Beware!

Anne Frank's diary contains references to icky girl parts!

Most of us are worried about job security, stagnant incomes, loss of pensions and benefits, lack of health insurance, home foreclosures. But the banksters are not most of us, and their worries are, well, on a different level. The big annual Versailles confab in Davos, Switzerland began this week, and some top banksters have told Bloomberg, "they think the biggest challenge for the industry is overcoming public anger about bonuses and compensation." Read more.

crossposted from a comment at FDL

Everyone would agree that the cleanest way to create a public option is to just expand Medicare. If it starts off as premium-based (with affordability subsidies) and employer premiums were simply redirected from private insurers to the Medicare trust fund, we’d avoid the need for a steep rise in Medicare taxes. Once the insurers have been euthanized (the PO would be subsidized, private insurance would not be), it wouldn’t be difficult to replace premium funding with tax funding down the road. Anyway, that’s exactly the approach Pete Stark’s “public option on steroids" Americare bill took, but I haven’t heard anyone on the Hill (including Stark) advocating it since the House agreed on their Tricommittee bill last Spring (a google blog search doesn’t show any recent comments about it other than my regular plugging of it here).

Jon Walker over at Fire Dog Lake makes a very effective argument about why learning the wrong lesson from the defeat of Martha Coakley in Tuesday's Massachusetts Senate race will lead to disaster.

Today, Chris Matthews asked Howard Dean for his interpretation of the results in Massachusetts. Howard told him that it was because voters wanted more than they were getting from Washington and that they were angry at Washington. He also said that Coakley's defeat was due not only to Independents voting for Brown, but also to progressives who either voted for him, or decided to stay home.

So I've been pondering the recent MA election.

And I realized the following things:

everyone in MA who watched TV/read the papers/listened to the radio had ALL the information they needed to make a wise choice.

everyone in MA who was Democratic or unenrolled received not one, but multiple GOTV contacts

everyone in every area had the chance to attend enlightening local events, had they chosen to

The people of MA had all they needed to make a wise choice, but they did not do so. The outcome is their responsibility. Not the fault of those of us who provided the information.

A story:

Look, people, there's only one progressive in the MA race, and her name is Martha Coakley.

Raise your hand if you know that Martha Coakley opposes Obama's position on a troop surge in Afghanistan. Raise your hand if you noticed Martha Coakley came out against Stupak with lightning speed. Raise your hand if you think she will not with equal lightning speed continue to educate her colleagues about about a woman's right to choose.

Self-proclaimed progressives who don't support an actual progressive, one who uses the "p-word" in public, might want to think about adjusting their personal self-labelling device.

Both the right and the left have been casting a lot of social hypnosis spells at Martha Coakley, and we've all been a little stunned by that Psychic Scream.

Gasoline on the open market at $8 a gallon, the black market at $20 a gallon, according to a live report from MSNBC, and the cost of a bottle of fresh water doubled during the day today at the one store in Port-au-Prince which still has water for sale.

Jonetta Rose Barras reports on Rhee's decision to replace the popular principal at Hardy Middle School.

DCPS needs a demographic adjustment. It needs more whites. Rhee has denied race or class factored into her thinking. That denial is hard to swallow, since most of Hardy's critics are white and from upscale Palisades.

Crossposted on Firedoglake

HIV is not the cause of AIDS. In fact, HIV may not even exist. If it does, it's just a harmless passenger virus brought along by other ailments. The HIV antibodies have never been adequately isolated, and testing for the virus is highly inaccurate. AIDS itself is caused by a variety of factors, such as recreational drug use, malnutrition, poor sanitation, and the side effects of the anti-retroviral medication used to "treat" HIV.

Ed Rendell promised to sign Pennsylvania single payer legislation if it passed; but apparently he never expected his bluff to be called:
Pennsylvania’s Single Payer Health Care Bill - 4113th Edition

Governor Rendell of Pennsylvania has a Health Bill before the Pennsylvania House of Representatives called Prescription for Pennsylvania.

This bill is losing support with only 8 sponsors as of this writing.

HB 1660 currently has 35 sponsors.

Why is HB 1660 superior to Prescription For Pennsylvania?

HB 1660 guarantees health care protection for all Pennsylvanians thus delivering quality, comprehensive health care.

Rendell’s plan does not.

Here's Cromwell's Again

Hey, Byron Dorgan and Chris Dodd, while both of you have been doing too little good for my taste, Cromwell's plea:

[Fish in a barrel time: SiteMeter tells me that Booman's thrown us a link. But I don't have time to give him what he really wants. RL calls. Readers? -- lambert]

OMG:

SAT Test Analogy Questions

1.) FDL : Riverdaughter ::
(A) dog : doghouse
(B) tree : tree
(C) beaver : dam

Bill Moyers hosted an interesting conversation the other day among Robert Kuttner, Matt Taibbi, and himself about health care reform, the performance of the Administration to this point, and the relations of progressives with the President. The conversation focused in part on how Taibbi and Kuttner would vote on the Senate's pending legislation, if it were up to them. Even though they both agreed very closely on the shortcomings of the Senate's bill thus far, and also on how far from what's needed this bill is, they disagreed about what should be done.

from tpm:

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) just told reporters that he and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid shook hands last night at 10:30 p.m. with Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) on an agreement that he would vote for cloture on health care reform, on the basis of the abortion language in the manager's amendment.

(a) STATE OPT-OUT OF ABORTION COVERAGE.-- ''(1) IN GENERAL.--A State may elect to prohibit abortion coverage in qualified health plans offered through an Exchange in such State if such State enacts a law to provide for such prohibition.

When I was young the United States had some liberals of courage in the Senate. People like Estes Kefauver, Paul Douglas, Hubert H. Humphrey, Herbert Lehman, Wayne Morse, Richard L. Neuberger, Maurine B. Neuberger, Eugene McCarthy, Mike Mansfield, Ernest Gruening, Pat McNamara, Phil Hart, Frank Church, George McGovern, Albert Gore, Sr., Ralph Yarborough, Warren Magnuson, and William Proxmire. These liberals could be counted on to go to the mat for most liberal causes. They said what they meant, and meant what they said. They compromised. But they never pre-compromised, and they never folded. They were never afraid to walk away from negotiations that were producing bad bills.

One fashion-forward consumer good that just could be coming back into style!

Single payer advocates argue that the only way forward with health care is to pull out the good parts that help people right away, declare victory, and reboot with an open and transparent process -- this time, for real. Naturally, the "progressive" access bloggers never refute these arguments directly, since that would give oxygen those who advocate the only policy on offer that can be shown to save money and lives, but apparently they've been talking privately among themselves about it. Here's the implicit "progressive" response and strategery (via Ackroyd at Eschaton):

The problem is, you give up on this and what do Democrats have to exclaim about doing for healthcare reform in 2010?

Who gives a shit?

Individual mandates? Making people buy crappy insurance from the same old insurers that will continue to find ways to exclude their claims and jack up their premiums?

Which none of the bills change.

Giveaways to the insurance industry of upwards of $600 billion in the form of the subsidies and credits given to the people who are forced to buy the crappy insurance?

Which none of the bills change.

The problem is, as Greg Sargent points out, is that Lincoln, Landrieu, Nelson, and Lieberman share a characteristic of the Republicans: they just don't really give a shit that people are suffering.

Bollocks. That's not the problem at all.

How we look at things matters.

How we choose to look at things matters.

How we think about things matters.

If we assume, as our fearless unelected leaders in the occult cabal clique-who-must-be-obeyed have, that outcome A is hopeless, we will clearly be unable to take steps to achieve outcome A.

This is negative future projection, and it is a cognitive style with behavioral implications.

Weirdly enough, this aberrant cognitive style has gone viral, and has nearly wiped out Medicare Equality for All, as an outcome.

It's like one of those dog-torture scenarios: delivering electric shocks that are unavoidable, so the dog sinks deeper and deeper into hopelessness, then goes belly-up, and submits and dies.

Well, folks, the Senate health plan is out. It's 2,074 pages long, and is even more crapulent than the House plan, from what I can tell.

Some of the awesome features:

1) Taxing more expensive plans that employers provide. The meme is that these are "Cadillac" plans, as if the people who are covered by these plans have any say WHATSOEVER in how much the programs cost.

2) Cutting even more from Medicare.

3) Offering an "opt-out" option for the states.

4) Forcing people to buy insurance, then penalizing them if they don't do so.

That's it!

Oh, wait. You wanted to know about that whole abortion thingy? Don't worry. The Senate has you covered!

CNN:

More than one-third of all weapons the United States has procured for Afghanistan's government are missing, according to a government report released Thursday.

The U.S. military failed to "maintain complete inventory records for an estimated 87,000 weapons -- or about 36 percent -- of the 242,000 weapons that the United States procured and shipped to Afghanistan from December 2004 through June 2008," a U.S. Government Accountability Office report states.

[...]The military also failed to properly account for an additional 135,000 weapons it obtained for the Afghan forces from 21 other countries.

Wired:

The Treasury Department wants more than $500,000 to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, a fee an attorney on the case suggested Tuesday might be one of the largest bills of its kind.

“I have not seen one that has been larger,” said Noah Wood, a Missouri attorney suing the government to comply with his nearly four-year-old FOIA request.

[...]Still, the government wants Wood to pay $522,886 for the records. The original tab was more than $26,000, but after some revisions in what Wood was seeking, the government upped the ante — even though not all information sought would be forthcoming, according to the bill.

Via Avedon Carol, this little item from Caltics:

Now it looks like they're moving to up the Hooverite ante, and two of California's powerful federal politicians are at the center of the debate. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is joining 6 other Senators to demand that Speaker Nancy Pelosi approve a commission to recommend cuts to Medicare and Social Security - or else they'll refuse to vote to increase the US government's debt ceiling: ...

Steve Benen

'DELAY, DEFINE AND DERAIL'.... Roll Call reports today on what we can expect to see from the Senate GOP caucus as the debate over health care reform enters the final stretch.

Senate Republicans, acknowledging they lack the votes to block a health care reform bill outright, have implemented a comprehensive political strategy to delay, define and derail. [...]

The Republicans have been very candid that their strategy is to sabotage the Obama Presidency so that things get worse for American and Republicans can get back in power.

Anne Applebaum on Roman Polanski:

He did commit a crime, but he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers' fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar.

Richard Cohen on Cap Weinberger:

Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense – which is the way much of official Washington saw him,” Cohen wrote. “Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that’s all right with me.”