Mike Lux writes a very disturbing piece about something that he warned us about back in June. It's called a Trigger.

The moment I am talking about is the debate of the so-called trigger mechanism for having a public option in health care insurance.

The insurance lobby has had multiple tactics for stopping the public option idea, which they despise because they know if regular folks have choice to go to a public option, insurance companies won't have the same ability to treat their customers like garbage when they get sick. The first tactic was just to try to kill the public option outright, and the good news is that they appear to have failed at that. This so-called trigger proposal is the second tactic: the idea is to write a "trigger" that will allow for a public option only under certain conditions, but write the legislation so that those conditions would never get met in the real world. It's a classic DC tactic, right up there with calling for a commission to study something. Olympia Snowe is carrying the insurance industry water on their trigger proposal, proposing triggers that would only get tripped in some fairyland none of us have ever visited.

Rahm bragged about it in July, but then was forced to backpedal on it when we all came out and raised bloody hell.

Rahm Reassures Angry House Members that Obama Backs Public Plan, No Trigger

As Lux describes it now, the White House is obsessed with Olympia Snowe and they are willing to allow her to write the language in the bill that adds the trigger to the public option. but she will basically eliminate any chance a trigger will actually get triggered.

Are you confused?

Media reports and insider buzz make it increasingly clear that key people at the White House have become obsessed with Olympia Snowe on health care, and are willing to do pretty much whatever she demands in order to get her on board. The price is looking more and more like this incredibly bad trigger proposal she has been pushing, a trigger that quite literally is written to automatically never trigger a public option. You see, Senator Snowe is writing language into an amendment that is literally a Catch-22. The legislative language says that a public option will be set up in a state in which health care is not affordable to 95% of the state's residents, but it defines affordability as after the new tax credits that are written into the bill to make health care affordable. Not only would this be an incredibly weak public option (doing it in one state will mean it can't get the market power to compete with the big insurers), but it would be a public option that is written by its definition to never be triggered. This is a trigger specifically, intentionally designed to kill the public option...read on

Please keep up the pressure and don't allow Rahm or the White House negotiate the public option away with bullshit triggers put there by Olympia Snowe.

HCAN writes: The Snowe Trigger - A catch-22 to kill the public health insurance option

Olympia Snowe's trigger is a plan to kill the public health insurance option. Not kill it as in make it weaker, but kill it as in make absolutely sure it will never, ever come into existence.

Senator Snowe's trigger is literally a catch-22, defined by Wikipedia as "a set of rules, regulations, procedures, or situations which present the illusion of choice while preventing any real choice."

Since the media gasbags for the most part have all proclaimed the public option DOA, the trigger will be a point they will hammer progressives that go on TV about. It's the Bipartisan Creep for Broderites. I hope any members of the CPC are well informed before they decide to do the Hardball's, CNN or cough, cough....FOX News. The Villagers think they speak for America when they discuss health care reform, but they do not. Americans overwhelmingly support a public option and one that isn't rigged to a phony trigger. Lux warns that this will cause a civil war in the Democratic Party.

The AFL-CIO, Howard Dean and Democracy for America, bloggers, MoveOn.org, progressive media figures, and the tens of thousands of people coming to Obama rallies and cheering wildly for a public option will figure out quickly that this trigger proposal is a farce specifically written to kill any chance of a public option. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus already are angry at having legal immigrants thrown under the bus by Baucus, all will explode.

Ya think?

This trigger will never trigger a public option, but I can tell you what it will trigger: a civil war inside the Democratic Party just when you most need unity to pass health care reform. I am convinced that there are deals that can be struck that will bring progressive and moderate Democrats, House and Senate Democrats together on a good strong health care bill that will pass. But a trigger designed to never trigger isn't even close to being one of them.

Rahm seems to be using the trigger to get his backroom deals done with Big Insurance, and he's playing with fire.

No Triggers. Do you hear that, Rahm?

I'm a little behind this story, but yes, the AP acted like goons when they threatened the Drudge Retort with a lawsuit over fair use. I would imagine it was some of their lawyers hunting around the Internets to see if any websites were copying their material. Unfortunately, they got a little trigger happy and attacked a blogger for nothing.

The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.
On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was "heavy-handed" and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers. The quick about-face came, he said, because a number of well-known bloggers started criticizing its policy, claiming it would undercut the active discussion of the news that rages on sites, big and small, across the Internet

Jamie emailed this story over when it first hit on Slashdot, but I didn't have a chance to post this yet. I've always been treated fairly by the AP so it was surprising to see them act like this, but give someone a new internet tool to play with and you wind up with idiotic threats. As KOS said earlier they now are backtracking a little bit:

The AP is going to lecture bloggers about what the "spirit of the internet" is all about? Laughable. And the AP certainly doesn't have free reign to rewrite copyright law on its own. Fair use provisions.

Hahahaha, OK, sure. Good luck with that, AP, I think it's really about trying to save face on their part at this time, but they walked right into a buzz saw. Look what they got themselves into.

Continue reading »

Hey folks. I'm still Manila Ryce from The Largest Minority signing in for Mike.

T. Boone Pickens of BP Capital Management is feeling mighty stupid and it's not just because he was named after a steak house. No, it's because Pickens is soon to owe John Kerry 1 million dollars if he can disprove even one Swift Boat allegation. Doesn't it feel good seeing billionaires lose money to lowly millionaires like you and me?

As a follow up to Nova's "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial", Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes covers the conservative rage over the episode's misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a religious belief and not a scientific one. No matter how many fundamentalist Christians insist that Intelligent Design is indeed science, the scientists just won't listen.

Tommy Boy Friedman has come up with the best combination since nuts & gum. Obama & Cheney in '08! After Bush leaves office, Cheney's trigger finger is gonna get cold. Freidman apparently thinks Obama's butt is ripe for the puppetmaster to strongarm.

Some advice to the conservatives out there: Insulting someone by calling them a "communist" just doesn't carry the same level of stigma that it did in the 1950's. This is especially true when said person is simply suggesting that we follow our constitution and impeach Cheney (I hope that won't affect the unity ticket mentioned above).

Zeno presents us with probably the most uneven match I've ever seen - Dinesh D'Souza vs Mark Twain! D'Souza bases his solid belief in God on the fact that he can make a mess whenever he feels like it. There's no doubt that he does, and his article is just one example, but I think D'Souza's actions prove the existence of Satan rather than God.

Got submissions? Email me at John (dot) William (dot) Harrison (at) Gmail (dot) com

In the legislative debate over the RESTORE Act, the administration is focusing much of its attention on immunity for telecommunications companies that participated in Bush's legally dubious schemes. Responding to an argument from Time's Joe Klein, Glenn explains how misguided this really is.

To Klein, telecoms did not act illegally. Not at all. They were simply victims of "the Bush Administration['s] refus[al] to update the law" to make the law consistent with what the telecoms were doing. That would be tantamount to a criminal defendant charged with embezzlement going into court and saying: "Your Honor, I didn't do anything wrong. Why should I be punished just because the Bush administration refused to update the law to make my criminal behavior legal?"

Such an "argument" would trigger judicial laughing fits and probably sanctions. But our Beltway elite is so desperate to defend telcoms (and, more importantly, to close off the sole remaining mechanism for investigating the administration's illegal warrantless eavesdropping and obtaining a judicial ruling as to its illegality) that they will twist themselves into the most inane positions in order to defend something as extraordinary as granting retroactive amnesty for lawbreaking telecoms....

[E]ven more unfathomable is the idea that the Congress would pass a law that has no purpose other than to protect from all legal consequences the largest and most powerful corporations in the event that they are found to have broken our nation's surveillance and privacy laws. What possible justification is there for any of that?

Christy has been working hard on this all week, and has more.

The Politico:

The Macaca moment has morphed into an official learning tool for the Republican establishment.

It's right there, on pages 18 and 22 of an Internet guide from the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee that its chairman, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), hopes will become scripture for the 2008 candidates.

Always assume you're being recorded, and always record your opponent. The blogs -- oh, scratch that -- the Republican blogs are your friends, so use them for rapid response in good times and bad.

"The paradigmatic example of failure to do so is the 'macaca' moment," reads the guidebook (excerpted here), referring to a remark last year by former Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) that was captured on video and sunk his reelection campaign.

And btw, the mainstream media are so, uh, 2006. The first stop for press secretaries, according to the guidebook, should be bloggers who can create "buzz" and inevitably trigger stories in the drippy MSM.

You'll never guess which are the top 5 bloggers to which to go for those Republicans... oh wait, it's probably obvious.

Apparently, health warnings must be applied to watching this video.

Guardian UK: (h/t Gregory)

Yesterday they were mocking it. Today, the Sun and Mail triumphantly report that the juddering fluorescent London 2012 Olympics logo is not only bizarrely inadequate to the task of promoting the capital - it can trigger epileptic fits. "Within hours of it being launched we received 12 reports of people suffering seizures," a spokeswoman for Epilepsy Action tells the Sun.

The accompanying Talking Heads-meets-cover of-Smash Hits video has been hastily re-edited. Yesterday the multicoloured shapes were seen fizzling through swimmers' diving bodies, down motorways and up Tate Modern. Now we have footage of a cyclist being overtaken by a woman in an electronic wheelchair and elderly Britons practising their karate chops.

The Mahablog: When will the Dems take the GOP smear campaign and shove it back in their faces? Start talking about the kind of people they are: Hypocrites and phonies.

The Brick Testament: The Bible, like you've never experienced it. Hey look...it's raining hogs!

Needlenose: Torturers love loopholes

The Horse's Mouth: As you read this, keep in mind that this man is probably the presidential adviser with the most influence over domestic policymaking in the United States. On the other hand, the departure of another policy advisor and speechwriter might leave G-Dub grasping for Godtalk

Fanatical Apathy: Trigger laws...they're amazing and consequence free! Just pass a law that isn’t actually a law unless it becomes legal for that law to exist.

FRONTLINE: The PBS show investigates Dick Cheney's role as chief architect of the War on Terror and his battle with the CIA for control of the "Dark Side.

The hype of Paul Vallely by Fox News via Larry Johnson---Christmas and Alito via Raw Story

Majikthise- When alleging rape becomes a crime.---Worst President ever?-Attaturk

The Carpetbagger Report: Delay speaks again.---Ted Nuggent doesn't believe in trigger locks becasue -you have to teach your child to "spiritually" respect a gun.

Is Dick Cheney getting ready to pull the trigger on a massive attack on Iran? That's what "The American Conservative" is implying. Doug Ireland has the story.

Global News Matrix

As Yogi Berra would say "it’s déjà vu all over again," the only difference being this time President Bush has his itchy trigger finger pointed toward Iran instead of Iraq.

Remember the faulty intelligence reports and media stories circulated before the Iraqi invasion, describing how Sadaam Hussein was an imminent threat and possessed WMD armed and ready to fire. Remember how these reports proved false and how it’s now pretty much a forgone conclusion that Bush "doctored" these reports to illegally invade Iraq.

Bush basically sold America a used car with a blown engine and now he is trying to do the same thing all over again. The only question remaining is will America allow this "two bit war provocateur," posing as a peace-loving, born-again Christian President, the opportunity to sell them another "doctored-up" used car. Continue reading...