No, no, of course not. Go read Chris Floyd for a spectacularly jaundiced -- and by "spectacularly jaundiced" I mean "superbly written and correct in every respect" -- view of American official corruption -- and by "official corruption" I mean "business as usual for the elite" -- in Iraq. Peter Galbraith, Zalmay Khalilzad, Jay Garner, and Neil Bush join a cast of thousands!

Via ThinkProgress, both the Baucus Bill and the plan put forward by Pelosi will enroll some more people but most will not be in the Public Option and it will not cover everyone:

CBO: Public Option To Attract Only 6 Million Enrollees & Doesn’t Offer Lower Premiums

The public option would attract about 6 million enrollees by 2019 and charge premiums that are “somewhat higher than the average premiums for the private plans in the exchanges.” This is because the public option would “engage in less management of utilization” by its enrollees and “attract a less healthy pool of enrollees,” the office concludes. Moreover, since the House bill expands Medicaid up to 150% of the federal poverty line, it’s possible that the enrollees that would have enrolled in the public option went into Medicaid instead.

Below is a comparison of the relevant provisions in the House and Senate Finance Committee legislation:

	CBO Score Of House Bill	CBO Score Of Baucus Bill
Costs	Reduce deficits: $104B/10yrs Cost: $894B/10yrs Spends on subsidies: $605B/10yrs On Medicaid/CHIP: $425B/10yrs On Small Employer Credit: $25B/10yrs	Reduce deficits: $81B/10yrs Cost: $829B/10yrs Spends on subsidies: $461B/10yrs On Medicaid/CHIP: $345B/10yrs On Small Employer Credit: $23B/10yrs
Insured	Uninsured reduced by: 36M Uninsured in 2019: 18M In Exchanges: 30M | Public Plan: 6M In Medicaid: 15M	Uninsured reduced by: 29M Uninsured in 2019: 25M In Exchanges: 23M In Medicaid: 14M
Revenue	Mandate penalty: $33B/10yrs Pay-Play penalty: $135B/10yrs New taxes: $572B/10yrs	Mandate penalty: $4B/10yrs Free rider penalty: $23B/10yrs New taxes: $196B/10yrs
Medicare and Medicaid	Total savings: 426B/10yrs Medicare Advantage: $170B/10yrs	Total savings: 404B/10yrs Medicare Advantage: $117B/10yrs

With a Single Payer solution it would be everybody in and nobody out - AND it would save a heck of a lot more money for everyone.

The difference is not just everyone being covered but HUNDREDS of BILLIONS of DOLLARS saved every year:   Read more…

[cross posted at NPR Check]

On Friday I was staying late at work and before leaving heard this promising start to a story on All Things Considered:

"This week, we've been reading a vivid narrative in the New York Times by the journalist David Rohde. He was held captive for seven months by the Taliban. He was moved frequently from house to house all over remote parts of Pakistan. And one detail in this story made us particularly curious."

Holy cow! I thought, NPR is going to allude to the three rather stunning observations contained in Rohde's articles which Glenn Greenwald so aptly wrote about a few days ago:

Obama, in the Rose Garden, speaking to a gathering of physicians today:

Every one of you here today took an oath when you entered the medical profession. It was not an oath that you would spend a lot of time on the phone with insurance companies. (Laughter.) It was not an oath that you would have to turn away patients who you know could use your help. You did not devote your lives to be bean counters or paper pushers. You took an oath so that you could heal people. You did it so you could save lives.

[cross posted at NPR Check]

Last Saturday Scott Sermon made this claim about the US war in Afghanistan:

[Cross-posted to OpenLeft. Feel free to add comments over there, too. --lambert]

The blogosphere is all atwitter over Alan Grayson's powerful rhetoric on health care insurance reform -- and don't get me wrong, I'm all for effective rhetoric.* Grayson said:

44,789 Americans die every year according to the Harvard study. and you can see it by going to our website at grayson.house.gov. That is 10 times more than the number of Americans who have died in Iraq and who died in 9/11. but that was just once. this is every single year. That's right. every single year.

Take a look at this. Read it and weep. And I mean that, read it and weep, because of all these Americans who are dying because they don't have health insurance. Now, I think we should do something about that and the democratic health care plan does do something about that. It makes health care affordable for those who can't afford insurance and it saves these peoples' lives.

Leave aside the fact that co-authors of Harvard study Grayson cites are single payer advocates; we're used to the public option crowd stealing the good stuff. The more the merrier!

What really gets me is that Grayson's wrong on one very obvious and important fact:

[Do read the comments. --lambert]

[I have dear friends who will vehemently disagree with me about this. But so be it; I have to make a choice!]

Now that Edwards is out of the race I find myself, like VastLeft, surprised, even chagrined, to find myself endorsing Hillary. But there it is. I wish this could be something other than a rambling, impressionistic post, but heck: Maybe that's how we all make decisions anyhow.

My bottom line is this:

I feel that I know Hillary. For all her faults, I know her.

I want to entrust the very challenging future of our country to someone I know. Simple as that.

I don't feel that I know Obama, and the more I learn about him, the less I like.

Unbelievable. The troops, their parents, their Chambers of Commerce—they all bought armor to get the protection Bush couldn't give them in the His war of choice in Iraq.

Now, asking for some kind of recognition would be too much. This isn't Medal of Freedom-caliber patriotism, after all.

That "We" is bracketed because not all of us who oppose the Bush policies in Iraq were there. Corrente was represented by Riggsveda, and I'm sure we'll hear more first-hand reporting from her when the pain subsides from her broken toe, (not sure if this was a result of demonstrating, but as all who read her know, she is nothing if not intense, particularly about this demonstration).

I should admit right up front that I was somewhat skeptical of this demonstration. First, I have a real problem with ANSWER, even though I agree that it is outrageous only the left is ever called upon to renounce its idiot contingent; compare the actual power in the world of a Ramsey Clark to that of a Dr. Dobson, or a Pat Buchanan, who has a permanent berth of sorts at MSNBC, and I'm not even mentioning all those certifiable racist loons who are waiting for the confederate South to rise again, and who show up all over the place where Republicans gather.

Second, I always worry about lack of focus, as well as a dangerous sort of moral superiority that can develop in demonstrators, a topic for a later post. In spite of all that, had I not been a full continent away from Washington, I would have been there.

I don't have any evidence for it, but I believe that interest in the war in Iraq is waning in the US. We're the nation that invented the short attention span, and when combined with the media's decision to milk higher ratings from home grown disasters over foreign ones, I think Iraq is going the way of Afghanistan. Not for progressives, military families or Halliburton employees of course, but the former two are only tiny focus groups, and the latter can afford all the mercenaries they need to keep the looting, I mean cash flow moving along nicely for the duration of the war.

Digby's comment on the latest torture scandal:

It's pretty clear that even our own highly disciplined military can lose their humanity without a whole lot of provocation. These weren't dipshit national guard hicks either. This was the 82nd Airborn. No excuses.

Because I am fond of repeating myself I'm going to repeat myself: "Don't blame the low-level individuals, blame the powerful officials all the way up the chain of command."

If there had been an explicit policy coming straight from the top (meaning the Commander in Chief and the Sec Def) that US soldiers were to follow the Geneva Convention to the letter and that any deviations would be severely punished, none of this would have happened. Soldiers follow orders. That's what they do. In Iraq they were ordered to "soften up" detainees. The word from the top was to "take the gloves off". If they had been ordered to treat detainees humanely at all times, they would have followed that order as well.

The "decorated former Captain in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division" quoted in Time (via Digby):

I witnessed violations of the Geneva Conventions that I knew were violations of the Geneva Conventions when they happened but I was under the impression that that was U.S. policy at the time. And as soon as Abu Ghraib broke and they had hearings in front of Congress, the Secretary of Defense testified that we followed the spirit of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan, and the letter of the Geneva Conventions in Iraq, and as soon as he said that I knew something was wrong.

The Peace Rally last night on the lawn next to the National Constitution Center near Independence Hall ran a little late, simply because there were so many speakers trying to squeeze into the 2-hour timeframe, but it felt like it went quickly.

They said we were the largest crowd they had yet encountered on the tour, and though I'm not good at estimating that kind of thing, it seemed like there could have been 500, all told.

What I missed, having had to hoof it across the city to get there after right after work, was Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds-Brown reading the Resolution Against The War passed the day before by the Philadelphia City Council. Although she was the sponsor who introduced the resolution, it was co-sponsored by 12 other council members, including two Republicans. Here's what the website had to say about it:

"On the urging of members and friends of the Bring Them Home Now Bus Tour, the Philadelphia City Council voted today 16 to 1 for a Resolution calling on the federal government to "rapidly withdraw US troops from Iraq expeditiously." Following a Thursday morning caucus session in which Gold Star Families for Peace co-founder Celeste Zappala and other Bring Them Home Now Bus Tour members were introduced to council members..."

In addition to Cindy Sheehan's Gold Star Families for Peace members, other groups represented at the rally included Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans For Peace, and Military Families Speak Out. There were a wonderfully representative group of speakers, and some singer-songwriters who played and sang beautifully. Although the crowd spanned the age range, it seemed a bit on the older side. That will certainly change when the draft comes down. And, as so often happens with political activities like this, it was way too white. If this message is to start taking root and have resonance, outreach efforts have to be made more strenuously to link to and include minorities and their advocacy groups, especially since they are the ones doing a disproportionate amount of the fighting on the ground. But enough of that. It was inspiring, and I was glad I could be there. It lacked the carnival atmosphere that attends many such gatherings, but that was okay. Members of various groups circulated through the crowd handing out flyers and stickers, and the Iraq vets were selling IVAW T-shirts (I wanted one but at $20 I just couldn't spend the cash. I'll pick one up at the DC rally.) Further up, close to the speaker's platform were places to buy buttons and tour shirts. People stretched out on the grass, dogs rolled, babies cooed, bicycles served as impromptu chairs. Many threads ran through the speeches, not the least of which were calls for impeachment and rallying for attendance at the DC anti-war mobilization next Saturday. It was a night of strong rhetoric, much stronger than I had expected.   Read more…