"The White House meeting drew such media interest that press secretary Robert Gibbs said he looked forward to facing no more questions about what beers each man would drink. For the record, it was Bud Light for Obama, Sam Adams Light for Gates, Blue Moon for Crowley and nonalcoholic Buckler for Biden."
Instead, Obama was stuck choking down dishwater mixed with rubbing alcohol, just to avoid the Dijon mustard backlash from the arugula-phobes on the right.
If Obama had ordered a faux-Belgian brew with an orange slice on the side, he would have been pilloried on the right by the anti-endive police and the Chablis-and-brie-conspiracy crazies.
I would have expected Biden to go with vodka on the rocks, and I wonder if he doesn't drink or if the event planners hope to shift the center of the culture war by throwing in this not-so-obvious pick.
The POTUS does not need to involve himself in a low level city problem?
Tell that to Terri Schiavo, who got an act of the Republican congress and the GOP president's opinion all up in her business.
A GOP butt-in-ski is perfectly fine for the FOX-Limbaugh-Drudge echo-network when a wedge issue is just what is needed to get their guy reelected, but Obama's out of line for answering the question when he's asked about a friend to whom he had just spoken.
I see.
Obama was wrong for distracting the press from the healthcare debate, which he arguably may have intended to do, since negotiations were falling apart.
As long as the healthcare co-ops are allowed to be big enough to make a difference through bargaining power, the idea fits nicely with our idea to turn the Democratic Party into a massive national healthcare union that puts its money where its mouth is and provides healthcare for its members.
"They are the villains in this. They have been part of the problem in a major way," Pelosi said of the insurance industry after her weekly press conference. "It's almost immoral, what they are doing," she said, referring to industry lobbying against a public insurance plan option."
It's written on a napkin somewhere... we were brainstorming a couple of years ago about a private solution to the current mess. We were like, "Hey man. get this...no really... the political parties should stop fighting about healthcare, and just build the damn system each of them wants for themselves.
"Offer a healthcare policy as a benefit of party membership. Upwards of one hundred million democrats could solve the healthcare problem for its membership... a DYI co-op... a massive healthcare union with enormous bargaining power. Poor religious conservative Republicans without healthcare would go, 'Gawd damn! I want that!'"
We were inspired, ironically, by Hezbollah and Hamas, who attract members, not by blowing up Zionists, but by providing social services like medical care, school, food, and education. Even IF that's just their propaganda, it's a pretty good idea.
We support a fully funded public option and a federal-payer, too, but we're also DIY types who think the DNC could put up or shut up when it comes to this subject and organize what might be the largest pool the insurance industry has ever had to face in America.
Senator Kent Conrad's co-op plan is geographic, and we're leery of geographic pools, because insurance companies have been known to discriminate against particular zip codes, so Conrad's co-ops should not be rejected as a gateway, out of hand, but they should be rolled in with Obama's healthcare exchange, the fully-funded public option, the federal payer, and for-profit commercial offers.
Something from a reader:
"I have ALWAYS thought one of your most unfailingly brilliant of all unfailingly brilliant ideas was to have the DEMS do this. Maybe now is the time!!! HOWEVER, would their big corp fat cats ever let them? Or the blue dogs? Between fat cats and blue dogs what are we to do? What about having the Green Party or the Libertarians do it instead?
— Dr. S.
Isn't it about buying in bulk? The Greens and (to some extent) the Libertarian parties might be more philosophically inclined to do this... but does either party have enough members to have the impact that even a quarter of the Democratic Party would have?
Aside from that, isn't it a surprise that conservative Democrats, Blue Dogs and fat cats... the fat blue cats... are using the word co-op? It smacks of leftist cooperative grocers, checkers, stockers, and produce handlers who own the building, including the artists' live-work lofts up above the store. It's such ideologically loaded socialist term.
For those of you who may have received the VERY scary email insisting that the healthcare reform bill mandates euthanasia counseling for seniors every five years... sigh... such a horrible idea is obviously FALSE, according to snopes.com.
"She describes this term as 'code' for 'limiting care based on a patient’s age.'
In fact the term for that is 'age rating,' a practice used by insurance companies to discriminate against older Americans against which AARP is vigorously fighting, and we look forward to her next column to help the cause.
"Comparative effectiveness research, on the other hand, is a technical term that just means giving doctors and patients the ability to compare different kinds of treatments to find out which one works best for which patient."
What this Betsy McCaughey lady describes as forced euthanasia on Fred Thomson's radio show is really nothing more unusual than Medicare paying for a senior's consultation with their doctor about the usual stuff related to your end of life care, your DNR, medical power of attorney. This measure ensures that Medicare pays for consultations your family may have with your doctor when you're unable to do so.
AARP responds to McCaughey' healthcare reform scare tactics, calling her comments "rife with gross, cruel distortions".
The FOX-Limbaugh-Drudge set is trying to cast Obama as a character as bad as George Bush... a murderer... but they have no actual bodies to dig up, like the million or so that Bush killed, so they have to invent some instead. Some of them crave the comparison so strongly, because they know, deep down, that Bush's political supporters are certainly complicit in his most diabolical mortal sins, his war crimes.
To mischaracterize Obama is to mischaracterize those of us who support him, and that's what they really want. They want us to lower our moral estimation of ourselves, so that we have no higher standards to use in our judgment of them. None of this is conscious. Their sense of guilt has made lunatics of them.
Would you Rapture-ready birth certificate conspiracy nuts please Rapture already, and leave the rest of us the hell alone, so we can get on with building a civil, livable society once you're gone?
Wouldn't it be weirdly ironic if Republican's adopted single-payer just to thwart Obama? This backbiting interview with an Obama ally reminds me about how much stranger than fiction things can get in real life.
Strangerthat fiction: Obana's doc delivers teh poor diagnosis.
(HuffPo)
"I look at his program and I can't see how it's going to work," Scheiner told the Huffington Post.
"He has no cost control. There would be no effective cost control in his program. The CBO said it's going be incredibly expensive... and the thing that I really am worried about is, if it is the failure that I think it would be, then health reform will be set back a long, long time."
The current House amalgamation: an effort to give everyone the essence of what they want... the pseudo-single-payer insurance policy and a universal-ish public option, competing in a preexisting condition-blind exchange with private insurance products, ALL for a trillion dollars over a decade... $100 billion a year... about the cost of a year in Iraq... It would seem not to be the end of the debate, even if it's signed as legislation.
There's a fear among everyone that one of these options is going to prevail, and maybe not theirs.
Europe's various single-payer and public healthcare systems were devised in the wake of world war wreckage we haven't seen here. It was a shock-doctrine application of emergency aide at a time when people didn't have the luxury to argue ideological preferences that are more psychologically affordable now and before the war.
Indeed, it might be argued that this is what the war was all about in the first place, competing strains of various forms of social and capital interests emerging from that horrible bombardment as a mixed social-capital economy.
Europe fought and paid a heavy price to find the happy medium they seem to ejoy more than we enjoy being ourselves, and Canada benefited from the Queens apron strings, while Australia appears to have adopted, in 1984, something more similar to the collection of options we debate today.
The robust public option working alongside national and private payer insurance in a well-regulated market. Australia, which ranks seventh in life expectancy, even ahead of Canada, France, and Sweden, may be the over-looked comparison in most debates. Who would argue that they've become a trembling teacup brimming full with pampered effete milquetoast elites?
Obama's doctor is a single-payer purist, but there are examples of a successful hybrid approach that would neither befriend nor be-foe a particular option, exclusively, and why should we?
Contrary to Republican rhetoric that the US government can't do anything right and therefore should NOT be let anywhere near healthcare, Bill Kristol steps into a mess of his own making by saying the healthcare we afford to military personnel is top notch... but so-called ordinary American's simply don't deserve as good.
Meanwhile, Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) dogs Rahm Emanuel and his conservative Blue Dog recruits. She says that her conservative and centrist fellow House members say they're holding out for a lower price-tag on healthcare, while they argue for higher reimbursement to doctors in their rural districts.
"The chickens have come home to roost," declared the California Democrat.
"On the one hand, they don't want to spend money but, on the other hand, they want to spend money when they think it benefits them or their districts."
It struck me as poetic, too... but I realize too late, Palin's snarky, FOX-populist berate... in place of honest debate... that her jive didn't jibe with reality, because it's cold Yukon poetry, with white-rap asymmetry that only makes perfect sense when we say good-bye, when I listen with a smile.
Meanwhile... Jon Stewart... as usual... just doesn't get it, interpreting her more literally, instead of liberally... in which sense, she makes absolutely no sense.
And Huffington relays what "Charles Krauthammer said Monday on Fox News that her complaints have a 'whining quality'. Fred Barnes of the 'Weekly Standard' agreed:"
"There is a way to deal with the press. Look at the way Ronald Reagan did. He didn't attack the press. He teased them. He made fun of them. He jokes about them, embarrassed them. It was great. People loved it and it didn't have that edge, that whiny edge that you always want to avoid"
— Fred Barnes on FOX Noose
But FOX Noose largely lionized Sarah, calling her one of the greats... recasting each of her griping mistakes, now, as strategic tactics, comparing her siren to Richard Nixon in '62... hinting...
diabolically...
...no matter what we do... that Bill Kristol's media-elite creation, one we pretend is an authentically coarse grass-root manifestation... will be queen of the world some day.
Reich should have included the matter of making pre-existing conditions moot, but he rounds all the rest up nicely in one paragraph.
When we speak disparagingly of all of this in the near future, let's remember the July benchmark that people in office and the likes of Reich set as the point of no return. There IS an element within the political apparatus of the elected Democratic Party that wants robust public healthcare and universal coverage subsided by the rich, the top 1%, for individuals making up to $41,600 a year (400% of the national poverty line).
That's where our cannibalistic recriminations must feast if Democrats are unable to pass it.
That's the mainstream Democratic benchmark for argument, debate, discussion and wishful thinking, while the so-called centrist wish-list is comprised of little more than a mandate that we all purchase private insurance... for responsibility sake... maybe-maybe not in exchange for insurance corporations turning a blind eye to pre-existing conditions... while they sit back to enjoy their handy work.
The frustration in all of this is that a single-payer system is misunderstood by most of those who argue against it, believing the concept itself to be some specifically defined and monolithic thing and mistaking it for the public-run health care of Canada and the UK, while misunderstanding the success and popularity of those public-run institutions too.
At this point, we can fairly call the proposal on the table in the House Obama and Pelosi's hybrid of a robust public-run healthcare option for those who don't buy into a parallel gateway to subsidized coverage concomitant with federal employee healthcare plans.
To leftists, progressives, and liberals arguing over the public option vs. single-payer, this love-child between the two camps will seem like a luxury, just a year or two from now... even to the flimsy-minded centrists who respond nervously to simplistic fear-mongering about how much the current, cruel system of corporate healthcare rationing means to being a true American.
We hear from the swing-states: "Our 'con' column is a lot more than the 'pro,'" the aide to Sen. Mark Warner, (D-Va.) said. "There have been hundreds of people who are against the plan or any specific part of it compared to dozens for it. And that was only in the last week."
And THAT, my friends, is why healthcare reform will amount to little more than a mandate for purchasing private insurance.
If you live in one of these so-called centrist states or districts, if you care about healthcare reform, whether a public option or single-payer, if you haven't called your senators and representative, you're losing the battle for us.
What can you do if you don't live in a swing state? Again, if you know someone in Oregon, Connecticut, Maine, Louisiana, or Nebraska, now would be a good time to ask them to call or write one of these eight so-called centrists holding up the healthcare reform bill in the Senate.
"DALLAS — Police said they found a 3 1/2-week-old infant stabbed and decapitated in a Texas home on Sunday and his mother screaming that she killed her son after the devil told her to do it.
"Investigators took a sword, a machete and a kitchen knife from the home."
There's clearly a cultural pattern developing in that state, one no one really wants to discuss, out of fear of offending religious and regional sensitivities.
Court is just a formality.
It's practically a rite of passage for religious Texas mommies to prove their faith and whack a baby for Jesus.
She'll get away with it, and I propose the statistic that there's more parents that almost kill their kids than there are those who do it. Abraham was the first post-partum depression case, hearing the righteous voice of the Lawd tellin' him to knife Isaac... until Gawd called him off.
My theory is that the near-sacrifice of Isaac, bound on the mountain-top in Moriah, is a parable for more worldly parenting. It accepts that the harried parent might reflexively think he has a legitimate reason to kill his kid, but the noble thing is to hear any whisper of second-guessing... of Jehovah... in your ear... at the last second... and spare the mischievous monster, damaging him no further than making it clear you could do it if you had to. Genesis 22 may be the first case study in harmer reduction.
"When you get Stephanopoulos, Huffington, Will, Brazil, and Krugman to agree on the high-holy conservative talkRadio trope that Obama, of all people, was unfocused, something went seriously wrong."
Anyone who saw the first 3/4 of Wednesdays infamous healthcare press conference would have come away informed, but if you stayed to the end, you would have forgotten all of that.
To paraphrase Jon Stewart: 50 minutes of healthcare policy... 30 seconds of racial controversy... I wonder what the media will lead with tomorrow?
It may be that healthcare reform was never really possible in the first place, and if it fails this time, Gates-gate will be the historical moment we will point to and blame, saying that it happened then and there, where healthcare reform went off the rails. That the Senate announced the following day that Obama's legislative deadline is dead says a lot about how blurry his point got that night.
Here's what we SHOULD be talking about.
It's not that Obama didn't make a great case Wednesday night, but he should have known the press would ditch healthcare's imperative in favor of a racist scandal.
More cynical voices say that's a perfectly obvious outcome, that it's hard to ignore their notion that Obama may have intended it. They have a point.
Hot off being selected America's Most Trusted Newscaster, Jon Stewart gives Lou Dobbs hell for backing up those trigger-happy birth certificate conspiracy nuts.
Just three days after his own CNN show debunked the cranky conservative conpiracy theory, Dobbs then said of such foolishness, "There's a lot of questions remaining, and seemingly the questions won't go away, because they haven't been dealt with."
A day earlier, MSNBC's Chris Matthews took on California Congressman John Campbell, a sponsore of the "Birther bill" which would require "future presidential candidates" (one in particular running in 2012) to provide a copy of their original birth certificate.
Matthews accuses Campbell of subtly "appeasing the wacko wing of his party" when the congressman appends "as far as I know" after Matthews presses him to admit that Obama's an American citizen.
CNN competes with FOX Noose to scrape the bottom of the barrel, because both stand ABSOLUTELY no chance of catching up with network TV news.
While rejecting CNN's craven struggle to live up to Roger Ailes journalistic standards, can we PLEASE stop accepting FOX lying about how popular they are?
Any of the national network TV anchors are more than twice as popular, even Katie. Combined, that's a LOT of people who don't choose FOX Noose.
Twenty-six million compared to 3.4 million? Most people are not FOX zombies.
Add CNN and MSNBC. It's 30 million non-FOX viewers, almost ten times as many.
Enough rightwing mythologies... hubris... and arrogance... misplaced anger... Dobbs spewing lies about Obama, like someone's rejected stalker.
"Limp-minded Lilly-livered Lefties"
Can you IMAGINE Brian, Charlie, Katie, Brokaw, Stephanopoulos, Schieffer, Koppel, Jennings, Russert, Cronkite, Brinkley... any of them acting the way Dobbs does.
They would NEVER even be in this position, and if they found themselves there, like Dan Rather, they'd have the decency to resign.
"The demographic that stands to gain the most from an increase in insurance coverage happens to represent the fastest-expanding voting bloc.
"More than 41 percent of Hispanic Americans are uninsured, Gallup reports, which is by far the largest segment of the U.S. population. The next highest groups are those who make less than $36,000 a year (28.6 percent uninsured) and those aged 18 to 29 (27.6 percent)."
The Republicans have one plan, to end employer-sponsored healthcare and leave everyone out on the open market, victim to the whims of a capricious industry that makes money by denying treatment to those who need it.
Republicans are concerned about the cost of healthcare to business, not the cost of healthcare. They want to do nothing to bring down the price, only to shift any responsibility for the provision of healthcare coverage away from employers.
But the GOP's own internal polling finds Americans want a public plan an trust the Democrats over republicans to reform healthcare.
The GOP suddenly supports taxation of healthcare benefits, arguably the only reform they've offered, because it will encourage businesses to drop healthcare benefits altogether.
Chuck Schumer and the Democrats orchestrate a careful charade of pro-gun votes, defeating the NRA while allowing vulnerable senators to vote Yes, but their Ayes really mean No.
"As the vote neared an end, the door swung open and in bounded Pryor. 'Mr. President! Mr. President!' he shouted, getting the attention of the desk.
"Comfortable that Byrd wouldn't be making the trip, and with Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) voting no, Pryor switched his vote to a yes and the amendment failed by two, 58-39. Pryor (D-Arkansas) could now say at home that he stuck with the National Rifle Association."
It took me a long time to figure out that I'm not against guns as much as I'm against the people who really, really like them. These trigger-happy birth certificate conspiracy nuts running the GOP through the NRA are dangerously crazy.
As it is for certain church-sponsored marriage licenses, Senator Thune's NRA-sponsored ammendment would force states to respect the gun laws of other states when out-of-state pistol-packin' visitors come a-calling.
In Thune's ideal world, a state that forbids felons from owning guns would have to allow some felon from a felon-with-a-gun state to carry his weapon.
A state that does NOT allow guns in school, church, or a bar would HAVE to allow the felon to cary his gun in their schools, churches, and bars... care of the NRA.
The occasional need for the people to rise up against their government is the reason the founding fathers left guns in the people's hands. The nostalgic paeans and political pabulum about the proud tradition of hunting... something fewer than 8% of Americans engage in any more... is nothing but rhetoric not even mentioned in the Constitution.
After eight years of Cheney and more to come from Lynn...
...you don't really want the government to be the only armed presence in America.
"To avoid any appearance of favoritism, his aides say, Baucus quietly began refusing contributions from health-care political action committees after June 1. But the policy does not apply to lobbyists or corporate executives, who continued to make donations, disclosure records show."
"Legislation is already pending in the Senate to reduce the control individual lawmakers and Congress as a whole have over setting the rates doctors and other providers are paid under Medicare.
"In his letter, Orszag forwarded an alternative proposal that he said would accomplish the same goal.
As it is, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission recommends how much Medicare pays doctors and other providers. Congress isn't obliged to follow them or even vote on the recommednation when it sets annual rates.
Orszag recommended that lawmakers vote on the 10-member board recommendations, and he proposes that the recommendations take effect unless rejected by the House and Senate.
I know it's totally post-PC to remark on Orszag's Semetic good looks, but has anyhbody called gaydar on this guy yet?
Meanwhile, six centrist senators hope to slam the door in the face of healthcare reform. This is one of those moments when you can do something, even if our your own peculiar senators aren't involved.
If you know someone in Oregon, Connecticut, Maine, Louisiana, or Nebraska, now would be a good time to see if they're willing to call or write one of these six senators trying to hold up the healthcare reform bill in the Senate. Request this dirty half-dozen act in good faith.
If you believe the arch of history places us directly in the path of prophecy, that the Rapture is eminent, and the Tribulation is teetering over us... why abandon us to 7 years of hell without healthcare... just moments before you go?
We have few secular apostles to speak with any authority for the interests of the damned. Virtually ALL of our elected officials are defenders of faith in this completely meddlesome God of ours, and we have to negotiate for ourselves, our agnostic needs, and we ask you to leave us with a healthcare system in better shape than the way you found it.
"A woman who said evangelist Tony Alamo "married" her at age 8 is telling federal jurors that he sexually assaulted her repeatedly until she escaped his compound in late 2006.
"Alamo took explicit photographs of her that year with an instant camera and, on looking at them, called her a sexually demeaning name. She said she didn't understand the term but that Alamo told her it was a good thing."
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests reports that the 2nd largest US church, the Southern Baptist Convention, is heavily involved in cover-up and reassignment of preachers.
With the backdrop of a neighborhood in a religious rampage over policy initiated under Jerusalem's new secular mayor, a very religious lady is arrested for starving her baby.
"They've dismantled traffic lights, and without traffic lights deadly accidents could take place. They've disconnected systems in electricity poles and people could be electrocuted.
"I have not found a single place in the Bible where it is written that these actions are permissible."
The Judeo-Christian-Muslim religion justifies Abraham trying to stab his own child as a sacrifice to Jehovah. The religion raises its own children to believe the willingness to do so is an admirable sign of faith in God, who supposedly approves, so I think they can get by the horror of trying to starve a child too. Judging from the riots, they obviously do.
Religion, like a gun, is a killer in the hands of the beholder, but I can't think of the last time I saw rampaging atheists and agnostics in the street.
"I do guerrilla warfare," Reed once boasted to a reporter, describing how he ambushed his enemies as a political operative. "I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag"
Google: Ralph Reed, Jack Abramoff, Sun Myung Moon, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, and see how much company they keep.
Today, much of the Republican Party is made up of southern segregation Democrats and their offspring, those who were disgusted by northern Democrats who signed onto the 1964 Civil Right Act. They and their children, and their children's children, have never gotten over it.
Neoconservatives, represented today by Kristol, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Pearl soon followed, because of their disgust for fellow Democrats involved with the anti-Vietnam War peace movement.
But the GOP sealed its fate, the one it's living today, when Ronald Reagan kissed the opulent ring of that corpulent gay-basher, Jerry Falwell, who ostensibly ran the Moral Majority on behalf of Ralph Reed, who's been laundering church tithing for decades via illegal operations with his College Republican cronies, Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist.
Rove sopped up the dregs of these religiBigot war-mongers from the Democratic Party in 2004, but they were nothing new to the GOP by then, just the ones who needed that kick in the pants from 9/11 scareMongering...
...and the wedgie he gave them over same-sex marriage. More war... More religion. Warligion is their brand, so the DNC was essentially drained of these characters by then.
What we see now is the mass-migration of those three waves of jihadi-bigots from Bush to Palin, in whom they've suddenly found his intellectual relative browsing the city library stacks for books to burn.
That movement and the moderates now being purged from the RNC is the primary political dynamic of our day. The Democrats have only had to sit quietly, eerily polite for the last four years, while 8 years of self-serving policy disasters destroy the RNC.
Ralph Reed, if he had it to do all over again, would do it all over again.
"Aune, 28, said he gave Jones, 25, a hug and kiss and that the two were then approached by a security guard, who asked them to leave, telling them they were being inappropriate and that public displays of affection aren't allowed on the property. He said other guards arrived and the men were handcuffed."
Mind you, Utah allows guns in church, in a state where the Mormon church signs off on law.
It's one thing to be within your rights and another thing to be right.
The Mormon Church, arguably, could be within its right to ban hugs and kisses, but it's wrong to ban hugs and kisses, especially in church, where they couldn't be more appropriate and should be more prevalent.
If there really is no kissing or hugging allowed in and around the Mormon churches and temples... that's one sad situation.
It just says something about a church that would outlaw displays of affection.
"You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you.
I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here."
My niece sees Shields & Brooks on PBS and thinks they look like a pair of movie reviewers, and she's not that far off.
What drama, but in his younger days the idea of patting David on the inner thigh doesn't sound as bad, and it could easily have been Mark Foley mistaking Brooks for just another chicken dinner.
We need more context and timeframe tp properly seat this story:
Conservative columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan pens the epilogue on the rise and fall of Sarah Palin, but I don't think Palin's done with us yet. Still, it's scathing stuff:
"She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence.
"In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying."
I don't think anybody has put it any better, except when Noonan put it even more succinctly, very early on, when she was caught on a live mike last year calling "political bullshit" on the Palin pick for VP.
Noonan also reads the beads of people who make excuses for the rise and fall of Sarah Palin, "some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths. To wit..."
I'm reminded of my sister's harangue. She's in education and says "kids today" are taught that everybody's a little prince or princess, everyone's a winner, except Noonan aims directly at OUR generation:
"Burris was appointed by disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to fill the Senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama. His appointment was criticized from the moment it was announced and prompted calls for Burris to resign...
Burris is the Sarah Palin of the Democratic Party, defiant until the... until the... premature end.
His effective resignation just seals the impression of a loud mouth out of his league.
Really, the guy has the gall-filled balls of that woman, shrugging off his own parade of ethical violation... the violations of Blagojevich... as if it's just something someone made up just to get under his skin.
We're all special and have peculiar and wonderful talents, but where do some people get this sense of entitlement, the feeling that God intends SUCH great things for them... to the extent that their lies and deceit, even treachery seems to them like the will of God too?
Today, we're looking at the Obama bank bailout that didn't happen under an administration routinely noted to have simply followed its predessessors's lead.
"According to GAO, the government has disbursed approximately $339 billion and promised $102 billion more. That leaves some $259 in the fund plus the $70 billion banks have repaid."
Of the $700 billion bank bailout passed in a panic last October, then-treasury secretary Hank Paul gave $350 billion to the banks, with the rest pending the new administration's request and approval by Congress.
There's $328 billion unspent or uncommitted left in the fund.
Mind you, the amount spent includes cash allocated to each of the following programs, collectively known as a bank bailout, but little understood in its parts:
Capital Purchase (100s of banks, big & small): $133.068 Bln
Automotive Industry (GM & Chrysler): $79.966 billion
Since Obama took office, , only five no-name banks have taken more than $100 million in bailout funds in exchange for company shares.
Starting on page 4 of the July TARP Transaction Report, only two no-name banks have sold $200 million in shares to the Treasury. Only Discover, at $1.2 billion, and Hartford, at 3.4 billion, have broken $1 billion.
Gone are the money-salads served to BofA, Citibank, Goldman, JPMorgan-Chase, Morgan Stanly, and Wells Fargo... $10-25 billion per plate... between October and January.
They don't say so here, but it seem that the semblance of conditions the Obama administration put on bailed-out banks, weak though that criteria seems, compared to what you'd think is needed, have been onerous enough to keep the banks from being particularly interested in taking the rest of the money.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom doesn't let getting jilted by 53% of Californians get him down. Left at the altar by Prop 8, he's raising the dowry for a run for governor, with no concerted competition for the state's hand yet apparent.
That has always been an odd feature, that the preponderance of SFGate commenter-hate never seems to manifest electorally, increasing Newsom's win from 53% in his first mayoral election to 72% in his reelection.
Who was not surprised how competition ran, hiding, even after various peccadilloes could have made Newsom vulnerable? It's as if he becomes more popular as his antagonists become more mouthy, but it's probably the other way around.
Is he governor material?
Has CaLEEFORNia had a governor who was... lately?
If only 28% of SFer's hate Newsom, we can assume some of them are angry Green Party hippies, still pulling for 2003 mayoral runner-up Matt Gonzalez, or the Rapture-ready zealots upset about same-sex marriage.
That leaves maybe 10% who dislike the man personally, and they're just never been enough to swing the race.
"I'd been wondering why the liberals are so passionate about this Health Care thing. It couldn't be because they actually care about sick, poor people. If they did, they would visit hospitals, and give ten percent of their gross salaries to Compassion International and World Vision, like us stupid church go-ers do."
Victoria Jackson's like this Palin-Coulter love-child... but without the love.
One day we're laughing at the antics of her baby-doll character on SNL, and then it's like the Zombie Jesus got her. These opposite-mongers twist very basic precepts of their religion into something cruel, unforgiving, and stingy.
Au contraire, my Rapture-ready birth certificate conspiracy nut.
You can get caught up on so-called socialism, but some people call it Christian:
Act 4:31-37:
When they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled, and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost. They spoke the word of God with boldness.
The multitude was of one heart and one soul: neither said any of them that the things which he possessed were his own, but they had all things common.
Neither was there anyone among them that lacked, for many who possessed land or houses sold them and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according to his need.
...but Nixon said something that most religious conservatives don't cop to today, that their real concern about abortion is not for the life of an undifferentiated cluster of blastocyst cells, but for what they fear to be inconsequential promiscuity.
Rapture-voters could solve the problem of abortion by making it unnecessary, by pushing for family-friendly wages, proportional tax policy, and the right to a healthy life... not just life... but universal, affordable healthcare, the trop of Obama's philosophy, which hopes to make abortion unnecessary, not illegal.
They would stop ranting about abortion and do something to make life a viable option, an exciting choice, instead of impossible. They would literally argue to make raising babies affordable.
Back to promiscuity. That's an argument I heard a lot as a kid, clatter about the rampant promiscuity unleashed by the Supreme Court's ruling on Roe v Wade, but that inarguably nosy-sounding noise was soon supplanted by the pro-life stand, after the roving ban of sex police went out of fashion in America.
At the Atlantic Free Press, Jayne Stall points out that the same release of Nixon tapes frees a tidbit between Nixon and Republican Party National Committee chair, George H.W. Bush, discussing the merit of picking a beautiful woman to run for office.
