Glenn Beck is a skidmark on the underwear of mankind.

(h/t Egalia at TGW)

This is an open thread.

Labor’s Heroes: Remembering Mother Jones

“The elderly woman smoothed her black dress and touched the lace at her throat and wrists. Her snow-white hair was gathered into a knot at the nape of her neck, and a black hat, trimmed with lavender ribbons to lend a touch of color, shaded her finely wrinkled face. She was about five feet tall, but she exuded energy and enthusiasm. As she waited to speak, her bright blue eyes scanned the people grouped beyond the platform. Her kindly expression never altered as her voice broke over the audience: “I’m not a humanitarian,” she exclaimed. “‘I’m a hell-raiser.’

Her size and grandmotherly appearance belied her fiery nature. When she stepped on a stage, she became a dynamic speaker. She projected wide variations in emotion, sometimes striding about the stage in “a towering rage.” She could bring her audience to the verge of tears or have them clapping and “bursting with laughter.” She was a good story teller, and “she excelled in invective, pathos, and humor ranging from irony to ridicule.””  (Source)

Since today is Labor Day, I’d like to take this opportunity to remember this “hell-raiser,” Mary Harris Jones, more famously known as Mother Jones.

Mother Jones was born in Cork Ireland and she claims her birthday is May 1, 1830. I mention this because historians have noted that much of her persona is self-created and there is some belief that she chose May 1^st May Day, because of its significance to the labor movement.  There is also some dispute over her age, making her birth year somewhere between 1830 and 1840.

She came from a long line of Irish Freedom fighters but the famine and violence of 19^th Century Ireland caused her family to flee to America in 1835.  Employed as a dressmaker and school teacher, Mary met her husband-to-be, George E. Jones in 1861.  George was an active member of the Iron Molders’ Union and together they had 4 children.  Mary’s blissful wedded life was cut short however in 1867, just six short years after she’d wed, when yellow fever claimed the lives of her husband and all four of her children.  Her grief over this was still palpable 60 years later as she penned her autobiography.  She wrote:

“All about my house I could hear weeping and the cries of delirium.  One by one, my four little children sickened and died.  I washed their little bodies and got them ready for burial.  My husband caught the fever and died.  I sat alone through nights of grief.  No one came.  No one could”
(p. 1).

Moonbats for Moonbeam

From the Sacramento Bee:

The California attorney general’s office opened an investigation Thursday into allegations that the state’s largest health insurers were rejecting medical claims at alarming rates.

The inquiry was prompted by a report released Wednesday by the California Nurses Association. The report suggested that the insurers rejected a fifth of all claims received over the past seven years.

“The public is entitled to know whether wrongful business practices are involved,” Attorney General Jerry Brown said Thursday in a statement.

[…]

The nurses union said some of the companies had denial rates between 27 percent and 40 percent during the first six months of this year, with PacifiCare rejecting 39.6 percent of claims it received.

The CNA said Cigna rejected 32.7 percent, Health Net 30 percent, Kaiser Permanente 28.3 percent and Blue Cross 27.9 percent.

Jerry Brown is the right kind of crazy.  He is also a genuine liberal.

Born in 1938, Edmund Gerald “Jerry” Brown Jr. is the son of Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, California’s last old-school New Deal-style liberal governor. Pat and Jerry bookended Ronnie Raygun’s tenure in Sacramento.

Jerry Brown attended a Jesuit seminary with the intent to become a Catholic priest but he left the seminary to attend UC Berkeley instead. After graduating from Cal with degrees in Latin and Greek he attended Yale Law School. As a young lawyer he worked as a community organizer working with migrant workers and anti-Vietnam war groups. In 1969 he entered his first political campaign when he ran for and won a spot on the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees.

The State of Labor

Every now and then, someone will sum up a concept so clearly and elegantly that truth cannot be missed.  I only wish Dean Baker had written it last year when Chris Bowers and the rest of Whole Foods Nation were in the “You like me!  You really LIKE me!” stage as the Obama campaign was fluffing them.  Here it is, all you need to know about the working class:

“Most of us work for a living; the rest are bankers.”

If you are not a banker or someone who owns a huge chunk of an international corporation, you are working class.  You depend on a banker of a corporate owner for your livelihood.

And you are incredibly vulnerable.

Rich people are not like you and me.  Wait, I think someone else said that.  Well, he’s dead now, he won’t mind.  He was right, of course, the very wealthy and well connected are Jet Setters.  They think globally, not locally.  That whole citizenship/patriotism/pride in country thing is soooo outre.  Everyone knows that labor is cheap everywhere else in the world and people are swappable like new widgets.  And if your own workers are too expensive or still covered by a bothersome union, have no fear!  You only have to shutdown your American research facilities and with the money you save, you can buy up some struggling little companies with  good ideas.  Buy them up!  Drink their milkshake!  Corner the market on innovation.  Never think beyond the next resort season.

It’s all about power and accumulation and not having to answer to anyone and a huge, global game of Monopoly where you can charge rent on everything from St. Charles to Park Place.  Don’t worry about the proles getting in a high dudgeon about it.  Hire a bunch of mindf$^&ers who will convince the gullible to vote against their own interests.  Or tell them that losing their jobs is a sacrifice for the greater good.  Keep them from associating with each other.  Make them call each other racists and teabaggers.  Sit back and watch the fun.

But seriously, folks, when the mindf%*(ers convinced the Whole Foods crowd to vote for Obama, the neofeudalists won.  It is going to be very, very hard to work our way out of the predicament we are in.  Unless we can wake up the working class in the next couple of years, we will not be able to turn this around.  We will have turned ourselves into a highy stratified society consisting of the superrich and everyone else.  We won’t mix.  There will be no equality.  No innovation.  We’ll have our own caste system.  Even higher education will be pointless.  There will be no jobs.  It will only be the masters and their servants like Jane Austen’s England. And don’t think that Sonia Sotomayor is going to make a bean’s worth of difference on the USSC.  I wouldn’t be surprised if she were just the kind of justice the bankers (and their bonuses) love.  We shall see.

We Clintonistas were the canaries in the coal mine, last year.  We saw where the working class was headed when the Democratic party abandoned us.  And we tried, desperately, to get the attention of the Whole Foods crowd, to no avail.  But the truth is, the self-identified “creative class” were *always* one of us.  They just didn’t know it until now.  And until they accept us as their equals and join with us in solidarity, we will have no power as a Union.

Happy Labor Day.

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

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

Monday News Blast

Fighting over Frida Kahlo

In Mexico, the emergence of work said to be made by the artist has led to a very public debate about its authenticity. The Times’ art critic has seen the pieces.

I don’t quite get how you have a “signature issue” and yet only now are ready to “draw some lines in the sand” — but, hey! I’m not the president:

Obama Readies Reform Specifics

Until now, Obama has resisted taking firm positions on specific elements of a broad health-care bill, instead expressing openness to many ideas. But the approach has left lawmakers divided over contentious elements, such as how to rein in costs. And with a growing chorus in favor of a slower, less ambitious approach, Obama is inching toward a proposal that would bear his name and carry the political risks of sponsorship.

The president returned from Camp David on Sunday and spent part of the day working on his address, some of which may be tested Monday in a Labor Day appearance in Cincinnati, aides said.

“People will leave [Wednesday’s] speech knowing where he stands,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “And if it takes doing whatever to get health care done, the president is ready, willing and able to go do that.”

Obama is not inclined to make veto threats, as President Bill Clinton did on the issue of universal health care, Gibbs added, “but I’m sure he will draw some lines in the sand.”

New Fee on Health Insurance Companies Is Proposed to Help Expand Coverage

The proposal by Mr. Baucus does not include a public option, or a government-run insurance plan, to compete with private insurers, as many Democrats want.

…

The separate new fee on insurance companies would help raise money to pay for the plan. The fee would raise $6 billion a year starting in 2010, and it would be allocated among insurance companies according to their market shares.

…

Mr. Schumer said, “The health insurance industry should pay its fair share of the cost because it stands to gain over 40 million new consumers under health care reform legislation.”

Mr. Rockefeller said the fees were justified because insurance companies were “rapaciously, greedily and unstoppably making money by underpaying the patient, by underpaying the provider and by overpaying themselves.”

…

Another section of Mr. Baucus’s proposal would help pay insurance premiums, co-payments and deductibles for people with incomes less than 300 percent of the poverty level ($66,150 for a family of four). It would also provide some protection for people with incomes from 300 percent to 400 percent of the poverty level (up to $88,200 for a family of four), so they would generally not have to pay more than 13 percent of their income in premiums.

Mr. Baucus’s proposal does not include a “trigger mechanism” of the type recommended by Ms. Snowe, who would offer a public insurance plan in any state where fewer than 95 percent of the people had access to affordable coverage.

. . . . Are you kidding me? It’s going to take 20 years to close Medicare D’s donut hole????
Questions from readers about healthcare debate

What specific cost and benefit changes to Medicare are included in healthcare reform plans?

The House is considering a change to the Medicare prescription drug benefit that would raise premium costs while lowering beneficiaries’ total spending on prescription drugs. The 20-year plan to close the “doughnut hole” — the gap in coverage that occurs when a patient has reached the coverage limit of $826 but not the catastrophic limit of $4,350 — is estimated to result in higher premiums for Part D plans, but lower average drug spending. For patients who spend small amounts on prescription drugs, this change would raise premiums more than it would lower out-of-pocket costs. For patients who require a lot of expensive drugs, buying prescriptions would become more affordable.

Ah, now we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty:
Axelrod: Firm on public option

Axelrod disputed that interpretation in an e-mail.

“In no way did I back off our position,” he wrote. “I must have said half a dozen times that he thinks the public option is an important tool to bring about competition and choice that will help consumers. To say that it is not the whole of health insurance reform, in a country where 160 million people have employer-sponsored health insurance and would not even be affected by this, does not mean I am backing off!”

Gadget Makers Can Find Thief, but Don’t Ask

Amazon’s policy is that it will help locate a missing Kindle only if the company is contacted by a police officer bearing a subpoena. Mr. Borgese, who lives in Manhattan, questions whether hunting down a $300 e-book reader would rank as a priority for the New York Police Department.

He began to see ulterior motives when he twice sent e-mail messages to Amazon seeking an address to send a police report and got no reply.

“I finally concluded,” Mr. Borgese said, “that Amazon knew the device was being used and preferred to sell content to anyone who possessed the device, rather than assist in returning it to its rightful owner.”

And in a related story: Amazon.com Offers to Replace Copies of Orwell Book

---

Scientists hail breakthrough in Alzheimer’s research
Scientists working in seven countries announced on Sunday they had uncovered variants of three genes which play a role in Alzheimer’s, a discovery that should throw open many new avenues for tackling this tragic, mind-killing disease.

---

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!

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

Open Thread: Is Obama a Socialist?

If only he was! We might be getting real Health Care Reform right now. Google defines a Socialism as follows

socialism (uncountable)

1. Any of various political philosophies that support social and economic equality, collective decision-making, and public control of productive capital and natural resources, as advocated by socialists.
2. The socialist political philosophies as a group, including Marxism, libertarian socialism, democratic socialism, and social democracy.
3. (Leninism) The intermediate phase of social development between capitalism and full communism. This is a strategy whereby the State has control of all key resource-producing industries and manages most aspects of the market, in contrast to laissez faire capitalism.
4. (Classical Marxism) The international communist society where classes and the state no longer exist.

I don’t see how this description fits the President at all. But I could be wrong. Why don’t we ask him? Ever since the primaries ended, some people have adopted right wing memes about Obama, (like that he is a Socialist) and claimed them to be the truth. Some of these people have even called themselves PUMAs. How rude! The Hillbuzz boys are a good example. Many of us really enjoyed their site at one point. But some time in 2008, they went off the deep end began spouting right wing birther nuttery about how Islam and ACORN is trying to take over the world and how Dick Cheney kept America safe and is a champion for Gay Rights. *spits out water* Since then, most liberals have been driven from their website, and it is now an echo chamber for reactionary conservatives. This morning, I was bored, and I saw that they had posted yet another loony article about how textbooks are indoctrinating children with political correctness and a belief in Climate Change or some such other thing, so I left a comment.

This website is more and more becoming an echo chamber for wingbat conservatives. I still love it, but I used to love it more. I don’t think I’ve seen an actual substantive post that didn’t have something to do with demonizing liberals, calling Bam a “socialist” (falls over laughing)or spouting some nuttery about how ACORN is taking over the world in months. There has been nothing about Health Care, nothing about the continuation of Bush’s wiretapping policies and torture, nothing about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nothing. Once upon a time, this website was wonderful. Now this morning’s post is about how… er

Europe is a weak, crippled, pathetic continent where once mighty societies once stood. It sure doesn’t seem like a coincidence the devolution of Europe coincides perfectly with its catering to all of this PC, pretend everything’s rosey, insist Muslims are Care Bears crap.

I’m sorry, but I just had to say something.

The Hillbuzz boys proceeded to ban me, and then wrote several subsequent comments about my evil partisan leftism and how I was trying to “censor” them. They called me a “good little Democrat” and so on and so forth. They defended themselves by saying they had never claimed to be liberal and had always explained that they were “moderates.”

If moderates and conservatives mounted a years-long effort to take back our schools and install boards who’d fight the Islamization of our curriculums and the re-writing of history in PC-terms, then maybe we can push back against these Alinsky/ACORN radicals before they take permanent hold of young minds and send America down the tubes alongside Europe.

I should be ashamed of myself! I’m just going to go back to destroying America with my socialism now. I only tell this story because it goes back to the Jones controversy. Idiot Right wingers should never be taken seriously. The Hillbuzz boys did, and look at what happened to them.

This is an open thread.

digg!! share!! tweet!!

Dear Mr. Fantasy…Dreaming of 2012

Relax and let yourself dream

This story is a couple of days old; but since I don’t watch TV anymore, I didn’t hear about it until today. It seems that two of MSNBC’s most enthusiastic koolaid-slurpers, Keith Olberman and Eugene Robinson, had a discussion on last Thursday night’s Countdown about whether President Obama could find himself with primary challengers in 2012 if he doesn’t pass a strong health care bill with a public option. Here’s the video:

Rasmussen Reports took note of the suggestion.

Olbermann said the president has “compromised on everything so far and as self-defeating as it may be, the progressive caucus and progressives would abandon him if necessary, if this was to be the policy of this administration into 2012. If it’s necessary to find somebody to run against him, I think they’d do it, no matter how destructive that may seem.”

But just over a month ago, before the president signaled a willingness to give up on the so-called public option element of his health care reform plan, voters were evenly divided over whether Hillary Rodham Clinton would challenge Obama for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2012. Clinton, after all, was a very close second for the party’s nomination last year.

In fact, Rasmussen took a poll.

Van Jones resigns

Van Jones

---

We haven’t been following the saga of Van Jones here at The Confluence because we try to ignore the VRWC Noise Machine and we have been focusing on health care reform.  Here’s the latest news from the Washington Post:

Van Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, resigned Saturday, following weeks of pressure from the right and a flurry of revelations about his past statements.

“I am resigning my post at the Council on Environmental Quality, effective today,” Jones said in a statement dated Sept 5 released around midnight on Sept 6.

“On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me.They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide,” he continued. “I have been inundated with calls — from across the political spectrum — urging me to ‘stay and fight.’ But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.”

White House officials had offered tepid support last week Jones after he issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”

Earlier, Jones said he was “clearly inappropriate” in using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.

Who is Van Jones? From Gawker:

The story of how the President’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs became the biggest, scariest villain of the right wing (this week, anyway) is also the story of how the right wing information delivery process works now.

Here’s the biography of Van Jones: he was a bookish black kid from Tennessee who went to Yale Law and moved to San Francisco and became a radical. Then he decided to use his law degree and smarts to clean up and make things better from inside the establishment.

He was, he openly acknowledges, a “full-on Marxist” in early ’90s California. He joined a revolutionary Marxist group and protested police brutality. Then he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which combats over-incarceration, police brutality, and urban poverty and violence.

Running a civil rights group dedicated to producing real and immediate improvements in urban life will make a revolutionary Marxist a bit more pragmatic. Jones began focusing on job creation, and, with a bit of prognostic intuition that ought to put Thomas Friedman to shame, he decided, in the late-’90s, to focus on “Green Jobs.” This is, you know, capitalism—he wants to create wealth, and use market forces to make the world and black communities better places!

And in 2008 he wrote a book called The Green Collar Economy, and it made the Times best-seller list, making him as much of a figure of the mainstream as Sean Hannity or Malcolm Gladwell.

So here we have a radical youth turned respectable liberal. Respectable enough to be on Time magazine listicles and win World Economic Forum prizes and everything. Respectable enough for Tom Friedman to profile him. And The New Yorker. Respectable enough for Meg Whitman, as in former eBay CEO and wealthy Republican California gubernatorial candidate and John McCain advisor Meg Whitman, to proclaim herself “a huge fan of Van Jones.”

And for both his activism and his charm he was rewarded with a White House job with the Council on Environmental Quality. He was tasked with making sure stimulus money for green jobs actually went to green jobs. And he’s a great person to have in this administration—he is a genuine environmentalist and the only special interest he’s beholden to is poor people. He is the sort of person we were all praying Obama would bring with him to DC, instead of Larry Summers.

I am no fan of Barack Obama. I rate him as somewhat better than George W. Bush only because he hasn’t launched an unprovoked war on false pretenses. But I have said before and I’ll say again that I would love to be proven wrong about him.  If he fails we all suffer.

I am not going to oppose people and/or policies just because of their connection to Obama, nor am I going to think less of anyone (like Hillary Clinton) because they choose to serve our nation by working for him.  I want Obama to appoint good liberals and progressives to positions in the federal bureaucracy and judiciary.

Van Jones seems to have been a good pick for the position he held. None of the crap thrown at him by the wingnuts had anything to do with his qualifications or job performance.  Obama should have given Jones his full support.

---

---

From the Washington Post:

Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck all but declared war on Jones after a group the adviser founded in 2005, ColorofChange.org, led an advertising boycott against Beck’s show to protest his claim that Obama is a racist.

Glenn Beck is not on our side, he is a member of the right-wing lunatic fringe. The idea that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is bullshit. The attacks on Jones are not based on any alleged incompetence or corruption.  As Digby said:

Murdoch and Ailes have made it quite clear that if you mess with Fox they will unleash the crazies. They’re taking Van Jones’ scalp to send that message.

I have no interest in watching the VRWC destroy a bad Democratic POTUS so they can replace him with someone even worse. Nor will I cheer when real liberals and progressives are driven from an administration that is already overloaded with conservatives and centrists.

---

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

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

Kiss my ass, Dave

---

David “M-M-M-My” Sirota has written an accurate yet ridiculous piece about last year’s election:

Though the 2006 and 2008 elections were billed as progressive movement successes, the story behind them highlights a longer-term failure. During those contests, most leaders of Washington’s major labor, environmental, antiwar and anti-poverty groups spent millions of dollars on a party endeavor — specifically, on electing a Democratic president and Democratic Congress. In the process, many groups subverted their own movement agendas in the name of electoral unity.

The effort involved a sleight of hand. These groups begged their grass-roots members — janitors, soccer moms, veterans and other “regular folks” — to cough up small-dollar contributions in return for the promise of movement pressure on both parties’ politicians. Simultaneously, these groups went to dot-com and Wall Street millionaires asking them to chip in big checks in exchange for advocacy that did not offend those fat cats’ Democratic politician friends (or those millionaires’ economic privilege).

[…]

But after the 2008 election, the strategy’s bankruptcy is undeniable.

As we now see, union dues underwrote Democratic leaders who today obstruct serious labor law reform and ignore past promises to fix NAFTA. Green groups’ resources elected a government that pretends sham “cap and trade” bills represent environmental progress. Healthcare groups promising to push a single-payer system got a president not only dropping his own single-payer promises, but also backing off a “public option” to compete with private insurance. And antiwar funding delivered a Congress that refuses to stop financing the Iraq mess, and an administration preparing to escalate the Afghanistan conflict.

I’m not disagreeing with anything that Mr. Sirota says. The problem is that Dave writes as if he spent the last few years hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar on Funk&Wagnalls front porch. In reality Dave was a Kool-aid chugging, CDS infested Obamafluffer.

There were a whole bunch of people last year who weren’t so keen on the idea of subverting their agendas in the name of electoral unity. They even formed a group. Dave didn’t think too highly of them when it mattered. Earlier this year he had this to say:

I’m very proud of the reporting I did during the campaign, and of the work I’m doing with the team at OpenLeft. We don’t carry water for individual politicians – we’re honest and straightforward about trying to do our part to build a movement. And that means there’s going to be praise and criticism – all at the same time. That doesn’t make us the hypocrites in American politics – not even close. Indeed, the real hypocrites are those who insist they care about the future of this country, but either disengage or actively work to undermine a president because their favored candidate didn’t win.

So my message is pretty simple:

1. I – and other Obama supporters – have nothing to apologize for on this score. Nothing at all. If telling the truth makes you dislike me or anyone else, that’s your problem, not mine.

2. To Naderites, STFU and start doing the unglamorous work of building the third-party you say you really want.

3. To Clintonites, just STFU and slither back to your rathole of bitterness. Your candidate lost because she helped create the problems we now have to fix. Deal with that and become a productive member of society, or again, just STFU.

As Joseph Cannon said, “The guy is just plain bugfuck nuts.”

If Dave and his ilk did such a good job “reporting” then how come we know more about Sarah Palin’s scary lady parts than we do about Obama’s years in Chicago and his relationships with Tony Rezko, William Ayers and Reverend Jeremiah Wright? How did an empty suit get into the White House without showing his college transcripts and legislative records?

How did someone with Obama’s resume raise $50 million dollars in the first six months of 2007 despite mediocre polling and piss-poor debate performances? Who were the wealthy and powerful people that jump-started Obama’s campaign? More importantly, why did they do it and what do they expect in return?

Where was Dave Sirota when democracy was punked by the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committed in order to anoint Obama as the Democratic nominee? Where was the hard-hitting investigative journalism when the caucuses were gamed?

Before Dave Sirota is welcomed back to the ranks of respectability a mea culpa and an act of contrition are called for. First Dave needs to utter those two magic words – “I’m sorry.” As for the act of contrition I will offer myself as a representative of all the disenfranchised Democrats.

All Dave Sirota needs to do is name the time and the place and I will be there to offer up my flabby white ass for him to kiss. I’ll even make sure it is freshly washed. It can be a small, private ceremony – just me, him and a photographer.

If he would prefer to apply his liver lips to another set of buns  I’m sure there are plenty of pissed off Democrats who will volunteer. All Dave has to do is give us an address or fax number and we can all send him photocopies of our asses so he can choose which one he wants to pucker up and smooch.

After the way he chapped his lips on Obama’s skinny butt one more derriere shouldn’t be too hard.

---

Your Breakfast Read Saturday Edition

Health-Care Mess

My peeps at Black Agenda Report want us to stop blaming everybody under the sun: There’s a clear culprit.
Who’s Blocking Health Care Reform Now? Blue Dogs? Senate Dems? House Progressives? Or the White House Itself?

In less than a year, Democrats have transformed themselves from the party of change to the party of excuses. Republican birthers and teapartyers, blue dog Democrats, rogue donkey and elephant senators, and even progressives favoring single payer or the shadowy “public option” have all been blamed by the White House for holding up health care — or is it health insurance — reform.
[…]
It’s not Republicans, it’s not blocking blue dogs, or die-hard progressives who form the biggest political obstacle to enacting universal health care this year. It’s Democrats, following the lead of the chief Democrat in the White House.

Huh???
Obama May Need Sense of Crisis to Revive Health-Care Overhaul

President Barack Obama returns to Washington next week in search of one thing that can revive his health-care overhaul: a sense of crisis.

I’m dying to see what this draft would look like.
White House Considers Drafting Health Care Bill

Multiple sources close to the process told CNN Friday that while the plan is uncertain, they are preparing for the possibility they could deliver their own legislation to Capitol Hill sometime after the President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress Wednesday, with one source calling the possibility of new legislation a “contingency” approach if efforts by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus to craft a deal fall through.

The White House emphasized Friday that no formal bill has yet been written. “The President has been reviewing all of the various legislative proposals, but no decision has been made about whether formal legislation will be presented,” said Deputy Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer.

Max Baucus says he has a bill.
Senate Chairman Says Health Care Bill Is Coming

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee told colleagues on Friday that he would soon present them with a detailed proposal for overhauling the nation’s health care system in an effort to force either an agreement or an acknowledgment that further bipartisan negotiations would be futile.

The least powerful and least listened-to group in the whole debate is making a plea.
Liberals Push Obama on Health Care Public Option

House liberals pleaded with President Barack Obama on Friday to push for creation of a government-run health care program as the Senate’s chief negotiator said he won’t wait much longer for Republicans to compromise amid dwindling chances for a bipartisan bill.

Breaking news: The sun rises from the East.
Harry Reid may compromise on public option

With so many doofuses and duplicitists “tinkering” with the legislation, this has become a very realistic scenario.
What If They Had a Health-Care Reform Bill and Nobody Could Support it?

[T]here’s an increasingly evident path by which health-care reform begins to hurt the very people it’s meant to aid. As Jordan Rau reports, making health-care reform affordable for the centrists in the Congress could make it unaffordable for the people.

Health Bills Might Not Protect Some Needy Americans, Experts Say

Concern about the legislation’s cost has overshadowed a major worry among some policy experts: Whether the Democrats’ plans would protect low- and moderate-income earners from excess financial burdens, as backers have promised.

Wasn’t this whole thing a farce to begin with?
Gang of Six healthcare reform negotiations on verge of collapse

Bravo Al Franken!

---

Around The Nation

Stories like these are the reason I’m opposed to the death penalty.
Did Texas execute an innocent man?

[Cameron Todd Willingham] insisted upon his innocence in the deaths of his children and refused an offer to plead guilty in return for a life sentence.

He got what he deserves.
US soldier gets life for rape and murder of Iraqi girl

A US army soldier has received five consecutive life sentences for his role in the rape and murder of an Iraqi teenager and the slaying of three of her family members.

Colleges brace for swine flu assault

With thousands of college students flooding New England campuses this week, universities are taking unprecedented measures to contain possible outbreaks of influenza, knowing that young adults sit squarely in the bull’s-eye of susceptibility to swine flu.

In observance of Labor Day: a progress report on jobs

The picture is slowly improving. But how well you’re doing depends on your profession, where you live, and how old you are.

---

Torturegate: The “Postplay”

Chalabi aide: I went from White House to secret prison

U.S. authorities detained a top aide to former Iraqi exile leader and Bush administration ally Ahmad Chalabi last year and accused him of helping Iranian-backed militants kidnap and kill American and British soldiers and contractors.

Ashcroft can be sued over arrests, appeals court rules

In a ruling that said Ashcroft could be sued for prosecutorial abuses, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the former attorney general immunity from liability for how he used the material witness warrants in national security investigations.

---

Economy Watch

Paul Krugman has a superb essay on macroeconomics in the NY Times Magazine.
How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?

Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists came tobelieve that markets were inherently stable — indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views. But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Neither side was prepared to cope with an economy that went off the rails despite the Fed’s best efforts.

Black Swan anyone? (Sorry! I had to squeeze that in, I’m currently re-reading the book and I can’t believe how prescient Nassim Nicholas Taleb was.)

Economists React: Improving Trend ‘Can’t Be Denied’

Economists and others weigh in on the increase in the unemployment rate and moderating job losses.

Things getting better or “getting worse more slowly”?
Job losses slow as unemployment rises to 9.7 percent

Another important sign of a firming economic recovery emerged Friday from government statistics showing a slowdown in the torrid pace of job losses, even as a larger-than-expected rise in the unemployment rate to 9.7 percent signaled a long road ahead before Americans feel a return to normalcy.

Whose recovery is it anyway?
U.S. Recovery Leaving Workers Jobless May Spur Company Profits

Employers kept Americans’ working hours near a record low in August, signaling that economic growth is poised to reward companies with added profits while postponing any recovery in the job market.

Why the Stimulus Is Helping the Economy but Not Obama

Proving a negative is always a challenge, but there’s mounting evidence that the controversial $787 billion stimulus bill is achieving one of its major goals: shortening the recession. Economists at Goldman Sachs say the bill, officially called the American Recovery and Reconstruction Act, has resulted in a 2% to 3% boost to annual GDP in the second and third quarters of this year, turning what could have been a worsening recession into potential growth. For President Barack Obama, whose poll numbers have dropped precipitously from around 65% to around 50% as Americans have become worried about government spending and health-care reform

How did we get here?
How the collapse of Lehman Brothers pushed capitalism to the brink

The Wall Street titan’s bankruptcy triggered a system-wide crisis of confidence in banks across the globe

This is just not looking good.
Banks Closed in Four States; 89 in 2009

Regulators on Friday shut down banks in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa and Arizona, pushing to 89 the number of banks that have failed this year under the weight of the soured economy and rising loan defaults

The financial meltdown made some big winners and losers.
Executives who gained–or lost–the most in the economic crisis

---

Op-ed Columns

Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two American journalists that were captured and held hostage in North Korea penned an op-ed a couple fo days ago. It’s well worth a read.
Hostages of the Hermit Kingdom

Since our release, we have become aware that the situation along the China-North Korea border has become even more challenging for aid groups and that many defectors are going deeper underground. We regret if any of our actions, including the high-profile nature of our confinement, has led to increased scrutiny of activists and North Koreans living along the border. The activists’ work is inspiring, courageous and crucial.

Many people have asked about our strength to endure such hardships and uncertainty. But our experiences pale when compared with the hardship facing so many people living in North Korea or as illegal immigrants in China.

Health-care reform 1993: Brad Delong reminisces
Why health-care reform failed last time

Joe Conasson says Obama screwed the pooch.
Healthcare didn’t have to go this way

Obama gave away the store on this crucial issue. It’s time to take it back

Chuck Hagel making some good noise
America Must Recognize Her Limits

Iraq and Afghanistan Aren’t Ours to Win or Lose

Where the Jobs Aren’t

As is the case with so many economic indicators these days, the only good thing to say about the August jobs report is that it could have been worse. Employers shed another 216,000 jobs last month, a smaller loss than expected and the lowest monthly loss total in a year.

---

Around The World

Did Gordon Brown really believe we would be happy about the release of the guy we are holding responsible for blowing up hundreds of Americans?
Lockerbie bomber: Megrahi’s release has strained the special relationship

There is no mistaking the rage in America, across the board, at the release of the Lockerbie bomber Megrahi, and at the apparent duplicity of Gordon Brown and his kinsmen north of the border. Americans dislike more than anything else duplicity among friends (though it is not always absent in Washington).

Nobody likes “collateral damage” on their soil.
NATO seeks to calm Afghans after deadly air strike

U.S. and German military officers met families and victims of a NATO air strike in Northern Afghanistan on Saturday in a bid to cool anger over an incident that undermines NATO efforts to win hearts and minds.

Afghan officials say scores of people were killed, many of them civilians, when a U.S. F-15 fighter jet called in by German troops struck two hijacked fuel trucks before dawn on Friday.

You can guess who in the G20 is against a serious reform of the financial sector: It’s so much more fun to play footsies with Wall Street.
G20 united on stimulus, divided on bank reform

While policymakers appear agreed that economic life-support packages need to remain in place, divisions have appeared over the best way to fix the banking system and ensure no repeat of the credit crisis that plunged the world into recession.

Those damned “communists”
France tells G20 finance ministers it will cap bankers’ bonuses

France will go it alone and axe bankers’ bonuses even if Britain and America refuse to cap them, the French Finance Minister said yesterday after the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in London.

---

From The World of Science

When do we actually start to know what we are doing and why we are doing it?
When Does Consciousness Arise in Human Babies?

It is well recognized that infants have no awareness of their own state, emotions and motivations. Even older children who can speak have very limited insight into their own actions.
[…]
A more complex behavior is imitation: if Dad sticks out his tongue and waggles it, the infant mimics his gesture by combining visual information with proprioceptive feedback from its own movements. It is therefore likely that the baby has some basic level of unreflective, present-oriented consciousness.

But when does the magical journey of consciousness begin?

---

Odds & Ends

Tired of these usually boring “Top Colleges” lists, here is a much better one for you:
America’s 25 Douchiest Colleges

The question isn’t whether you’re a douche bag when you go to college. We were all kind of douche bags when we went to college, if we’re going to be honest about it. No, the question for America’s youth is: What kind of douche bag do you aspire to be?

Some members of Congress have really deep pockets, but the recession didn’t spare them either.
Rich List: Kerry, Issa, Harman most wealthy; new kids of ’09 are rich kids, too

The richest lawmaker is Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a veteran senator and 2004 presidential nominee, who has a net worth of at least $167.8 million, thanks to his wife’s fortune. Some of the members well known for their wealth, such as Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Jane Harman (D-Calif.), are also on the Rich List, with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.

Best wedding wows ever.

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

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