that people drop their customs and heritage to adopt "American ways," which are inevitably defined by an inflexible majority culture.

Meanwhile, some conservatives grow misty-eyed at the melting pot for enforcing the old up-from-the-bootstraps idea and the supremacy of American society. Or they loath it because it implies that the government should acknowledge languages other than English and that people can't just shout "Merry Christmas" at everyone.

So which is it? Can the melting pot be both innocent ideal and vile subversion? Is it both inspiring metaphor and insufferable indoctrination?

It shouldn't be this difficult. We live in a post-racial society, after all... right? We're supposed to run around yelling, "Hey everybody, it's the achievement of Martin Luther King's dream!" But clearly, even looking at thirty-year-old cartoons can prove vexing to that plan. We still struggle with the very idea of what it means to be American. One has to wonder if we will ever come to an answer.

In any case, regardless of your opinion of the segment, and the whole idea of an American melting pot, there is one thing that all Americans can agree upon:
"Conjunction Junction" flat-out rocks.

Stephen Ducat: Hypocrisy in Red and Blue: How Republicans and Democrats Betray Their Principles Differently

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:22:13 -0500

We are no longer surprised that Republican scandals are so often ripe with the stench of hypocrisy. It is a fetor that frequently accompanies the predictable libidinous lapses of pious "family values" conservatives. Sanford, Ensign, Craig, Vitter, Haggard, Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Palin are only some of the more recent purveyors of right wing rectitude whose messy real lives and even messier longings have collided head-on with their revered black and white biblical mandates. It needn't be pointed out that these are the same rigid rules with which they are fond of flagellating others, primarily liberals.

Before weeping over the wages paid for his sexual sins, Governor Sanford shed a bucket of crocodile tears over the dire prospect of taking federal stimulus money. As we later discovered, he was quite willing to use taxpayer funds as another sort of stimulus - to subsidize a tryst with his Argentine "soul mate." As I will show later in this post, the conjunction of these two moments of hypocrisy - the economic and the erotic - reveal much about conservative psychology. But before we go there, let's look at their opponents across the aisle.

Democrats are certainly not strangers to bimbo eruptions or other scandals. But for the most part they don't tell others how to lead their private lives. Nor do they pummel their opponents with holy books or claim to be taking orders from God (or any other invisible sky man, as the Daily Show's John Oliver would put it). So, embarrassing revelations about uncontained lust towards forbidden objects of desire, even when they rain personal and political disaster down upon Democrats, do not render them hypocrites.

To be sure, Democratic politicians are no less capable of betraying their stated values. But their hypocrisy derives from a very different character flaw, a crippling moral cowardice - an inability to actually fight for positions they claim to believe in. So many Democrats seem allergic to their own aggression. Their idea of negotiation is to start out asking for very little, and retreat from there. Preemptive submission is their primary tactic. We can all recall their declarations at various points that certain items were "off the table" - the impeachment of Bush regime members or, post-election, investigations of their crimes - and now "single-payer" health care.

Perhaps the most malignant expression of Democratic Party surrender, because it facilitates all the others, is the willingness of its elected members to accept GOP linguistic and narrative frames on all the major issues. Regardless of their beliefs to the contrary, Democrats have been quite willing to parrot phrases like "war on terror," "tax relief," "defense of marriage," and "enemy combatant." This has not only set them up for the inevitable legislative capitulation, but also enabled the already docile, mostly stenographic mainstream media to function as an uncritical vector for right-wing talking points.

As we have come to see, the rhetoric of "bipartisanship" is often a cover for a desperate, masochistic need for approval from GOP colleagues who feel nothing but contempt for their groveling Blue State supplicants. In spite of doing their own share of war mongering over the years, Democrats have been readily depicted by Republicans as "weak on defense." It is no wonder. Even with a congressional majority, there's been very little they have been willing to go to battle over. Merely the whisper of a GOP filibuster is enough to make them wet their pants and seek "compromise". They begin most debates pleading for the usual half a loaf, only to end up toast - defeated by their own timidity.

Even when Democratic presidential candidates have lost elections due to a right-wing judicial coup (Gore) or as a result of frank and widespread GOP election fraud (Kerry), there is no protest or call for investigation. In both cases electoral theft was followed by a rapid concession to the perpetrators because it was "good for the country" and we needed to "move on." Well, I think we all saw how good these two surrenders turned out to be for the country. As a result, we've gotten to know Republican hypocrisy all too well.

GOP hypocrisy is founded in a very different psychology. The problem is not simply that they are "two-faced." After all, there are few humans who are not plagued by contradiction and a Janus-faced psyche. Rather, what so often dooms the sanctimonious prigs of the Republican Party is their inability to face their own complexity - the conflicting impulses and longings that are so painfully at odds with the dictates of their fundamentalist super-egos.

For them simple-mindedness is more than a cognitive deficit; it is also what they seek. George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan are perhaps the most outstanding examples of conservative politicians for whom self-reflection was an abomination to be avoided at all costs. They prided themselves on having an opaque inner life, and worked strenuously to keep it that way. Their gaze, like that of so many right-wingers, was always fixed on the external world, where evil, immorality, and murderous impulses could be projected and battled.

Not surprisingly, the traits of conservative politicians tend to be mirrored in those who vote for them. In 2003 four prominent psychologists published an encyclopedic assessment, called a "meta-analysis," of nearly all the research conducted over the last fifty years on the personality characteristics that differentiate conservatives from liberals. From the perspective of these authors, right-wing ideology, like all political views, tends to be driven by what they call "motivated social cognition." By that they mean that political attitudes result in part from unconscious psychological needs and concerns. This can lead us to believe what we need to believe, and see what we want to see.

One of the most striking of the many findings the research has yielded is that adherents of right wing ideology are likely to exhibit a profound intolerance of ambiguity. This anxiety leads to a tendency towards black and white thinking, a distorting lens through which they see the larger social world. As a consequence, they often divide it into domains of unalloyed good and pure evil.

This trait also enables a simplistic vision of their inner lives. It affords a picture of themselves as shorn of complexity, conflict, or religiously unsanctioned impulses. Sadly, this does not stop them from acting out the desires they so desperately struggle to disavow. Thus we have become accustomed to the seemingly endless series of tearful press conferences in which family-values fundamentalists apologize to their families for one or another sexual transgression. Unfaithful people of faith, sexually active abstinence believers, and gay homophobes are now a perennial feature of the tabloid media-scape.

In is not just in these scandals that Christian Right hypocrisy shows up. An astonishing recent analysis by Charles M. Blow in the New York Times revealed that states that voted Republican in the last election were dramatically higher in divorce rates, teenage pregnancies, and subscription to online pornography sites. This does not appear to be something right-wing politicians want to know about themselves or their constituents.

Rather than look inward, conservative leaders - like that mythic monarch of antiquity, Oedipus - would rather put out their eyes. No wonder they find themselves in the middle of public relations disasters, their exploded careers and personal lives in ruins around them. They never see it coming. Again and again, they seem to prefer hysterical blindness to the emotional pain of leading an examined life.

Right wing authoritarians around the world, as varied as they may be, share a familiar cognitive reflex - the reliance on "outside agitator" explanations for most internal problems. Just the other day Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a week after his own security forces murdered and thereby martyred the young woman known as "Neda," promised (like OJ) to find the "real killer." In the mean time, he's expelling foreign journalists, who he claims are the ones responsible for stirring up the population, making people march in the streets, and generally disturbing the erstwhile tranquility of Iranian society.

Here on these shores Rush Limbaugh recently exceeded the usual contortions his logic can take when he conjured one of the most inventive outside agitator explanations I've heard in a long time. In an argument only M.C. Escher could follow, Limbaugh reasoned that Mark Sanford was so disturbed by Obama's stimulus package and the "Big Government" control it signified, that the Governor decided to throw all caution to the wind and have a mad, passionate extramarital love affair, one that began before Obama was elected.

But that only serves to highlight another major manifestation of conservative hypocrisy. For nearly thirty years Republicans have made opposition to what Reagan called the "National Nanny," and her addictive social services and infrastructure milk, one of their primary battle cries. Steeped in their rhetoric of cowboy individualism, they have consistently denounced the dependency-inducing perils of getting government assistance, as well as the taxes necessary to fund it. "Tax and spend" liberals were the source of most social woes in their view.

As it turns out, they doth protest a bit much. Based on 2005 tax data, the vast majority of states (84%) that receive more federal tax money than they contribute are Republican. And, most of the states (78%) that contribute more than they get are Democratic. A recent study of tax revenue distribution within California shows that this pattern is replicated within the state. The greatest recipients of state funds are Republican-dominated counties. And the largest donors are the most Democratic counties.

So, part of what this data tells us is that, in addition to aspects of sexuality, another panhuman trait conservatives cannot face in themselves is their dependency on others. This has lead to a particularly malignant manifestation of Republican hypocrisy, one that has impeded social progress on multiple fronts, and severely impoverished their own Red-State constituents.

In conclusion, it is unlikely that Republicans are going to enter psychoanalysis en mass and come to terms with their own complex inner worlds. We needn't wait for that. However, if we are going to have health care, consumer protection, and environmental policies (to name but a few crucial areas) that are not dominated by the interests of corporate predators and their conservative minions, Democrats are going to have to get up off their knees and act with integrity. They don't have to wrap themselves in the American flag on every occasion, just stop waving the white one when confronted by Republican hypocrites.

Washington Post Plans Salons With Lobbyists: Anyone Shocked?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:05:52 -0500

You know, whenever I try to point out how, in Washington, DC, the line between "edit meeting" and "cocktail party" has become blurred to the point of ridiculousness, there's never a shortage of people who'll line up and tell me how cynical I am. But from time to time, I get to issue a big fat, "Suck it!" and one of those days is today, thanks to this article in the Politico:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off the record, non-confrontational access to "those powerful few" -- Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper's own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health-care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it's a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its "health care reporting and editorial staff."

The offer--which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters--is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

Oh, the memories this brings to mind! Why I can recall a day, many years ago, when I was Wonkette, when I got Gawker Media into a whole heap of bad mojo. I had posted an item given to me by a tipster who said that Mike Allen, then of Time Magazine had been at a party at Dick and Lynne Cheney's house telling anyone who would listen that he knew who that year's Time Person of the Year would be. I put up the post, and suddenly everyone was outraged and I was a big jerk who told tales out of school. (On Wonkette. I know: HEAVENS TO BETSY!) (You can read what remains of that heavily redacted item, here.)

Anyway, what can I say? I was a noob, I guess? Unversed in the witchy ways of Washington politesse was I, and it showed. But you have to understand it from my perspective: The fact that some media type was off flaunting his scoops at a party in order to impress political types didn't strike me as something all that unexpected or rare. To me, it was just a wildlife study, and I seem to recall that Dian Fossey published all sorts of observations of her quarry without vetting her copy with the gorillas' spokespersons.

Anyway, after all the outrage over my Wonkette post had died down, I lived to write another day; Wonkette's proprietress, Ana Marie Cox, went to work for TIME; and Mike Allen got to deliver today's report on the WASHINGTON POST playing with lobbyists. Circle of life!

What this long preamble seeks to reinforce with you, gentle reader, is that I have been here, in Washington, a long time. And while I definitely experienced a mix of emotions when I read this story in Politico, there was a notable absence: shock. I was not shocked to read this report. Nor was I shocked to read the official WaPo response from Kris Coratti, his eerily practiced language, speaking in a resounding, "How did that happen?" And shock was similarly off the menu when Howard Kurtz reliably went around collecting everyone's statement, keeping the "critic" part of his "media critic" title corralled in the passive voice.

Yeah, there was really not a lot of shock to be had, I'm afraid. That said, this doesn't mean we can't have a whole lot of fun asking questions!

First off, when I heard that there might be lobbyists in the market for the Washington Post to play go-between between K Street and the White House, at first blush, I was inclined to think, "Hmmm. Maybe there really is something to this. Maybe the White House really is that hostile to the advances of lobbyists that they need all of this extra help!" But then, I consulted my birth certificate, and lo, the date July 1, 2009 did not appear on it.

So I would very much love to have a list of the "Obama administration officials [and] members of Congress" who were prepared to attend these little soirees. I especially want to know who was coming from the White House, after they made such a big, blessed deal about how they weren't going to cozy up to lobbyists, AT ALL. (With exceptions made for certain defense industry lobbyists with indispensable genius, of course.)

Nevertheless, I do not believe, not for one blessed minute, that the lobbying world is in such desperate need of a new channel to access lawmakers. Those channels are open because said lawmakers want to get re-elected. So, I am left to conclude that the key reason all this money might have potentially changed hands was in order to get access to "the paper's own reporters and editors."

And make no mistake, that's the only group of people from the Washington Post with whom anyone at a lobbying firm wants to converse. Coratti's statement reads, "The flier circulated this morning came out of a business division for conferences and events, and the newsroom was unaware of such communication." Please do not make me pull out my birth certificate again! The first of these "salons" was to be at Katherine Weymouth's house, and Marcus Brauchli was to be a featured guest.

Weymouth, for her part, issued the following statement:

"Absolutely, I'm disappointed," Weymouth, the chief executive of Washington Post Media, said in an interview. "This should never have happened. The fliers got out and weren't vetted. They didn't represent at all what we were attempting to do. We're not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom."

I have some ideas for Weymouth, as to a better way to avoid "impugning the integrity of the newsroom" while better representing "what [you are] attempting to do." TELL MARCUS BRAUCHLI TO STAY HOME FROM THESE EVENTS, maybe. How about: DON'T HOST THE EVENT AT YOUR HOUSE. The juxtaposition of these two concepts -- "roomful of lobbyists" and "Katherine Weymouth's personal dining room, at Katherine Weymouth's own house" -- don't leave a whole lot of mystery! Another suggestion: Maybe add a preliminary "vetting" stage where the people in your business division come to you and say something like: "Hey, Katherine, should we be putting your address on these fliers, which we are giving to lobbyists?"

I will say this about that Washington Post business division: I LOVE ME THOSE PRICING MODELS! $25,000 gets you into one of these "salons," but for $250,000, you get the eleventh salon for free! THIS IS EXACTLY HOW I PAY FOR CHOP'T SALADS! Was the Washington Post going to provide punchcards? If so, could I still have one, to commemorate this totally frabjous day in our lives?

I also admire this part of Mike Allen's report:

The offer--which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters--is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

One email I read on this matter notes that this is about as close to describing the "pimp/ho" relationship as you can get away with in the Politico (who by the way, ALSO hosts sponsored parties). Maybe this is how print journalists "struggle for survival." It's enough to make you admire the class and dignity that Dian Fossey's charges display in their own struggles.

It's a funny thing. Just the other day, I was on the phone with my mother, who moved to Washington, DC as a child and whose father was a newsman in Hammond, Indiana. She was, on that occasion, lamenting the disappearance of a forgotten DC institution, the Evening Star. I don't have many memories of this paper, myself. During my lifetime it was known as the Washington Star, and a failing brand. But what my mother most admired about the Evening Star was that it practiced a "studied lack of concern" with anything having to do with the federal government. Instead, they went about their journalism with the guiding philosophy that there were actual people living in Washington, DC, living actual lives, who needed the news they needed to know.

In DC today, all journalism slouches toward Capitol Hill, seeking to be reborn. The paper that broke this story, Politico, makes its bacon selling print ads targeted at "influentials" -- that is, politicos. The Washington Times is reorganizing around national politics. The Washington Examiner is investing big money in institutionalizing a conservative-leaning political presence, that seems intended to be a righty version of TPM. And the Washington Post it seems, is much the same, competing for the same eyeballs and the same ad dollars, and demonstrating that they, too, are not above playing fast and loose to get some.

Of course, somewhere, at the Washington Post, there's some editor with a little bit of that Evening Star spirit, who desperately wants answers to what happened the other day on the Red Line Metro that resulted in the deaths of so many people. But no one is paying $25,000 to meet with that guy. And nobody is hosting a meeting at Katherine Weymouth's house to make sure that top notch reportage is applied to that story. The people affected by that train disaster just aren't influential enough. They aren't invited to the right parties.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

Jenny Sanford: 'I Am Willing To Forgive Mark'

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:59:11 -0500

More news from the Sanford camp. Jenny Sanford, wife of the love sick Gov. has just broken silence, for the first time since Gov. Sanford's AP interview in which he disclosed multiple "line crossing" affairs with other women, and referred to his Argentinian mistress as his "soul mate." In it, she acknowledges that his actions were inexcusable, but says she is willing to forgive him.

***

The full statement:

The last week has been very painful for me, my family and for the people of South Carolina. However, throughout this terrible ordeal, the incredible outpouring of kindness, support, and prayer I've received from countless friends and folks I have never even met has been truly uplifting. I appreciate that more than I can say. Please know that my sons and I are doing fine, given the circumstances. We are surrounded by friends and family, and we will make it through this. I believe it is how we respond to the challenges we face in life, and what we learn from them, that is most telling about who we truly are.

There is no question that Mark's behavior is inexcusable. Actions have consequences and he will be dealing with those consequences for a long while. Trust has been broken and will need to be rebuilt. Mark will need to earn back that trust, first and foremost with his family, and also with the people of South Carolina.

The real issue now is one of forgiveness. I am willing to forgive Mark for his actions. We have been deeply disappointed in and even angry at Mark. The Bible says, "In your anger do not sin." (Psalm 4:4) In this situation, this speaks to the essence of forgiveness and the critical need to channel one's energy into positive steps that uphold the dignity of marriage and the family, and lead to reconciliation over time. My forgiveness is essential for us both to move on with our lives, with peace, in whatever direction that may take us.

Desmond Tutu said "forgiveness is the grace by which you enable the other person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew." Forgiveness opens the door for Mark to begin to work privately, humbly and respectfully toward reconciliation with me. However, to achieve true reconciliation will take time, involve repentance, and will not be easy.

Mark showed a lack of judgment in his recent actions as governor. However, his far more egregious offenses were committed against God, the institutions of marriage and family, our boys and me. Mark has stated that his intent and determination is to save our marriage, and to make amends to the people of South Carolina. I hope he can make good on those intentions, and for the sake of our boys I leave the door open to it. In that spirit of forgiveness, it is up to the people and elected officials of South Carolina to decide whether they will give Mark another chance as well.

O'Reilly fill-in Williams provides platform for global warming misinformation

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:57:38 -0500

Guest-hosting The O'Reilly Factor, Juan Williams did not challenge Bernie Goldberg's false claims about global warming.

William Bradley: The GOP's Palin Food Fight: Why Now?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:53:06 -0500

GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin discussed her knowledge of Russia and foreign policy last fall with CBS News anchor Katie Couric.

You have to hand it to Sarah Palin. For a sideshow, she's very good at being the center of attention. Even when she doesn't want to be.

She had a few big controversies earlier this year -- her on-again/off-again headlining of the big Republican congressional fundraiser, the soap opera around her pregnant teenage daughter, the usual Alaska stuff -- but she's hit the jackpot this week with a huge food fight among big name Republicans. What's unexamined is this question: Why now?

Vanity Fair ran a long article a few days ago detailing various criticisms of Palin by her former colleagues in the John McCain campaign. But while of great interest to folks who don't like Palin, with some nice detail, it's all familiar material.

Palin's confused first national press conference, held after last November's election.

But that didn't stop Palin's great admirer, neoconservative commentator Bill Kristol, from launching an attack, both in his own writing and in a Politico story, on former John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger campaign director Steve Schmidt, whom he decided to hold responsible for the article. Which is a little strange, as there's really not a shortage of McCainiacs to diss Palin, whose performance as the Arizona senator's running mate was simply disastrous.

So why Kristol's hot reaction? Oddly for a purported intellectual, Kristol is a huge booster of the determinedly anti-intellectual Palin. And Kristol's great friend and fellow neocon Randy Scheuneman, who was McCain's controversial chief foreign policy advisor, is an enemy of Schmidt.

This is a fight between some neocons who still want to promote Palin and their discredited geopolitical agenda against some Republican would-be modernizers and McCain backers who blame Palin for blowing their slim chance against Barack Obama.

Palin's high water mark accepting the Republican nomination for Vice President of the United States.

In the aftermath of the Vanity Fair piece on Palin, in which ranking John McCain aides talked about how difficult she was to deal with, Politico ran a story prompted by the post-VF piece battle between commentator Kristol and Schmidt, who managed Schwarzenegger's landslide re-election and, after working for months without pay as McCain rebuilt his campaign, took it over last summer. The story is long and complex, but worth checking out. What Politico, which is really a conservative publication, doesn't get into is why Kristol launched the attack.

Kristol is upset by two things. One, another blow to the notion of Palin as presidential timber, something he has promoted against all the weight of evidence to the contrary. Two, he hates Schmidt's diminution of longtime Kristol friend Randy Scheuneman, who was McCain's chief foreign policy advisor in the campaign and, more importantly, a longtime neocon advocate who was also the paid lobbyist for the government of Georgia.

Scheuneman's enthusiasm about Georgia may well have prompted that country's president, Mikhail Saakashvili, to foolishly invade the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, thus providing Russia with its pretext to crush the Georgian military and dramatically reassert its dominant role in Russia's periphery. With his paid lobbyist at the side of the Republican nominee for president, Saakashvili probably thought the Republican White House would backstop his idiotic move.

Indeed, McCain promptly declared: "We are all Georgians now!" To which most Americans, as I predicted here on the Huffington Post, said: "Say what?"

The McCain campaign did its best to spin up Palin's thin background in this campaign video.

Once she was picked, Scheuneman became a huge advocate of Palin, who was on foreign policy essentially a neocon tool, having no inherent views or knowledge of her own ("I can see Russia from my house," in Tina Fey's deadly parody). He was suspected by Schmidt of leaking to Kristol and others in their circle of right-wing commentators on Fox News and elsewhere, to the extent that Schmidt ordered an in-house search of staff e-mail.

It's fascinating that Kristol -- who is still very influential in Republican circles, notwithstanding the fact that he's virtually always wrong -- and his allies are so concerned about continuing to promote Palin. After all, Barack Obama's fondest wish in his re-election campaign, almost certainly, would be to run against her.

But Kristol, Scheuneman (who became Palin's greatest champion in the McCain campaign) and other neocons are looking for a horse, their other nags having retired or turned up lame. Palin is lame, too, but she has celebrity and a big standing with the party's grassroots right-wing base.

Schmidt, who helped push the pick as one of a series of Hail Mary passes to keep McCain highly competitive with Obama, which worked for awhile, figures prominently in the Vanity Fair account. Among other things, it recounts a not unfamiliar story of how he had to drop most everything for three days in order to prep her for her debate with Joe Biden. And how most of her other early advocates in the campaign found her impossibly difficult to work with.

Now CBS News has come up with some other internal McCain campaign e-mails. In them, Palin is revealed not only as a dissembler on her husband Todd's membership in the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party but also as someone with poor political judgment, wanting the campaign to deny the obvious about which the press no longer really cared, which would have swung McCain wildly off-message shortly before the election.

Before being picked for the national ticket, Palin talked up "Drill, drill, drill" as the answer for America's energy future in this interview with pundit Larry Kudlow.

It's all a bit sad, really.

My immediate take here on the Huffington Post was that the Palin pick was a mistake.

That continued to be my take when she briefly seemed to be taking off. I'd spent a few hours looking into her as a possible McCain running mate, which amounted to nothing more than reading several articles about her, watching video footage of her, and recalling Wasilla, which I've actually been to. She struck me as something of a female Elmer Gantry.

Immediately after her big convention speech, which had Team McCain toasting one another and TV anchors wowed, I wrote: "I think in the end Palin is a sideshow, a base play too problematic and extreme to appeal to independents and moderates, a tyro whose politics actually undercuts the positioning John McCain needs to win the election."

She's still a sideshow. But she is a sideshow who transfixes the Republican Party. In large part because she is a willing tool for what remains of a discredited neoconservative tendency -- it was never a movement, because it has no popular base of its own -- that still clings to influence on the right.

You can check things during the day on my site, New West Notes ... www.newwestnotes.com.

Stuart Whatley: Obama's Agenda: Hope, Change and Lobby-Centricity

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:38:38 -0500

President Obama's self-imposed rule against lobbyists in his administration, and the method whereby he is now implementing his progressive agenda, hews toward a rather perverse irony, if not hypocrisy. He is admirably abiding by his anti-lobby diktat in most administrative nominations (with just a few small exceptions); and yet, he is simultaneously handing over his most important policy initiatives, through Congress, to the very special interests he feigns to keeps at arm's-length, furnishing them with a golden opportunity to sabotage the types of real reform they fear most. Don't let a crisis go to waste? K Street is taking that apercu to heart.

A number of observers have touched on Obama's "Congress-centricity" -- that he's given his 535 former colleagues on Capitol Hill the role of actually formulating all of his policies while he sets the broader vision for them to follow. For his part, David Brooks attributes the administration's surrendering of the legislative authorship to Democrats' failure to pass health care reform during the Clinton years -- when it was drafted behind closed doors in the White House, only to be shot down in Congress.

And of course, what is "Congress-centric" is also "lobbyist-centric" to an equal or even greater degree. Executive branch officials may be forcibly insulated from lobbyist influence, but the policies they will be enforcing will carry the stench of special interests through and through. A prime example is a recent bill to reform federal regulators' bank takeover powers that was written by the finance lobby's lawyers.

And it doesn't stop there. Lobbyists are demonstrating their clout in influencing Obama's progressive agenda and economic rescue measures day by day in the halls of Congress. In April, a crucial cramdown bankruptcy reform bill was quashed by Democrats who couldn't stand strong to a last-minute bank lobby surge. For health care reform, lobbying efforts occluded the legislative route for single-payer early on, and have since succeeded (as of this writing) in challenging a government-run insurance program to compete with the private sector*. And in cap-and-trade, Obama's original and promising plan to auction off 100 percent of the emissions allowance has since been watered down to a piffling 15 percent, with 85 percent being disbursed for free like alms to the poor.

In particular, the debate over health care and cap-and-trade now transpiring in Congress has been an all-out legislator-lobbyist orgy of disappointment, leaving each historic policy proposal vapidly deflated. And though "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" makes for a usually-wise platitude, Voltaire wasn't dealing with the exorbitance of American health care or the ecological cataclysm of global warming. Moreover, to classify the draft bills in their current states as "good" is potentially dangerous. If Potemkin village versions of each bill are to pass, it means symbolic reform will occur at the expense of real reform. And while special interest prima donnas toast to their invincibility, the inadequate policies will remain as political eyesores for those who had let them pass when the time for real reform is again called for.

Obama may have a vision, but Congress must get by with astigmatism. Being all too familiar with this, one must wonder why the administration is allowing its agenda to be sullied and sundered before its very eyes. And this isn't to say the White House is taking a hands-off approach. Quite the contrary, Obama's White House has actively courted more members of Congress so far than any other president in recent history. It's too bad such promising policies keep surfacing from the muck of the Swamp as lobbyist-infused let-downs. And with each new instance, the ironic hypocrisy of Obama's ardent anti-lobbyist stance rings truer.

One reason may be that Obama is still sympathetic to his former job. Laws are technically meant to come from the legislature, so he is leaving it up to legislators, out of respect for the system, to take the initiative from start to finish. The problem is that radical change (the type that got him elected) doesn't mix with respect for the "system", especially when the system itself is in need of some overhauls, namely in campaign financing.

Kevin Baker argues in Harper's that Obama's reticence could make him more like Hoover--an admirable thinker, no doubt--than like Roosevelt--a president who eventually embraced the need for radical change. And The Economist's Lexington column this week, quoting Arthur Schlesinger, warns of the presidential mediocrity--not greatness--that comes with too much deference to Congress.

Obama is circumventing his own touted position against special interests by outsourcing his entire platform to Congress, much to the detriment of what is meant to be an historic progressive moment. Unless the administration forgoes the willful ignorance or cynical cognizance that is allowing its agenda to be sandbagged by the same old usual suspects, these recent warnings will have been in vain.

*UPDATE: The unveiling of Senator Kennedy's health care bill today after this writing--which includes a public option and will cost just over $600--bodes well, and certainly far better than what we've seen in the banking and carbon emission sectors.

BBC 5Live reports that gay life in Iraq is worse than under Saddam

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:30:29 -0500

The ability of gay people In Iraq to live relatively freely has been severely curtailed following the toppling of Saddam Hussein, a documentary to be aired on BBC 5Live will report. Although apparently not revealing anything that PinkNews.co.uk has already reported, the programme does inform the wider British public of the issue.

Eric Lurio: Ah! The Glorious Second!!!

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:55:25 -0500

Today is the 233rd anniversary of the secession of 13 British North American Colonies from the Empire, thus creating the United States of America. However, the celebration is on the fourth. Why is that? Well, you have to go back to 1776 to find out...

John Dickinson was a patriot. He in fact voted for a resolution demanding the overthrow of the Royal Governments of the 13 rebellious colonies of North America, but he thought that it wasn't the right time for a republic and opposed the resolution that had been introduced by Virginia a couple of months before, so unlike the heroic (but wrongheaded) stand he is seen taken in the musical 1776 (to be seen on Turner classic Movies 10 PM EDT Saturday night), he was convinced to just not show up that day, and he didn't.

A preamble to the first resolution, which was written by Massachusetts delegate John Adams, in fact, was an informal declaration, and that's why several state delegations voted against it. So, to some extent, independence had been legally achieved (depending on who you were talking to) the previous May, but these things have to be formalized. As the Declaration was hammered out by a select committee (Thomas Jefferson with three others looking over his shoulder), there was a great deal of back room negotiations, with Dickinson demanding that Articles of Confederation come first, and Adams demanding that Independence come first. On June 30th, the document was ready, and debate began. Then voting began the next day. The vote at close of business on July 1st, 1776: yea 9, nay 1, and not voting 3.

South Carolina's nay vote was reversed the next day; Caeser Rodney of Delaware, though gravely ill, arrived in the nick of time to sway his colony in the yea direction; Pennsylvania's Dickinson didn't show up, and patriot and financier Robert Morris decided to abstain. The vote was now 12 to 0 to 1.

Now about that 1:

New York's delegation was completely in favor of independence, however, the state legislature had refused to issue instructions, so they didn't vote. It was unanimous, sort of. Most of the East Coast of North America was now a federal republic. Adams prophesies that July the Second would become a national holiday celebrated with picnics and fireworks.

July 3rd was dedicated to ripping Jeffersons' draft declaration apart, and that went on until the middle of the next day, when it was voted on, and sent to the printers. Thus, the Fourth of July -- when the deed was made public -- not the Second -- when it was done -- is the date for the holiday.

So drink two toasts to Liberty, one today and one on Saturday! Huzzah!

Jim Wallis: Three Moral Issues of Health Care

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:45:03 -0500

Good health is the will of God for each and every one of his children. Death, disease, and pain did not exist in the Garden, and Revelation tells of a "new heaven and new earth," where once again they will not exist. We live in a fallen world where injury and sickness are a fact of life. In fact International Classification of Disease now identifies 68,000 distinct diagnoses. Every year in our country there are about 119 million ER visits, up to 902 million doctor's office visits, and about 3.5 billion prescriptions filled.

Perfect health will never be achieved and physical death on this earth will never be overcome, but the scriptures paint a clear picture that this was God's intent from the beginning and will be the goal once again in the end. This means that on a personal, national, and global level the physical well-being of all God's children is close to God's heart and should be close to ours as well.

There is not a religious mandate or God-ordained system of health care or insurance. No amount of biblical exegesis or study will lead you to a policy conclusion on health care savings accounts, personal versus employer provided insurance, single payer public systems, or private insurance plans. Luke might have been a physician, but he still never commented on whether or not computerizing medical records should be a national priority.

These policy questions are still of vital importance and will be debated and discussed in the coming months at the White House, in Congress, in the press, and I hope in our churches. With an issue like health, deeply personal but of great public concern, I believe that the faith community has a unique and important role to play. That is, to define and raise the moral issues that lay just beneath the policy debate. There will be a lot of heat, maybe even a few fires, over the weeds of the policy, and the faith community has the opportunity to remind our political and national leaders about why these issues are so important -- why they speak to our values.

There are, I believe, three fundamental moral issues that the faith community can focus on and call our political leaders back to, lest they forget. They are: the truth, full access, and cost.

The Truth

For decades now, the physical health and well-being of our country has been a proxy battle for partisan politics. When Truman tried to pass a national health insurance plan, the American Medical Association spent $200 million (in today's dollars) and was accused of violating ethics rules by having doctors lobby their patients to oppose the legislation. In the 1970's when Nixon tried to pass a national health insurance plan, strikingly similar to what many democrats are proposing today, the plan was defeated by liberal democrats and unions who thought that they would be able to pass something themselves after the mid-term elections and claim political credit for the plan. In the 1990's the "Harry and Louise" ads misrepresented the Clinton health care plan but was successful enough PR to shut down that movement for reform.

Already, industry interests and partisan fighting are threatening the opportunity for a public dialogue about what is best for our health care system. As a resource for congregations, small groups, and individuals, Sojourners has worked with its partners to publish a Health Care tool kit [click here to download] to help frame and guide this necessary debate. This guide gives an overview of the biblical foundations of this issue and frequently asked questions about it. What we need is an honest and fair debate with good information, not sabotage of reform with half-truths and misinformation.

Full Access

The second fundamental value question is that of quality and affordable full access to health care. About 46 million people in our country today are uninsured and many more find themselves without adequate coverage for their medical needs. Many of them are working families who live in fear of getting sick or injured. Some delay seeking medical attention at the risk of their own health and increasing cost later on, or use emergency room services instead of primary care physicians. An estimated 18,000 people a year die unnecessarily, many from low-income families, because they lack basic health insurance. As a father, I know how important the health, wholeness, and well-being of my family is to me and is to every parent. Seeing your child sick is a horrible feeling; seeing your child sick and not having the resources to do something about it is a societal sin.

Cost

The third issue is cost. An estimated 60 percent of bankruptcies this year will be due to medical bills. Seventy-five percentof those declaring bankruptcy as a result of medical bills have health insurance. The costs of medical care stem from varied sources. Some of these costs come from malpractice lawsuits, some from insurance companies with high overhead and entire divisions of employees hired to find ways to deny benefits. Someone who thought they were insured could find out that their benefits were terminated retroactively because the insurer decided that there was a pre-existing condition. In the end, some are paying too much for care and others are making too much from these present arrangements.

There is a lot of money, to say the least, wrapped up in health care. The faith community needs lift up the concerns of those who have no lobbyists on Capitol Hill or PR firms with slick advertising campaigns.

These are pressing issues for our country, lives are at stake, and it is a debate we must have and take seriously. For the month of July, we will be taking this discussion to our blog and having some of our regular writers and guests give their opinions and perspectives.

There are a myriad of special interests groups who will be promoting their own self-interests during this process. The faith community has the opportunity to step in and speak for the interests of the common good and those who would not otherwise have a voice. I am sure that every one of the 18,000 preventable deaths that will happen this year from a lack of basic health insurance breaks the heart of God. And, it should break ours too, because healing is at the very heart of the Christian vocation.

Jim Wallis is the author of The Great Awakening, Editor-in-Chief of Sojourners and blogs at www.godspolitics.com.

Click here to get e-mail updates from Jim Wallis

Rep. Dennis Cardoza: Clarifying My Views on the Obama Administration, the EPA and USDA

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:38:42 -0500

I generally feel that I have been treated fairly by the press during my many years in public service. Unfortunately, a comment I recently made at an Agriculture Committee hearing was misinterpreted by Politico newspaper as a criticism of the Obama Administration. This misinterpretation continues to be cited by other news organizations and I would like to set the record straight.

While speaking at an Agriculture hearing on the effects of climate change on agriculture, I commented that I believe it's difficult for policy makers in the East to understand rural farmers in the West. I was referring to the difference between the US Department of Agriculture and the US Environmental Protection Agency. My comment and the bulk of the hearing focused on the pending American Clean Energy and Security Act. My comment was referring to differences being worked out between the Committee on Agriculture and the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

The EPA has an important role to play as the caretaker of our environment. However, the staff of the EPA does not necessarily understand the unique challenges faced by farmers and agriculture operations. The USDA on the other hand has been working with farmers for years and is in a much better position to help them meet the challenges of addressing climate change.

This is the important point I was trying to explain at the hearing when discussing the Obama Administration's efforts on climate and energy. Further, this is exactly the policy I pursued in the energy bill as I negotiated farmer-friendly provisions into the language of the legislation. I am sure there was no malicious intent by Politico and I believe they make a sincere effort to be fair and accurate. However, I wanted to set the record straight. My comments had very little to do with the Obama Administration and everything to do with my farming families back home.

White House Acknowledges Officials Were Likely Invited To WaPo Salons

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:26:14 -0500

The White House acknowledged on Thursday that some members of the administration may have been invited to high-priced "salons" sponsored by the Washington Post and featuring corporate executives and lobbyists. But in his daily briefing with the press, spokesman Robert Gibbs said that no one, to his knowledge, had accepted the invitation and that the administration's ethics policy most likely would have prevented them from doing so.

"I think some people in the administration writ large may have been invited," Gibbs acknowledged towards the end of Thursday's briefing. "I do not believe, based on what I have been able to check, that anyone has accepted the invitation. Obviously the [White House] Counsel would have to review an invitation like this, and I think it would likely exceed what the counsel would -- the Salon that the Washington Post is offering would likely exceed what [administration] would feel in this case would be appropriate."

The admission that administration officials were likely contacted to attend the proposed Washington Post gatherings is another interesting tidbit in a story that has consumed much of the journalism and political wor.d on Thursday. Early in the morning, Politico reported that the Post was arranging a series of gatherings that would bring together newspaper officials, lobbyists, industry executives and White House officials for a price ranging from $25,000 to $250,000.

Several reporters at the paper told the Huffington Post that they were outraged by the news, having not been told in advance that management or the business side of the operation were considering the salon idea. Even if they did not partake in the events, these journalists felt that having representatives of industries and companies the paper was tasked with covering pay for access to its staff would irrevocably compromise their credibility. For the Obama White House, the association with lobbyists at these salon events would also create a host of ethical dilemmas.

The issue was made moot (at least for the time being) Thursday afternoon, when Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth canceled the planned events.

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Norm Stamper: Progressives Push Against Drug War: Will Dems Listen?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:16:17 -0500

It's official. We can now talk openly about what the great majority of us have known for a long time: drug prohibition isn't working, and never will. It's time to try something different. News organizations are awash in stories about the failure of the "drug war." Latest issues of three of the most influential progressive magazines have feature stories on the topic.

Mother Jones puts drug policy on its cover -- under the headline "Totally Wasted" (as in, money and lives) -- as part of a package including at least 10 separate pieces on topic. The American Prospect also fronts the issue, proclaiming "The End of the War on Drugs." The Nation has a feature (quoting yours truly and other drug policy reformers, including my Law Enforcement Against Prohibition colleagues) confirming that the topic has finally ripened to maturity, its earnest discourse inescapable.

It's not only newsprint publications calling out the futility and harmfulness of our decades-old prohibition policy. The progressive blogosphere, including Daily Kos, TalkLeft, Crooks and Liars, and, of course, Huffington Post has been devoting more and more bits and bytes to bashing our insane, inhumane drug laws.

So, why does the President of the United States insist on making a joke of the issue? Why, indeed, do most Democrats in Washington scramble to avoid the conversation altogether?

Three out of four Americans believe the "war on drugs" is a failure and can never be won. Serious people like Sen. Jim Webb, former Mexican president Vicente Fox, Congressmen Barney Frank, Charlie Rangel, Steve Cohen and others, even a growing body of right-of-center analysts and politicians have been saying it's time to fundamentally reshape our approach to drug control.

So, why this divide between massive public opposition to current policies and the positions taken by our leaders? Fear, of course. They're afraid of being punished for touching what has been perceived, mistakenly, as a third rail issue.

And the cause of this "drug war dementia"? I'm guessing it has something to do with a brilliant 2004 poll on the topic of medical marijuana. The poll asked two questions, the first confirming what had already been shown over and over again: that about 70 percent of people support the idea of legalizing marijuana, at least for medical purposes.

But then, pollsters asked something interesting:

"Regardless of your own opinion, do you think the majority of people support making marijuana medically available, or do you think the majority opposes making marijuana medically available?"

The result? In Rhode Island, where the poll was conducted, only 26.5 percent thought that most people support medical marijuana.

The lesson here? While many of our elected representatives privately support serious changes to our failed drug laws, they believe they are alone. They think if they stick their necks out they'll be handed their heads come election time.

Which is why we must rise up and let our elected officials know they are safe to support drug law reform. And in considerable political danger if they do not.

Amb. Tim Carney: Ballots Not Bullets for Afghanistan

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:04:37 -0500

On August 20, Afghanistan holds only the second election in its long and often turbulent history. For its own people, this is a historic event. For the many nations helping Afghanistan with troops and aid, it is a critical watershed.

Elections held in a conflict zone are always far more difficult, and the enemies of Afghanistan's freedom and democracy are now far more active and dangerous than they were in 2004 when the first election was held.

In these circumstances, the elections were postponed as a result of decisions taken last year, and rescheduled after a near-political crisis for August 20. The international community, led by the UN and NATO, is supporting these elections with a substantial amount of resources, including international observers, hundreds of millions of dollars, and additional troops.

The goal is clear: whoever governs Afghanistan for the next five years must derive authority and power from the consent of the governed. That means an election that is accepted as legitimate, fair and open. In any election, including our own, there are obvious advantages to incumbency, but in a fair election, there should be constraints on the exercise of those advantages. We have just seen the consequences of abuse of this principle in Afghanistan's western neighbor.

President Obama has set into place a new strategy for Afghanistan with a significantly increased level of support. Others countries from Europe to the Gulf to Japan and China have increased their commitments to Afghanistan.

Some people have charged that our efforts, and statements by the United States and other nations, constitute improper interference in the election. This is nonsense. Our "interference" is merely a necessary involvement to ensure a free and fair election on a level playing field. This is done, at considerable rush and expense, at the request of the Afghan government and under a clear UN mandate.

We will neither favor nor oppose any individual candidate. But as the campaign proceeds, we, along with our allies, will speak out from time to time on the process - and the process only. What follows is a view by Ambassador Time Carney, the head of the special U.S. team assigned to assist in the elections.

-- Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke

Elections provide an opportunity to transform an aspiration for a better future into a reality. We Americans seized the opportunity of our elections on November 4. This August, our partners, the people of Afghanistan, will follow suit as they go to the polls to select a new President and representatives for their 34 Provincial Councils.

Success in Afghanistan depends on Afghans having a government that has been chosen in a manner that is widely accepted as reflecting the electorate's desires: a government that derives its authority from the people; takes their needs into account; offers the best vision for the future; and delivers on its promises. If Afghans believe their government can ensure their basic needs are met, then they will not support those who seek to undermine it through force and intimidation. Above all, an election confers legitimacy on those elected, provided it is accepted by the electorate as just, fair, and open.

That is why we are encouraging the Presidential candidates - 41 in all - to describe their vision of the future of Afghanistan, set out their platforms, and explain their programs. Afghans are telling the candidates they want what humans the world over crave: jobs and economic opportunities, security for themselves and their families, justice and education, and an accountable government. These should be at the heart of the campaign.

The new President will need to be skilled in delivering all of these things, including reintegrating back into society those insurgents who have renounced violence and want to be part of the solution. They will have the full support of the international community, backed by the United Nations, as they vote.

But the elections process in this fledgling democracy is challenging. Free and fair elections are not always easy to achieve, even in established democracies, including - at times - our own. In Afghanistan, a realistic benchmark is that they are credible, secure and inclusive.

Afghanistan's complexities must not daunt its friends or - more importantly - its people. Many Afghans, for example, still broadly believe the United States endorses the incumbent, despite public statements of impartiality. Our President's statement on the first day of election campaigning on June 16 made clear the U.S. does not support or oppose any particular Presidential or Provincial Council candidate. Ambassador Eikenberry, in Kabul, has repeated this point in words and actions. The international community, including the United States, supported extending Hamid Karzai's term until the next President is inaugurated, in order to preserve stability in a war-time situation, and this reflected the preference of most of the authorities and political class, but it did not indicate a preference among the candidates.

Afghans will need to find both our words and our deeds credible. That is the primary purpose of the inter-agency team I run in Afghanistan: to support the United Nations and the Afghan electoral institutions to deliver an impartial process. While no elections are ever perfect, our priority is to help the Afghan election authorities and the UN deliver access to transport for candidates so they can campaign across the country; access to the media so they can set out what they stand for; and access to security to ensure the candidates feel safe to campaign.

We are actively supporting the establishment of comprehensive audit processes to limit potential fraud from bogus registration cards and polling staff collusion. We are supporting the Afghan national civic education campaign on the electoral process and election safeguards. And our civilian and military staff will be monitoring the processes and raising any issues of concern.

The elections, therefore, are a potential milestone of political progress. But what comes afterwards also matters: the willingness of the people to hold their governments to account through their nascent civil society structures - and the ability of that government to respond to the will of its people.

In the end, perfect elections themselves are not the lynchpin of a stronger democracy. Over the past 40 years working on elections throughout the world, I've seen fraud in South Vietnam, aborted counts and jailed opposition in Lesotho, hope and participation in Cambodia, complicated, politically-charged results in Haiti, and joy and reconciliation met with universal approbation in South Africa. And we have the dramatic - but hardly democratic - situation in Iran today - a role model we must avoid. What matters is that people regard and accept the process and the results as being credible, secure and inclusive. Only then can a government attain legitimacy.

"Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets." So said our 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. He could have equally been talking about Afghanistan in 2009. This is an opportunity for Afghan leaders to listen to the calls of the Afghan people, who want their views to be heard through peaceful means.

The U.S. will be there, in partnership and in friendship, with the Afghan people.

Retired Ambassador Tim Carney has spent 42 years in foreign affairs, mainly in areas of conflict and transition. He is at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul leading a U.S. Interagency Electoral Support Team to assist the UN family and our allies help Afghan independent election authorities realize a credible, secure and inclusive electoral process.

Ginny Sloan: A Gitmo Tragedy: The Uighurs

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:52:27 -0500

Of the many Guantanamo tragedies, perhaps none has been greater than our handling of the Uighurs, a group of Chinese Muslim detainees. Picked up, detained, and wrongly classified as dangerous terrorists, 17 Uighurs spent more than seven years wrongfully imprisoned. Four were finally released last month, but 13 remain locked up at Guantanamo.

The courts, the United States military, and the executive branch - dating back to the former administration - have long recognized that these men are not "enemy combatants" and do not pose a threat to the nation. No moral, legal, or security grounds exist for holding these men a single day longer. This is not a partisan issue. It is one of due process, civil liberties, and fundamental fairness.

In an unexpected move on Monday, the United States Supreme Court put off deciding whether to hear the remaining Uighurs' case, Kiyemba v. Obama, until they convene again in the fall. The Uighurs seek review of a D.C. Circuit decision holding that courts lack the power to order the executive branch to release them, even though a court has found that their detention lacks any legal basis. After years of delay and disappointment, the Kiyemba case represented a glimmer of hope for the wrongfully imprisoned men. The Supreme Court's failure to take decisive action--while not an outright rejection of the Uighurs' petition--leaves the promise of their release unfulfilled, a dream deferred. Before the case is even considered, the Uighurs will remain at Guantanamo for several more months, unless either political branch steps up.

Thus far, however, the legislative and executive branches have been moving in the opposite direction. Congress has created a culture of fear in Washington, with members rushing to introduce bills that would prevent any detainees from being transferred into their districts. Just last week, Congress passed a supplemental appropriations measure that included provisions severely restricting the president's authority to bring any of the Guantanamo detainees into the United States - for trial or release. The Uighurs, who cannot be repatriated to China, their homeland, due to state-sponsored persecution, are now prohibited from being released into the United States, at least until the appropriations bill expires at the end of the fiscal year.

President Obama, for his part, has not done much better. Reacting to political pressure, he signed the supplemental appropriations bill into law, undermining his efforts to shut down Guantanamo in the process. And he continues to assert the authority to detain the Uighurs though they have won their habeas cases and pose no security threat to our country. While his administration successfully resettled four Uighur detainees in Bermuda, attempts to move the remaining detainees to the island nation of Palau or other countries have been unsuccessful thus far.

The president missed his opportunity, before this bill became law, to resettle some of the remaining Uighurs in the United States. Local Uighur communities offered to help these men integrate into our society. Of more strategic importance, by accepting its share of responsibility, the United States would have sent a clear signal to our allies, encouraging other countries to partner with us to fulfill the promise to close the Guantanamo detention facility in one year's time.

Instead, the administration now faces an uphill battle in any efforts to find alternative homes for these wrongfully detained men. At this rate, it may still be up to the Supreme Court next fall to finally provide justice for the Uighurs.

Rick Horowitz: Sanford Shakeup? Nothing Could be Finer Than a Job in Carolina

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:35:20 -0500

POSITIONS AVAILABLE

Executive Assistant -- Chief executive of prominent southern state needs experienced staffer to oversee all office and personal activities. Primary responsibilities will include keeping accurate track of governor's whereabouts at all times, and assuring that governor does not travel beyond state borders unaccompanied by security detail, wife and/or children. Familiarity with GPS, surveillance tactics a plus. Knowledge of Appalachian Trail not necessary.

Budget Analyst -- Republican governor with previously unlimited potential seeks senior budget analyst to handle a variety of issues related to transportation, lodging. Must have strong commitment to fiscal responsibility, aversion to misuse of public dollars. Successful candidate will have demonstrated ability to distinguish public and private expenditures, and at least 5 years' experience in airline reservations and/or hotel management.

Spiritual Adviser -- Standout GOP executive needs discreet professional guidance on wide range of home and family issues, including "forbidden love," "blowing off steam," "letting guard down," etc. Note: Position no longer requires periodic service as chaperone, but successful candidate must still be willing to listen to endless stream of puppy-love and midlife-crisis piffle.

Personal Assistant/"Body Man" -- Strong supervisory presence sought by governor with tendency to cross "lines," if generally not "ultimate lines." Applicants should be highly motivated, with excellent analytical and conceptual skills. Previous experience as school crossing guard, NFL referee, or graphic artist especially useful. Linguistics majors will also receive strong consideration.

Press Secretary -- Unique opportunity for a highly talented and properly motivated individual. Former contender for future GOP presidential nomination now requires complete overhaul of media operation. New press secretary will be tasked with gaining office-wide acceptance of "Less is more, and none is even better" media strategy. Willingness to speak truth to power absolutely essential, including, as necessary, "No, you can't do another interview with the AP today!" and "Stick a sock in it!" As circumstances warrant, press secretary will also collaborate with other staffers to hog-tie and muzzle governor and provide for his indeterminate stay in a padlocked room or storage locker. Additional responsibilities as assigned.

Pension Analyst -- Southern governor contemplating sudden career change seeks expert counsel on all available options: retirement packages, deferred-compensation plans, plea bargains, etc. Knowledge of potential leisure-time activities especially attractive, unless activities involve potential contact with especially attractive females.

Soul Mate -- No additional applications are being accepted for this position.

Rick Horowitz is a syndicated columnist. You can write to him at rickhoro@execpc.com.

Jodi Jacobson: Just the Facts, Sir: The False Dichotomy of Catholics vs. "Pro-choice" on Common Ground

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:26:11 -0500

Originally posted on RHRealityCheck.org - News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

As the anticipated release by the White House of a "common ground" proposal on abortion draws near, numerous members of the male pontificator commentariat are trying to spark anxiety by claiming that Obama will have to make a choice betwen "the Catholic vote," and "the pro-choice community."

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The facts:

Obama got the majority of the Catholic vote in 2008. Fifty-four percent of Catholic voters went for Obama as opposed to 45 percent for McCain. More conservative Catholics gave McCain a slim margin. Among more observant Catholic voters--those who attend church weekly--McCain got 50 percent to Obama's 49 percent.
A majority of Catholic voters approve of the President's performance to date, and a majority support a woman's right to decide what is best for her when facing an unintended pregnancy, and the majority also support access to contraception. As noted by the Pew Research Center:

Catholics' overall approval of Obama is consistent with the fact that many Catholics themselves do not share the Catholic Church's opposition to abortion and embryonic stem cell research.

The real-life practices of Catholic women and couples when it comes to contraception and abortion is consistent with that of the general population.

There is no danger of the Administration losing the broad support of Catholics on this particular issue, as long as the Administration makes clear its values and principles and goals and objectives, and as long as it sticks to the facts. The assertion that unless he bows to the most conservative Catholic position he will lose widespread support is a scare tactic of the right. (And in any case, this should not be the priority consideration in regard to freedom of choice, freedom of religion and the decision of whether, when and how many children to have).

While it is now clear from recent reports that any common ground proposal will not be accepted by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), this is also no surprise. We knew that already. The only thing that will suffice for the USCCB is if Catholic doctrine becomes the law of the land.

Here is what the White House proposal needs to do:

Underscore what everyone already knows: This is a pluralistic society with a variety of complicated collective views on sex and abortion, but that the vast majority of Americans understand and agree that these personal decisions must be left up to women and their families.
Make clear that the White House is committed to evidence-based policies in public health that will yield the greatest results in promoting both the health of women and their families, while meeting social goals of reducing unintended pregnancies and reducing demand for abortion in the long run.
Make clear that the number of abortions in the United States has been declining and that with the right policies in place, this trend can continue without compromising women's reproductive choices or their family wellbeing. The Administration is in line with the vast majority of the American public in its position that how to deal with an unintended pregnancy is a decision that needs to be made by women, their partners, their families, and their doctors, not the White House or the Congress.
Acknowledge that while some progress has been made, the number of unintended pregnancies in the United States remains unacceptably high. Recent reversals in positive trends, such as the upward swing in teen pregnancies, can be traced back to years of abstinence-only programs and efforts to stigmatize basic reproductive health care.
Underscore that all the best public health data show that the best way to reduce unintended pregnancies, and hence the need for abortion, is to provide universal access to prevention services. Refer to data showing that the rate of unintended pregnancies and hence abortions is highest among those populations of women with least access to family planning services.
Underscore that it is not the job of the government to convince women what to do when faced with an unintended pregnancy but to ensure that all options can be weighed fairly.
Base the policy proposal on the following:

Increased funding for basic family planning services to reduce unintended pregnancies, including dramatically expanded access to emergency contraception.
Increased emphasis on expanding access to early abortion for those who choose to terminate a pregnancy.
Dramatically increased funding for comprehensive reproductive and sexual health education, and evidence-based approach increasingly shown by research to be highly effective in delaying sex among teens, reducing unintended pregnancy and unsafe abortion and reducing sexually transmitted infections.
Ensuring women facing unintended pregnancy receive evidence-based, unbiased counseling on all their options: continuing a pregnancy to term, choosing to carry to term and give a child up for adoption, and choosing to terminate a pregnancy. The government should support, not direct, proscribe or limit, women's choices.

Focusing on facts will ensure that the public understands that the Administration is committed to what the President promised--evidence-based public health policies. It will also show the majority of the public that the Administration is not accommodating ideology, but standing on fact.

By doing so, the Administration can, in the long run, actually bring profound change to this debate: evidence-based policies put into practice will achieve many of the goals we seek and take the air out of the ideological fight in which we have been engaged.

Michael Wolff: Jenny Sanford Is a Bummer

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:24:09 -0500

How come Jenny Sanford has become a heroine for American women in the new sex wars? Ruth Marcus excitedly expressed the conventional wisdom on Mrs. Sanford in yesterday's Washington Post, calling her a "model for the wronged political spouse." Tina Brown, who, as I recall, stole her husband out from under another woman, detailed her keen satisfaction that Sanford had not stood shamefacedly by her husband's side in the manner of Silda Spitzer and Hillary Clinton (and so many others), and faulted her only for her apparent willingness to take him back--that is, if he was appropriately humbled.

Women everywhere seem to like Jenny Sanford. But her husband doesn't. That much we know: Mark Sanford may be going back to her, but he's dying to get rid of her.

And, truly, what man wouldn't want to?

She has "investment banker steel," according to Marcus, which, while I can't be sure what this is exactly, sounds an awful lot like a helluva cold heart.

Continue reading on newser.com

Committee Dems Release Cheaper, Better Public Health Care Bill

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:03:46 -0500

Sen. Ted Kennedy's Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee released details of its plan Thursday to expand access to health insurance, create a public option that consumers could buy into and reduce health care costs over the long haul.

The Congressional Budget Office evaluated the proposed bill, estimating that it would cost slightly more than $600 billion over ten years, considerably less than earlier predictions. The CBO score was also released by the health committee Thursday.

A Medicaid expansion that is likely also be included in the overhaul is not part of the HELP committee's jurisdiction, but it could add several hundred billion dollars to the cost (that estimate doesn't account for potential savings.) The dollar amount also omits some other costs that come from areas outside the committee's jurisdiction, but it also doesn't rely on savings that are expected.

The overall cost is still looking to be roughly a trillion dollars over 10 years -- the target amount -- but the health committee bill shows that number is still possible while still providing accept to a public health care option to everybody.

An indication of the direction the committee took is given by the reaction of the reform lobby Health Care for America Now, which strongly backs a public health care option.

The health care reform lobby, Health Care For America Now, which strongly backs a public health care option, is pleased with the direction that the committee has taken.

"The HELP Committee's bill will give Americans all across this country what they want -- a choice of a strong public health insurance option that will provide lower costs and keep the insurance companies honest. The public health insurance option included in the HELP bill will be available on day one, giving Americans a new alternative to the private insurance industry. It will also encourage the delivery of better health care at a lower cost. The public health insurance option, combined with other key sections of the HELP Committee legislation, makes this bill a good prescription for health care reform. More specifically, the bill invests enough resources to make good, affordable health care available to middle-class families and includes strict rules to stop insurance company abuses," said Jacki Schechner, an HCAN spokeswoman, in a statement.

An earlier CBO score had spooked Democrats when came in higher than expected without providing substantially more coverage. And without a public option. The current bill, which does include the public option, is expected to cover to 97 percent of the population within ten years.

"The original numbers were kind of crazy because they increased all the expenses without including any cost control," said economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "That wasn't a serious projection of the costs of the bill. Now this is taking a fuller look."

The cost is relatively small. "As a measure of the share of GDP that's less than four-tenths of one percent (.04) of GDP," he said of the $600 billion estimate. "It's not trivial but it's not huge in the grand scheme of things. The Iraq war was over 1 percent of GDP."

The committee on Wednesday released a set of documents providing background on the bill. The documents and the full bill are below. If you have thoughts on the proposal or anything jumps out at you, write to ryan@huffingtonpost.com.

The bill itself.

A letter from Kennedy and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), to colleagues, outlining the proposal.

A summary of the public option proposal.

Budget estimates.

An outline of employer responsibility, which a senior committee aide said is key to the bill's ability to reduce costs.

Jeff Muskus contributed reporting.

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DraftBachmann.com: Mock Website Plugs Michele Bachmann For Governor

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:48:27 -0500

With the 2010 Minnesota gubernatorial race approaching, and Representative Michelle Bachmann still mum on whether or not she will run, the Democratic Governors Association has launched DraftBachmann.com, a hoax website ironically supporting her potential candidacy.

"If Michele Bachmann knows anything, it's that out-dated ideas -- like helping the middle class -- are ruining this country. And in a year when hospitals are struggling, teachers are being laid off and road repairs are delayed, Bachmann's ideas are exactly what we need if we are going to truly protect our billionaires."

The website urges people to pick a Fourth of July e-card to send out to friends and family. Each of the cards exhibits a prime Bachmann quotation.

Michelle Bachmann on global warming:
"...it's all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax."

Michelle Bachmann on common sense job creation:
"Literally, if we took away the minimum wage... we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level."

Michelle Bachmann on Barack Obama:
"I'm very concerned that [Barack Obama] may have anti-American views."

Michelle Bachmann on science:
"Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat, which became a donkey, which became a human being? There's a real lack of evidence from change from actual species to a different type of species. That's where it's difficult to prove."

Michelle Bachmann on setting life goals:
"My number one goal is to not go to jail."

Michelle Bachmann on Congress:
"I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-American or anti-American."

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India decriminalizes consensual gay sex - Christian Science Monitor

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:43:24 -0500

Telegraph.co.uk

India decriminalizes consensual gay sex
Christian Science Monitor
Gay rights activists hope that Thursday's ruling will hasten a creeping change in society's attitudes toward homosexuals here. ...
Be happy and gay; historic high court judgementLivemint
HC judgment on gay sex 'progressive': Gay activistsTimes of India
HC verdict makes India 127th country legalising gay sexIndian Express
Financial Times -PinkNews.co.uk -euronews
all 702 news articles »

Mark Potok: New SPLC Report Details 75 Radical Plots, Rampages

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:34:25 -0500

It's been a remarkable few months in the world of domestic terrorism and the radical right. Since the election of Barack Obama last November, six law enforcement officers -- three Pittsburgh police officers, two Okaloosa County, Fla., sheriff's deputies, and a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. -- have been murdered, allegedly by right-wing extremists. There has been a spate of Obama assassination plots, and a physician who provided abortions was shot to death in his own Kansas church. And a number of recent reports from federal and other law enforcement agencies have pointed out that the radical right seems to be growing increasingly dangerous, findings that jibe with a February analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center that documents the rise of hate groups since 2000.

In light of these incidents, the Southern Poverty Law Center this week releases a sweeping review of terrorism and other serious violence that has emanated from the domestic radical right since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The special report -- "Terror From the Right: 75 Plots, Conspiracies and Racist Rampages Since Oklahoma City" --shows that domestic right-wing terrorism is far more prevalent than most Americans realize. The report begins with a short introduction that is followed by summary descriptions of each of the 75 cases.

Bob Cesca: Time for President Obama to Throw Down Against the Corrupt and Spineless

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:29:13 -0500

If President Obama is truly serious about changing the way Washington operates, he'd begin to aggressively hector the entourage of lawmakers that I've not-so-affectionately nicknamed the "Coalition of the Corrupt and Spineless" (COCS) -- the Democratic Senators who have very obviously been bought off by the healthcare lobby, along with other almost-as-awful Democrats whose cowardice is only matched by their weakness of will.

Throw down, Mr. President.

Maybe even do one of those big Hollywood movie style presidential speeches, like the one at the end of The Contender in which President Jeff Bridges calls out that slippery douche Congressman Gary Oldman in front of a joint session:

"I am not free of blame. Right from the start, I should have come down here, pointed a finger your way -- pointed a finger your way and asked you, "Have you no decency, sir?" Yesterday, I met -- Mr. Runyon, you may walk out on me, you may walk out on this body, but you cannot walk out on the will of the American people."

There can be no denying that the COCS are flagrantly and unapologetically legislating against -- what's the word? -- overwhelming super-majority popular support for the public health insurance option. And why is that? I can't recall another example in recent memory when the collusion of lobbyists, corporate PACs and members of the United States Senate has been this obvious. We can only conclude that the COCS are entirely ignoring the will of the American people because they're hiking the Appalachian Trail with the healthcare industrial complex.

What other excuse might they have? To date, not a single senator in the COCS has explained this disparity, chiefly because it's such an awkward and transparent illustration of the very worst side of Washington -- the side that President Obama pledged to help mitigate.

Nate Silver analyzed the president's polling and noted that the popularity of healthcare reform and the popularity of the president should mean that the president's healthcare approval numbers should be Herculean. Yet they're weaker than expected. This leads Silver to conclude: "That's not to suggest that Obama should throw caution to the wind and push for single payer. But he needs to begin pushing for something, and something fairly specific."

That something has to be the public option.

It's seriously the right time for the president to make the hard sell on the public option -- to knock some heads and to push it through. Hard. This means perhaps calling out healthcare lobby errand boys like Joe Lieberman and Max Baucus, or at least using some of his considerable popularity to privately smack them around a little. Threaten to pull back the curtain on their healthcare mob ties.

Meanwhile, the 120 member TriCaucus (the House Black Caucus, the House Hispanic Caucus and the House Progressive Caucus) have pledged to vote against any healthcare reform bill that doesn't include a robust public option. Without these 120 votes, there are only 131 Democratic votes left. They need 218 votes to pass the House and, if their voting record this year is any indication, you can count on zero Republican votes for anything authored by Democrats.

In other words, the president's healthcare reform agenda depends entirely upon the inclusion of an acceptable government-run option for affordable health insurance.

So why not own it? Why not make it a central front in his campaign for healthcare reform?

Plus, there's a real opportunity here to achieve more that just healthcare reform. In addition to giving us a public health insurance option, the president can do some serious damage to the healthcare lobby, as well as to the members of Congress who so brazenly suck down the lobby's collective diarrheic filth.

It's an easy case to make since the distinction couldn't be clearer. Upwards of 76 percent of Americans support the public option. Sixty-nine percent the new Quinnipiac poll. And, this week, the AMA expressed its support for the public option. Furthermore, the CBO scored the Kennedy version of the healthcare reform bill and determined that with the public option included the price tag is hundreds of billions of dollars less than previously reported.

Knowing all of this, does the COCS support the will of its voters (and now the TriCaucus, the CBO and the AMA)?

Of course not. Because they're being paid to oppose the public option. Again, there aren't any other explanations. And so calling bullshit on this corporate-congressional exercise in mutual masturbation ought to be a cakewalk.

Regarding the pitch for the public option, by the way, there's a stronger argument to be made beyond simply insuring people like me and my friend Lee Stranahan who have lost our health insurance for whatever reason. It's about everyone else -- the other 250 million Americans who have health insurance and who, one day soon, will be screwed by their provider. The mafia never wants to pay, and it's only a matter of time, as costs skyrocket, before even those with Cadillac plans will be dropped, investigated, gouged, or denied. Think of the public option as Screwing Insurance.

As much as I'd love to hear President Obama use the phrase "Screwing Insurance," he's much more, you know, mature than I am. And that's definitely a good thing. So he can probably come up with something less offensive. But in addition to forcing the private insurance mafia to play on the level, the public option will provide a safety net for 250 million Americans who have insurance, but would prefer to not be left in the lurch when and if they're screwed out of the benefits they paid for. One of the best aspects of Michael Moore's SiCKO was how he focused mainly on people who owned health insurance policies but who were crapped out the ass end of the deal. The lesson was simple: if you have insurance -- even a policy that you like -- history and many horror stories indicate that it's only a matter of time before you are summarily screwed and left for dead.

This is probably why up to three-fourths of Americans want a public option -- far greater numbers than those who are uninsured.

If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that Americans of all parties would applaud the president if he were to call out the corrupt and spineless. The only thing we'd enjoy more, considering the corporate bilking of taxpayer cash for too many years, is the president castrating the seemingly enormous financial balls of the healthcare lobby.

Enough prevaricating. The storm is perfect. Kick some ass, Mr. President.

Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog! Go!

Andy Borowitz: Sanford: "I'm Too Sexy for My State"

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:28:45 -0500

Lashing out at critics who have called for his resignation, an unrepentant Gov. Mark Sanford released a statement today indicating that he might be "too sexy" for his critics to handle.

"I'm too sexy for my state, too sexy for my state, so sexy I can't wait," the statement read in full.

Mr. Sanford's latest outburst has motivated an "emergency intervention" on the part of two former elected officials, former Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

"What we did was wrong, but at least we shut our fucking pieholes about it," Mr. Spitzer said.

More Andy Borowitz here.

Andy Borowitz is a comedian and the author of "Who Moved My Soap? The CEO's Guide to Surviving in Prison: The Bernie Madoff Edition." He performs Thursday July 2 in New York at the 92nd Street Y Tribeca. Tickets available here.