O-bow-ma greets the Emperor of Japan

Trying to reassure allies and rivals, President Barack Obama billed himself Saturday as “America’s first Pacific president,” promising the nations of Asia “a new era of engagement with the world based on mutual interests and mutual respect.”

“America’s first Pacific President” took office forty years ago, and his name was Richard Nixon.

Nixon was born in Yorba Linda and was raised there and in Whittier, California. Not only is California on the Pacific coast, but Orange County (which contains Yorba Linda) and Los Angeles County (which contains Whittier) are coastal counties.. Nixon attended Whittier College, left the state to go to Duke University School of Law, then returned to California to practice law in La Habra, which is also in Orange County.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor Nixon joined the United States Navy, and rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander while serving in the Pacific Theater. After the war he was elected to the House of Representatives from California’s 12th District and in 1950 he was elected to the Senate.

After serving two terms as Eisenhower’s Vice President and losing the Presidential election in 1960, Nixon returned to California where he ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1962.

While he was President he spent much of his time dealing with two East Asian nations – Vietnam and China. He also had a home in San Clemente that he called “Casa Pacifica” (dubbed “The Western White House” by the media) that sits above a popular surfing spot. When he died he was buried in Yorba Linda at the site of his Presidential Library.
.

Tricky Dick

What a putz. I guess the guy who thinks there are 57 states and that Oregon is near the Great Lakes doesn’t realize that California is on the Pacific Ocean.

Honestly, I know enough biology to know that it can’t be. It just can’t. And yet how else to explain the sudden ignorance of a guy as sharp as Bob Somerby? He’s talking about Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow beating up on Stupak for tribalistic, Village reasons.
Somerby finds that inappropriate.

For ourselves, we think pro-choice groups have every right to bail on the bill if they decide it ends up affecting choice in unacceptable ways. But then, we also think that anti-abortion groups have the right to make the same sort of decision. That is, to jump ahead just a bit: We assume that different people, acting in good faith, may judge the morality of a measure in different ways.

Leaving Olbermann and Maddow aside, this is the first time I’ve seen Somerby completely miss a question of right and wrong.

What if the amendment read, “Hair straightening is unnatural and immoral. No medical costs associated with complications can be paid for using any Federal tax dollars.” Would he be as tolerant of that viewpoint? Male circumcision is an unnecessary procedure whose only health benefit comes from compensating for poor hygiene (or, in the case of AIDS, from the unnaturally thickened skin of the glans). Would he be as quick to understand people with moral objections to the deformation of men? (Note to the humor-challenged: I’m paralleling anti-abortion attitudes, not actually arguing for a specific kind of anatomy.) If I felt it was immoral and harmful to everyone to overpopulate the planet, and attached an amendment saying that no Federal money should ever be spent on pregnancy, childbirth, or infants after the second child, would he sagely say my morality could become law if I had the votes?

I could have all the morals I want about these things. As soon as I tried to make anyone else live according to them, I would be wrong.

Stupak and Pitts deserve disgrace for trying to take away our rights. It has nothing to do with morals, Stupak’s, mine, or the man in the moon’s. Rights. The right to control our own medical procedures. The right to control our bodies. Rights. Get it?

So, no, “different people, acting in good faith” may not judge a law about rights in different ways. Not even when it’s a law about women’s medical rights.

What is so hard to understand about this? Even with the handicap of a Y chromosome?

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Good Afternoon Conflucians!

In the mood to discuss some news?

The Nation Politic:

I read this yesterday morning from a link in the morning news thread down page, but it bears putting up here if you didn’t catch it.  It’s from RealClearPolitics and it’s entitled “Can the Clinton Coalition survive Obama? It’s a great look at Virginia as a bellweather state for why democrats are losing some voters quickly.

States with a Democratic base of liberals, urbanites, and minority voters — like California and New York — haven’t moved much against Democrats.  Obama’s polling numbers, as well as those of Democratic candidates for Governor and Senator, in classic “Emerging Democratic Majority” states like Colorado and Nevada are not looking good at all.  And of course in Jacksonian states like Kentucky, he’s below 40%.

This doesn’t mean that Democrats are doomed in 2010. An improved economy, Republican missteps, and a host of other factors could keep the band together for them. Maybe some of the more marginal voters that Obama brought to the polls to enact hope and change will return in 2010 to keep hope alive. But the personal nature of Obama’s victory is starting to show its downside for downticket Democrats.

The Clinton coalition is looking creaky. If Obama doesn’t improve and the coalition comes apart, Democrats could find themselves weaker than they were even in the 1980s and 1990s.

Over on Politico, Newt Gingrich is worried about Republicans eating their young alive in destructive primaries.  So what else is new?  There’s an entire group over there with an agenda that they expect every one to goosestep to … including women’s issues.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich predicted disaster for his party if the conservative wing of the GOP continues to field independent candidates to the right of the party’s nominee.

“If we get into a cycle where there are tea parties and there are conservative third-party candidates, we will make [Nancy] Pelosi speaker for life,” Gingrich told POLITICO in an interview Thursday, calling the practice “totally destructive.”

But Gingrich, who broke with many fellow conservatives by getting behind the liberal Republican who was nominated but ultimately dropped out and backed the Democrat in a New York special congressional election, admitted that Dede Scozzafava was too far to the left to hold the GOP’s center-right coalition together.

“That’s a mistake,” he said, referring to a candidacy such as Scozzafava’s. “But it’s equally clear that you can’t be a right-wing party and govern the country.”

Then, at the Wall Street Journal, Scott Rasmussen warns the democrats a little more about losing independents.  Given all this analysis, do you think independents have any where to go any more?  I sure as hell don’t want either party any more underwhat’s gone on and I hardly see Obama as too far to the left … what’s an independent to do?

Mr. Obama’s approval among likely voters has dropped to the low-50s in most polls, and the most recent Rasmussen Reports poll of likely voters shows him slightly below the 50% mark. This is a relatively low rating for new presidents. Mr. Obama’s approval rating began to slide in a serious way in early July, triggered by a bad unemployment report.

A look at more detailed data shows why Mr. Obama’s ratings are likely to drop even further.

A CNN poll released Nov. 6 found that 47% of Americans believe the top issue facing the country is the economy, while only 17% say its health care. However, the bulk of the president’s efforts over the past six months have been not on the economy but on health care, an issue in which he continues to draw negative ratings.

In a Rasmussen Reports poll taken after the House of Representatives passed health-care reform by the narrowest of margins last Saturday night, 54% of likely voters say they are opposed to the plan with only 45% in favor. Furthermore, in the all-important category of unaffiliated voters, 58% oppose the bill. That’s one of the reasons why so many moderate Democratic House members opposed it.

The CNN poll also shows that in addition to health care, a majority of Americans disapprove of how Mr. Obama is handling the economy, Afghanistan, Iraq, unemployment, illegal immigration and the federal budget deficit. Put simply, there isn’t a critical problem facing the country on which the president has positive ratings.

The Economy:

Are financial regulators captured by their banks and is that an inherent systemic problem?  Yes, says Steve Randy Waldman at Interfluidity in Discretion and Financial Regulation.

An enduring truth about financial regulation is this: Given the discretion to do so, financial regulators will always do the wrong thing.

It’s easy to explain why. In good times, regulators have every incentive to take banks at their optimistic word on asset valuations, and therefore on bank capitalization. It is almost impossible for bank regulators to be “tough” in good times, for the same reason it is almost impossible for mutual fund managers to be bearish through a bubble. A “conservative” bank examiner who lowballs valuation estimates will inevitably face angry pushback from the regulated bank. Moreover, the examiner will be “proven wrong”, again and again, until she loses her job. Her fuddyduddy theories about cash flow and credit analysis will not withstand empirical scrutiny, as crappy credits continually perform while asset prices rise. Valuations can remain irrational much longer than a regulator can remain employed.

Bad times, unfortunately, follow good times, and regulatory incentives are to do the wrong thing yet again. When bad times come, overoptimistic valuations have been widely tolerated. In fact, they will have become very common. Overvaluation of assets leads to overstatement of capital. Overstatement of capital permits banks to increase the scale of their lending, which directly increases reported profitability. Banks that overvalue wildly thrive in good times. Fuddyduddy banks lag and their CEOs are ousted and The Economist runs snarky stories about what schlubs they are. The miracle of competition ensures that many of the most important and successful banks will have balance sheets like helium balloons at the end of a boom. Then, like a pin from outer space, somebody somewhere fails to repay a loan

For being the Fed in the Sunny South, the Atlanta Fed’s Macroblog sure likes being dismal and gloomy in this analysis called “Small businesses, small banks, big problems?”

They still see problems coming for Commercial Real Estate  (CRE) and this will lead to further problems in small businesses who are hurting for customers now.

What are the connections between CRE and small business? An obvious direct link running from small businesses to CRE is that small businesses are an important source of demand for many types of commercial space. A link from CRE to small businesses is that CRE problems in banks could potentially affect credit availability for small businesses.

CRE pressures
The problems currently facing the CRE industry have been building for some time for both property owners and the holders of CRE debt:

• The income generated by nonresidential/nonowner-occupied CRE has generally been falling as vacancy rates on commercial space rose, and capitalization rates–the ratio of income to valuation–have climbed sharply.
• The decline in CRE valuations has created a significant amount of “rollover risk” when CRE loans and mortgages mature and need to be refinanced (about $340 billion in CRE debt is estimated to mature in 2010 and 2011). At the same time, delinquency rates on CRE loans have been increasing sharply, especially for CRE lending for residential construction and development purposes.

Cultural Shock and Shlock:

We know about SoD’s vagina wars …  now we have the War on Bambi according to The Economist.

As humans spread into once-rural areas, deer learned to adapt. With few or no natural predators, and thanks to the advent of hunting bans in developed areas, they thrived. There are an estimated 30m deer in America now, more than there were a century ago. The growing herds in urban and suburban areas have sparked a number of programmes to control the animals, not without controversy among humans.

In Town and Country, a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, the problem has reached a dire stage. The community suffers, on average, a collision a week between a deer and a car, and the animals are scoffing plants of all kinds in yards and gardens. After a series of heated hearings the city has decided to spend $150,000 on getting sharpshooters to kill 100 deer and veterinarians to sterilise another 100. The city has already tried other methods including paying for the relocation of deer, an ineffective tactic (the deer just came back) that has now been outlawed. The suburb has also banned people from feeding the deer, which has upset residents who like them.

What’s on your reading list today?

(As with all of our news threads, this one’s open!)

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I must admit, I love debates; and the caliber of those in our community make this forum an excellent opportunity to hone our chops in this area.  We previously held an excellent debate discussion here at TC on the issue of parental rights versus responsibility regarding medical treatments for their children.  Therefore, I’d love to have another go.  We could all use a distraction from the hostile-to-women environment our current Democratic leaders are fomenting.  Join in if only out of love for the ‘art of the argument.’

The debate topic I’ve chosen is the use of animals for testing.  It’s well known that animals are used for testing in several areas including medical and consumer products.  Much of the testing inflicts great pain other testing is considered more humane.  But pain infliction is not the core question I’ll be asking for a debate on.  It is the question of right or obligation relative to our species’ actions towards another.  I’m sure the scientists in our group will certainly have a few things to say about this and I think it should make for an interesting and lively conversation.

The New York Times profiled a research effort at the Salk Institute this week that I thought might provide an excellent platform for a good old fashioned debate. In the following article: Salk institute Scientists Research how Animals Regenerate Body Parts, they profile the efforts used by these researchers to determine the potentiality for human limb regeneration by studying the biological processes that create this phenomenom in the animal world.  As part of their research, the Scientist’s have used the following method:

The Salk Institute scientists — Scott Stewart, Zhi-Yang Tsun and Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte — have now found that dual-purpose switches control many of the 100 or so genes that are activated in the regenerating cells of a zebra fish’s tail. They report their findings in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The switches consist of chemical modifications to the chromatin, the material that wraps and controls access to the DNA of every cell. Genes are most directly controlled through nearby regions of DNA that are themselves turned on by certain regulatory proteins. But a second layer of control is built into the chromatin, which has to unpack itself if the regulatory proteins are to have access to the underlying DNA.

Zebra fish tails can be cut off with a razor blade (the fish are anesthetized first). Within 12 hours, genes that are usually silenced throughout the fish’s adult life are turned on.

So, the questions are:

Do we as a species have the right to use another species for this purpose? if so, where do we derive that right?

Or in the converse, Do we have an obligation to use other species for this purpose?; and if so, how does this obligation supercede the rights of the other species?

Finally, if we have the right and/or obligation, what lines should be drawn, if any?

Some ground rules:

1) No personal attacks, ad hominems, or name-calling — you WILL be moderated

2) Rely on logical arguments to the greatest degree possible

3) Use facts, questions, statistics, etc

4) Respond in point-counterpoint fashion throughout by use of our nesting feature

What do you think?  (full disclosure: I believe in animal rights, but I am conflicted or not fully committed in this area; however, I do have issues about inflicting pain upon another species for our species’ benefit. — I anxiously await the discussion.)
This debate is purely for the enjoyment of the art.  Have at it. — and remember rule #1:  don’t take disagreement personally, take it as a challenge.  Enjoy!

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What are you doing this morning?

OK Conflucians, we’ve had more depressing news this week than we certainly deserve.  Therefore, I’m ordering a cease and desist on gloom and doom, at least for this thread. I’m challenging you all to make me, and everyone else here, LAUGH.  What do you have in your bag ‘o’ tricks that will create spontaneous explosions of laughter?  A video?  A picture? A website? A joke?  The sky’s the limit.

Just

MAKE US LAUGH!

OK, this video is just ridiculous, but I can’t stop laughing whenever I watch it.

Beat that Conflucians!

Yesterday I received my official Democratic Party Headquarters “2009 Priority Issues Survey.”  This document reveals just what “Change” is being implemented.  While pleading for donations to the DCCC, they provide a checklist survey which includes among other things, a request for donors to rank a list of Democratic “priorities.”  Here’s the list:

_____ Lifting the economy out of the Bush recession

_____Helping families avoid home forclosure

_____Expanding access to affordable health care

_____Equal rights for all

_____Protecting America against terrorism

_____Bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq

_____Stabilizing Afghanistan

_____Guaranteeing retirement security for America’s seniors

_____Enacting middle-class tax relief

_____Improving educational opportunities

_____Raising wages and protecting jobs for American workers

_____Taking swift action to stop global warming

_____Restoring fiscal responsibility in government

_____Add your own priority ________________________________

Do you notice what is missing?  It’s a woman’s right to choice, autonomy, and privacy.  Oh sure, we can “add it.”  Just like we’ll be able to “add” special supplemental insurance for our reproductive needs.

This my friends is their official public list of priorities; and we’re not on it.  The Democratic Party is no longer concerned about our issues.  Earlier this week, Peter Beinhart, over at The Daily Beast, indicated his approval for the party’s abandonment of “cultural” issues as a strategic method for obtaining and retaining political power.  He calls their Stupidstupaksepsis compromise “The Dems Smart Abortion Move.”

The House’s passage of health-care reform is the clearest sign yet that the Democratic Party is, once again, for better and for worse, a big tent. By essentially sacrificing abortion and immigrant rights to get conservative Democrats to vote for expanded health-care coverage, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi restored the old hierarchy that between the 1930s and the 1960s helped Democrats establish dominance on Capitol Hill. Today, to a degree we haven’t seen since then, the Democratic Party is about economic protection first, and cultural freedom second.

Meet the “New Democratic Coaltion.”  Beinhart’s casual disregard for “cultural” issues like “choice” are being echoed by Obama-toadies everywhere.  This morning I noted the competitive attitude of some who seem to value beating a candidate such as Martha Coakley–who dared to call out the current leadership for their betrayal, instead of endorsing her as a strong defender of liberal ideals.  Speaker Pelosi’s recent endorsement of Capuano, who voted for the bill that included that egregious provision, over Coakley who publicly stated her opposition to the entire bill should it contain the anti-choice measure, speaks volumes about these new priorities and where women stand in the party.  It is almost unfathomable that a Democratic supermajority and a Democratic president would instigate such a devastating rollback of our rights.  But it has happened.  They have exposed their true intentions and clearly believe they can continue down this path with impunity.

It should have been clear to all women, as it was to us, that this direction was set in motion long before the moment Obama called Hillary “likable enough.”  But it wasn’t.  The party’s cries of WWTBQ, so that the one with a penis could be pushed over the finish line, should have been an “aha” moment for all women.  But it wasn’t.  The decision of the RBC to take earned delegates from Hillary and transfer them to Obama to ensure that there were no “numbers” problems with the delegate counts should have set off alarms for all women.  But it didn’t.  The outrageous sexist and misogynistic behavior of this so-called “New Democratic Coalition” toward both Hillary and Sarah should have been a major wake-up call to all women about the unacceptable level of derision with which women were being treated.  But it wasn’t.  The decision, for the first time in our party’s history, to deny a candidate (who just happened to be the first viable female candidate for president) the right to a roll call vote at the convention should have felt like a sledgehammer to the heads of all women.  But it didn’t.  The appointment of pro-lifer/anti-choicer Tim Kaine to head the DNC should have been the final straw.  But it wasn’t.

This recent action of using women’s autonomy in reproductive choices as a bargaining chip must be the final affront.  We cannot allow this to continue.  We have been the sacrificial lambs for far too long.  We have fought too long and too hard to get where we are.  Regressive attacks on our rights must be met with fierce challenge.  The time to say NO MORE has come.

I am nearly 50.  I have never had, nor needed, nor had to decide about whether to have an abortion.  But that’s not the point.  Control over our reproductive choices is part and parcel with the Constitutional promise of equality.  But then again, this party has no interest in advancing the Equal Rights Act.  Because that would mean we deserve autonomy and independence regardless of gender.   And we now know, that is not a “priority.”

I am no longer willing to take one for the team or fall on my sword for the greater good.  Both political parties have placed their disdain for our gender on public display.  We must unite in common consciousness if we are to overcome this blatant attack on our equality under the Constitution.  The Hyde and Stupidstupaksepsis amendments are nothing more than legalized discrimination against women.  It’s up to us to send the message:

No

Not. This. Time.

I invite you to read the lyrics by Christina Aguilera

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Politico has a series of threads up on the Stupak Amendment, insurance coverage of abortion, and angry choice activists.  The first one is on the amendment and what hopefully is its inability to survive the reconciliation process . The other is on the RNC pulling abortion coverage from its staff’s insurance plan. The men in this country clearly want to know what goes on between every woman’s pelvic bones.

Democrats will almost certainly kill the anti-abortion Stupak amendment in the process if they go to Plan B on passing health care — using a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill — budget experts say.

“There is no way on God’s green Earth that the Stupak amendment would pass muster in a budget reconciliation bill,” says Bill Hoagland, an insurance lobbyist who was the top GOP aide on the Senate Budget Committee for two decades and served as then-Majority Leader Bill Frist’s budget guru.

Democratic budget experts in Congress and the administration who asked not to be quoted on the record agree with Hoagland’s assessment.

The biggest problem Democrats have on the health bill right now is the difficulty they will have mustering a 60-vote coalition to shepherd the measure into a conference with the House. If they can’t do it, they may scale back the bill and try to put it through under restrictive “reconciliation” rules that would require a bare majority but limit the scope of what policies can be adopted.

An additional good post at TPM comes from Brian Beutler who investigates who is going to be most impacted by the amendment should it wind up in the final bill.

The Stupak amendment would forbid anybody who receives new government health insurance subsidies from buying policies that cover abortion. So why should women’s health care be treated differently than other kinds of health care? Is it fair to prevent women, forced into the health care market, from buying any insurance policy she wants, even if they have some government assistance?

But somewhat less prominently, these same combatants have been at odds about what the practical effect of the Stupak amendment would actually be. There’s substantial lack of clarity on that score–many say it’s likely that there will be no abortion coverage in the exchange at all, and others hypothesize that, over time, the norms in the exchange will come to dominate the norms across the insurance market. At this point, that’s all theoretical. But there is at least some data on the immediate practical implications of the Stupak amendment: It will, at least, directly and immediately impact a small, but growing number of poor and middle-class women.

Meanwhile, mainstream women’s and choice groups are awakening from their koolaid stupor and realizing we’ve been had.  Kate Michelman and Frances Kissling hammered away in this morning’s NYT.

A GRIM reality sits behind the joyful press statements from Washington Democrats. To secure passage of health care legislation in the House, the party chose a course that risks the well-being of millions of women for generations to come.

House Democrats voted to expand the current ban on public financing for abortion and to effectively prohibit women who participate in the proposed health system from obtaining private insurance that covers the full range of reproductive health options. Political calculation aside, the House Democrats reinforced the principle that a minority view on the morality of abortion can determine reproductive health policy for American women.

Many House members who support abortion rights decided reluctantly to accept this ban, which is embodied in the Stupak-Pitts amendment. They say the tradeoff was necessary to advance the right to guaranteed health care. They say they will fight another day for a woman’s right to choose.

Believe me, they will not fight another day for a woman’s right to choose because they never have since  the fetus fetish fanatics woke up and smelled women’s  freedom and started pushing their religion based on pseudo-medical concerns. We’ve been told that democratic pols were the firewall between going back to the days of backroom abortions, herbal concoctions that frequently killed women, and the infamous hangers.  The time to dry the line in the sand is now. I’ve convinced myself to vote democrat blunder after blunder and dunderhead after dunderhead on the idea that our right to privacy would be preserved.  If they sell out on this one, they’ve sold out the very last straw for me.  There will be no going back for many of us.

**The parody of the MS magazine  cover  comes from Cannonfire. My guess is if we pressure him enough, we can get him to make T shirts and make him a millionaire.

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Looming Nor'easter in New England

Good Morning Conflucians! It’s a gloomy Friday the 13th here in the Boston area. I guess we’ll be getting hit with the tail end of Hurricane Ida over the next couple of days. I’m feeling a bit lethargic this morning, but I’ll try to locate a few interesting news links nonetheless. Please add your own in the comments!

Did you know this is the third Friday the 13th in 2009? Maybe that’s why this year has been such a disaster. Anyway, its supposed to make today “extra freaky.”

THERE IS HOPE FOR THEM YET

Paul Krugman is finally back to criticizing administration policy–without mentioning the President. But it’s a step in the right direction. Will Krugman be summoned to the White House for another Koolaid injection? He explains why Germany isn’t suffering from massive unemployment as the U.S. is.

Here in America, the philosophy behind jobs policy can be summarized as “if you grow it, they will come.” That is, we don’t really have a jobs policy: we have a G.D.P. policy. The theory is that by stimulating overall spending we can make G.D.P. grow faster, and this will induce companies to stop firing and resume hiring.

The alternative would be policies that address the job issue more directly. We could, for example, have New-Deal-style employment programs. Perhaps such a thing is politically impossible now — Glenn Beck would describe anything like the Works Progress Administration as a plan to recruit pro-Obama brownshirts — but we should note, for the record, that at their peak, the W.P.A. and the Civilian Conservation Corps employed millions of Americans, at relatively low cost to the budget.

Alternatively, or in addition, we could have policies that support private-sector employment. Such policies could range from labor rules that discourage firing to financial incentives for companies that either add workers or reduce hours to avoid layoffs.

And that’s what the Germans have done. Germany came into the Great Recession with strong employment protection legislation. This has been supplemented with a “short-time work scheme,” which provides subsidies to employers who reduce workers’ hours rather than laying them off. These measures didn’t prevent a nasty recession, but Germany got through the recession with remarkably few job losses.

I’m really starting to wish I could move to a European country–preferably one with universal, affordable health care like Italy or France. On the other hand, I love the wide open spaces here in the USA and I would prefer to stay here if I could. Sometimes I even fantasize about moving to Western North Dakota near Theodore Roosevelt National Park or maybe way up near Canada where I can live really cheaply and relatively free from government interference. Not that I’d join a militia or anything, lol, just that I’d be less noticeable to the authorities and maybe I could survive the authoritarian crackdown that I think is coming when the economy really collapses.

I have made fun of Chris Bowers and Open left over the past couple of years because of their slavish adoration of Obama, but I am starting to read them again. They are really standing up to their former “precious” of late. I’ve always like Paul Rosenberg’s work, and Natasha Chart has been on fire. Here’s her latest:

DNC, OFA Abandon Women In Healthcare Action Alert

Nancy Keenan, head of the national NARAL group (and most obedient of the obedient losers) was apparently personally promised before the health care battle by the Obama administration that they would look after the organization’s constituency interests in the health care bill and preserve the status quo. In return, NARAL was asked to stand down its activism.
They did. So with all their colleagues, they got caught with their pants down when a floor vote on the Stupak amendment was imminent.

Today, I got a press release from the DNC, and their Organizing For America project, on their plan to drum up more support for the health care reform bill: targeting Republicans.

It says nothing about women’s healthcare. Nothing. Like it isn’t even at issue. OFA is still watching NARAL’s back, women’s backs, as well as they always have.

OFA is crowing about the 500,000 phone calls they’ve prompted on the health care issue. Were any of them centered around preserving reproductive health care when it mattered? Ha! As Femlaw says at the link, “The idea is to build organizational capacity, so when really critical moments in the campaign happened, OFA could deliver huge numbers.”

Targeting Republicans is critical. Encouraging Democrats to stand together for women’s health and rights, not critical.

Even The Huffington Post has begun to rag on Obama’s policies. Here’s the big headlined post this morning:

Goldman To Private Insurers: No Health Care Reform At All Is Best by Sam Stein

A Goldman Sachs analysis of health care legislation has concluded that, as far as the bottom line for insurance companies is concerned, the best thing to do is nothing. A close second would be passing a watered-down version of the Senate Finance Committee’s bill.

A study put together by Goldman in mid-October looks at the estimated stock performance of the private insurance industry under four variations of reform legislation. The study focused on the five biggest insurers whose shares are traded on Wall Street: Aetna, UnitedHealth, WellPoint, CIGNA and Humana.

That must be why the Goldman Sachs administration Obama administration is doing it’s darndest to kill health care reform by excluding women’s health coverage.

LATEST BREAKING STORIES

This news is just breaking around the world: ‘NY trial’ for key 9/11 suspects

Alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be sent from Guantanamo Bay to New York for trial in a civilian court, reports say.

Citing unnamed government officials, the reports said he would be transferred from the US prison camp in Cuba with four other suspects.

US Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce the decision later, the officials say.

Mr Mohammed has admitted planning the 9/11 attacks, the US military says.

That seems like a step in the right direction. Maybe we will see Guantanamo closed after all. I’d sure like to see that happen.

Politico: After spending binge, White House says it will focus on deficits

Bloomberg:
Home-Purchase Index in US Plunges to Lowest Level Since 2000

NYT: Among Obama Aides, Debate Intensifies on Troop Levels

The Nation: Whose Team Is It, Anyway? by Katha Pollitt

The Hill: Tensions brim between GOP and CEOs over healthcare reform

The Latest Lecture from Charles Krauthammer: Medicalizing mass murder (he does have a few good points)

WEEKEND ESCAPES

What’s Friday the thirteenth without the release of a big horror/disaster movie?

‘2012′ Cheat Sheet: Everything You Need To Know

It’s 2009 and a couple scientists discover the sun is freaking out and heating up the Earth’s core. Good news for anyone who likes a nice subterranean sauna. Bad news for anyone who wants the Earth not to fall to pieces in the few years.

Disaster kingpin Roland Emmerich’s “2012″ then cuts to the year 2012, which looks pretty much like 2009, except the governments of the world are scrambling to come up with a secret survival plan for humanity. Which they are going to need — stat! — because it’s not too long before a few Los Angeles tremors make way for mega-quakes, lava-gushing volcanoes and tsunamis that no amount of human fortitude can combat.

Into this apocalyptic mess comes John Cusack’s struggling novelist Jackson Curtis, who has to rescue his ex-wife and kids while trying not to pee himself.

This one, on the other hand, looks really worthwhile, even if you need to bring a box of Kleenex with you.

Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire

It’s hard to believe that a movie that traffics so operatically in images of brutality and squalor can be so fleet, assured and lyrical. But such breathtaking contradictions abound in “Precious,” which in the course of introducing the viewers to unspeakable despair, manages to imbue them with an exhilarating sense of hope — if not in a bright and cheery future for the film’s beleaguered protagonist, then at least in the possibilities of cinema as a bold, fluent and adamantly expressive art form.

That beleaguered protagonist is Claireece “Precious” Jones (played in an astonishing debut by Gabourey Sidibe), a 16-year-old girl who, as the movie opens, is still attending junior high school in 1980s Harlem. Morbidly obese, functionally illiterate, pregnant with her second child after being raped by her father, Precious lives with her mother, Mary (Mo’Nique), in a squalid apartment where she endures the latter’s near-constant verbal, physical and sexual abuse. Precious’s only escape from this lurid tableau is rich, glittery fantasy life, in which she has a “light-skinned boyfriend” and “good hair,” dresses in ball gowns and carries a little terrier.

HAVE A FABULOUS FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH!

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Greg Craig and his boss

In the first major shakeup among President Barack Obama’s senior staff, White House Counsel Greg Craig is being pushed out in favor of veteran Democratic lawyer Bob Bauer because of a dispute over plans to close the U.S. military prison in Cuba, CNN has learned.

The move will be announced by the White House in the coming days, a senior administration official and a senior Democratic source confirmed. The sources said it could be announced as early as Friday while the president will be in Japan starting a four-nation tour of Asia, which would make it likely the staff change will be overshadowed by other events.

[...]

Democratic officials said Craig was ousted because of frustration among senior White House aides over his handling of the plans to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. As the White House’s top lawyer, Craig was pivotal in advising Obama to sign an executive order during his first week in office promising to shut the prison by the end of January 2010.

In a politically embarrassing move that has frustrated some of the president’s liberal supporters, White House aides have since backed off that deadline, citing complex legal issues surrounding what to do with the approximately 200 terror suspects still detained at Guantanamo.

Some administration officials privately believe Craig should have better anticipated the pitfalls. However, his supporters believe he is being used as a scapegoat and note he was not the only top official who supported the ironclad executive order.

Closing Gitmo isn’t the problem. The problem is what to do with all the people that have been detained by our government for up to eight years without trials. Habeas corpus and due process aren’t “just words.”

The answer is simple – bring them here, give them trials and let the chips fall where they may.  But that won’t happen, it might upset Obama’s fellow Republicans.

It sounds like Craig believes in the rule of law. Too bad for him, cuz his boss doesn’t. The Friday White House News Dump doesn’t usually include bodies, so maybe they’re gonna wait until Saturday night to massacre him.

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The more things change, the more they remain the same:

The Obama administration is increasingly exasperated by leaks of national-security-related information and is planning a major effort to root out and punish those responsible, top officials said Thursday.

Every administration since George Washington has complained about leaks. But there’s an old saying – “The ship of state leaks from the top.”

Maybe the White House should call a plumber to find and fix the leaks. This guy has some experience at doing that:

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