More Lies, Damn Lies: Climate Change Edition

[UPDATE]:

Via Proud Socialist in comments, Bonner is indeed a serial offender. More at Talking Points Memo.

--------------------------------

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. They have no shame whatsoever:

As U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello was considering how to vote on an important piece of climate change legislation in June, the freshman congressman’s office received at least six letters from two Charlottesville-based minority organizations voicing opposition to the measure.



The letters, as it turns out, were forgeries.



“They stole our name. They stole our logo. They created a position title and made up the name of someone to fill it. They forged a letter and sent it to our congressman without our authorization,” said Tim Freilich, who sits on the executive committee of Creciendo Juntos, a nonprofit network that tackles issues related to Charlottesville’s Hispanic community. “It’s this type of activity that undermines Americans’ faith in democracy.”

Isn’t there a fucking law against this?

Grist obtained copies of the climate change letters which I’ve linked to here and here.

There’s more:

The letters came from the Washington lobby firm Bonner & Associates, which offers “Strategic Grassroots / Grasstops support to help you win.” It hasn’t yet come to light who hired the firm to do this possibly illegal work. Another set of forged letters claimed to represent a local chapter of the NAACP.

Bonner & Associates is a notorious astroturf outfit. Look what they did when PhRMA hired them to scuttle Maryland legislation to lower prescription drug costs:

Donna J. Stanley, director of Associated Black Charities, was ready to mobilize for political battle after she received a fax marked "urgent" this week.

The fax told her she needed to sign an attached petition "today" to prevent 600,000 of Maryland's poor and disabled from losing access to affordable prescription drugs. The fax, sent to dozens of community leaders, had the markings of a grass-roots effort, including grammatical errors and a handwritten cover letter.

But the appeal was actually generated by a sophisticated Washington lobbying firm trying to defeat several bills before the General Assembly supported by advocates for the poor.

In short, Bonner & Associates is a serial offender. They routinely forge letters, claiming to be from Hispanic and African American organizations or other advocacy groups, saying they oppose xyz legislation, and send them to members of Congress and others.

In short, they lie. They misrepresent, falsify, and lie.

I’m not a lobbyist nor do I know any, but I have a question: don’t you people have a code of ethics against this kind of behavior? No, I'm not kidding. Quit laughing. Seriously, if you don't have a code of ethics, maybe you'd like Congress to develop one for you.

There has been a huge uproar about this, prompting Bonner to blame a temp. Right. In light of their history, let me be the first to call bullshit. Must be the same “overzealous staffer” who was responsible for all the GOP fuckups during the Bush administration.

I’d like to know who hired Bonner & Associates. This is lower than low. There is no bottom for these people, no “too low.” And Congressman Ed Markey says his Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming plans to launch an investigation into the affair.

I will just remind Bonner and whomever hired them that karma’s a bitch and she will make her displeasure known.

Lies, Damn Lies!

Via Kleinheider I learn that someone is peddling a pack of lies about the healthcare reform bill in an effort to scare the bejeezus out of people, just in time for the August recess.

Before this thing goes all “Obama is a secret Muslim” viral, I’m being proactive and sending the debunking to all of my friends and relatives who regularly send me “OMG is this true??!!11!!11!!ELEVEN!” e-mails. Because it is truly awful:

We're hardened, battle-scarred fact-checkers, so false claims in e-mails don't really surprise us anymore. But we sent Tolbert a copy of the latest from our in-box, and she was none too pleased.

"It's awful," she said. "It's flat-out, blatant lies. It's unbelievable to me how they can claim to reference the legislation and then make claims that are blatantly false."

The claim that the bill provides free health care for illegal immigrants is particularly egregious, Tolbert said. "No one's provided with free health care. That's ridiculous," she said.

In fact, the e-mail claims such outrageous things as:

• Page 42: The "Health Choices Commissioner" will decide health benefits for you. You will have no choice. None.

And:

• Page 58: Every person will be issued a National ID Healthcard.

And:

• Page 65: Taxpayers will subsidize all union retiree and community organizer health plans (read: SEIU, UAW and ACORN).

And:

• Page 95: The Government will pay ACORN and Americorps to sign up individuals for Government-run Health Care plan.

Are any of these things true? Of course not. Not even close.

For bonus points note the use of these wingnut dogwhistles: ACORN, “unions,” "National ID cards" and “illegal immigrants.” I detect the aroma of the Swift Boat-“whitey tape”-“secret Muslim”-"Obama doesn't have a birth certificate" smears at work here. It’s "the Clintons had Vince Foster killed" all over again: the same crap the right wing has used to sink presidents and presidential candidates, and now they’re using it to sink healthcare reform. It’s sleazy, dirty, lying politics, and it hurts the very people they pretend to defend.

I suspect it's coming from the same source. I'd love to out these lying bastards, too. Maybe one of our crack reporters can get on it? Aw, who am I kidding! They're still rehashing the Great Beer Summit Of Ought-Nine.

Dialing Back Expectations?

Charles Krauthammer parses President Obama's July 22 speech and spies the language of retreat:

But that bill will look nothing like the massive reform Obama originally intended. The beginning of the retreat was signaled by Obama's curious reference -- made five times -- to "health-insurance reform" during his July 22 news conference.

Over at Swampland, Karen Tumulty asked the president about the word change. She concludes:

The phrase "health insurance reform" is indeed an effort to tailor his message to the concerns of people who have coverage--who are, after all, the vast majority in this country.

Krauthammer claims this change in language represents a failure on Obama’s part, a dialing back of expectations. He’s only correct to a point. Obama certainly campaigned on an overhaul of our healthcare system, and I believe he had every intention of doing so, but the way this debate has been approached and framed from the get-go has always ensured we’d be talking about insurance reform.

If you look at who was invited to those White House meetings, it’s really always been about insurance. Every TV talking head, every Congress Critter, has always talked about insurance. Again, I’ve been talking about this for a long time, since I first clued in to how the healthcare narrative had become a health insurance narrative.

This debate is indeed a failure: a failure on the part of progressive groups to not get their ducks in a row and ensure we kept the conversation on healthcare, not just insurance. Because insurance is just one piece of the puzzle. We should have seen this coming, knowing the powerful and well monied corporate interests we’d be facing, realizing that the political status quo would guarantee any policy solution would focus on the corporate stakeholders while the rest of us would be left out. Business groups are always the squeaky wheel that gets the most grease; too often, the actual people are left out of the discussion.

If there was a failure to rally behind a single, simple message, it belongs on the left. Because we let the message be about health insurance, we won’t be getting the comprehensvie overhaul of our healthcare system that we need. We’ll get a little tinkering here and there. When we get to the end of this angst and rancor I fear we’ll have very little to show for it.

FGF: Breakfast Edition

This cracked me up. I bring you the late Minister Cleo Clariet and his fiancé Katherine Lane. Clariet passed away from heart disease in 2004, but not before this appearance on "The Kay Bain Show" was captured on tape. Now, through the miracle of YouTube, we can bring it to the world!

Burying The Lead

It’s made all of the headlines: President Obama’s own doctor is knocking “ObamaCare”! Check out this headline from Forbes:

Obama's Doctor Knocks ObamaCare

And this headline from CNN:

Obama's former doctor critical of White House health care plan

And here’s the Wall Street Journal:

Obama’s Former Doctor Criticizes Health Care Overhaul

Even the liberal Huffington Post:

Obama's Doctor: President's Vision For Health Care Bound To Fail

For shame, HuffPo, for shame!

Wow, if you didn’t read down (in some cases) all the way to the sixth paragraph, you’d think Obama’s own doctor was in favor of leaving things the way they are.

Here’s what he said:

Scheiner thinks that Obama's "public plan" reform doesn't go far enough. He supports the idea of that option for people who don't like or can't afford their HMO. But he worries that it will be watered down or not happen at all. "It's nonsense that the private insurance companies need to be protected," he says. "Why? Because they've done such a good job?"

So the news is that Obama’s former doctor favors a single-payer, public plan, not just that he’s “against ObamaCare.”

This kind of shit happens all the time and it really bugs me. I think a large chunk of people get their news from headlines and snippets grabbed over the radio or TV. Not everyone has the time or interest to read a whole story or even click the link. We're a society that skims for its news and information. But really we're at a place in this debate where the story is what someone like Dr. Scheiner is for, not against.

What it boils down to is this: is the story about politics, or is it about healthcare? Sadly, our inept corporate media has never, ever made this story about healthcare. It’s always been about the politics. A "Doctor Against ObamaCare" headline is a story about politics. "Doctor Favors Single Payer" headline is a story about healthcare.

You want to hear something amazing? Only Fox News got it right:

Obama's Former Doctor Opposes Health Care Plan, Calls for Single-Payer System

This is why I keep voicing frustration with how this issue has been discussed. We are fighting for healthcare, not health insurance. If insurance plays a role in arriving at healthcare, fine. But let’s remember what this is about.

Plenty of people have health insurance and yet lack healthcare. The 50 million uninsured don't just lack insurance they lack healthcare. And saying you can go to the emergency room is just lame. Emergency treatment is not "care."

I'm tired of hearing Rep. Cooper talk about "insuring" everyone and hearing that the Senate Finance Committee had to take a crash course in health insurance. That's just bullshit. As Dr. Scheiner said:

Looking at Obama's team of health advisors, Scheiner doesn't see anyone who's actually in the trenches. "I have a suspicion they pick people from the top echelon of medicine, people who write about it but haven't been struggling in it," he says.

Of course. They plucked people out of the establishment and got a policy that reinforces the status quo. Shocked? I'm not. It's the way our American system works. Real change is impossible in this day and age; the best we can hope for is a slight shift.

Which is too bad because when it comes to healthcare, this is probably our last chance.

News You Won’t See On TV

I did not know that there was something called the “World Outgames,” a kind of gay and lesbian Olympics, taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark right now.

I did not know that two Nashvillians, Sam Felker and Keith Little, are competing in these games and writing about it on their blog.

I did not know that on Tuesday the track and field competition was disrupted by a bomb attack that injured one runner. Sam and Keith were there during the attack and posted pictures on their blog.

You’d think with Nashville debating its non-discrimination ordinance right now, and the fact that at least two Nashvillians are actually at the games and witnessed the attack, that there might be some local media interest in this incident.

Silly me. Outside the GLBT media and blogs: **crickets**

I think it would be helpful for everyone to know about this, and the fact that hate crimes against the GLBT community occur even in progressive cities like Copenhagen.

Thank you, Nashville blogosphere, for doing the job our local media would not.

This Is Why I Don’t Like Guns

A tragic story all the way around :

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. -- A 56-year-old man was killed with a shotgun by his son-in-law early Wednesday morning, police said.

The incident happened just after midnight inside a home on Maple Street near downtown Murfreesboro.

At about midnight, the victim's son-in-law said he heard a noise and got his gun to check out the situation. That's when he spotted his father-in-law, Dana Jankovoski, inside the apartment and said he mistook him as an intruder.

Tragic that this happened in a home; thank God it wasn’t a public place like a park, school, restaurant, bar, or some place where other lives would be at risk. And I can’t imagine what kind of pain the son-in-law is experiencing right now.

These tragedies are entirely preventable. If guns made us safer, we'd be the safest country in the world, with 90 guns for every 100 people, according to this 2007 report. We've armed ourselves to the teeth but we're no safer than any other country.

It's just stupid.

Astroturfing Healthcare Reform

[UPDATE]: Seems Jeff Crank is not a cancer survivor at all. Someone else at the rally is the cancer survivor. CBS screwed it up and sent out a clip that was incorrect. Shocked.

-------------------------------------

You knew it was happening, right? Right?

The new anti-health reform front group known as the Coalition to Protect Patients’ Rights, is being managed by the lobbying firm known as the DCI Group. After being contacted by ThinkProgress this afternoon about its sponsorship of CPPR’s press conference last week, DCI Group staffers acknowledged that they coordinate PR for the front group. Not be confused with Conservatives for Patients’ Rigths, another front group opposing health reform, CPPR has been organizing lobbying efforts against health reform and publishing op-eds across the country with misinformation about the public option.

Tom Synhorst, a former staffer to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Bob Dole, joined fellow right-wing operatives Doug Goodyear and Tim Hyde to form DCI Group in 1996. The firm quickly flourished working for the tobacco industry, coordinating a sophisticated astroturf campaign to build public opposition to tobacco regulations. Ironically, before helping to manage this “patients’ rights” campaign, DCI founded “Smokers’ Rights” groups across the country for the tobacco lobby. Indeed, DCI has specialized in manufacturing “grassroots” support — using telemarketers, PR events, and letter writing campaigns — to achieve policy results for narrow corporate interests.

Meanwhile, let’s move west, to Colorado and this anti-reform rally in Denver which featured speaker Jeff Crank, identified in newspaper reports as

state director for Americans for Prosperity, a public policy group backing free enterprise

I know about this because a clip from this rally was placed on the national news feed, and was aired on Nashville’s WTVF this morning. But Crank was identified simply as a “cancer survivor” (and he may well be) who made the outrageous claim that he “would have died” if his treatment had been in government hands. This is what prompted me to do what our local media would not, which is hit the Google.

Oh, my.

Jeff Crank, I have learned, is many things. He was a Republican candidate for Congress last year (he lost). He is a Republican lobbyist to the Colorado State Legislature whose clients include the Colorado Chamber of Commerce (which opposes healthcare reform) and the Colorado Chiropractic Assn. He is a conservative talk radio host.

And, as we have mentioned, he is Colorado state director of Americans For Prosperity.

Let’s look at Americans For Prosperity, shall we? According to SourceWatch, it is one of the groups behind the April 15 Tea Party protests. Americans For Prosperity’s other activities include sending a hot air balloon around the country to fight “global warming alarmism.”

And finally, they made their name fighting smoking bans around the country. Just like DCI Group. Gee, I wonder if there’s a connection.

Of course, none of this was mentioned when the news media interviewed “cancer survivor Jeff Crank” who would have died if the government had been involved in his healthcare in any way.

Meanwhile, let’s look at the activities of some other chapters of Americans For Prosperity, shall we? Yesterday, the Maryland chapter hung a Congressman in effigy at their state rally. Lovely.

By all means, let’s listen to the wackadoodle, racist, fringe of the Republican Party on healthcare, the people who oppose workplace smoking bans and hang Congressmen in effigy. And let’s pretend they are normal citizens when they are interviewed on the TV news, not the slithery, slimy things crawling under the rock that is the Republican Party.

The Tea Party That Wasn’t

Ooops. Looks like some folks went to a tea party at Bart Gordon’s office and a healthcare reform rally broke out instead:

With less than 24 hours' notice, Change That Works Tennessee and its coalition partners staged a massive counter-demonstration at a Tea Party in front of Rep. Bart Gordon's office in Rutherford County. Our action turned the 'Tea Party' into a health care reform party.

A mere seven anti-reform "Teabaggers" were overwhelmed as over 60 health care reform supporters converged on the square in downtown Murfreesboro to urge Bart Gordon to support H.R. 3200, America's Affordable Health Choices Act.

"They didn't know what hit them," said Tony Cani, the state director of Change That Works. "Rutherford County is ground zero for conservative politics in Tennessee and we went right into their house and took over their event. I think a couple messages were sent today at this rally. First, the Teabaggers and the other enemies of change are not going to keep going unchallenged in Tennessee. Second, Bart Gordon needs to do the right thing and vote for health care reform because it isn't only conservatives who are watching his vote on H.R. 3200."

Wait a minute: only seven people showed up for a tea party? So much for that movement.

Watch the video:

Health Coverage Does Not Make You Fat

Wow, as we wrestle with this healthcare insurance reform thing, a lot of bullshit is seeping up through the floorboards.

The latest one being passed around in media circles is this bogus "health coverage makes you fat” study:

According to the study, health-care coverage literally encourages obesity, because people tend to become less careful about weight-gain when they know that insurance will cover at least some of the weight-related health costs in which they may incur.

Let me be the first to call bullshit on that one.

Let’s imagine someone at the grocery store trying to feed their family on a time and money budget. As they go down the aisles, are they thinking about their health insurance policy? Or are they thinking about the buy-three-get-one-free coupon for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese they clipped out of the paper that morning? Are they thinking that a head of broccoli costs $1.50 and is only part of a meal whereas you can pop a bowl of Chef Boyardee lasagna in the microwave and you’ve got dinner.

Or let’s say you’ve got an hour lunch break, during which time you’ve got to swing by the bank, pick up the dry cleaning, pick up your prescription at the drugstore, maybe make some personal phone calls your boss won’t let you do at your desk. As you swing through the Wendy’s drive-thru, are you thinking about your insurance policy or are you thinking about how fast you can inhale your lunch so you can get back to your to-do list?

I’m really not thinking that insurance plays into people’s food and lifestyle choices. At all. Here's a study for you: a ban on fast food advertising during children's TV programming could reduce childhood obesity by 18% according to a study last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research--the same folks who released the "health coverage makes you fat" research.

But let’s get back to insurance and obesity:

Though the study found weak evidence that more generous insurance encourages greater weight gain, or that risk-adjusted premiums discourage it, there was “strong” statistical evidence that being insured increases body mass index and obesity. So, will expanding health-care coverage to drive up U.S. obesity rates to new record-setting heights?

So even though people with generous insurance plans are not more obese than people with limited insurance plans, they still have found ”strong” statistical evidence that health coverage leads to obesity. Really? I wonder what else these people had in common. Jobs? Married? Kids? Did they own cars? Have blue eyes and brown hair?

Did they look at France, with its universal health care and low obesity rates, despite a diet rich in butter fat? No.

Did they look at America’s poorest citizens, who also tend to have the highest rates of obesity, yet also make up the ranks of the uninsured? No.

This whole argument just plays into the right wingers’ “personal responsibility” meme: if only you lazy lardasses would quit shoving Twinkies and KFC down your gullets, the rest of us wouldn’t have to pay through the nose for our health insurance. Once again, it’s blame everyone else except a system that is stacked against the people who need our help the most.

Obesity is a huge problem in America and yes, it has added tremendously to our healthcare costs. There are a lot of reasons for the obesity epidemic but no, I don’t think health insurance is one of them.

Bye Bye Public Option?

Apparently a “bi-partisan” Senate committee has dropped the public option:

Like bills drafted by Democrats, the proposal under discussion by the six Finance Committee members would bar insurance companies from denying coverage to any applicant. Nor could insurers charge higher premiums on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions.

But it jettisons other core Democratic provisions in a reach for bipartisanship on an issue that has so far produced little.

[...]

They said any legislation that emerges from the talks is expected to provide for a nonprofit cooperative to sell insurance in competition with private industry, rather than giving the federal government a role in the marketplace.

[...]

Officials also said a bipartisan compromise would not subject large companies to a penalty if they declined to offer coverage to their workers. Instead, these businesses would be required to reimburse the government for part or all of any federal subsidies designed to help lower-income employees obtain insurance on their own.

So a “bi-partisan” committee is dropping the key Democratic reforms in exchange for ...?? Prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage or charging higher premiums because of pre-existing conditions?

Are you fucking kidding me? You’re giving away the store for that? The two most abusive policies insurance companies have, the biggest reason everyone hates insurance companies, the insurance industry’s largest PR negatives--you don’t negotiate those, you fucking morons. Those are a given. Those are the things that documentaries are filmed about, that make headlines in the newspapers and evening news: the woman with breast cancer denied coverage by Cigna, or the millions who cannot afford an insurance policy at all.

Those are the things you tell the industry they must stop, period. That’s not a bargaining chip. With stories like that in the news on a daily basis, they should be glad they are allowed to stay in business at all, not get wiped off the map in a wave of socialize medicine that makes insurance companies a quaint thing of the past, like house calls. Everyone has a "denied coverage" insurance horror story.

You don’t give up the public option for that. Those criminal practices were history when Congress first uttered the words "healthcare reform." You give up the public option for something else, something big, something truly controversial or groundbreaking. Something huge. Honestly, I can’t even think of what it would be, because I think the public option is crucial to reining in insurance company greed. And some "bi-partisan" Senators gave it up in exchange for insurance companies agreeing not to act like soul-sucking vipers.

The U.S. Chamber Of Commerce is cheering this deal. Which is a sure sign that it’s going to suck for consumers.

Here’s the best part:

They have met for hours in recent weeks in Baucus' office, joined by aides and outside advisers such as actuaries summoned to explain arcane details of insurance.

Of course they have. They have to learn all about insurance, the ins and outs and ups and downs of it. Because that’s what this has always been about: insurance reform.

Not healthcare reform, but insurance reform.

Epic Fail.

The Things I Learn On The Internets

Via dday at Digby’s, I learn that apparently all of those “Viva Viagra” ads and Cialis ads and Sally Field hawking Boniva ads and ads for Abilify which I used to think was one of those words President Bush just made up and Janeane Turner hawking her fake Restasis tears and all of that pharmaceutical clutter on the TV is actually a tax deduction for Big Pharma.

WTF??? Big Pharma is getting a TAX DEDUCTION for pushing their drugs? Why? Who cooked that up?

Drug companies get a TAX DEDUCTION for running ads for their drugs. Is this true of Frosted Flakes? Audi? Xerox? Does any other company in America get subsidized for airing commercials to get America to buy their products? It's not "significant money," though, so ending this direct payout from taxpayers to drug companies got shelved.

Not significant money? In 2004 drug companies spent $4 billion on direct to consumer advertising.

Set aside for a second the hypochondria that a nightly barrage of ads telling you that you have restless leg syndrome or iron-poor blood or any of a thousand ailments induces. Set aside the self-medication and the boiling down of complex medical issues into 30-second spots showing couples running through a field. Set aside how drug ads increase demand for medications and thus the costs. Set aside that some of these ads run before the Food and Drug Administration even completes their studies of the side effects. You mean to tell me that I'm helping PAY for these things, too?

If “my tax dollars” are going to go somewhere, it sure as hell better not be to help a gazillion billion dollar industry pay to promote its product.

I still can’t believe this. I'm thinking it has to be a mistake.

[UPDATE]: dday has since learned that the deduction is as a business expense, not a straight tax deduction. That certainly changes the outrage factor on the tax issue. But I agree that direct to consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals is a really, really, really bad idea that should never have been allowed to begin with and probably should be repealed.

But it probably won't be repealed, ever, because have you seen how many freaking pharmaceutical ads are on CNN and MSNBC and the other networks these days? Not to mention the three and four page ads in magazines and newspapers, filled with all of that fine print about how you might die of oily anal discharge from your weight loss pill? If the mainstream media loses that revenue they're screwed. Since they have a dog in this fight, expect them to pull out all the stops to make sure the cash river keeps flowing.

Just a hunch.

A Word About Birthers

Ha! Made you look!

No, this post is not about those birthers. Saturday night I happened to catch Ricki Lake’s fabulous documentary "The Business Of Being Born”. I highly recommend it, whether you are an expectant mother or not, because it addresses a lot of what’s wrong with our healthcare system in this country.

Nothing highlights the problems of a for-profit healthcare system more starkly than when a woman gives birth. Women have been having babies since the dawn of the species; they’ve been giving birth at home, aided by experienced practitioners such as midwives, for thousands of years. Yet in the past 100 years, the trend toward hospital birth has escalated, and not always with good results. For example, the rate of Caesarian sections in America is an astonishing one-in-three births. This is off the charts, especially when studies indicate there is no medical reason for this level of C-sections.

Despite the movement toward natural childbirth in the 60s and 70s, today women choosing to give birth at home assisted by a midwife are not supported by our healthcare system. Many healthcare professionals seem to feel threatened by midwifery, despite the fact that midwifes have been bringing babies in to the world for centuries. Insurance policies don’t cover midwife-assisted home birth, and the medical lobby seems to treat midwifery with outright hostility.

This is despite all of the evidence that shows non-hospital births are both less expensive and have better outcomes. The American Prospect looked at this issue earlier this month:

Midwives like Bartlett are often the only option for pregnant women who are underinsured, as many in her state are. She's seen a growth in her midwifery practice in recent years, and many of the women who come to her fall between the gap of the privately insured and those who qualify for Medicaid. These women choose to enlist Bartlett's services (a bargain at around $3,000) rather than pay out of pocket for a hospital birth (around $8,500) or even the high deductible for their insurance plan.

Bartlett and her clients aren't the only ones who see the cost benefits of midwifery. David Anderson, economics professor at Centre College in Kentucky, has run the numbers and says that midwifery care could save us billions of dollars annually, without affecting quality of care (maybe even improving it). Anderson posits that if we increase the percentage of women giving birth out of hospital by 10 percent (currently at only 1 percent nationally) we could save close to $9 billion per year. He points to the difference in baseline costs for out-of-hospital birth -- a difference of more than $6,000 when comparing the average cost of a home birth to an in-hospital one. Another main cost reducer, according to Anderson, is the significantly lower rate of C-sections for out-of-hospital births.

It's not just the costs that are lower, according to these advocates. The outcomes are better too, which in turn, further lowers cost by reducing additional care needed by sick babies and mothers. Anderson adds that if CPMs are allowed to practice in all 50 states, competition will drive down prices for maternity care, since more women will have access to a low-cost alternative to hospital births.

This is just one of the many things that frustrates me about our whole healthcare reform conversation. Today I saw Congressman Jim Cooper on CBS’ Face The Nation, and all I heard from him was how much he supported covering all Americans, the need to make health insurance more affordable and make health insurance more available and to offer Americans a variety of different insurance plans. This is his idea of reform. It’s all about insurance and it’s not about healthcare.

That’s not my idea of reform. Health insurance companies are part of the powerful medical industry lobby that is basically dictating to women what kind of care they can have and where and how they can deliver their babies, despite the fact that it’s cheaper and safer to do it another way!

That makes me wonder: what other medical procedures are cheaper, safer, more effective, less traumatic for patients, etc. which we are denied access to by our medical gatekeepers? (Acupuncture?)

I don’t have the answers. I don’t know if this means we need to include some kind of health savings account component to cover things like home births and treatments not currently blessed by insurance companies or what. I just think if we’re talking about giving people choice, then choosing among a bunch of different insurance options isn’t really “choice” to me. I think our problems are bigger than just "choice." Our entire system needs to be overhauled.


If you’d like to learn more about the birth issue, a good place to start is the documentary’s trailer:

Keep Your Shirt Tucked In

If it works for schools maybe it will work for bars, too:

Can CNN Survive As Lou Dobbs Ups The Crazy?

After Lou Dobbs thoroughly embarrassed the “most trusted name in news,” which is how CNN still has the cojones to refer to itself, the network’s top brass has told Dobbs to cool it. It seems CNN president Jon Klein got the network's researchers to contact Hawaii state authorities and get answers to the question about Obama’s birth certificate (apparently in 2001 the state of Hawaii went paperless). In an e-mail Klein instructed Dobbs staffers to

be sure to cite this during your segment tonite. And then it seems this story is dead - because anyone who still is not convinced doesn't really have a legitimate beef.

Thx

At which point Dobbs promptly ignored Klein’s request to drop it, ignored the evidence the researchers provided, and went on to question why Obama hasn't presented every crackpot in America with a copy of his birth certificate.

Meanwhile, today the Southern Poverty Law Center called on CNN to take Dobbs off the air. The letter from the SPLC president to Jon Klein reads, in part:

As he has in several other instances, Mr. Dobbs, in taking up the birthers' claims, is adopting an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that originated on the radical racist right. As Gawker.com has reported, this particular conspiracy theory was first developed by an open anti-Semite and circulated by right-wing extremists who cannot accept the fact that a black man has been elected president of the United States. Among its adherents was neo-Nazi James von Brunn, the alleged murderer of a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., this June. Von Brunn had helped spread the birthers' claims on the Internet and attacked the "dishonest & conspiratorial Media" for not taking them up.

This is not the first time Mr. Dobbs has pushed racist conspiracy theories or defamatory falsehoods about immigrants. We wrote you in 2007 to bring to your attention his utterly false claim that 7,000 new cases of leprosy had appeared in the United States in a recent three-year period, due at least in part to immigrants. (The real number, according to official statistics, was about 400. Mr. Dobbs took his spurious information from the late right-wing extremist, Madeleine Cosman.) In addition, Mr. Dobbs has reported as fact the so-called Aztlan conspiracy, which claims that undocumented Mexican immigrants are part of a plot to "reconquer" the American Southwest. He has suggested there is something to a related conspiracy theory that claims the governments of Mexico, the United States and Canada are secretly planning to merge into the "North American Union." He has falsely claimed that "illegal aliens" fill one third of American prison and jail cells. And Mr. Dobbs has routinely disparaged, on CNN's air, those who have had the integrity to point out the falsity of these and similar claims.

Respectable news organizations should not employ reporters willing to peddle racist conspiracy theories and false propaganda. It's time for CNN to remove Mr. Dobbs from the airwaves.

The SPLC has a point. Lou Dobbs and his ilk have mainstreamed extremist thought. It’s one thing to blather like an idiot on your own wingnutty radio show, but his position on CNN--“the most trusted name in news”--lends a gravitas and legitimacy to his extreme right-wing views. You know, if the most trusted name in news is going to repeat this BS, maybe there's something to it, eh?

It's not a matter of right vs left, it's a matter of fact vs fiction, with a poltiical motive behind it. That just sucks five ways to Thursday.

I’m sure this is why CNN has gone to so much effort to debunk these ludicrous lies, but when one of your own hosts is ignoring the obvious, you gotta wonder if CNN’s own credibility might not get sullied in all of this. Frankly, I haven’t trusted CNN in a long time, anyway. I wonder how much longer other folks will, too?

CNN first got itself into hot water when they hired Glenn Beck. It seems they've got another wackadoodle they need to hand over to Fox News before they lose all credibility. And hey, Jon Klein: ask Lou to take Nancy Grace with him.

(BTW, just wondering: does Vanderbilt’s Carol Swain still want to draft Lou Dobbs for president?)

More Like This, Please

Driving down 8th Avenue in Berry Hill today what to my wondering green eyes should appear? The beautiful view of a 25 KW solar array going up atop the Sonic Drive-In bays.

This is absolutely awesome! Clean, green energy, produced right here at home, creating jobs all across the work sector: from the guys doing the installation to the Lightwave Solar office staff to the factory workers making the panels in Memphis and Clarksville, to the R&D folks at our labs and universities figuring out how to make these systems more efficient. This is what the green economy is all about, folks.

I have no idea how the owner of this restaurant paid for a 25 KW array, but I would guess they availed themselves of one of the many low or no-interest loans, grants and other incentives available to businesses in the state (which are not available to residential homeowners, I might add).

Kudos to Sonic Drive-In for their support of the green economy. You know, if you look down 8th Avenue in Berry Hill, there’s lots of open roof space, unencumbered by tree tops or tall buildings. There’s really no reason why every single building on 8th Avenue/Franklin Pike doesn’t have a solar array on it. For that matter, there’s no reason why every residential rooftop with the proper exposure doesn’t have a solar array, either. None whatsoever, save the will and the financing.

It’s just a no-brainer. Sonic’s solar panels will begin generating clean, green energy immediately. It will take 25+ years before the first kilowatt is produced in one of Lamar Alexander’s suggested 100 nuclear power plants. And I haven’t seen too many oil wells in Tennessee lately. In fact, while we burn a lot of coal, and pay the price for it with sludge disasters like the one in Kingston, we aren't the coal production powerhouse we once were. According to the EIA, Tennessee coal mines employed fewer than 700 people in 2006.

Solar's the way to go for Tennessee.

Look What Inhofe & The GOP Did For Us

Here’s Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Wingnuttia, jumping aboard the “Waterloo” train:

Inhofe said if President Obama failed to get a Senate vote before the August recess, "I would say there’s no way in the world they’re going to get this done this year. And next year would not be any easier. But I just, frankly, for political reasons, I kind of like the idea of keeping this thing alive. Look what it did for us in 1994."

Hey, Sen. Inhofe: Southern Beale has a steaming cup of STFU with your name on it. Because back in January, American Progress did take a look at what it did for “us” when your side of the aisle put the kabosh on healthcare reform in 1994. And it hasn’t been good:

Since 1994, the cost per person of American health care has more than doubled, with an annual growth rate regularly more than twice that of inflation. Fueled by rising costs of prescription drugs, inefficient outpatient care, expensive and unnecessary medical procedures, and ballooning insurance premiums, these costs are a burden on state and federal governments, businesses, and families.

Per-person health care expenditures in the United States have risen 6.5 percent per year since 2000, and 5.5 percent per year on average since 1994. In contrast, consumer inflation has averaged just 2.6 percent per year.

Health care costs burden American employers, who are forced to cut back on providing coverage and benefits or suffer a competitive disadvantage against international companies who don't bear health costs. Premiums for employer-provided health care have doubled since 2000 (the earliest year the Medical Expenditures Panel Survey has on record). That year the average family premium was $6,800. By 2008, it had risen to $12,700. This premium growth eats away at wages and pressures firms to reduce coverage.

The share of American firms offering health benefits shrank to 60 percent today, from 66 percent in 1999. And the percentage of Americans covered through their employers, where coverage is of a much higher quality than in the individual market, was 59 percent in 2007, down from 64 percent in 1999. Without workplace health insurance, Americans must struggle to find coverage in the unregulated private market (where people with pre-existing conditions find it difficult or impossible to secure coverage), go on public assistance, or become uninsured.

This is your country on Republican bullshit. Can’t govern, can’t fix anything, just like to play political games and repeat talking points while healthcare costs spin out of control and people go without the medicine and care they need.

Thanks for nothing, assholes.

The Guns In Bars Bandwagon That Wasn't

Remember that whole spiel about how 40 states allow guns in bars and restaurants and so Tennessee should, too? The argument being, if it hasn’t been a problem in those 40 other states, why would it be a problem here? You know, time to jump on the bandwagon and all that?

Heh. Funny thing: according to a local attorney who has researched the applicable state laws, it turns out there aren’t anything close to 40 states allowing guns in bars and restaurants after all:

On Wednesday, The Lede spoke with David Randolph Smith, whose Nashville law firm is leading the fight to have Tennessee’s law declared unconstitutional. Mr. Smith says that his legal research team looked closely at the gun laws in every state, and found that there are just 14 states that issue permits allowing patrons to carry firearms in restaurants that serve alcohol.

Mr. Smith has posted the results of his legal team’s research on his Web site, beneath this statement: “The claim that ‘40′ states have ’similar laws’ to Tennessee’s new guns-in-bars law is false and misleading.” In fact, Mr. Smith writes, “because bars, saloons, nightclubs and restaurants with bar areas are notorious for fights, assaults and breaches of the peace, carrying loaded guns is expressly prohibited by law in bars, nightclubs or bar areas serving alcohol in 24 states [23 now that AZ changed its law].”

Heh. So, 14, not 40. Big difference.

I wonder where NewsChannel5 and the rest of our local media got that “40 states” information from, anyway? Information they were too lazy to verify? I can only imagine.

But in how many states does the law allow concealed weapons in bars? Actually, other than Tennessee, none:

No state, by statute or regulation, expressly allowed firearms to be brought into bars until the Tennessee legilsature passed Public Chapter 339, T.C.A. sec. 39-17-1305(c).

Tennessee law, unlike the law in the other 14 states that permitted carrying firearms into restaurants (but not bars) that served alcohol, does not distinguish between bars and restaurants.

All bars and clubs on Second Avenue & Broadway in Nashville and on Beale Street in Memphis, for example, are licensed as restaurants. Tenn. Code Ann. sec. 57-4-102(27)(A).

Indeed, it appears that five of the 14 states allowing guns in restaurants serving alcohol specifically ban guns from a restaurant's bar area.

So, more states ban guns in bars than allow them. And the Tennessee legislature jumped on a phantom bandwagon, the media repeated false gun lobby talking points, and the gun nuts misrepresented their side of the debate.

No one could have anticipated any of that.

They’ve Got Nothing

Literally, when it comes to healthcare reform (and just about everything else), the Republican Party has no ideas. None. Zip. Nada.

And now, they’re admitting it. Roy Blunt, who heads the House GOP Health Care Solutions Group, says they won’t even offer their own bill:

Republicans who had promised last month to offer a healthcare reform alternative are now suggesting no such bill will be introduced.

Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said, “Our bill is never going to get to the floor, so why confuse the focus? We clearly have principles; we could have language, but why start diverting attention from this really bad piece of work they’ve got to whatever we’re offering right now?”

Oh, clearly. Yes, the House Republicans could offer their own alternative to Democratic proposals, but why bother? What’s the point when they can play political games instead? Seriously, what do you think they were sent to Washington for, anyway? To craft legislation? Fix problems facing the country? C'mon! Be serious!

Unless, of course, House Republicans don’t have a healthcare alternative: never did, never will. These folks couldn’t govern their way out of a paper bag. All they know how to do is play politics. Tax cuts and banning abortion is all they’ve got. When it comes to actually fixing the dire problems America faces, they haven't got a clue, so they won’t even try. They’re gonna take their ball and go home, just like Sarah Palin.

Not just the party of no, but the party of no ideas.

Come on, House Republicans. If you've got something to say besides "NO!" then say it. Let's hear your suggestions on fixing healthcare in this country. We know you're going to be against whatever the Democrats are doing; what are you people for?

Anything? Anything at all?

This Week In Intolerance

Book burnings? Really? Sadly, when it comes to library books that don’t portray GLBT folks as demons, yes:

Ginny Maziarka, 49, said the books in the section of the library aimed at children aged 12 to 18 included homosexual and heterosexual content she thought was inappropriate for youths.

She and her husband also asked the library to obtain books about homosexuality that affirmed heterosexuality, such as titles written by "ex-gays," Maziarka said.

"All the books in the young-adult zone that deal with homosexuality are gay-affirming. That's not balance," she said.

[..]

Outside West Bend, the fight caught the attention of Robert Braun, who, with three other Milwaukee-area men, filed a claim against West Bend calling for one of the library's books to be publicly burned, along with financial damages.

The four plaintiffs -- who describe themselves as "elderly" in their complaint --- claim their "mental and emotional well-being was damaged by [the] book at the library."

The claim, unconnected to the Maziarkas, says the book "Baby Be-bop" -- a fictional piece about a homosexual teenager -- is "explicitly vulgar, racial and anti-Christian."

Braun, who says he is president of a Milwaukee group called the Christian Civil Liberties Union, said he singled out the book because it "goes way over the line" with offensive language and descriptions of sex acts.

So, just to recap: A Wisconsin mom wants to remove books about gays from the young adult section of her public library because they don’t portray gays as having some kind of disorder.

Meanwhile, some old farts who don’t even live in that town claim to have been so traumatized by one of the books in the library that they want it to be burned and they are suing for damages.

Let’s be even more clear: West Bend, where the library is located, is in Washington County, “an hour’s drive north of Milwaukee.”

Braun lives in West Allis, in Milwaukee County, which is just west of downtown Milwaukee. Not very close to West Bend, at all. I’m wondering if he couldn’t be emotionally damaged by some library books a little closer to home?

However, I did learn that West Allis is home to the International Clown Hall Of Fame. I think they have a new member to induct.

That Can’t Do Spirit

[UPDATE]:

Nancy Pelosi gets the message!

Good for her. Figures when you need some "can-do" around the place you gotta look to a woman.

--------------------------------------

This is where I wonder what happened to the whole American can-do spirit, that “we can do it” attitude that Americans like to think we are famous for. Because right now, especially on the healthcare issue, all I’m hearing is a bunch of “nope, can’t be done” from Congress, and it's got some of us wondering if we've just gotten all soft and lazy.

And I have to say, it’s really distressing to hear this from those “Blue Dog” Democrats. I call these folks DINOs, not because they are “Democrats In Name Only” but because they are dinosaurs, fossils from a political landscape that hasn’t existed in this country in 10 years or more.

If the Blue Dogs didn’t learn the lessons of 2006 and 2008, let me remind them: Americans didn’t just vote for change. There has been a wave of populism sweeping the country, on both right and left. People are rebelling against the status quo, against the entrenched corporate and political power structure that they feel has held the reins for too long, with damn little to show for it. On the right, it’s brought us tea parties, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. On the left, it sent Barack Obama to the White House. The point is: we're tired of sending people to Washington to see nothing happen. You've got a job to do, and you'd better get cracking.

In today’s WaPo, Harold Meyerson gets it right:

Centrist Democrats' opposition to health reform verges on the incoherent. A caucus (the Blue Dogs) formed ostensibly to promote balanced budgets now disapproves of the proposed taxes that would cover the expenses of the new programs. The congressional centrists say, commendably, that they want to squeeze more economies out of the system, but they oppose giving more power to an agency that would set the payment scales for physicians.

[...]

The Republican opposition to President Obama's push for health-care reform, on the other hand, makes clear political sense. If they can stop Obama on health care, as South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint recently noted, it "will be his Waterloo." Why Democrats of any ideology want to cripple their own president in his first year in office, and for seeking an objective that has been a stated goal of their party since the Truman administration, is a more mysterious matter.

Indeed it is. As I blogged yesterday, we’ve waited long enough for some kind of national healthcare policy in this country. I can get Republicans being the party of “no” where this is concerned, but Democrats? What the hell? Don’t tell me we can’t get it done. We’re America, we can do anything, right?

But this disturbing turn of events speaks to larger issues at play. Writes Meyerson:

But the big picture here, of which the resistance to reforming health care is just one element, is our growing inability to meet our national challenges.

Meyerson likens it to our inability to respond to Hurricane Katrina. Is the failed response to Katrina “the new normal in America,” he wonders?

I hope not, but I’m starting to wonder, too. I started worrying about this when I first heard criticism of President Obama for “trying to do too much,” as if our country isn’t in a deep mess on all fronts, as if we didn’t need to roll up our sleeves, loosen our ties, burn the midnight oil, etc. and get some shit done around here.

Bill Press makes a good point on the healthcare debate in Congress:

They’ve got it backwards. The goal should not be to get it done before leaving for a month’s vacation. The goal should to get it done, period. Before anybody even thinks about leaving for vacation.

And if it works out that Congress doesn’t get a month’s vacation this summer, or even a week’s vacation, so be it. Delivering universal healthcare legislation is more important.

Amen to that.

Hey Congress: I don’t give a shit about your August vacation. If you have to stay in Washington, D.C. through the dregs of August and give up your cushy golf vacations paid for by BlueCross/BlueShield, well boo fucking hoo.

There are some pressing issues in this country. You folks need to get to work. If you can’t work it out, then you shouldn’t have your job to begin with.

Report: Big Problems At TVA Coal Ash Sites

Can’t say we didn’t see this one coming, but at least it’s now official:

Consultants hired by the Tennessee Valley Authority report widespread problems with how the federal utility is running and maintaining its coal ash storage operations.

By the way, TVA is not just a "federal utility," it is a federally owned corporation. But I digress:

The report by McKenna Long and Aldridge of Atlanta follows the massive spill of more than 5 million cubic yards of coal ash December 22 at the Kingston Fossil Plant about 40 miles west of Knoxville.

The consultants said the "necessary systems, controls and culture were not in place" to properly manage the coal ash sites at TVA's 11 coal-fired power plants.

The report found TVA had no standard operating or maintenance procedures and failed to conduct annual training for engineers doing inspections. It said there was little or no internal
communication between the four TVA divisions responsible for ash retention.

The firm presented its findings to the TVA board Tuesday.

Hmm, with that in mind, I remind everyone that last February TVA shuffled its executive staff around, moving former coal operations chief Preston Swafford to head TVA’s nuclear operations.

Let’s hope Mr. Swafford manages TVA’s nuclear waste better than he did its coal ash.

I’ve Waited Long Enough, Thank You

Here's one that is not a joke: the latest talking point from the Republican Party is that we’re moving too fast on healthcare reform.

Unbelievable, I know.

We see it in a lot of places, from Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decrying “rush and spend Democrats,” to “centrist” Senators to, hilariously, Michael Steele cribbing from GOP strategist Alex Castellanos.

That just cracks me up. We’ve been talking about this issue since Bill Clinton was president and conservatives scuttled “Hillarycare.” That was back in 1993.

Sixteen years isn’t enough time for you folks? Let me take a wild guess: how about never? Does never work for you? Apparently Republicans are a giant FAIL when it comes to healthcare policy because the poor dears just can't figure this stuff out after a couple of decades. I mean, think about it: they had Congress and the White House for years, and healthcare reform was never important enough to warrant their attention, save a Big Pharma giveaway flawed Medicare prescription drug bill which left a giant donut hole that Obama had to plug. And now they’re telling us to slow down?

I'm starting to question their commitment to the issue. [snark]

Of course, this is just another political message they hope will stick. “Slow down, it’s too important to rush through.” Hilarious. The reality is, we’ve been talking about healthcare reform in every election for the past 15-20 years. Yes, I remember “Hillarycare.” I remember Al Gore urging support for the Patients’ Bill of Rights in his 2000 presidential campaign. I remember it being a big issue for Democratic presidential hopefuls in the 2004 campaign, while the media was trying to tell us we should care about “moral values” (and according to our glorious mainstream media, people forced to choose between healthcare and food is not a moral issue.) I remember John Edwards’ healthcare plan earning kudos from Paul Krugman during the last primary campaign.

Hell, does anyone remember Michael Dukakis’ universal healthcare bill? I think it was called “healthcare for all”:

Mr. Dukakis suffered a public setback in October when the State House of Representatives sent back to committee his proposal to provide health insurance for virtually everyone in the state. It had been billed by Mr. Dukakis and others in the state government as a potential model for the nation.

Anyone want to guess the date on that story? 1987. That was 22 years ago. To hear the Republicans talk, we should wait another 22 years before getting something done with healthcare. Anyone think we can wait 22 years?

How about the Treaty of Detroit, the 1950 agreement between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three car manufacturers:

Walter Reuther, the union’s captain, would have preferred that the government provide pensions and health care to all citizens. He urged the automakers to “go down to Washington and fight with us” for federal benefits.

But the automakers wanted no part of socialized care. They seemed not to notice, as a union expert wrote, that if Washington didn’t provide social insurance it would be “sought from employers across the collective bargaining table.”

Wow. That was nearly 60 years ago.

“Slow down” has to be the most dishonest GOP talking point since Dick Cheney simply stated there was no doubt that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. But fine, if that’s how you folks want to play it, let’s roll with it. If the GOP talking point is 60 years isn’t enough time to figure out a national healthcare policy, then clearly you people are idiots who cannot govern your way out of a paper bag.

I have just one thing to say to you folks: time to get out of the fucking way.

Al Gore Is Still Fat

By now everyone has weighed in on Nate Silver’s challenge to global warming skeptics. So I guess it's my turn.

It just goes without saying that if there’s a week of unusually cool weather, the flat-earthers use this as proof that global warming doesn’t exist. Or, as our own Glen Dean likes to say,

You would have to be an idiot to actually believe that man has any effect on the climate.

One man, perhaps. But there are more than six billion of us right now. Personally, I think you have to be an idiot to actually believe that more than six billion human beings wouldn’t affect the climate.

Yes, it’s been a gorgeous weekend throughout pretty much the entire country. We’ve got our windows open and the A/C off in the house right now -- proof that Al Gore is fat, global warming is a hoax, and there’s a cabal of environmentalists with the gleam of one-world government in their eyes who have turned scientists around the world into their minions.

You know, as Glenn Greenwald Tweeted earlier today,

Many obituaries in my morning paper: proof that world population is decreasing

Hah.

Nate Silver’s post got a lot of attention because he threw down the gauntlet, with real money involved (and as of my last look, no one has taken his bet--not even Sen. Inhofe, who has all that Big Oil money to play with.)

But the point of Silver’s post is that one cold weekend does not make for science. Folks like Hinderaker and Drudge who scream “Al Gore is fat!” every time the temperatures dip below normal are silent when we have early hot spells, like the one that hit Nashville this April. It was so hot during the Country Music Marathon this year that the women’s winner vomited several times after finishing the race, and one runner died.

But I’m not going to say that is proof of global warming’s existence any more than a cool July proves it isn’t real. For that I’m going to look at the changes in my garden over the past few years, the work of real scientists looking at global warming over the past 30 years, and some real number crunching from statisticians like Nate Silver.

And I'll repeat what I've said before, which is that even if you don't believe global warming is real, you cannot deny that:

•  air pollution is responsible for diseases like asthma;
• coal power destroys our environment and has resulted in disasters like what happened in Kingston, TN, last December;
• dependence on foreign oil has made our country vulnerable to the whims of unstable foreign regimes and forced us to compromise our moral authority as we do business with regimes like Saudi Arabia who practice intolerance.

With all that going for it, I can't imagine why anyone would stick to the old way of doing things. You know, there's a reason they call it fossil fuels. It's for dinosaurs.

Good Luck With That

Apparently some in the Republican Party (cough*cough*TEA BAGGERS”cough*cough*) think being obstructionist on healthcare reform is a political winner:

"I can almost guarantee you this thing won't pass before August, and if we can hold it back until we go home for a month's break in August," members of Congress will hear from "outraged" constituents, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint said on the call, which was organized by the group Conservatives for Patients Rights.

"Senators and Congressmen will come back in September afraid to vote against the American people," DeMint predicted, adding that "this health care issue Is D-Day for freedom in America."

"If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him," he said.

It really is just all about politics with this crowd, isn’t it? Yes, I imagine Congress Critters will hear from angry constituents: angry because they put politics over the needs of the people, that they did nothing to reform a system that is hopelessly broken.

For a recap on Conservatives for Patients Rights, that is the anti-reform group formed by disgraced Columbia/HCA chairman Rick Scott, the company responsible for the largest healthcare fraud scandal in U.S. history. Scott left Columbia/HCA in tatters, with a golden parachute to the tune of $10 million. And the company handling the group’s PR? The same folks who handled the Swift Boat campaign.

So the clueless tea baggers are being played by their corporate overlords. No wonder we point our fingers and laugh at you.

Anyway, healthcare reform is a national necessity. The system we have now is permanently broken, everyone knows it. I don’t see how being obstructionist on reforming a broken system that only works for corporate crooks like Rick Scott and the Swift Boat smearmongers is going to be a winner for the Republican Party.

But, good luck with that.

Another Peace Sign

I'm telling ya, they're everywhere!

Lobby of 190 LaSalle Street, Chicago:

Not Welcoming Our Corporate Overlords

File this under irony: In the dead of night, Amazon snuck into people’s Kindle electronic readers and took back their copies of “1984” and “Animal Farm”:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

Even worse, this is not the first time this has happened: the New York Times reports other Kindle deletions: Harry Potter books and Ayn Rand.

I’ve told Mr. Beale I want a Kindle reader for my birthday next year but now I’m rethinking the idea. I loved the idea of a device that can hold thousands of books, in one convenient package. But the books can’t be loaned, or donated to a charity, or left for someone else to read at the laundromat, or anything else you can do with a book. And with a real book, the publisher can’t sneak into my house and take it back because they didn’t like the store where I bought it.

There are some advantages to being a Luddite.

Amazon has given itself a black eye over this Orwell thing, so they’ve promised not to take back purchased copies ever again. Riiiight. Until they put some kind of switch on my Kindle that allows me to control the who, what, where, when and why of access to my device, I’m not going to believe them. Who’s to say Amazon won’t sneak into my Kindle and edit my books? Change the content? Decide to make some “corrections”?

We’ve arrived at a funny place in the world of intellectual property, copyright, and technology. Who really owns a work? If I buy a paper-bound book, it’s mine. I can write on it, tear out the pages, use it to line a bird cage, read it, loan it to a friend, do whatever. I can read it once, twice, three times. It’s mine and no publisher, book seller, or author can tell me I can’t. I’m not supposed to make money off of it, but people do all the time when they sell their books to used book stores. If I buy an electronic book, however, I can’t do any of these things.

Why is that? What’s the difference? Just because electronically they can control what buyers have purchased, that doesn’t mean they should. If I can loan a book to a friend when I buy the hard-bound copy, I should be able to loan an electronic copy. After all, my rights as a buyer don’t change whether the book I purchase is paperback, hardback, large type, or anything else.

Record companies will go after you for millions of dollars because you wanted to share the cool new songs you heard with some friends. But if I made a cassette tape of a new CD and gave it to a friend, no problem -- there’s a tax (or used to be) on blank tape sales that supposedly reimbursed record labels for their lost royalties when consumers taped recorded product.

Why couldn't they do the same thing with electronic files if they're so worred about "stealing"?

Nothing is going to make me want to stick to old technology more than some brain-dead corporation trying to control my behavior after I’ve bought their product. Or redefining what it means to "own" something, and deciding that no matter how much money we consumers shell out, we're really just "renting." Own means own, it means it's mine.

Corporations are going to have to get off the greed train because they're only hurting themselves in the end. I don't want part of any system where Amazon can come into my house in the middle of the night and take back the books I purchased.

I See Peace Signs

Historic wall sconce inside The Rookery, Chicago:



(For reference, read here.)

Today's Message

Your daily words of wisdom:

Karma’s A Bitch

Watch Southern Beale play the world’s tiniest violin for this right-wing broadcasting outfit which has fallen on hard times:

Sinclair Broadcast Group faces possible bankruptcy

The broadcaster, which is controlled by David Smith and his family and operates 58 television stations, says that if it cannot restructure its heavy debt load, it will have to file for Chapter 11.

By Joe Flint
July 15, 2009

Another big broadcaster may be on the verge of bankruptcy.

Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., which is controlled by David Smith and his family and operates 58 television stations, said that if it couldn't restructure its heavy debt load, it would have to file for bankruptcy protection.

The Baltimore-based company, which has about $1.3 billion of debt, is trying to negotiate terms on notes of $500 million that are coming due in the next 18 months.

Oh, poor Sinclair Broadcasting, the lying sacks of far-right shit who literally Swift Boated John Kerry two weeks before the 2004 presidential election, and tried to smear Barack Obama before the 2008 election. The same broadcast group which loved the troops so much, they were happy to cheer on the Iraq War, but wouldn’t allow its stations to air a “Nightline” episode honoring our fallen soldiers.

The same right-wing broadcast group that pushed Armstrong Williams’ pro-Bush propaganda on its stations (and viewers).

The same broadcasting group run by family-values guy David Smith, the same David Smith busted in a prostitution sting in 1996.

Awww. Karma’s a bitch, guys.

I’m sure there are plenty of good people who work for this piece of shit company. But I’m only human. And really, when your job requires you to flush your integrity down the toilet like this:

"You weren't reporting news," says the producer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "You were reporting a political agenda that came down to you from the top of the food chain."

then it’s hard for me to muster a lot of sympathy. You're just asking for the karmic boot to kick you in the ass.

Does this make me a bad person?

Probably.

C’est la guerre.

I know that schadenfreude is not becoming on a blogger. But this one hits home. Back in 2004 I joined a small group of activists who protested in front of Nashville’s Sinclair offices during the “Stolen Honor” affair. I waved a sign and chanted against a media conglomerate using its power to spread lies and swing a presidential election. Well, Sinclair got their second term of Bush, and the resulting economic meltdown. And so no, I don’t feel sorry for David Smith and his family and their dwindling fortune.

Good luck restructuring your debt, Mr. Smith. And next time, don't spend all your money on hookers and wingnut political propaganda.

Don't Look Back

Light blogging over the next few days as I take care of some stuff. I took this picture last year in Stockholm. It always amused me:

What A Difference A Few Months Makes

Sarah Palin was for cap and trade before she was against it. The money quote is at 5:07:

Overturning Tables

Yet another right-wing fundiegelical snake-oil salesman attempts the inevitable post-scandal “comeback”:

“This is not going to be your daddy’s Christian Coalition,” Reed said in an interview to describe his new venture, the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “It has to be younger, hipper, less strident, more inclusive and it has to harness the 21st century that will enable us to win in the future.”

Here’s a question: why are these right-wing conservative Christian groups always “coalitions”? Who are they coalescing with?

I visited the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s website and here’s what a found: a picture of a happy white family and this message:

We are advocating time-honored values, protecting the dignity of life and marriage, reducing taxes, and insuring [sic] fiscal responsibility in Washington.

Oh. So in other words, the same old shit, complete with grammatical error. So much for that “less strident” and “more inclusive” stuff.

There’s no coalition here, just a scandal plagued homophobe peddling the same crap we’ve already decided we don’t want. Hey Ralph, I’ve got a steaming cup of STFU and it’s got your name on it.

Here’s Reed again:

“You have to reinvent it,” Reed said. “It’s the political analog to the iPod and the iPhone. It would be cool. It would be transformative. It would transform our politics and bring younger people to our ranks. All of those are critical imperatives.”

You know you’re doing this religion thing wrong when:

• “faith” means you have to be a member of one particular political party;
• “faith” has anything to do with consumerism;
• you need your “faith” to be “cool.”.

If you’re describing your movement as “the new iPod” then you’re not talking about faith, but a product. And that’s just wrong.

Faith is not a product. It is not a political party. And it is not a trend that is “cool” or “uncool,” “in” or “out.”

Ralph Reed is a first-class huckster and charlatan. Anyone who gives him a dime has been duped.

Guns In Bathrooms Are A Bad Idea, Too

Yet another idea why guns in restaurants are a bad idea. Sooner or later, nature calls:

TAMPA, Fla. -- Authorities said a bullet from a gun that was accidentally dropped injured a Tampa woman sitting in a bathroom stall. Police said the bullet hit 53-year-old Janifer Bliss in the lower left leg. She was taken to a hospital with minor injuries.

Bliss was sitting on the toilet in a hotel bathroom when a woman in the next stall accidentally let her handgun slip out of her waist holster. The weapon discharged when it hit the ground.

Police said the gun belonged to a 56-year-old woman who has a concealed weapons permit.

The case has been referred to the State Attorney's Office to determine if any charges will be filed.

Gosh, I thought CCW permit holders were always so responsible with their firearms. Guess not.

Zelda The Wonder Dog!

She walks! She runs! She plays! Two weeks after surgery!

Feel Good Friday, Solar Power Edition

Guess whose solar panels got commissioned today?

Pfooey To Pfrance

Every time the subject of nuclear energy comes up, someone has to mention France.

France, if you listen to the hoopla, is a kind of holy grail of nuclear energy, a country that has “figured it all out” and does everything right where nuclear power is concerned. And no wonder: France sells electricity all around Europe, so of course they have marketed their energy as clean, green and cheap.

Except, it’s not. And they haven’t. First we have this December 2008 report, commissioned by the Green Party for the EU, which raised several issues, including some cooked books by the French government and contamination from the uranium processing plant at La Hague.

But if you don’t want to believe the Greens, please believe the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Last June they looked at the French nuclear hype and determined it was a lot of hot air:

In 2007, nuclear energy provided 78 percent of France's electricity, which corresponded to 39 percent of its commercial primary energy but only 18 percent of its final energy. Primary energy is the energy contained in the fuel when it enters the system, while final energy is what is left over for the consumer after processing, transformation, and distribution. In the case of large nuclear or coal-fired power plants, only about one-quarter of the primary energy reaches the consumer's home, office, or factory. In France, more than 70 percent of final energy is provided by oil, gas, and coal, of which one-half is oil alone, just as in many other countries. This year, the country will face an all-time record energy bill of more than $80 billion.

So much for the energy independence myth, as well as the climate change myth. France depends on foreign energy sources just like the rest of us.

Furthermore, France closed its last uranium mine in 2001. With 100% of its uranium imported, “energy independence” isn't just far fetched, it's flat-out wrong.

The mythic “low cost” of French nuclear production is also debunked:

For decades, the civilian program has profited from direct and indirect subsidies, in particular through cross-financing with the nuclear weapons program. Current estimates don't appropriately take into account eventual decommissioning and waste-management costs, which remain a concern and quite uncertain. (In addition to post-fission waste, 46 years of uranium mining has left 50 million tons of waste for eventual cleanup and remediation, the cost of which is unknown.) Official final disposal cost estimates for long-lived high- and intermediate-level fission wastes vary between $21 billion and $90 billion.

Heh. Just like here.

And then we have the fancy footwork, the hype and hoopla of the French nuclear miracle, which appears to be smoke and mirrors:

Last year, France exported 83 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and imported 27.5 billion kilowatt hours--obviously, a large net export. But the ambassador neglects to mention that France cheaply exports base-load power and imports expensive, essentially fossil fuel-based, peak-load power to use in its citizens' wasteful winter heating systems. Net power imports from Germany, which is phasing out nuclear power, averaged about 8 billion kilowatt hours over the last few years, and the emissions linked to these imports are attributed to the exporting country, not France. But the radioactive waste stemming from its exported nuclear-generated power--equivalent to the output of a dozen reactors--remains in the country.

France’s new nuclear projects are behind schedule and overbudget: for example, the Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, built by France’s Areva, is three years behind schedule and $2.4 billion over budget. That’s billion, with a B, folks.

On July 4, while Americans were grilling hot dogs and trying to figure out Sarah Palin’s latest meltdown, the Kruemmel nuclear reactor in Germany unexpectedly shut down for the second time in a week. It had just been fired up in June, after being shut down for two years after a fire. Swedish utility Vattenfal, which operates the plant, says it is is losing about $750,000 a day from the shutdown.

This isn’t cheap energy, folks. It's not independence, either. As for "clean," well, consider that leaks and other incidents happen with regularity. You don't hear about them because they aren't all of Chernobyl-level scope. But they happen and they pollute water and air and soil and cause problems.

And speaking of Chernobyl, today's irony award goes to Irish firm Greenfield, which is using the poisoned Chernobyl land to make biofuels.

Anyway, I have an idea why some folks want a resurgence in nuclear power. It’s highly centralized, and allows corporate or nationalized government interests to retain control.

The idea of something decentralized, like people putting solar panels on their roof or windmills in their backyard, threatens the centralized status quo. If people produced their own energy, maybe there wouldn't be support for resource wars like Iraq.

I dunno, but I don't see how nuclear power is any better than coal power. It's got all of the same problems and a few others too.

Today In Hate

Actually, it was yesterday, at Steve McNair's memorial. Two people with four signs each. I'd say the Phelps clan is spread a little thin these days:



I've said before, I don't understand why some enterprising journalist hasn't figured out whose bankrolling these assclowns, who seem to do nothing except travel the world looking for attention. I suspect the money trail will lead in some very surprising and interesting directions.

Anyone interested?

A Message For Senator Alexander

Hey Lamar! Your call for 100 new nuclear power plants is stupid.

Says Lamar:

Why are we ignoring the cheap energy solution to global warming which is nuclear power?" Alexander asked a hearing of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), of which he is a member.

He said, "Over the next 20 years, if we really want to deal with global warming, we really only have one option and that is to double the number of nuclear power plants. There is no technological way to obtain a large amount of cheap, reliable, clean electricity other than nuclear power."

One keeps hearing how “cheap” nuclear energy is, which I find incredibly dishonest. If it were so cheap, there would be nuclear power plants all over the place. There are not. Lamar is doing some funny math.

There are a slew of government subsidies to the nuclear power industry, stuff that green energy producers (or any industry, for that matter) would give their eye-teeth to have. For example, we have the Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act , in which the government indemnifies the nuclear industry in the event of an accident. Boy, Big Pharma would kill for one of those. And we have the Dept. of Energy’s Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, in which the government pays for building and securing long term storage of nuclear waste. Man, the chemical industry is pea-green with envy over that one!

And by the way: what about all of that nuclear waste, Lamar? That stuff which is lethal for hundreds of years? That doesn’t sound so clean or cheap to me. Where are we going to put it all? At taxpayer expense, no less?

What about the pollution caused by uranium mines, Lamar? What, you never heard of the polluted well water in New Mexico and poisoned waters of Lake Ontario? Who pays for that?

What about the fact that so much nuclear fuel comes from Central Asia and Africa? So we’d be trading a Middle Eastern energy source for an African one? Trading being nice to Saudi Arabia to sucking up to Uzbekistan? Not sure that helps our energy security, buddy. They boil people alive there.

This is just so typical of our politicians today: spit out some bumper sticker nonsense they’ve dreamed up (“cheap, reliable, clean electricity!”) and don’t even bother to see if it’s true. Do you think uranium pellets grow on trees?

Dumbass.

The Sierra Club’s Carl Pope has more about Lamar’s boneheaded idea:

It appears that what is envisaged is that the taxpayers actually pay for building these plants -- but not that the taxpayers would ever be repaid from the sales of electricity. No, the profits from this investment would flow to shareholders in big utility and nuclear companies. This is not even a bailout -- I guess you could call it a bail-forward. And it would be very expensive.

This is your typical wingnut welfare program. Get the government (that’s you and me, folks) to pay for the infrastructure, and make sure we keep on paying while wealthy investors reap the profits. While you’re at it, by all means make sure there are tax cuts for the wealthy to ensure that the true beneficiaries never repay the government (you and me) for our initial investment.

It’s a classic example of nationalize the costs, privatize the profits. Furthermore:

Even the Business Round Table, in its recent study calling for major policy initiatives in the climate arena, conceded that in the absence of much larger subsidies than are currently available to nuclear, the most we can realistically expect is to replace the existing fleet of nuclear power plants as they are retired -- nuclear simply is not going to be a bigger part of our energy future unless we just keep throwing more money at it.

So, even 100 new nuclear plants won't be enough to replace the dirty coal plants as Lamar envisions.

Don’t want.

America The Awkward

I’m so glad we have an African-American president and gay marriage in five (or is it six?) states and all of the other things that prove America has moved past its historic squeamishness of all things non-white, non-straight and non-male.

That means we can ignore people like the Family Action Council of Tennessee’s David Fowler, who objects to a proposed ordinance that would protect Metro Nashville GLBT employees from discrimination on the grounds that it would be “awkward”:

Asked about the unintended consequences, he said passage of a bill would lead to lawsuits and confusion and awkward situations, citing a recent publicized case in Maine in which a transgender student who was biologically a boy was allowed to use the girls restroom.

For the perfect takedown of this idiocy, read Aunt B. I just loved the whole “awkward situations” thing, though. Heavens, we can’t have that. Let’s make sure gays, lesbians and transgendered folks continue to face job discrimination because to do otherwise would be, ahem, “awkward.”

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia we have inner city kids barred from a private swimming pool because of “complexion” issues:

Creative Steps Day Camp paid The Valley Swim Club more than $1900 for one day of swimming a week, but after the first day, the money was quickly refunded and the campers were told not to return.

At first there was no explanation, but some of the campers recalled overhearing comments about the color of their skin while at the club.

Then the swim club president John Duesler issued this statement: "There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club."

Yes, well, if you take a look at the club’s website, the patrons are all of a certain, shall we say, complexion. I imagine having all of those brown inner city kids in the pool would be very awkward, indeed.

Finally, on Fox & Friends we have host Brian Kilmeade going into full meltdown mode as he claims whites marrying non-whites has weakened our gene pool, leading to things like Alzheimer’s. You just can’t make this shit up:

Brian Kilmeade: We keep marrying other species and other ethnics--

Gretchen Carlson: Are you sure you are not suffering from some of the causes of dementia right now?

Brian Kilmeade: The problem is the Swedes have pure genes. They marry other Swedes, that's the rule. Finns marry other Finns; they have a pure society. In America we marry everybody. We will marry Italians and Irish.

Dave Briggs: This study does not apply?

Brian Kilmeade: Does not apply to us.

Italians and Irish as another species? A rule that Swedes can only marry other Swedes? Intermarriage leading to Alzheimer’s?

Is Kilmeade on crack?

Gosh I’m glad we live in a post-racial America, an America where we don’t need things like anti-discrimination laws. To admit otherwise would just be too darned awkward.

Message To Obama

Dear President Obama:


Love, Greenpeace

But Who Will Kill The Icky Spider?

Oh, crap. I spent half the day putting together a post about the mess that is “the death of macho,” conservative author Reihan Salam’s equal-opportunity-offender tome to the global economic crisis and how it will lead to a female-dominated world.

There’s just too much wrong with this article to know where to even start, so I’ve given up. Suffice it to say, Salam relies on a lot of outdated stereotypes about gender roles, cherry-picked statistics and some mighty selective international examples to conclude that men are on the way out and women are ascendent.

You see, the global recession has hit men harder than women, since the job losses have occurred in male-dominated fields like finance, manufacturing and construction. As a result, males worldwide have folded like lawn chairs, ill equipped to handle their newfound irrelevancy.

Men of the world now lie curled in the fetal position, sucking their thumbs, leaving only lesbian women with mustaches to fill the void. Males must adapt to this new world order run by females, he warns, or resist. And resistance means violence, ‘cuz they’re dudes and that’s how they roll.

Okie dokie.

I think I should have stopped reading after the third paragraph when I got to this:

The death throes of macho are easy to find if you know where to look.

Must. not. make. obvious. joke.

Courtney at Feministing has written a good rebuttal to this nonsense:

I don't think anyone can herald the "death of macho," or that men are an "endangered species" (Zincenko), until things actually change. Women still aren't making equal pay for equal work and still are disproportionately targeted with subprime mortgages. As Dana Goldstein reports in "Pink Collar Blues," sixty percent of impoverished children are living in female-headed households. The poverty rate is still higher among women than it is among men of any race. One out of six American women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime.

Not exactly the “women on top” view of the world Salam presents.

Just for kicks I though I'd show everyone Salam's hilarious look at the post-macho world:

Surly, lonely, and hard-drinking men, who feel as though they have been rendered historically obsolete, and who long for lost identities of macho, are already common in ravaged post-industrial landscapes across the world, from America’s Rust Belt to the post-Soviet wreckage of Vladimir Putin’s Russia to the megalopolises of the Middle East. If this recession has any staying power, and most believe it does, the massive psychic trauma will spread like an inkblot.

Uh-oh! EVERYBODY PANIC!!!!

Seriously. I want a job where I can mix some government statistics with my personal social stereotypes, arrive at a dumbass thesis and get paid for it. I don't think macho will ever die because as long as there's testosterone, there's gonna be macho. But if I'm wrong and macho is indeed dead, it's because of the failure of this:

Think about it. It was the ultimate macho moment, and it was a spectacular FAIL.

Macho ain't dead. As Adam Kleinheider found to his horror and disbelief, men are still screwing around on their wives. Gun and ammo sales are up. "The Proposal" is only number four at the box office.

Fear not.

May Not Town

Our short civic nightmare is over:

Matthews moves for indefinite deferral on May Town Center; council approves unanimously

The mister and I visited Bells Bend over the weekend; we took a walk through Bells Bend Park, and I tried to count how many different bird calls I heard.

Years ago a friend and I drove several miles out of our way to take the car ferry across the river at Old Hickory. We knew that the ferry's demise was inevitable, though it would keep operating for several years after our trip. I'm wishing I'd gone back to take it again. I think we were the only car on the ferry; I thought operating that ferry must be a lonely job.

As we walked around on Saturday I snapped this picture, which seems appropriate:

Surreal

Just came from the nail salon, one of those Vietnamese sweatshop-type places. They had the televisions tuned to CNN and the Michael Jackson spectacle. Every single nail technician in the place had their eyes glued to the TV screens. Most of these folks don’t speak English or if they do, it's spotty. Several are newly-arrived in this country. All are from Vietnam, a communist country. And all were deeply mourning the loss of Michael Jackson.

I find that very interesting.

Permanent War Economy Electric Boogaloo

Beating swords into plowshares? Saxby Chambliss isn’t a fan:

An effort by Sen. Saxby Chambliss to force the Pentagon into buying more F-22 fighter jets is reviving tensions between the Georgia Republican and a stalwart in his own party, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

Chambliss won narrow approval at a closed-door Senate Armed Services Committee markup for his amendment authorizing $1.75 billion to purchase seven F-22 Raptors from Georgia-based Lockheed Martin — despite strong objections from McCain, the ranking Republican on the panel, and a veto threat from President Obama.

This is corporate welfare for the war economy in a nutshell. Sen. Saxby Chambliss is trying to force us to spend $1.75 billion -- that’s with a B folks -- on a program the Pentagon doesn’t even want!

The F-22 is obsolete:

It is a cold war relic, designed for defense against the Soviet Union. It has never flown in combat, much less in the wars this country is actually fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But Republicans and a handful of breakaway Democrats in Congress want to stay on the F-22 gravy train :

During the closed markup, Chambliss got support from three other Democrats and one Independent: Sens. Edward Kennedy (Mass.), Robert Byrd (W.Va.) — both voting by proxy — Mark Begich (Alaska) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.).

Lieberman supports it because although Lockheed Martin assembles the F-22 in Marietta, Ga., the engines are built by Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut. I’d guess the other Senators have similar jobs incentives for keeping an obsolete fighter jet the Pentagon doesn’t want in production. After all, that is the point: that is why companies like Lockheed Martin spread their production around the country, to maximize their influence in Congress.

And it’s not just jobs: some in Congress have their personal fortunes at stake, too. For example, Rep. Phil Gingrey of Georgia, a vocal F-22 defender, owns stock in Boeing, Lockheed Martin’s partner in the F-22.

I’ve written about this issue before here. It would be nice if we could cut wasteful Pentagon programs that cost in the billions of dollars and transition that money to job-creating programs in the green energy sector, for example, or healthcare reform.

People need jobs. America needs to manufacture things. Would it be so hard to transition away from manufacturing an obsolete fighter jet to making solar panels and wind turbines? Heck, we transitioned from manufacturing consumer goods to manufacturing for war during World War II.

Of course, it doesn’t work that way anymore.

It’s not like the Pentagon has suddenly become all touchy-feely, we-are-the-worldy, everyone hold hands and sing Kumbaya. They simply wish to cap the F-22 fleet at 187 planes, which should be sufficient. Sec. Gates wants to transition production to the F-35 instead, also made by Lockheed Martin. This isn’t a cut in Pentagon spending at all, it’s just changing to a different kind of fighting weapon. And its controversial because people like Saxby Chambliss want to preserve jobs in their states.

One of these days, maybe a few centuries from now, we’re going to look back on an America that built its economy on war toys at a time when the people needed healthcare and clean energy. And we’re going to wonder what the hell were we thinking?

But for now, the permanent war economy rolls on.

Huzzah.

Your Liberal Media

[UPDATE]:

Joe Klein on the “Real America”:

Sarah Palin's political future will be crippled by her inability to speak to that America, as will the Republican Party's, so long as it scorns diversity and "cosmopolitan" sensibilities--as Rudy Guiliani, of all people, did at the GOP Convention last summer. The attempts to plaster over this glaring deficiency by putting people like Michael Steele and Bobby Jindal front and center are, to coin a phrase, like putting lipstick on a pig.

Indeed. And cosmopolitan urban elites like Mika need to quite apologizing for who they are and where they come from, as if growing up in New York City and Washington D.C. is somehow not “real America.”

-------------------------

Apparently, “real Americans” are those people who agree with Sarah Palin and her “conservative views.”

Those who don’t support Sarah Palin are “elites” who live in liberal cities. Also, too, they are not “real Americans.” And such as.

If this nonsense came from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Bill O’Reilly it wouldn’t merit a post. But it didn’t.

It came from Mika Emilie Leonia Brzezinski, an expert on “real Americans” by virtue of being the daughter of former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski . Her mother is the grandniece of Czechoslovakian ex-president Edvard Beneš.

I think someone is feeling a little defensive about her pedigree, don't you?

Brzezinski , of course, is co-host of Morning Joe on the “liberal” cable news network MSNBC. And this is why I no longer watch cable news. I thought newsbots like Mika learned their lesson about "real America" during the election. Sadly, no.

Watch and weep:



(h/t, Atrios)

Then & Now

Several folks have asked how Zelda is doing since her mystery accident which left her paralyzed.


Here she is after her surgery. I was able to bring her home last Monday. She was paralyzed for several days, then slowly was able to sit up, move a paw, wag her tail. There have been quite a few accidents in the house, and I have the cleanest floors in the neighborhood because I was mopping them once or twice a day!

Meanwhile, I have some awesome arm and leg muscles from lifting a 40-lb dog and carrying her outside every hour and a half. Silver linings!

Here she is about five days ago, sitting up but not really ambulatory. Then at the end of last week it’s like her leg muscles suddenly remembered what they are supposed to do. She’s taken a few shaky steps outside, I’ve been able to entice her to try to walk with biscuits and other treats. She actually took about three steps today and stood, shakily. So I’m starting to think the doctor was right when he said she’d be recovered in two to three weeks.

I don’t want her to overdo it, and unfortunately we have hardwood floors in the house, which is hard for her. But we’ll try walking some more outside where the grass is soft and she can dig her claws into the soil and see what happens.

I’m frankly amazed. After seeing her completely paralyzed for so many days, I had little hope that she’d be able to walk, or if so, without some kind of cart or other assistance.

She is truly Zelda the Wonder Dog!

So Much For Country First

I just read the Vanity Fair article on Sarah Palin. Nothing that liberal bloggers and news junkies didn’t already know, of course, save the part about the conservative cruise ship:

Palin had been on the national Republican radar for barely a year, after a cruise ship of conservative columnists, including The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, had stopped in Juneau in 2007 and had succumbed to her charms when she invited them to the governor’s house for a luncheon of halibut cheeks.

OH. So that’s what you did on your vacation. Hopped off the cruise ship in Juneau, picked up a few knick-knacks for the in-laws, some Inuit trinkets for the kids, and oh by the way, here’s your vice presidential running mate.

Glad to know conservatives take this shit seriously.

And really that’s what continues to surprise/offend me about the whole Sarah Palin narrative. I care less about the gossipy tidbits than the fact that everyone, the writer included, seems to treat Sarah Palin like she’s the star of a Hollywood blockbuster who's being difficult at Cannes. No one seems to realize that a person completely unsuitable for high national office (or even high state office, if you believe half of what’s in the article) was trying to be Vice President of the United States. You know, a heartbeat away from the presidency and all that. They knew she was all wrong, dangerously wrong, and they forged ahead anyway.

In a campaign titled “Country First,” no less. Irony is the first casualty of political ambition, I guess.

I have to wonder, amid all of the last minute scrambling and rescheduling as the seasoned politicos realized that Sarah Palin was not ready to campaign for vice president, did it dawn on anyone that she was not ready to be vice president?

As they toured the country under the slogan “Country First” with the woman they nicknamed “Little Shop of Horrors,” did no one stop to think about, you know, putting country first?

You have to read nearly to the end of the article to get that question answered:

In recent rounds of long conversations, most made it clear that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt: they can’t quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be. They quietly ponder the nightmare they lived through.

Oh no, you don’t. You DO NOT ask for sympathy. For the love of all that is holy, do you people have any idea of what you were doing? Do you not have a scintilla of perspective?

Survivors guilt, my ass. You people should be on your knees begging America for forgiveness. You almost turned the keys to the White House over to the psychodoodle faction of the Republican Party. You folks in the McCain campaign knew that better than anyone.

This is America we’re talking about here! Country first, remember? Hello?

They all know that if their candidate—a 72-year-old cancer survivor—had won the presidency, the vice-presidency would be in the hands of a woman who lacked the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job. To ask why none of them dared to just walk away is to ask why Colin Powell did not resign in protest over the Bush administration’s foreign policy, or why none of Bill Clinton’s disillusioned aides resigned after he lied to them about Monica Lewinsky. The question cannot comprehend the intense bonds that the blood sport of modern politics produces.

No, no, no. Getting a blow job is not the same thing as working your butt off to elect someone wholly unsuitable to be president or vice president.

And that is ultimately what scares me about America. The riches of political victory have become so vast that people will tell themselves anything if it means their side will win.

Country First is, after all, just a slogan. Words used in a political pitch, like “good to the last drop” or “breakfast of champions.” Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.

If Sarah Palin comes back with a 2012 run, there will be people who think she’s fabulous and there will be other people, insider people, who know she lacks “the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job,” but will work their tails off regardless because no one steps outside the bubble long enough or far enough to realize the implications of what they are doing. They all lack perspective.

And Sarah, well, she might like to think she’s some kind of “outsider” who’s a “maverick” who doesn’t do things the “Washington way” and that might be true to a certain extent, but honey you’re going through the same sausage factory as every other politician. Don’t delude yourself.

Play Her Off, Keyboard Cat

Wow, what a couple of weeks. First the Jon & Kate thing explodes all over the place and before I can process that we have Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson dying and then before we can catch our breath and enjoy a nice, long holiday weekend, Gov. Sarah Palin decides this would be the perfect week to announce she’s leaving office.

Talk about your Friday news dumps.

Bill Kristol, dean emeritus of the Conservative Clown College, hits the trifecta of stupidity by musing:

It's an enormous gamble - but it could be a shrewd one.

After all, she's freeing herself from the duties of the governorship. Now she can do her book, give speeches, travel the country and the world, campaign for others, meet people, get more educated on the issues - and without being criticized for neglecting her duties in Alaska.

Uh, yeah. Okay honey, here’s a lolly, now go outside and play while the grownups talk.

Folks whose heads aren’t up their asses are following rumors that a criminal indictment is pending related to a scandal over a company called Spenard Building Supplies. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I got a good laugh over this “it’s always good news for Republicans” quote from Mary Matalin:

Ms. Matalin joked that despite her own initial inside-the-Beltway reaction of surprise, shoppers at her local WalMart in the Shenandoah would be whooping "hoo-rahs" because of Ms. Palin's continued popularity among conservative voters.

Uh yeah, conservatives love it when their Republican governors resign from office. Indeed, conservative voters in California and South Carolina eagerly anticipate the resignation of their states’ Republican governors. It’s how they show their love for their state! Now Mary, go outside and play with little Billy. The grown-ups have some talking to do.

There’s been a lot of silly parsing of Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, reading between the lines and whatnot. Please. Sarah Palin is not deep, that’s what people like about her. What you see is what you get.

Her resignation speech was hastily thrown together and her delivery was shaky, not the polished performance we’re accustomed to seeing from her. Her voice shook, she stumbled over her words, and she was at times drowned out by quacking waterfowl (I at first thought it was bleating goats); perhaps a better location could not be secured at the last minute. And she even botched the "retreat" quote attribution. It wasn't Gen. MacArthur. It was Major General Oliver Prince Smith. I know, I've never heard of him either.

So despite her claim that “this decision has been in the works for awhile,” I ain’t buying it. The decision not to run for re-election may have been a foregone conclusion, but the decision to resign was clearly a last-minute one.

While some speculate she’s clearing her calendar for a 2012 run, I don’t know how you can hear this and not think something is up:

These Troops and their important missions – those are truly the worthy causes in this world and should be the public priority with time and resources and not this local / superficial wasteful political bloodsport.

Sounds like one of her many ethics complaints is about to send everything crashing down around her to me. Sarah Palin is the patron saint of political victimhood, and of course she will write off any indictments to political vendettas and “bloodsport.” The poor thing, the evil liberals hate her, you see, and she’s done nothing wrong, just been a maverick, and beautiful, and a woman who winks.

Alrighty, then. Play her off, Keyboard Cat:

Ooops! Our Bad!

Did any major media outlets pull themselves away from feasting on the Michael Jackson/Mark Sanford corpses long enough to mention this?

The documents also confirm previous reports that Saddam falsely allowed the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction - the main U.S. rationale behind the war - because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, the hostile neighbor he considered a bigger threat than the U.S.

Whoopsie daisy! Turns out we didn’t need to wage that war after all. Gosh I hate it when that happens! Oh well! Sorry for all the dead civilians and dead soldiers and, you know, trillions of dollars in debt!

You know, the public record is full to overflowing with Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, John Bolton and the rest of the neocons telling us why it was imperative we take out the threat that was Saddam Hussein. None of these assclowns have ever been held accountable for this disaster; instead, they are still getting columns in national newspapers and quoted as “experts” on cable news.

So, in honor of July Fourth, I ask the mainstream media to say: no more.

Please, for the good of the nation, for the love of all that is holy, let these people slink quietly away from the public stage and back into their holes. Unless, of course, you’re covering their trials.

Every single one of them lacks any shred of credibility. Therefore, any media outlet that quotes them, publishes their columns, or puts them on the air lacks credibility, too. This is an undeniable fact, and frankly I’m sick of the national media acting as if nothing happened. As if the corrupt neocon cabal didn’t lead us into a costly, immoral war that killed thousands of Americans and over a hundred thousand Iraqis. Move along, nothing to see here.

I don’t ever want to see another column by any one of these idiots in any newspaper. And yes that means you, Washington Post, not exactly a bastion of credibility yourself these days: no more op-eds from John Bolton telling us we need to attack Iran or ZOMG we’re all gonna dieeee!! Clearly he’s a crackpot. Please quit giving him ink. It’s like trotting the crazy uncle out to the town square so everyone can laugh and point. It’s really not a very nice thing to do.

No more Dick Cheney on the TV, please. Again, another psychodoodle crackpot, who profited handsomely from the war he forced on the country that was completely unnecessary. He should not be regarded as an expert in anything save unspeakable evil. Time was, we put people like that in jail. Nowadays it’s all, “bygones!”

Wolf Blitzer and the rest of you idiots at CNN, when will you learn that Paul Wolfowitz is not a credible source? I don’t see you calling up people like Cindy Sheehan and asking her opinion on the situation in Iran. Why would you ask Wolfowitz? He has been wrong about everything! Why are voices for war so much more compelling to you than voices for peace? You are as complicit in the war machine as the neocon shills.

Is this some massive mainstream media CYA-ing in an effort to cover for the way they helped march America into an unnecessary war? You think we don't notice these things?

And yet you have the nerve to wonder why your circulation is faltering, your ratings are dropping, your listenership is down. You think the internet is the problem? Er, no. Not even close.

It is absolutely inconceivable to me that the architects of the Iraq war will never have their accountability moment. It’s like everyone hopes we can just move on. Well, no. That just won’t work. We can't pretend this didn't happen. It is immoral to pretend it didn't happen. America needs her accountability moment. America needs reconciliation, and this will not happen without confession. If, as the right wingers always tell us, we are a "Christian nation" then we should confess our sins.

Something for you tea baggers to think about.

God bless America? Not until we first ask God to forgive America.

WaPo Hilarity Ensues

You wacky kids and your ethernets. You sure are fast:

All A Newspaper Has Is Its Reputation

The Washington Post selling access to administration officials and editorial staff? Say it ain’t so:

Washington Post Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth said today she was cancelling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home where, for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few": Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors. 

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."

This sounds exactly like the kind of bone-headed idea a publisher with dollar-signs in her eyes would cook up without checking with anyone, least of all the editorial staff.

Oh yes. Trust me on this.

It’s also the kind of thing one sees when the publisher comes, not from the editorial ranks, but from the sales or marketing departments. Sure enough, according to Wiki, Katharine Weymouth is an attorney by education who worked in the Post’s general counsel's office before being named its advertising director and then publisher.

Oh lordie, I hate it when I’m right. I know about these things because once upon a time I worked in a newsroom for a publisher who unfortuantely came up through the marketing department. She would cook up just such bone-headed ideas, and never seemed to understand why the editorial department would constantly shoot her down. The idea of editorial integrity seems completely lost on people who spend the day with a nose buried in ledger books.

Publishers who come through the editorial ranks seem to understand instinctively the price-beyond-rubies that is a news organization’s editorial integrity. We used to have long, knock-down, drag-out fights about whether it was appropriate for reporters to accept junkets--trips paid for by someone who is inviting positive news coverage.

That sounds so quaint now. Our mainstream news media snapped up the ultimate junket back in 2003: the “embedding” of reporters with U.S. military forces during the Iraq invasion. To say the embeds didn’t compromise their coverage based on these circumstances suspends disbelief.

Newspapers continued to cross that line over the years with controversies like conservative columnist Armonstrong Williams, paid $240,000 in taxpayer money to promote President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act in his columns.

Alas, the golden age of for-profit journalism has all come crashing down around us, because the information people need to make informed opinions about their lives, their government and their world has deteriorated into a saleable commodity. That means you get weeks of coverage about Michael Jackson, which affects no one outside his immediate family, and little of substance about the healthcare debate in Washington, which affects everyone. Instead of real election coverage where the candidates’ policy approaches are examined thoroughly, we get silly coverage about what kind of recreational activity they engage in, where they vacation, what kind of food they eat.

Little wonder that people have turned to the internet for the red meat they crave; the fact that it's largely free has made it all the better. Sorry, MSM, you just weren't paying attention. You're like GM and Ford and Chrysler, churning out gas-guzzlng SUVs when what we really want are fuel-efficient hybrids. All the while you're telling us "you want this gas slupring monster truck! You do! You really really do!"

So no, you can't save newspapers by banning hyperlinks. That's not the problem.

I can’t quote this Ralph Gleason column from the 1972 Rolling Stone often enough:

Newspapers, as A.J. Liebling explained in The Press, are neither public servants nor custodians of the Holy Grail.

They are private enterprises in a capitalist economy whose primary function is to make money. Just like a department store or a gas station.

They are not in the business of truth and honesty and the public good unless the owner of the paper sees that as a way to making money.

Katharine Weymouth thought selling access to her editorial staff and Administration officials was a good way to make money. As the uproar the revelation of this scheme has created proves, Weymouth was horribly, embarassingly wrong.

Your Modern GOP

[UPDATE]: From commenter Pat Naughtin I learn that Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington actively promoted the use of decimal numbers for both currency and measurements.

-------------------------------

John Feehery, a former staffer for Dennis Hastert and conservative lobbyist, warns in this CNN commentary that the Democrats will use their new filibuster-proof majority to foist silly French ideas like the metric system on Americans.

Yes, fearmongering about the metric system is about what the GOP has been reduced to these days. Even then, he can't get his facts right. He writes:

In 1975, the newly dominant Democratic Congress sent President Gerald Ford a bill that declared that America was going to be metric, which he signed. When Jimmy Carter became president two years later, he signed a law that told Americans that they couldn't drive faster than 55 mph.

These measures made perfect sense to the liberal sensibilities of the time. But they didn't make sense to the American people, and are symbols of a philosophy that was out of touch with the people in the 1970s and is still out of touch with the lives of most Americans today.

Most Americans still don't use the metric system, and most certainly don't stick to the 55 mile an hour speed limit on the highways of America. And while they may still like Barack Obama and still laugh at jokes written by Al Franken, they will eventually grow weary of the newly dominant liberals who now run Washington.

Ha. What a maroon. First of all, there has been a metrication movement in the U.S. since the 19th century. The very first metrication bill was signed into law in 1866 by President Andrew Johnson.

The 1975 bill which Feehery blames on a Democratic congress was amended by the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 (would someone remind me who was president in 1988? I seem to have forgotten ...). This actually established a United States Metric Board (cue scary big-government music) to implement the conversion. Then in 1991 President George H.W. Bush signed yet another metric conversion act into law.

Hmmm. The metric system! It’s not just for Democrats anymore. Never has been.

While the average American may not use metric units, it is certainly widely used in certain industries--science, for example--as well as the U.S. military. In fact, the failure to use one consistent unit of measurement is what caused NASA to lose a $125 million Mars orbiter in 1999.

As for the National Maximum Speed Law, it was signed into law in 1974 by Richard Nixon (someone remind me what political party he belonged to? I forget ...). It was an emergency energy saving measure enacted in response to the 1973 oil crisis.

The reason most Americans “certainly” don’t stick to the 55 mph speed limit is that the law was repealed in 1995 (would someone remind me who was president in 1995? I forget...).

Used to be, you could count on the Republicans for some solid fearmongering. Sadly, even that trick seems to have failed them.

What We’re Fighting For

A reminder of something I blogged about last week: we are fighting for healthcare not health insurance.

The New York Times reminds us why:

Many With Insurance Still Bankrupted by Health Crises

Health insurance is supposed to offer protection — both medically and financially. But as it turns out, an estimated three-quarters of people who are pushed into personal bankruptcy by medical problems actually had insurance when they got sick or were injured.

And so, even as Washington tries to cover the tens of millions of Americans without medical insurance, many health policy experts say simply giving everyone an insurance card will not be enough to fix what is wrong with the system.

Too many other people already have coverage so meager that a medical crisis means financial calamity.

One of them is Lawrence Yurdin, a 64-year-old computer security specialist. Although the brochure on his Aetna policy seemed to indicate it covered up to $150,000 a year in hospital care, the fine print excluded nearly all of the treatment he received at an Austin, Tex., hospital.

He and his wife, Claire, filed for bankruptcy last December, as his unpaid medical bills approached $200,000.

This is especially pertinent in Tennessee, where 3 out of 5 people struggle with medical debt.

This is not healthcare or even health insurance, this is a legal Ponzi scheme, a highly organized and orchestrated theft from American families to insurance company profit ledgers. There should be a law against the “fine print” that excludes the treatment one needs when they get sick. People pay their monthly premiums in good faith, expecting to get coverage when they need it. Health insurance companies spend thousands of dollars trying to make sure you can’t collect your benefits.

Who wants more of that?

As I mentioned yesterday, private health insurance is for healthy people. Under our current system, sick people die.

The healthcare debate we’re having now is: do we have private healthcare with a public option? But really what we should be talking about is, do we have public healthcare with a private option. We’ve never really tried public healthcare in this country outside the VA; state and federal programs all involve insurance of some kind--Tennessee’s is provided by BlueCross/BlueShield.

We’ve seen the problems with health insurance. As our Congress Critters move forward in trying to develop a plan to reform healthcare, I want them to consider all of the options. If private health insurance needs to be part of the mix, then you’re going to have to explain to me why. “That’s how we’ve always done it” is not a good enough answer.