Monday Morning News and Views

Good Morning Conflucians! It’s been a lost weekend for me. I don’t know if I have the flu or just a bad cold, but I’m really out of it. I’ve been checking in at TC to read comments, but haven’t had the energy to get involved in the discussions. I don’t know how I’m going to get through the next couple of school days; thank goodness I have a five-day weekend coming up!

Anyway, I’m going to share a few stories with you and then open this thread for you to post what you’re reading this morning.

Now this is a really strange story. Am I actually awake and reading this?

Daily Mail: Rom Houben: Patient trapped in a 23-year ‘coma’ was conscious all along

A car crash victim diagnosed as being in a coma for the past 23 years has been conscious the whole time.

Rom Houben was paralysed but had no way of letting doctors know that he could hear every word they were saying.

‘I dreamed myself away,’ said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegatative state.

He added: ‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear.’

Doctors used a range of coma tests before reluctantly concluding that his consciousness was ‘extinct’.
But three years ago, new hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.

As for the zombie health care reform health insurance rescue bill, Democratic Senators are already announcing they will gladly give away the rest of the store:

Senate Dems suggest they’re open to altering health care bill

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the chamber’s second-ranking Democrat, acknowledged he was open to changing the bill’s controversial government-run public health insurance option favored by the left.

“We are open because we want to pass the bill,” Durbin told the NBC program “Meet the Press.”

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampshire, summed up the situation to CNN’s “State of the Union” program: “Listen, in the end, this is going to be a compromise. It’s not going to be a perfect bill, but it’s going to be a very important starting point.”

If this is the best they can do with a Democratic supermajority, I can’t imagine what it would take to make any real improvements to this joke of a bill. I guess surrender is the latest “health care reform” talking point, because the Washington Post has a similar story.

Public option at center of debate: Reid must find compromise to pass health-care bill

Democrats had little time to savor their weekend Senate health-care victory, as two of the lawmakers who voted to move the debate forward Saturday night indicated Sunday that they will not vote to pass the package if it includes a government-run insurance program.

One member of the Democratic caucus, independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), reiterated Sunday that he will oppose any bill that contains a public option. Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he called such a government-run plan “radical.”

“We have a health-care system that has real troubles, but we have an economic system that is in real crisis,” Lieberman said. “And I don’t want to fix the problems in our health-care system in a way that creates more of an economic crisis.”

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), another centrist who supported the move to continue debate but has made it clear he has many objections to the legislation as currently written, restated his opposition to a public plan. “I don’t want a big-government, Washington-run operation that undermines the private insurance that 200 million Americans now have,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Moderate Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.) and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) also have deep misgivings about the Senate language — a public option with a state opt-out clause — and have expressed varying degrees of unhappiness about other approaches under consideration.

{{Sigh…. }}

This sounds really ominous:

The New York Times: Wave of Debt Payments Facing U.S. Government

Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.

Even as Treasury officials are racing to lock in today’s low rates by exchanging short-term borrowings for long-term bonds, the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.

In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Politico: Forecast for Dem primaries: Ugly

The most closely watched Senate primary is in Pennsylvania, where Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. Joe Sestak are slugging it out in unusually personal terms.

Specter has cast Sestak as ineffective and opportunistic, attacking him for his failure to register to vote in Pennsylvania until shortly before launching his 2006 congressional campaign and labeling the two-term congressman as “No Show Joe” — a reference to the House votes Sestak has missed while pursuing the Senate nomination.

Not to be outdone, Sestak has assailed the party-switching incumbent’s character, referring to Specter as a “flight risk” for Democrats and reminding the party rank and file of Specter’s decades-long career as a Republican. Last month, Sestak launched a website dedicated to “The Real Arlen Specter,” featuring quotes Specter would rather forget and past tributes to the five-term incumbent from a cast of GOP heavies including President George W. Bush, Sen. Rick Santorum, Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush adviser Karl Rove.

Arlen Specter really isn’t a Democrat, you know….

This story is horrendous.

Story of an American Detained Overseas

Last month, an American citizen who spent over a year imprisoned in the Middle East was quietly freed by his captors in the United Arab Emirates. That man, Naji Hamdan, is now reunited with his family in Beruit, Lebanon. In his first broadcast interview since being freed, Hamdan spoke to me about his ordeal.

Hamdan is a 43-year-old Lebanese-American who spent 20 years living in southern California. Until three weeks ago, he was jailed by the UAE in a terrorism case still shrouded in mystery.

Hamdan spent 14 months behind bars in what he and his attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union call “proxy detention,” suggesting that Hamdan was detained by the UAE at the request of the United States.

And did you know there was a radiation leak at Three Mile Island over the weekend? Phew! Deja vu or what?

OK, I’m out of steam. Please post your links in the comments and have a marvelous Monday!

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine