It's funny, isn't it? The members of the corporate media are so very brave these days - as long as they're talking about Democrats. But whenever they're talking about Republicans, they're conveniently stricken with amnesia! I wonder why (*cough* corporate media *cough*)?

During a report on health-care legislation interest groups on the March 5 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, national political correspondent Jessica Yellin identified Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR) chairman Richard Scott as someone who "runs urgent-care clinics" and as the leader of "a media campaign to limit government's role in the health-care system," but did not note his prior position as CEO of a scandal-plagued hospital firm.

As Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented, a July 26, 1997, Los Angeles Times article reported that Scott resigned "as chairman of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. amid a massive federal investigation into the Medicare billing, physician recruiting and home-care practices of the nation's largest for-profit health care company." According to a December 18, 2002, Justice Department press release describing a tentative settlement with HCA to resolve civil litigation, "When added to the prior civil and criminal settlements reached in 2000, this settlement would bring the government's total recoveries from HCA to approximately $1.7 billion."

Media Matters has previously noted that The Washington Post and Fox News correspondent Molly Henneberg have reported on Scott's role with CPR without noting his prior role with HCA, while Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer interviewed Scott without doing so.

This is such good news - for those people who will be able to afford the treatments that will eventually result from this research. But let's not lose sight of the prize: health care for all!

President Obama is planning to sign an executive order on Monday rolling back restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research, according to sources close to the issue.

Although the exact wording of the order has not been revealed, the White House plans an 11 a.m. ceremony to sign the order repealing one of the most controversial steps taken by his predecessor, fulfilling one of Obama's eagerly anticipated campaign promises.

The move, long sought by scientists and patient advocates and opposed by religious groups, would enable the National Institutes of Health to consider requests from scientists to study hundreds of lines of cells that have been developed since the limitations were put in place -- lines that scientists and patient advocate say hold great hope for leading to cures for a host of major ailments.

"Opposed by religious groups?" There are plenty of religious groups who don't oppose embryonic stem cell research - but I guess the Washington Post is so used to having Pat Robertson on speed dial, they think religion is synonymous with GOP talking points.

I can barely read this through my empathetic tears:

March 5 (Bloomberg) -- Bank of America Corp. will suffer “grave and irreparable harm” if Merrill Lynch & Co. employees paid $3.6 billion in bonuses just before the firm’s acquisition by the bank are publicly identified, its lawyers said.

Bank of America today filed documents in state court in Manhattan to intervene in a case brought by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to compel former Merrill Chief Executive Officer John Thain to testify about the bonus recipients.

“Neither the individual names nor the job titles bear any reasonable or relevant relationship” to Cuomo’s investigation, the firms argued in the documents. “Nor is there a reasonable or relevant reason to disclose such information to the general public.”

The information Cuomo seeks would provide a “road map” revealing which business lines the banks believe to be most valuable and enable competitors to poach the bank’s top talent, Bank of America argued in the court filing. Disclosure of the information would also cause “internal dissension and consternation,” pose security risks for the exposed bankers and their families, and cause employees to leave, according to the filings.

God, I hate that internal dissension and consternation! And of course, unless they disclose, no one will have a clue that the guy with the Hamptons beach house, private car and driver, gold Rolex and Park Avenue penthouse works on Wall Street. Why, people might even try to steal from them the same way they stole from us!

You know who Pete Peterson is, right? He's the wingnut hedge-fund billionaire who's pledged a billion dollars to "reform" (and we know what that word means to the right wing) Social Security and Medicare. Via lambert, from Institutional Risk Analysis:

As we discussed with Josh Rosner and will be writing about same next week, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed Chairman Bernanke think they are driving this process, but in fact the markets are setting the agenda. Either we act now to deal with AIG and C and take these names off the table before the other zombies arrive for the dance party, or we risk being overwhelmed. If we have a choice between preserving the credit standing of the US Treasury and flushing AIG, C and every other CDS counterparty on the planet, we'll take the latter every time.

Indeed, yesterday we were slumming at the Four Seasons in New York. Among the dinosaurs we observed grazing in the tall grass of this Midtown Manhattan refuge for the transactional class was former C director Robert Rubin, former New York Fed Chairman Pete Peterson and Treasury Secretary Geithner, who apparently was there to get new instructions from his sponsors.

Before Geithner arrived for lunch, Peterson reportedly asked one NY real estate mogul: "How much of that toxic paper is there?" Now we may know where Geithner gathers his market intelligence -- over a luncheon table in New York with his owners. Next time we are going to bring the flip-cam.

But isn't it nice that the man who wants to take our Medicare and Social Security (so we can see it go down the tubes in the market, I guess) has such good relationships with his employees!

Gee, remember the old days when companies would announce massive layoffs and Wall Street would cheer? Good times!

And of course, depending on who you ask, the real unemployment rate may be double the number we're told:

WASHINGTON - The nation's jobless rate jumped to 8.1 percent in Feb., the highest since late 1983 and payrolls dropped by 651,000 jobs, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

Cost-cutting employers resorted to even bigger layoffs as they scrambled to survive the recession, feeding insecurities among those who still have jobs and those who desperately want them.

The net loss of jobs in February came after even deeper payroll reductions in the prior two months, according to revised figures. The economy lost 681,000 jobs in December and another 655,000 in January.

Employers are shrinking their work forces at alarming clip and are turning to other ways to slash costs — including trimming workers' hours, freezing wages or cutting pay — because the recession has eaten into their sales and profits. Customers at home and abroad are cutting back as other countries cope with their own economic problems.

[...] "This is basically cleaning house for a lot of firms," said John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia. "They are using the first quarter to cut back employment and figure out what they want."

Ah, the joys of the Randian free market! Go through the motions, use someone who doesn't know what they're doing, and make sure the plant has plenty of notice for the inspection. Why, it's a veritable recipe for disaster:

When food industry giants like Kellogg want to ensure that American consumers are being protected from contaminated products, they rely on private inspectors like Eugene A. Hatfield. So last spring Mr. Hatfield headed to the Peanut Corporation of America plant in southwest Georgia to make sure its chopped nuts, paste and peanut butter were safe to use in everything from granola bars to ice cream.

The peanut company, though, knew in advance that Mr. Hatfield was coming. He had less than a day to check the entire plant, which processed several million pounds of peanuts a month.

Mr. Hatfield, 66, an expert in fresh produce, was not aware that peanuts were readily susceptible to salmonella poisoning — which he was not required to test for anyway. And while Mr. Hatfield was inspecting the plant on behalf of Kellogg and other food companies, the Peanut Corporation was paying him for his efforts.

“The overall food safety level of this facility was considered to be: SUPERIOR,” he concluded in his March 27, 2008, report for his employer, the American Institute of Baking, which performs audits for major food companies. A copy of the audit was obtained by The New York Times.

Federal investigators later discovered that the dilapidated plant was ravaged by salmonella and had been shipping tainted peanuts and paste for at least nine months. But they were too late to prevent what has become one of the nation’s worst known outbreaks of food-borne disease in recent years, in which nine are believed to have died and an estimated 22,500 were sickened.

Did the U.S. Secretary of State actually criticize Israel? At a joint press conference with Mahmoud Abbas? That's new:

BRUSSELS, March 4 -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday criticized the Israeli government for plans to demolish dozens of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, calling the actions "unhelpful" and a violation of international obligations.

Clinton made the rare public complaint about Israeli actions in response to a question at a joint news conference with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, on the West Bank.

Israeli plans to destroy the homes in Arab East Jerusalem, which Palestinians consider the capital of a potential Palestinian state, have touched a nerve in Palestinian society.

The Jerusalem municipal government in recent weeks began planning to evict 1,500 residents and raze 88 homes in an area designated as a national park, on top of other demolition plans in the Silwan area. Israel says the homes were built without permits, but Palestinians say permits are impossible to obtain and that many of the homes were built before Israeli occupation in 1967.

"It is a matter of deep concern to those who are directly affected, but the ramifications go far beyond the individuals and families that have received the notices," Clinton said. "It will be taken up with the Israeli government."

Juan Cole warns that Clinton will be attacked by the far-right-wing Israel crowd, and urged people to support her speaking out - in fact, to urge her to use even stronger language the next time.

Matt Yglesias is right. Why the focus on keeping the insurance companies in business? If there's no government option in this health care plan, it's not really reform - it's just cost shifting. Dean is right, too, when he says mandates won't work - the Massachusetts plan is a mess, and infinitely more expensive than the politicians said it would be:

Yesterday, ThinkProgress interviewed former Gov. Howard Dean (D-VT) about the health care crisis. This is the first in a series of posts from that interview.

Asked to lay out his principles for reforming the health care system, Dean suggested that the government should offer free health coverage to young people, but should not require them to purchase insurance:

I don’t have an objection to a mandate. And I know Senator Clinton – now Secretary of State Clinton – who I have enormous respect for — argued for one. The president is considering changing his mind and doing one. I don’t have strong feelings against it. I just don’t think it will work. I don’t think the American people like mandates.

If you look at almost every state in the country that requires mandates for health insurance, people find ways to get out of it. You can’t convince me that a twenty-four year-old is gonna choose to comply with a mandate for 3000 bucks, as opposed to making a down payment on a Harley Davidson. You know, twenty-three-and-four year-olds don’t think anything’s ever gonna happen to them, and frankly, it usually doesn’t. When it does, it’s really serious, but it usually doesn’t.

Now, this is not something we’re gonna do in Congress – but if I was gonna push a button to design any health care system I wanted after pretty much a lifetime of experience in this, I would make health insurance free for everybody under twenty-five in this country. Especially eighteen to twenty-five, because from eighteen to twenty-five you’re in college, you’re out of college, you’re working, you’re working for yourself, you’re working with no benefits – it’s a mess. A very high percentage of kids under twenty-five, or even under thirty, are not covered, and they are very cheap. We did health insurance for everybody under eighteen in my state without a tax increase.

Now, granted, 50 percent of it was paid – or a little more than 50 percent – by the federal government because we did it by expanding Medicaid with a waiver from the Clinton administration. But it is very cheap [to] insure young people, and we ought to do it because you get paid back many, many times over when they’re sixty-five. If they’ve had pap smears every year and haven’t skipped GYN visits because it was expensive, if they’ve had the kind of basic maintenance that you need even for a young healthy person, then you’re less likely to get in trouble. And if you teach good health habits early you’re less likely to get in trouble later on. And it is dirt cheap to do it. The over fifty-five to sixty-five population is the next big problem, and that’s a very expensive problem to fix – but it’s really cheap, and if you want universal coverage for people under twenty five or thirty, just let them do it for free.

Some progressives have argued that you can’t fully eliminate cost shifting, manage chronic diseases or invest in preventive care without bringing everyone into the system. In part, they view the mandate as a cost containment measure. Dean is proposing a different option. Offer free health care coverage to Americans under 25 year of age (they’re cheap to insure and you can catch diseases before they become too expensive to treat) and spend less on expensive diseases down the road. (Remember, 80% of our health care dollars go towards treating chronic diseases).

Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias argues, “it’s not that a mandate is such a terrible thing, but its primary purpose is to keep insurance companies in business once progressive stuff like community rating and guaranteed issue policies are put in place. If I were in congress, I’d write a bill that has community rating and guaranteed issue. Let the insurance companies fight for the mandate! Make them deliver some votes for a “compromise” featuring all three. But there’s no particular reason that this favor to insurance firms should be defined as constitutive of the progressive health care agenda.”

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Oh, this one was fun to watch. Ari jumped onto the ice with a Hypocrisy Double Axel, immediately attacking the Obama administration and the "Democrat" party for... wait for it... being childish!

Yeah, Ari, because calling the Democratic Party the "Democrat Party" is so awesomely mature. (I know you are, but what am I?)

But that was just the beginning. Ari was spinning and leaping all over the place as he clutched his pearls, wondering over and over what happened to the "post-partisan" Obama? To hear him talk, he was puzzled and hurt by the vicious slash and burn tactics of the president and his party, and kept repeating how "childish" it all was.

Shuster wouldn't stand for his nonsense, though. He cited chapter and verse, including the time Ari attacked Move On and the entire Democratic party as "unpatriotic" over the General Petraeus ad.

Just go watch it. If this is the best media spokesperson the Republicans can throw at us, we're in good shape.

“Kurland is seeking to capitalize on a situation that was a product of his own creation. It is tragic and ironic. But then again, greed is a growth industry.”

- Blair A. Nicholas, a lawyer representing retired Arkansas teachers who are also suing Mr. Kurland and other former Countrywide executives.

Talk about disaster capitalists! These creeps are like cockroaches. No matter what goes down, they just come back stronger:

CALABASAS, Calif. — Fairly or not, Countrywide Financial and its top executives would be on most lists of those who share blame for the nation’s economic crisis. After all, the banking behemoth made risky loans to tens of thousands of Americans, helping set off a chain of events that has the economy staggering.

So it may come as a surprise that a dozen former top Countrywide executives now stand to make millions from the home mortgage mess.

Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect.

“It has been very successful — very strong,” John Lawrence, the company’s head of loan servicing, told Mr. Kurland one recent morning in a glass-walled boardroom here at PennyMac’s spacious headquarters, opened last year in the same Los Angeles suburb where Countrywide once flourished.

“In fact, it’s off-the-charts good,” he told Mr. Kurland, who was leaning back comfortably in his leather boardroom chair, even as the financial markets in New York were plunging.

As hundreds of billions of dollars flow from Washington to jump-start the nation’s staggering banks, automakers and other industries, a new economy is emerging of businesses that hope to make money from the various government programs that make up the largest economic rescue in history.

They include big investors who are buying up failed banks taken over by the federal government and lobbyists. And there is PennyMac, led by Mr. Kurland, 56, once the soft-spoken No. 2 to Angelo R. Mozilo, the perpetually tanned former chief executive of Countrywide and its public face.

[...] It is quite evident that their efforts are, in fact, helping many distressed homeowners.

“Literally, their assistance saved my family’s home,” said Robert Robinson, of Felton, Pa., whose interest rate was cut by more than half, making his mortgage affordable again.

But to some, it is disturbing to see former Countrywide executives in the industry again. “It is sort of like the arsonist who sets fire to the house and then buys up the charred remains and resells it,” said Margot Saunders, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, which for years has sought to place limits on what it calls abusive lending practices by Countrywide and other companies.