Ok, so I was feeling a little melancholy this evening. Sue me. I wanted to post something that took me back to a certain place in time and this version of "Hello It's Me" from 1973 fit the bill.
Todd Rundgren is a unique and underrated artist. His work with Nazz and Utopia was good, but I always preferred his solo work. I enjoy listening to all kinds of music, but have found myself in a 70's, mellow mode as of late. Maybe it's the holidays?
Rocking the house over at our sister site Newstalgia this weekend are
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(They were just as suspicious of us)
For all the saber rattling and threats and accusations during the Cold War period, there were times, especially in the late 1950s, where signs of thaw in relations were starting to become noticed.
And so the barriers started to come down, a little bit - but not for long. In December of 1957, CBS Radio, in what was hailed as a milestone, not only in broadcasting, but in East-West communications, hosted a program from their Radio Beat series. The program dealt with Education and the perceptions both the Russians and the Americans had towards each other.
Dwight Cook (CBS News): “We believe in the broadcast that you’re about to hear, that one of the rare firsts of this year, is coming about. Because for the first time, as far as we know, in the history of radio you’re going to hear an actual, unrehearsed discussion between a group of educators sitting in a studio in Moscow Russia and another group of educators sitting around a table with me here in CBS New York. Our discussion is going to be on the purpose of Education.”
All very polite and non-confrontational - no dissidents commandeering the microphone shouting about Gulags. Three leading educators from the U.S. sitting around asking questions of three leading educators from the Soviet Union - and vice versa. What it did was establish the idea that neither of the two super powers really knew anything about each other.
It was short lived however. When the U2 Spyplane scandal surfaced in 1960, what little thaw there had been froze solid and stayed that way for a very long time before resuming.
But in the late 1950s there was that window of opportunity.
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It was Bill O'Reilly and Jim DeMint's turn to pretend like no one has ever cut a Senator's time on the floor short tonight on the O'Reilly Factor. Bill-O and 'PrayerCast' member Jim DeMint do a little bit of history revision and pretend like Grandpa McCain hasn't done the exact same thing himself. So nice of them to show such concern for Joe Lie-berman while ignoring that McCain himself has acted a whole lot worse. Little wonder that O'Reilly would lash out at Franken since he's been mocking Bill-O since his days at Air America Radio.
Franken's spot where he panned O'Reilly for pretending like he served in battle on his radio show and his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them had to have gotten under O'Reilly's skin. If anyone out there has the recording of that segment on Air America, let the site know. I'd love to post it if I could find it.
As Think Progress noted, McCain was more than happy to cut off a Democratic Senator's time during the Iraq war debate. Now he's got memory lapse. Apparently it's too much to ask O'Reilly or DeMint to tell the truth about that in this segment. Fox News... unfair and unbalanced.
I'm still trying to figure out why the staff at Hardball could find footage of John McCain from back in 2002 cutting off another member of the Senate when the Rachel Maddow Show said they couldn't find it in the C-SPAN archives. Very strange.
WASHINGTON — A new report finds that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a poor job of screening medical experts for financial conflicts when it hired them to advise the agency on vaccine safety, officials said Thursday.
Most of the experts who served on advisory panels in 2007 to evaluate vaccines for flu and cervical cancer had potential conflicts that were never resolved, the report said. Some were legally barred from considering the issues but did so anyway.
In the report, expected to be released Friday, Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, found that the centers failed nearly every time to ensure that the experts adequately filled out forms confirming they were not being paid by companies with an interest in their decisions.
The report found that 64 percent of the advisers had potential conflicts of interest that were never identified or were left unresolved by the centers. Thirteen percent failed to have an appropriate conflicts form on file at the agency at all, which should have barred their participation in the meetings entirely, Mr. Levinson found. And 3 percent voted on matters that ethics officers had already barred them from considering.
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Rachel Maddow reports on the 'PrayerCast' attended by Senators Jim DeMint and Sam Brownback and Rep. Michele Bachmann where they prayed for the defeat of the health care bill. This has to be one of the creepiest things I've watched in a long time.
MADDOW: A lot of attention being paid today to the fight within the left over whether or not to support health reform now that it‘s been so watered down. I‘m here to tell you that this is the other side of that fight.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LOU ENGLE, PASTOR: Let‘s take hands together and let‘s pray right now for our leaders, the senators who are in this debate now. Would you just lift your voices just for a few moments? And let‘s just altogether pray together.
Lord, right now, we‘re calling on you. Oh, Lord, come and come to our senators. Would you break into their hearts and minds? Would you rule over them?
Lord, we‘re praying, give them wisdom. The wisdom that comes down from up above. For such a time as this we cry out to you!
And we thank you, Living God, that you hear in Jesus name, amen.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: Those two vaguely looking familiar men you see there at the end of that clip, those are two sitting Republican U.S. senators, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas. They were the headlining politicians at last night‘s effort to stop health reform with prayer.
When Congressman Joe Wilson shouted out "You Lie!" during one of President Obama's speeches earlier this year, Fox News ran cover for him and helped turn him into a right wing hero. When Senator Al Franken followed Senate procedure and told Joe Lieberman that his time was up, they tear him to shreds, making crass, childish and personal insults. Video and more from Media Matters:
During the December 18 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, hosts Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson, and Brian Kilmeade repeatedly attacked Sen. Al Franken -- calling him "uncivil," a "newbie," and "an angry clown" -- for denying Sen. Joe Lieberman extra speaking time on the Senate floor. The Fox & Friends hosts ignored that, in fact, Franken, Lieberman, and Majority Leader Harry Reid all stated on December 17 that Franken was following Reid's orders not to grant any speech extensions.
But Franken, Reid, Lieberman say Franken was following request not to grant extensions
Franken: "I really just had no choice." Minnesota Public Radio reported on December 17 that "Franken says Majority leader Harry Reid ordered all senators who presided today to keep speeches to their ten minute limits and not grant any extensions" for senators of either party:
Franken says he wasn't trying to slight Lieberman and in fact supports the amendment to the health care bill Lieberman was discussing. Read on...
The right loves a good nontroversy. Senator John McCain was so outraged by the incident that he couldn't hold back that nasty temper of his, calling it unprecedented and outrageous. As it turns out, he was completely off the mark and out of line. In fact, he's done the same exact thing himself.
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Last night on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show, Glenn Beck made his weekly appearance and was shocked to learn from O'Reilly that White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett was upset with him, and wanted to know why Beck was after her.
Beck either feigned amnesia, or he's a complete psycho who manages to obliterate any memory of his vicious verbal assaults on various individuals:
O'Reilly: She goes -- and she was very nice by the way -- 'What is his problem with me?' So here you are -- what is your problem with Valerie Jarrett?
Beck: I don't think I've -- I've mentioned Valerie Jarrett maybe a couple of times in the last year.
O'Reilly: She was very, very upset.
...
Beck: I don't know what I've said about Valerie Jarrett other than she is the Karen Hughes, if you will -- she's a huge player. She considers herself, uh, family. And I believe he considers her family.
O'Reilly: Is that bad?
Beck: No, no. I'm just saying she is very, very tight there. And she is one of the big players.
See, now this is why Whoopi Goldberg called Beck a "lying sack of dog mess." Because Jarrett has been a regular pinata on Beck's show. How many times has he played that tape of Jarrett praising Van Jones? We lost count, actually.
More importantly, it was just Sept. 30 when Beck devoted an entire twenty-minute segment to attacking Jarrett, placing her at the epicenter of the vast conspiracy or black radical Marxists who had infested the White House.
We've excerpted the more interesting parts of this attack:
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The day before this, he'd smeared her for her role in the Chicago Olympics bid, claiming she was a slumlord: "And Valerie Jarrett, some people say she was a slumlord, and she may personally benefit." He later added:
Beck: Is Valerie Jarrett, is it possible that she is going to benefit if the Olympics come to Chicago?
Caddell: Well, that's the word. She certainly had a lot of dealings going on in real estate.
He returned to the subject on his Sept. 3 show, when Beck invited Michelle Malkin on to slag Jarrett: "This woman is the consigliere not just to Barack Obama but to Michelle Obama as well, who shares these black nationalist and radical tendencies throughout their whole career."
I expect a Lexis/Nexis search would show that, besides the more outrageous smears, Jarrett has been mentioned on Beck's show at least twenty other times.
Beck is just flatly lying. But then, that's hardly news anymore, I guess.
It's a long call that features more actual policy debate than what you would find on most political TV programs that are supposed to actually carry the same type of substance, but often fail to do. They are more interested in shouting matches than a substantive debate. You can go to DFA's website where they want you to call Harry Reid's office and say no mandates without a public option.
The CBO has concluded that, on average, premiums will be the same as they would have been if the Senate had the public option, but that the public option saved the federal government more money by putting downward pressure on the premiums of low-cost private plans, which will be heavily subsidized.
The bill remains a big deficit slayer--$132 billion in the first 10 years. Over the next 10 years, CBO warns all estimates are very uncertain. But here's a key conclusion: "CBO expects that the legislation, if enacted, would reduce federal budget deficits over the ensuing decade relative to those projected under current law--with a total effect during that decade that is in a broad range around one-half percent of GDP."
Update: Of special note from the CBO report--which Pelosi should be trumpeting:
[FN 11] The presence of the public plan had a more noticeable effect on CBO’s estimates of federal subsidies because it was expected to exert some downward pressure on the premiums of the lower-cost plans to which those subsidies would be tied.
If the deficit scolds are really so worried about the federal deficit why aren't they backing the public option to be in the bill too?
Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe is the Grand Poobah of right wing nutjobs in the Senate, and is probably the leading Global Warming denier on Capitol Hill. On Friday, he proved yet again why he is nothing short of an embarrassment to the United States. Using taxpayer money he flew to Copenhagen with no schedule, no plans or arrangements made, and did little more than put on a right wing sideshow for anyone who would listen. He found the European press a little less accommodating than the media lap dogs here in the good old USA:
COPENHAGEN — Sen. Jim Inhofe flew across the Atlantic and — on little sleep — braved the snow, the cold and the dark to deliver his skeptical message at the international climate conference.
What he found when he got here: a few aides and a single reporter.
“I think he’s going to be a little disappointed,” one of his aides remarked.
When he was finally able to find a few reporters to listen to him, he went full on lunatic fringe:
“We in the United States owe it to the 191 countries to be well-informed and know what the intentions of the United States are. The United States is not going to pass a cap and trade,” he said. “It’s just not going to happen.”
A reporter asked: “If there’s a hoax, then who’s putting on this hoax, and what’s the motive?”
“It started in the United Nations,” Inhofe said, “and the ones in the United States who really grab ahold of this is the Hollywood elite.”
One reporter asked Inhofe if he was referring to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another reporter — this one from Der Spiegel — told the senator: “You’re ridiculous.”Read on...
Just got off another blogger conference call, this time with Howard Dean, former CIGNA exec Wendell Potter, and Mike Lux.
Dean announced the results of a DFA poll that is "really quite stunning," he said. (You can read the results here.) The Senate cloture vote is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve, he said.
Democracy for America's "No Option, No Mandate" campaign to contact Harry Reid clocked 7000 calls in four hours, too, he said.
Dr. Dean opened the call by saying "this bill has always been a giveaway to the insurance industry, but we were willing to compromise" to get the public option.
He recapped all the compromises we made: "We wanted single payer, but that was taken off the table early on. That was a mistake. We had to get to the place where we had health insurance for all Americans." But now, he said, there's no public option, and no Medicare option.
"You're forced to pay money to an insurance company or get fined $750 by your government, while 27% of your money goes to CEOs who are flying around in these private jets," he said.
He talked about the compromises made for pre-existing conditions, the most disturbing one the ability to charge you 300% more, merely for being older. "It's guaranteed issue, but if you’re making $65,000 a year for a family of four and you’re paying $20,000 for insurance, how is that reform?"
He said the real bad stuff in the Senate bill was
"hidden in the weeds, so you can’t find it."
Dr. Dean brushed aside the "Get a bill, any bill" mentality in Washington. "Any legislation passed will have a huge impact on American healthcare. If they can’t fix it, it shouldn’t pass."
Wendell Potter, former CIGNA executive and reform activist, said the insurance industry got "every single thing they wanted" in the Senate bill.
"There's no individual mandate, no public option. There's also three words, 'benefit design flexibility' in Senate bill – that means the freedom to design plans that will pass more and more of us into ranks of the underinsured - and charge up to 22% of income if someone gets sick," he said.
In Massachusetts, they have a 2 to 1 premium ratio, "and they're already having trouble finding affordable, adequate insurance. The industry wants to shift even more costs to individuals and families, having the government pay them half a trillion dollars. The Senate bill meets every one of their requirements," Potter said.
"They will continue to shift the cost burden to consumers and get around not using preexisting conditions by charging for certain factors like high cholesterol."
Dr. Dean pointed out the House bill "is the compromise, we didn’t think it was right to take the option of an employer-based system away if people liked it."
In Vermont, he said, you can't be charged more than double the lowest premium.
Dean listed some more of the insurance company wish list the Senate was so eager to fill. "Getting rid of the anti-trust provision. This contributes to the predatory effect of the insurance companies – they're essentially unregulated. We need to get the provision in, get them regulated.
Wendell Potter talked about something you often hear pushed from the Republican side: "Just let us sell across state lines and let the market decide." As he points out, insurers would go to the states with least regulation.
Paul Hogarth from Daily Kos asked them to address criticism that if the bill is killed, "there's no reform and we’re worse off, the momentum is gone."
"I don’t know that we’ll be worse off," Dr. Dean said. "We ought to strip down this bill and get rid of the mandate. It should have been done by reconciliation."
Digby and I have talked a lot about the mandate issue being presented by the health-care bill for months now, and a lot of great blogs have been hitting it too. A new poll done by Research 2000 for the PCCC and DFA says American voters will hate this bill if there are mandates and no public option.
If American voters aren't going to see any immediate pluses to their overall health care and are forced to pay into the mandates of the health care bill then how will the voters feel about the new outlay of cash? A good many will probably just pay the penalty instead of signing up and will be just as pissed, and that's coming from the left. The right-wing crazies will hate it even if it significantly helped their lives. so the debate has really focused on the differences on the left. We have captured the debate.
I know I'm a broken record on this subject, but I do think it's the thing most lacking from the insider conversations on HCR. Not that I really know, because I'm not an insider, but occasionally I get a wee sense of what's actually occupying staffers in various places. "Voters liking this thing" seems to be at best an afterthought.
It's sorta weird, really, because on most subjects it's the first thing they think of, both about the policy itself and the myriad imaginary attack ads that can be run based on the policy. If voters don't like this thing, it'll likely be repealed before most of it even takes effect, either because Republicans take over or because frightened members of a Dem controlled Congress do so. Sure, there's the optimistic view that it could be "made better" instead of repealed, but I'm not really feeling all that hopey.
No matter what the tosserRon Brownstein says, liberal activists want health-care reform much more than Villagers can imagine, but we don't want it if it does nothing more than enrich insurance corporations and in the end never accomplish much of the goals that the defenders of the Senate bill are saying.
Lieberman and the Villagers are more interested in protecting the DC insider crowd than they are reforming health care for America.
And to show how lacking his argument is, Brownstein tries to paint us as the racists. Brownstein should check out a few teabagger rallies. And to dismiss the complaints we have as "ideological" shows how petty the elitists truly are.
The deal is cut. Women's right to legal abortion? Subject to state legislative lottery! Buh-bye!
The bill will go to conference committee, but it's unlikely that the House will change that much, because Ben's holding their constitutional rights and duties at gunpoint:
Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.), the final Democratic holdout on health care, announced to his caucus Saturday morning that he would support the Senate reform bill, clearing the way for final passage by Christmas.
"We're there," said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), as he headed into a special meeting to outline the deal.
Democratic leaders spent days trying to hammer out a deal with Nelson, and worked late Friday night with him on abortion coverage language that had proved the major stumbling block. Nelson also secured other favors for his home state.
Under the new abortion provisions, states can opt out of allowing plans to cover abortion in insurance exchanges the bill would set up to serve individuals who don't have employer coverage. Plus, enrollees in plans that do cover abortion procedures would pay for the coverage with separate checks - one for abortion, one for rest of health-care services.
Nelson secured full federal funding for his state to expand Medicaid coverage to all individuals below 133 percent of the federal poverty level. Other states must pay a small portion of the additional cost. He won concessions for qualifying nonprofit insurers and for Medigap providers from a new insurance tax. He also was able to roll back cuts to health savings accounts.
"I know this is hard for some of my colleagues to accept and I appreciate their right to disagree," Nelson told reporters at the Capitol, of the many changes made at his behest. "But I would not have voted for this bill without these provisions."
If any of your loved ones are serving abroad, you might be interested to know the Obama administration, by virtue of SCOTUS's refusal of the case, just got the Supreme Court's blessing to torture. Obviously, other countries will follow our lead:
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that "torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use."
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., had ruled that government officials were immune from suit because at that time it was unclear whether abusing prisoners at Guantanamo was illegal.
Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.
The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By agreeing, the court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court, which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" – did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.
The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants."
Finally, the circuit court found that, even if torture and religious abuse were illegal, defendants were immune under the Constitution because they could not have reasonably known that detainees at Guantanamo had any constitutional rights.
The circuit court ruled that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants."
That opinion was written by Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson, who was appointed to the federal circuit court by Ronald Reagan in 1986 and to the Appeals Court in 1990 by George H.W. Bush.
The British detainees spent more than two years in Guantanamo and were repatriated to Britain in 2004 with no charges ever having been filed against them.
Eric Lewis, lead attorney for the detainees, said, "It is an awful day for the rule of law and common decency when the Supreme Court lets stand such an inhuman decision. The final word on whether these men had a right not to be tortured or a right to practice their religion free from abuse is that they did not."
"The lower court found that torture is all in a days’ work for the secretary of defense and senior generals," he added. "That violates the president’s stated policy, our treaty obligations, and universal legal norms. Yet the Obama administration, in its rush to protect executive power, lost its moral compass and persuaded the Supreme Court to avoid a central moral challenge. Today our standing in the world has suffered a further great loss."
Center for Constitutional Rights Senior Attorney Shayana Kadidal, co-counsel on the case, told IPS, "In many ways the opinion the Supreme Court left standing today is worse when one gets past the bottom line – no accountability for torture and religious abuse – and digs into the legal reasoning."
"One set of claims are dismissed because torture is said to be a foreseeable consequence of military detention," he said. "How will the parents of our troops captured in future foreign wars react to that?"
I scratched my head the other day when I heard that Sarah Palin had been invited to be a celebrity guest at a fundraiser for Canadian hospitals. Palin has railed against the Canadian health care system and continues to spread fear and lies about health care reform and lead the right wing rallying cry to keep Americans enslaved to giant insurance companies.
I don't know what genius came up with the idea, but apparently, the backlash was so great that organizers had to rescind their invitation:
HAMILTON, Ont. - Sarah Palin has been given the boot as a celebrity fundraiser for hospitals in Hamilton, Ont., but she will come to town raise money for a local children’s charity instead.
Palin has brought the American health care debate to Canada and it is causing a storm of controversy as concerned hospital supporters have protested her appearance to raise money for two local institutions in April.
The former vice-presidential candidate was supposed to speak at a fund-raising event for the Juravinski Cancer Centre and St. Peter’s Hospital in Hamilton. But a backlash of negative publicity cancelled those plans. Read on...
You may recall Palin being punked last month by Canadian comedian Mary Walsh, who posed as a conservative reporter. Palin told Walsh, “Canada needs to dismantle its public health-care system and allow private enterprise to get involved and turn a profit.”
Which made her a perfect candidate to come to Canada to raise money for their hospitals? I'm still scratching my head on this one...
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Wow. This is unusual. Ed Schultz does something you rarely see, criticize someone from his own network. Ed brings in Markos Moulitsas to respond to Chris Matthews insult of the netroots yesterday where he said we're not real Democrats and back-seat bitchers. John offered to debate Matthews yesterday. I wonder if we'll hear anything else from him on this now that Schultz had Moulitsas on. If Matthews wants to lob insults, I'd like to see him try to debate those he was insulting to their faces. I'm not holding my breath though. Good on Ed for giving Markos a chance to respond.
Moulitsas: You know in 2003 after ah--when Bush landed his plane on the aircraft carrier, behind the--spoke in front of the banner that said "mission accomplished", Chris Matthews had an entire show based on that event where he thought Bush was fantastic and he said "everybody knows that we won the war, except for a few critics". Well I was one of those few critics. People like me and the netroots were some of those critics and it turns out that we were right and the beltway conventional wisdom was wrong. And once again we're in a situation where people like Chris Matthews don't learn from these mistakes. They're sort of trapped in this bubble and and they think that they know better. The fact is most of the editors on Daily KOS either have worked on campaigns or worked on Hill staff and of my readers, I would venture to say the vast, vast majority knocked on doors, gave money, made phone calls on behalf of campaigns. They worked and they vote and if Chris Matthews is worried about us working and if he thinks that we're not Democrats, well then he really should be worried because he's got a thing coming.
[...]
Moulitsas: You know ActBlue is an on line clearing house for contributions to Democratic party candidates. In the last four years we have raised $115 million through ActBlue... a $115 million. Now that's not a bunch of kids in the back seat donating $115 million, at an average donation of about $30. So we're talking little dollars here and there. There's a lot of us. We're engaged. We're involved and we want a party that represents the American people and a government that represents the American people, not insurance companies, not big business and clearly we're not quite there yet but we only started this battle a couple of years ago. We're still fighting.
