Progressives, South Bend

Investors could only lose in Goldman's Caymans deals

When Goldman Sachs joined some of its Wall Street rivals in late 2005 in secretly packaging a new breed of offshore securities, it gave prospective investors little hint that the deals were so risky that they could end up losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Not only were investors buying shaky securities backed by mortgages, but they also were agreeing to pay Goldman if the risky home loans nose-dived in value — as Goldman was betting they would.

At last we get to bid farewell to a perfectly awful decade

Somewhere tonight, people will sadly note the end of the first decade of the 21st century. People who met the loves of their lives, perhaps. Had children. Got their first jobs - and held on to them. Men and women who will define the last 10 years by personal triumphs. They, however, will be in the minority. Most Americans will look back on the decade and say, "Good riddance."

Can a city awash in guns, grenades and explosives ever be safe?

Faux car bombs designed to check the ability of Iraqi police to spot explosives are just one of the efforts that the Iraqi government, with U.S. help, is making to protect Baghdad, a city of roughly 6 million. There are nearly 1,500 fixed and mobile checkpoints; blast walls; controversial hand-held explosive detectors; and armed security personnel on virtually every corner.
Goodbye 'Naughty Aughties,' but what should we call the new year?

The decision as the clock strikes midnight is: Should we say "Happy two thousand ten" or "Happy twenty ten." In this new digital decade, which technically isn't a new decade, comes the analog question of what the masses will call the new year.
State senator says Alaskans are gouged at gas pump

A state senator says Alaska oil refineries have been gouging Alaskans at the gas pump for more than a year, reaping profit margins unparalleled to ones in the Lower 48, and he is once again calling for government to step in. Profits for Alaska refineries are twice the national average, a nonpartisan report finds.
Lewis leaves as BofA CEO with his legacy undecided

When Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis steps down today, he might not even come into the office. Lewis leaves with a mixed legacy. He was twice named Banker of the Year by the American Banker trade publication. In 2007, he made Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. But he also made enemies who didn't like how he laid off thousands of workers or his sometimes-brusque demeanor. And shareholders have suffered: The stock closed Wednesday down 45 percent from his first day as CEO, April 25, 2001. This year, the once-lucrative dividend was slashed to a penny.
Dust: Tiny particles with a big impact

Dust is everywhere, burrowing under beds, piling up on windowsills, clogging guns and machinery, irritating eyes, noses and lungs. It soars thousands of miles over continents and oceans, sometimes obliterating the sky. Now scientists are beginning to have new respect for the way dust alters the environment and affects the health of people, animals and plants.
Republicans ask Obama to halt releases from Guantanamo

Seizing on the claim that ex-Guantanamo detainees were linked to the foiled Christmas Day terror attack, Republican leaders on Wednesday called on the White House to stop sending captives home to Yemen from the detention center in southeast Cuba.
U.S. rushing to build an Afghan army to battle insurgents

The effort to enlarge and train the Afghan army is critical to the Obama administration's plan to defeat the Taliban and al Qaida, pacify much of Afghanistan and begin to withdraw at least some U.S. forces in 2011. Success, however, is far from guaranteed: The Afghan military remains plagued by corruption, ethnic rivalries and illiteracy, and by its almost complete dependence on American logistical and intelligence support.
Hutchison outlines plans for Texas transportation needs

After months of hammering Gov. Rick Perry's record on transportation, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison outlined her own plan to keep Texas traffic moving. Hutchison's proposal included vows to reform the Texas Department of Transportation and support toll roads less often than Perry. But she provided no details on how future transportation improvements would be funded if she becomes governor.
KC police officers fight to keep man who shot them in prison

Fifteen years ago, Kansas City police officers Patrick Brown and Larry Schoen fought for their lives on New Year's Eve. Now they are fighting to prevent early parole for the man who emerged from a shadow and shot them both at point-blank range. A protective vest saved Brown from the bullet that slammed into his chest. Schoen was hit in the leg and hip.
Texas Tech chancellor defends firing Leach before bowl game

"The main thing is the facts were pretty well undisputed," Texas Tech Chancellor Kent Hance said in an ESPN interview Wednesday. "Mike [Leach] acknowledged that he had [James] locked up, he acknowledged that he had given him a pretty good cussing and did not work with us to try to solve the problem. . . . Mike was adamant that he wasn't going to have anyone second-guessing him, and it just went downhill."

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Truthout 12/30

Jason Leopold | AIG Executives Failed to Repay Majority of Bonuses
Jason Leopold, Truthout: "Despite previous promises, beleaguered insurance giant American International Group (AIG) has failed to return tens of millions of dollars in bonus payments the firm doled out to executives following the company's spectacular unraveling and subsequent multibillion government bailout, according to a recent report by the special inspector general for the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)."
Read the Article

Why Obama Must Continue Releasing Yemenis From Guantanamo
Andy Worthington, Truthout: "The weekend before Christmas, 12 prisoners were released from Guantanamo. In two previous articles, I told the stories of six of these men - two Somalis and four Afghans - and in this final article I look at the stories of the six Yemenis who were also released. These releases were enormously important because Yemenis make up nearly half of the remaining 198 prisoners in Guantanamo, and until these six men were repatriated, only 16 Yemenis had been freed from Guantanamo throughout the prison's long history."
Read the Article

Report Says ACORN Didn't Commit Voter Fraud or Misuse Federal Funding
Mary Susan Littlepage, Truthout: "The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) did not commit voter fraud, and it didn't misuse federal funding in the last five years, according to a recently released report prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a nonpartisan investigational arm of Congress."
Read the Article

Iraq Veteran Finds Sanctuary in Canadian Church
Gerry Condon, Truthout: "Rodney Watson is one of the bravest and nicest men I have had the pleasure of meeting. He is an African-American from Kansas City, Kansas. He is a very religious young man, 32 years old. His dream was to one day have his own restaurant. In 2004, when an Army recruiter told him he would be trained as a cook, he signed up for a three-year hitch. When Watson was deployed to Iraq in October 2005, his superiors told him he would be supervising the dining facility."
Read the Article

New Year's Memo to South Asia: Don't Trust Everyone
J. Sri Raman, Truthout: "'There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.' This maxim of Athenian orator and statesman Demosthenes (384 - 322 BC) can serve as a New Year's message to millions in South Asia."
Read the Article

Eugene Robinson | Cheney in Winter
Eugene Robinson: "It's pathetic to break a New Year's resolution before we even get to New Year's Day, but here I go. I had promised myself that I would do a better job of ignoring Dick Cheney's corrosive and nonsensical outbursts..."
Read the Article

Uncle Sam's Signature
Bruno Odet in an editorial and Cathy Ceibe in an interview with scholar Julio Navarro, both for L'Humanite, decry the continuing usurpation of power in Honduras: "The death squads are circulating once more. A week does not go by without atrociously mutilated corpses of militants from the various democratic organizations gathered together in the Resistance Front against the Coup d'Etat (FRCG) being found. The mutilations prove that they were tortured before being killed."
Read the Article

Senator Reid Vows to Force Vote on TSA Nominee Blocked by DeMint
McClatchy Newspapers: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) will force a vote on President Obama's nominee to lead the Transportation Security Administration when Congress reconvenes in three weeks."
Read the Article

Are Environmentalists an Endangered Species?
Stephan Faris, GlobalPost: "Way back during the first decade of this century, the Earth was roamed by a beast that will soon be extinct. Environmentalists, it seemed, were everywhere: at the supermarket, plucking at organic produce; at the stoplight, breaking in their hybrid cars; on your neighbor's roof, putting up solar panels. Even oil companies got in on the action, smiling green from the pages of your magazine."
Read the Article

Jim Hightower | Six Things to Do in 2010
Jim Hightower, Truthout: "In my travels, I've heard many cries of despair from you good folks about the timorous Obama presidency. On issue after issue, it's been go-slow and don't-rock-the-corporate boat. 'Where's the 'audacity of hope?" people are asking. 'Where's the 'change you can believe in?'"
Read the Article

The Foreign Policy of Optimism
Rubrick Biegon, Foreign Policy in Focus: "Times are trying for American exceptionalism, that peculiar notion that the United States is unique in its attributes and qualitatively different from the rest of the international community. For many Americans, the Great Recession, set against the military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, has clouded their view of the United States as a beacon of progress and anchor of stability in a turbulent world."
Read the Article

Ray McGovern | Are Presidents Afraid of the CIA?
Ray McGovern, Truthout: "In the past I have alluded to Panetta and the Seven Dwarfs. The reference is to CIA Director Leon Panetta and seven of his moral-dwarf predecessors - the ones who sent President Barack Obama a letter on September 18 asking him to 'reverse Attorney General Holder's August 24 decision to reopen the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations.'"
Read the Article

Anti-Mining Activists Killed in El Salvador
Amy Goodman, Democracy NOW!: "For the second time in a week, a prominent anti-mining activist has been assassinated in El Salvador. On Saturday, thirty-two-year-old Dora 'Alicia' Recinos Sorto was shot dead near her home. One of her children was injured in the shooting. Sorto was an active member of the Cabanas Environment Committee, which has campaigned against the reopening of a gold mine owned by the Vancouver-based Pacific Rim Mining Company."
Read the Article

McClatchy Washington report 12/30

Likely casualty of air plot: Obama's Guantanamo plans

The foiled Christmas Day plot to blow up a jetliner over Detroit has thrown up a major roadblock to President Barack Obama's pledge to close the prison camps at Guantanamo. Reports that alleged would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab trained in Yemen and that the plot was hatched by two former Guantanamo detainees have even supporters of emptying the prison predicting a new impediment to their effort. Half the current detainees are from Yemen.

Americans living at crossroads of Mideast diplomacy

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has offered a 10-month freeze on new settlement construction in the West Bank to get the Palestinians back to peace negotiations, but he's vowed to continue expanding the settlements around East Jerusalem. For the Americans who are the strongest supporters of the settler movement, there's no room for compromise.

Obama: Iintelligence community' blew air bomber tip

Obama blamed the intelligence community for failing to share "bits of information" that would have resulted in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab being placed on a no fly list after his father warned U.S. officials of his son's extremist views. "It now appears that weeks ago this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed so as to get the suspect's name on a no-fly list," Obama said.
Reid vows to force vote on TSA nominee DeMint blocked

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will force a vote on President Barack Obama's nominee to lead the Transportation Security Administration when the Senate reconvenes in three weeks. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who blocked an earlier effort to confirm TSA nominee Erroll Southers, accused Reid of "grandstanding." A Reid spokesman called DeMint "petty and vindictive."
High-tech airport scans work — too well, say opponents

Some legislators argue that the machines, which cost about $170,000 each and are in use at 19 U.S. airports, could have detected the explosive powder a 23-year-old Nigerian was carrying and should be approved for widespread use. Others, however, call a whole-body scan a "virtual strip search" that should be used only if there's probable cause.
Obama's remarks on the 'systemic failure' that led to the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253

The White House provided this transcript of Obama's remarks Tuesday on the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner in which he blamed the intelligence community for missing signs that might have prevented the suspect, Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, from boarding the place.
Anbar governor among the wounded in Iraq bombings

The three-pronged attack began at about 10 a.m. when a car bomb exploded at a busy intersection outside the Anbar government and police compound in the provincial capital of Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad — just as Anbar Gov. Qasim al Fahdawi prepared to leave the compound for a ground-breaking on a new project. At least 24 people died.
Texas Tech football coach Leach takes suspension to court

Tech officials suspended Mike Leach on Monday amid allegations he mistreated backup wide receiver Adam James after the James suffered a concussion during a Dec. 16 scrimmage. Leach's attorney, Ted Liggett, filed a motion for a temporary restraining order Tuesday in Lubbock. Tech plays Michigan State in the Alamo Bowl on Saturday, and Leach wants to coach the game.
Florida AG joins state officials contemplating health care lawsuit

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum directed his staff Tuesday to investigate the legality of requiring people to buy health insurance or face a penalty, a provision included in the federal health care reform bills before Congress. McCollum said the requirement sounded like a tax on living.
New California law on tracing bullet casings already in trouble

Beginning Friday, new semi-automatic handguns sold in California are supposed to include an innovative firing pin that stamps microscopic characters onto cartridge cases. It was intended to ensure that every bullet casing at a crime scene has a license number on it, traceable to a statewide gun database. But the law is on hold over details and patent fights.
Trouble coming? $128 million Powerball winner hires lawyer

A Kentucky Lottery official announced Tuesday a law firm representing the potential winner or winners of a $128.6 million Powerball jackpot has contacted the lottery. Chip Polston, vice president of communications for the Kentucky Lottery, said the attorneys did not give lottery officials any information about the winner, but did have the date and time the winning ticket was purchased.
Rail crossing horror: Trapped by traffic, mom backed into train

Hemmed in by cars on both sides of the railroad tracks, Deborah Bingham backed into the path of a speeding Amtrak train that killed her sleeping sons at a rail crossing in East Durham, N.C., according to a police report of the Dec. 9 incident released Tuesday. Four crossing gates descended after Bingham drove across three railroad tracks in heavy afternoon traffic a little after 5 p.m. One gate struck her windshield.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Truthout 12/29

Gaza Freedom March Rumbles Into Egyptian Security Services
Max Ajl, Truthout: "Lines of black-clad Egyptian riot police descended upon hundreds of French activists lining up in front of a rank of riot barriers separating the street and the sidewalk in front of the French Embassy in Cairo, locking the French activists into place. Dozens of police troop carriers lined the far side of the boulevard. Red water cannons sat behind them - palpably menacing. The French activists are part of the European Palestine solidarity group, EuroPalestine. They number about 300."
Read the Article

Dahr Jamail | Tracking the Sound of Revolution
Dahr Jamail, Truthout: "The band Junkyard Empire does not differentiate among music, message and life. Political Affairs magazine said, 'A jazz version of Rage Against the Machine, Minnesota-based Junkyard Empire blends jazz instrumentals, hip hop, and socially conscious lyrics to create a fresh sound ... this new Midwestern band has something to say.'"
Read the Article

US Intelligence Found Iran Nuke Document Was Forged
Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service: "US intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a 'neutron initiator' for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official."
Read the Article

What Was Really Decided in Copenhagen?
Brian Tokar, Truthout: "Detailed accounts from participants in the recent Copenhagen climate summit are still coming in, but a few things are already quite clear, even as countries step up the blame game in response to the summit's disappointing conclusion."
Read the Article

Who's Running the TSA? No One, Thanks to Sen. Jim DeMint
Margaret Talev, McClatchy Newspapers: "An attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration - if there were one. The post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) has held up President Barack Obama's nominee in opposition to the prospect of TSA workers joining a labor union."
Read the Article

Alexander Cockburn | A Decade Dies, a Movement Dies
Alexander Cockburn, Truthout: "Hazlitt got gloomily drunk for a fortnight after the battle of Waterloo, accurately anticipating that decades of reaction lay ahead, now that Boney had been definitely put away, with the Holy Alliance in the saddle and the French contagion safely bottled up. Smart fellow, that Hazlitt. He should have stayed drunk for a month."
Read the Article

Robert Naiman | US Press Ignores Egyptian Suppression of Gaza Freedom March
Robert Naiman, Truthout: "The government of Egypt is taking a spectacularly hard line against international solidarity efforts in support of civilians in Gaza on the one-year anniversary of the Israeli invasion, blocking peace marchers from the US, Canada and Europe from even approaching the Egyptian border with Gaza, and blocking an aid convoy that has the support of the Turkish government from entering Egypt at Nuweiba. Even a peaceful protest at UN offices in Cairo was largely walled off from public view by Egyptian police."
Read the Article

A Convenient Delusion
Earnest Partridge, The Crisis Papers: "The same sort of public relations wizardry that once convinced a sizable portion of Americans that cigarette smoking was harmless, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and had a hand in the 9/11 attacks, that Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet, and that John Kerry's war record was fraudulent, is now convincing an increasing number of our citizens that global warming is at least of little consequence, or, at most, a massive hoax."
Read the Article

Federal Appeals Court Sets Limits on Police Use of Tasers
Hudson Sangree and Kim Minugh, Sacramento Bee: "A federal appeals court on Monday issued one of the most comprehensive rulings yet limiting police use of Tasers against low-level offenders who seem to pose little threat and may be mentally ill. In a case out of San Diego County, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals criticized an officer who, without warning, shot an emotionally troubled man with a Taser when he was unarmed, yards away, and neither fleeing nor advancing on the officer."
Read the Article

Emmanuel Todd: "What Sarkozy Proposes Is Hatred of the Other"
Jean-Baptiste de Montvalon and Sylvia Zappi interview Emmaneul Todd for Le Monde: "A leader on the issue of social fracture that was taken up by Jacques Chirac during his 1995 presidential campaign, Emmanuel Todd has long observed the disconnect between the elite and working classes. For the first time, he confides his analysis of the debate over national identity. Without dissimulating his anger: 'If you are in power and you don't get anything accomplished on the economic front, the search for scapegoats at any price becomes second nature,' he deems."
Read the Article

Robert Parry | What the New Year Demands
Robert Parry, Consortium News: "The US political battle lines for 2010 are already clear. Despite having caused many of the severe problems the country faces, the Republicans and the Right are again in the ascendancy, having shifted the blame for most of the troubles onto President Barack Obama and the Democrats."
Read the Article

US Military Is Meeting Recruitment Goals With Video Games - but at What Cost?
Jamie Holmes, The Christian Science Monitor: "For the first time since the establishment of all-volunteer forces in 1973, the US military has met all of its recruiting goals. This success can be attributed in part to the new video games and graphic novels aimed at America's youth. It may sound like the US military has solved a major recruitment problem, but there may be a high cost."
Read the Article

The Sydney Awards II

By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times

On Friday, I gave out the first batch of Sidney Awards for the best magazine essays of the year. Frankly, it was disappointing to see how quickly some winners were corrupted by fame. Several have already abandoned their families, accepted spots on reality shows and begun hanging out with Lil Wayne. I’m hoping today’s winners will do a better job of keepin’ it real.

Steven Brill’s essay, “The Rubber Room,” in The New Yorker generated a lot of discussion. It’s about the room where New York City schoolteachers who have been dismissed for incompetence sit for years on end and continue to collect their six-figure salaries for doing nothing. The word Dickensian doesn’t fully describe the madness of a system that cannot get rid of bad teachers.

Brill takes readers inside the room, and describes the arbitration hearings for teachers who want to be reinstated. One hearing, with clear-cut evidence against the teacher, stretches on 50 per cent longer than the O.J. trial.

Few essays are as ruthlessly honest as Bethany Vaccaro’s piece, “Shock Waves,” in The American Scholar. Vaccaro’s brother Robert suffered a brain injury, caused by an I.E.D. explosion in Iraq in January 2007.

Vaccaro describes her first glimpse of him weeks after the explosion at Bethesda Naval Hospital. “Robert was swollen and bloated; his skin was puffy and enamel white. He looked worse than dead and somehow a bit reptilian.” But the real subject of the essay is the injury’s effect on her family. “Now it defines our daily existence. The ongoing process of rehabilitation since his injury has tenaciously enmeshed each one of us, altering our plans, our family structure and interactions, our ideas about life and sacrifice, and most resolutely our belief that if he would only make it back home, everything would be O.K.”

Robert’s injury, she writes, has “allowed him to come so close to being normal, and yet miss it altogether ... He will frequently prattle away with wide-eyed seriousness and then collapse into silly laughter that is sweet and uninhibited but also sad coming from a 25-year-old man.”

After the Israeli incursion into Gaza, the U.N. produced the Goldstone Report, a tendentious and simple-minded account of Israeli tactics. But the report at least produced a sophisticated response, “The Goldstone Illusion,” by Moshe Halbertal in The New Republic.

Here’s a typical problem: Hamas fires rockets from apartment buildings. Israel calls the residents of the buildings to warn them a counterattack is coming. Hamas then escorts the residents to the roof, knowing Israeli drones will not fire on crowded roofs. Israel then deploys a “roof-knocking missile,” a weapon designed to scare people off roofs in preparation for an attack. Halbertal wrestles with the moral boundaries that should guide this kind of warfare.

On the big think front, Josef Joffe has a bracing essay, “The Default Power,” in Foreign Affairs, puncturing the claims that America is in decline. William M. Chace wrote “The Decline of the English Department” in The American Scholar on why fewer and fewer college students major in the humanities.

Jim Manzi’s essay, “Keeping America’s Edge,” in National Affairs, explores two giant problems. First, widening inequality; second, economic stagnation, the fear that without rapid innovation, the U.S. will fall behind China and other rising powers.

Manzi investigates a dilemma. Most efforts to expand the welfare state to tackle inequality will slow innovation. Efforts to free up enterprise, meanwhile, will only exacerbate inequality because the already educated will benefit most from information economy growth.

In her Policy Review essay, “Is Food the New Sex?,” Mary Eberstadt notes that people in modern societies are freer to consume more food and sex than their ancestors. But this has produced a paradox. For most of human history, food was a matter of taste while sex was governed by universal moral laws. Now the situation is nearly reversed. Food has become enmeshed in moralism while the privacy of the bedroom is sacred. Eberstadt asks why, and provides a philosophical answer.

It’s become fashionable to bash Malcolm Gladwell for being too interesting and not theoretical enough. This is absurd. Gladwell’s pieces in The New Yorker are always worth reading, so I’ll just pick out one, “Offensive Play,” on the lingering effects of football violence, for a Sidney award — in part to celebrate his work and in part as protest against the envious herd.

There are, of course, many other essays that, in a less arbitrary world, would get Sidneys. Fortunately there are a few Web sites that provide daily links to the best that is thought and said. Arts and Letters Daily is the center of high-toned linkage on the Web. The Browser is a trans-Atlantic site with a superb eye for the interesting and the profound. Book Forum has a more academic feel, but it is also worth a daily read.

McClatchy Washington report 12/29

Who's running the TSA? No one, thanks to Sen. Jim DeMint

An attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration — if there were one. Instead, the post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has held up President Barack Obama's nominee in an effort to prevent TSA workers from joining a labor union.

Supreme Court has saved toughest cases for second half

When justices return on Jan. 11 for their next oral arguments, they'll be dealing with the cases for which the term is likely to be remembered. Some of the disputes the court will hear: Do restrictions on corporate political donations violate the First Amendment? Do cities and states violate the Second Amendment when they ban gun possession? Can Congress prohibit videos that purportedly depict animal cruelty, such as one that shows pit bulls attacking a domestic pig? Does the National Football League's tightly controlled licensing of hats and apparel violate antitrust laws?

U.S. intelligence: 'Time is running out' in Afghanistan

As the Obama administration and its European allies face dwindling public and political support for the eight-year-old Afghan war, the Taliban now have what a top intelligence official in Afghanistan called a "government-in-waiting," complete with Cabinet ministers, that could assume power if the U.S.-backed government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai fails. The Taliban now have shadow governors in 33 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, including those in the north, where U.S. and other officials had thought the Islamic extremists posed less of a threat.
Federal appeals court sets limits on police use of Tasers

The ruling, which applies only to the western United States, is one of the harshest to date in questioning the increasing use of Tasers by police departments. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a police officer in San Diego County, Calif., employed "excessive force" when without warning he shot an emotionally troubled man with a Taser when the man was unarmed, yards away, and neither fleeing nor advancing.
Levi-Bristol custody fight over Palin grandchild will be public

A judge last week ruled against a request by Bristol Palin that the case be kept sealed. Palin filed a petition for full legal and physical custody Nov. 4. She argued that she and her family provided almost all of the care anyway and asserted that "Levi is not yet mature enough to take on significant parental responsibilities." She also is seeking court-ordered child support.
Not mad at Tiger Woods over his affairs? Then read this

Two University of California, Davis, professors have concluded that investors in firms that sponsored Tiger Woods lost $12 billion in the stock market in the days after Woods' love troubles became public. They reached that conclusion by comparing what happened to nine sponsors' stock prices to the market in general and their closest competitors and found the decline unlikely to stem from ordinary price variations.
Man pleads not guilty to shooting a sea lion in California

Larry Allen Legans, 43, of North Highlands, Calif., faces a single felony charge of animal cruelty for allegedly shooting the sea lion Nov. 11 while fishing from his boat on the Sacramento River near Verona, Calif. The case became a cause celebre after dozens of people saw the injured sea lion on a dock near the Old Sacramento waterfront.
Thailand's ejection of Hmong refugees to Laos raises alarms

On Monday, the Thai military loaded more than 4,300 Hmong asylum seekers — residents of one of that country's largest refugee camps — into trucks and sent them home to their native Laos, forcibly repatriating them to a country many of them fear. In Sacramento, their relatives worried.
Immigration: Man adopted as infant is deported to Mexico

Robin Whiteley was an infant when his parents adopted him and brought him to Texas. But the complicated immigration paperwork wasn't done properly and he never became a U.S. citizen. Now 35, Whiteley was deported to Mexico afer a drug conviction. Now his sister is fighting to get him back.
80-year-old man charged with bank robbery attempt

Augusta Cannon was arrested Monday after the pastor of a south Kansas City church and several congregation members told authorities they recognized him from a bank surveillance photo published in The Kansas City Star.
Disaster brewing in Miami's commercial real estate market

Miami's commercial real estate market is already on the ropes, but it's likely to get worse: Two behemoth office towersare to be completed next year and another tower might open in 2011. That will dump hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space on the market and drag down any hopes of job-generating new construction.
Here are five online etiquette faux pas to avoid in 2010

Social media is constantly evolving, and tools like Twitter were new for tons of people this year -- especially folks trying to jump on the trend and use it as a business and customer relations tool. So today we count down the five worst (and most frequently committed) online faux pas that we witnessed in 2009. Hopefully, history won't repeat itself in 2010.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Truthout 12/28

Scott Galindez | We Won Round One on Health Care
Scott Galindez, Truthout: "There are widespread opinions out there on the Senate version of health care reform. I understand people's frustration with how 'Traitor Joe' Lieberman and 'Ben Arnold' Nelson held the Senate bill hostage. A robust public option would have been a great start to the real reforms needed to fix our broken health care system. Traitor Joe and Ben Arnold succeeded; there will not be a robust public option ... Many are saying it's better to just let the bill die and start over. I disagree, and here is why."
Read the Article

After Sunday Clashes in Iran, "Green Movement" Supporters Take Stock
Iason Athanasiadis, The Christian Science Monitor: "The young, unemployed college graduate joined Sunday’s bloody anti-regime protests in Tehran even after an army friend of his warned him that Iran's security forces might use live rounds. After several hours on the Iranian capital’s smoky streets, he returned home in a daze. 'People took the fight to the police in several places, attacking them with stones for the first time,' he said, asking that his name not be used. 'We saw them overturn a police jeep and set it alight.' The pace of change in demonstrators' attitudes has accelerated, he said."
Read the Article

Afghanistan Escalation a Bad Sign for the Country's Environment
Joshua Frank, Truthout: "Shipping off 30,000 more troops to the land of the Taliban may be infuriating to devoted antiwar activists, but the toll the Afghanistan war is having on the environment should also force nature lovers into the streets in protest. Natural habitat in Afghanistan has endured decades of struggle, and the War on Terror has only escalated the destruction."
Read the Article

Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff | Inside the Military-Industrial-Media Complex: Impacts on Movement for Social Justice
Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, Truthout: "Among the most important corporate media censored news stories of the past decade, one must be that over one million people have died because of the United States' military invasion and occupation of Iraq. This, of course, does not include the number of deaths from the first Gulf War nor the ensuing sanctions placed upon the country of Iraq that, combined, caused close to an additional one million Iraqi deaths."
Read the Article

Dean Baker | Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Just a Four-Letter Word?
Dean Baker, Truthout: "The TARP, along with the much larger lending programs from the Federal Reserve Board and the FDIC, succeeded in preventing the financial system from collapsing. The banks are now back on their feet, with near-record profits and near-record bonuses for the executives who are so skilled in getting public money. The largest banks have now repaid their TARP money, with many smaller banks anxious to follow suit in order to avoid troubling questions about how they have used their taxpayer dollars. The major exception to the happy picture in the financial sector is the plight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."
Read the Article

Tobacco: The (Small) Photo Shock
G.V., Le JDD: "Already employed in several countries, photos showing the dangers of tobacco will soon ornament cigarette packs sold in France. Nonetheless, the minister of health has settled for replicating the measures taken by our European neighbors."
Read the Article

Dick Meister | Rights, Finally, for Airport Screeners
Dick Meister, Truthout: "The underpaid, overworked and otherwise poorly treated airport screeners, who are essential to air passenger safety, may finally be winning their long struggle for the badly needed union rights guaranteed other federal employees."
Read the Article

Stephen Rohde | We Want Our Flag Back
Stephen Rohde, LA Daily Journal: "'If you had told me ten years ago that our government would be deliberately holding people in captivity on a naval base outside the US mainland so that we could do whatever we wanted to them without the intervention of US courts, I would have told you that you had been watching too many miniseries on TV.' These outraged words from Julia Tarver Mason, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City, are typical of the over 100 personal narratives written by lawyers, translators and others who have represented and assisted the detainees at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which have been collected in the new book 'THE GUANTANAMO LAWYERS: Inside a Prison Outside the Law.'"
Read the Article

Froma Harrop | The Future of Paper
Froma Harrop, Truthout: "All through the long winter night, my digital gadgets lay snug in their recharging docks as Enya crooned on the iPod. It was on such a wintertide eve last December that I resolved to figure out all the things these wonderful devices could do - other than have me tend to their ravenous energy needs and update their programs. Some of them seemed to be taking advantage of my gentle nature."
Read the Article

Jim Hightower | Hoping for a New Ethic in 2010
Jim Hightower, Truthout: "This special season got me to thinking about America's spirit of giving, and I don't mean this overdone business of Christmas gifts. I mean our true spirit of giving - giving of ourselves. Yes, we are a country of rugged individualists, yet there's also a deep, community-minded streak in each of us."
Read the Article

Michael N. Nagler | Afghanistan: What Would a Real Policy Look Like?
Michael N. Nagler, Truthout: "At a Washington meeting some years back, Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia said to a group of us who had come to discuss Mideast policy, 'All foreign policy is domestic politics.' The recently announced 'surge' of 30,000 additional troops for Afghanistan was designed to placate political pressures on the president, which, even if it were possible, is not the right way to formulate a policy. What would be?"
Read the Article

In New Gas Wells, More Drilling Chemicals Remain Underground
Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica: "For more than a decade, the energy industry has steadfastly argued before courts, Congress and the public that the federal law protecting drinking water should not be applied to hydraulic fracturing, the industrial process that is essential to extracting the nation's vast natural gas reserves. In 2005 Congress, persuaded, passed a law prohibiting such regulation. Now an important part of that argument - that most of the millions of gallons of toxic chemicals that drillers inject underground are removed for safe disposal, and are not permanently discarded inside the earth - does not apply to drilling in many of the nation's booming new gas fields."
Read the Article

Race to Replace Missouri's Kit Bond Becoming One to Watch
Steve Kraske and Dave Helling, The Kansas City Star: "The likely pairing of Democrat Robin Carnahan and Republican Roy Blunt in a race for a seat in the US Senate is fully under way, with general agreement that it will be among the most-watched races in the nation next year. After a year of primping and posing by both candidates, the race is close. Very close. 'It's a 50-50 race in a 50-50 state,' Blunt said."
Read the Article

The Big Zero

By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times

Maybe we knew, at some unconscious, instinctive level, that it would be an era best forgotten. Whatever the reason, we got through the first decade of the new millennium without ever agreeing on what to call it. The aughts? The naughties? Whatever. (Yes, I know that strictly speaking the millennium didn’t begin until 2001. Do we really care?)

But from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. O.K., the headline employment number for December 2009 will be slightly higher than that for December 1999, but only slightly. And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened.

It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.

It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early: right now housing prices, adjusted for inflation, are roughly back to where they were at the beginning of the decade. And for those who bought in the decade’s middle years — when all the serious people ridiculed warnings that housing prices made no sense, that we were in the middle of a gigantic bubble — well, I feel your pain. Almost a quarter of all mortgages in America, and 45 percent of mortgages in Florida, are underwater, with owners owing more than their houses are worth.

Last and least for most Americans — but a big deal for retirement accounts, not to mention the talking heads on financial TV — it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. Remember the excitement when the Dow first topped 10,000, and best-selling books like “Dow 36,000” predicted that the good times would just keep rolling? Well, that was back in 1999. Last week the market closed at 10,520.

So there was a whole lot of nothing going on in measures of economic progress or success. Funny how that happened.

For as the decade began, there was an overwhelming sense of economic triumphalism in America’s business and political establishments, a belief that we — more than anyone else in the world — knew what we were doing.

Let me quote from a speech that Lawrence Summers, then deputy Treasury secretary (and now the Obama administration’s top economist), gave in 1999. “If you ask why the American financial system succeeds,” he said, “at least my reading of the history would be that there is no innovation more important than that of generally accepted accounting principles: it means that every investor gets to see information presented on a comparable basis; that there is discipline on company managements in the way they report and monitor their activities.” And he went on to declare that there is “an ongoing process that really is what makes our capital market work and work as stably as it does.”

So here’s what Mr. Summers — and, to be fair, just about everyone in a policy-making position at the time — believed in 1999: America has honest corporate accounting; this lets investors make good decisions, and also forces management to behave responsibly; and the result is a stable, well-functioning financial system.

What percentage of all this turned out to be true? Zero.

What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.

Even as the dot-com bubble deflated, credulous bankers and investors began inflating a new bubble in housing. Even after famous, admired companies like Enron and WorldCom were revealed to have been Potemkin corporations with facades built out of creative accounting, analysts and investors believed banks’ claims about their own financial strength and bought into the hype about investments they didn’t understand. Even after triggering a global economic collapse, and having to be rescued at taxpayers’ expense, bankers wasted no time going right back to the culture of giant bonuses and excessive leverage.

Then there are the politicians. Even now, it’s hard to get Democrats, President Obama included, to deliver a full-throated critique of the practices that got us into the mess we’re in. And as for the Republicans: now that their policies of tax cuts and deregulation have led us into an economic quagmire, their prescription for recovery is — tax cuts and deregulation.

So let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing. Will the next decade be better? Stay tuned. Oh, and happy New Year.

McClatchy Washington Report 12/28

Obama orders probe of security gaps that let suspect on plane

President Barack Obama has ordered an investigation into possible U.S. security gaps that enabled a Nigerian man of known extremist leanings to keep his U.S. visa, smuggle explosives aboard a Christmas Day passenger flight and ignite them. Members of Congress said Friday's foiled attack exposed apparent security weaknesses.

Environmental case shows need for tougher regulation, critics say

A 562-foot smokestack that spewed a plume of arsenic, lead and other heavy metals over 1,000 square miles of Washington state's Puget Sound for nearly a century remains a fitting symbol of the largest environmental bankruptcy in U.S. history. However, it also tells a cautionary tale of how a company that's intent on shedding its environmental liabilities could manipulate the nation's bankruptcy system.

War on fat: California trans-fat ban goes into effect Friday

California will bar restaurants from cooking with trans fat beginning New Year's Day, becoming the first state to crack down on the substance tied to clogged arteries, strokes and coronary heart disease. The ban is hailed by supporters as a way to protect diners who routinely have not been aware of consuming trans fat at some restaurants because they don't see the meals cooked or the ingredients used.
GOP's internal wars are playing out in Placer County, Calif.

Tom Hudson, the chairman of the Republican Central Committee in Placer County, Calif., has been drafting candidates to run against sitting GOP officeholders in a local version of what's taking place at the national level as the party struggles between its conservative and moderate wings. Hudson says he's just trying to protect the brand by ousting people he says are liberals posing as Republicans.
Texas prosecutor who brought down Tom DeLay to run for lieutenant governor

Former Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle filed Friday to seek the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor. Earle said he concluded that the governor is too encumbered by "ceremonial duties" and that the lieutenant governor has a much greater role in shaping policy. Outgoing Houston Mayor Bill White's decision to run for governor as a Democrat also likely helped shape Earle's plans.
Scenes from the small-business lending wars

Starting in December 2008, Tari Dudley tried to get financing for a woman-owned, woman-friendly auto repair garage by approaching a large national bank where she had been a customer for 24 years. She had $47,000 in assets and was told that her credit score was excellent. But the loan officer didn't bother to hand her an application. Two community banks also said "no."
S. Carolina police charge 4 under lynching law in man's death

Authorities have arrested four men in a Christmas night beating that left a Charlotte, N.C., man dead in Indian Land, S.C. All four were charged Saturday with first-degree lynching in the killing of Ronnie Wallace, 42. Under South Carolina law, first-degree lynching is defined as a mob attack by two or more people that results in the victim's death. It doesn't relate to the victim's race or actual hanging.
What ails Florida coach Urban Meyer has a lot to do with stress

The medical conditions that drove University of Florida football coach to announce his resignation, then a leave of absence, just days ahead of Friday's Sugar Bowl game include chest pains and an arachnoid cyst on his brain. On Sunday, he wouldn't be specific about what medical procedures would be necessary to treat his ailments, but a stress-free environment seems to be a requirement.
Despite Obama's campaign vow, federal budget still a mess

2009 was supposed to be the year that federal budgeting was finally done smoothly and efficiently. It didn't happen. Spending on discretionary items, or those under White House and congressional control, is expected to run about 4 percent higher than last year, well above the rate of inflation. Still, that's less than the 7.5 percent annual average increase of the last 10 years.
Feds probing Congress' ties to disgraced banker Stanford

Just hours after federal agents charged banker Allen Stanford with fleecing investors of $7 billion, the disgraced financier received a message from one of Congress' most powerful members, Pete Sessions. Now the Justice Department is investigating millions of dollars Stanford and his staff contributed to lawmakers over the past decade while building his spectacular offshore bank in Antigua.
If GOP wins big in 2010, credit California's Rep. McCarthy

With visions of a Republican majority dancing in his head, California U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy is driving the back roads of America these days, looking for fresh faces to represent his party in 2010. To regain control of the House of Representatives, Republicans must pick up 41 seats. If they do, it will be at least partly because of McCarthy's recruiting efforts.
Couple celebrates 70 years of giving in on arguments

He's 95. She's 90. Roy and Marcia Zahrobsky met when he walked into her dad's grocery store in Hampton, Iowa, back in the '30s to get some lunch. Then one day he came up and asked her if she was going to the dance. Before you know it, a depression, a world war and a few decades later, here they are, celebrating their 70th wedding anniversary in a nursing home in Muldoon, Alaska.

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Truthout 12/27

Kirk Nielsen | Autumn of the Republic?
Kirk Nielsen, Miller-McCune: "Did America slip into a semiliterate, polarized, pre-fascist state over the past decade or so, allowing greedy oligarchs and corporate elites to run the government? Two books I recently read offer reasonably persuasive evidence and arguments that the country did, and a third suggests that dictatorial mindsets could besiege Americans, with an assist from the Internet, if they don't come to their more deliberative senses."
Read the Article

Joshua Holland | In (Very Reluctant) "Defense" of the Insurance Mandate
Joshua Holland, AlterNet: "I have no interest in defending the mandate that individuals buy an insurance policy. I think it's self-evident that coercing people to shell out their hard-earned cash to Big Insurance is a distinctly sucky thing."
Read the Article

David Bacon | The Racial Diversity of Hunger
David Bacon, East Bay Express: "Everyone knows that Oakland is diverse. Probably more people from more races and nationalities live in the city than anywhere west of New York or north of Los Angeles. But before we celebrate diversity, think of its most diverse places. Some of them are surely the lines of hungry people lining up for food."
Read the Article

The Lingering Bush Legacy: What to do About Those Tax Cuts
Kevin G. Hall, McClatchy Newspapers: "In the back of every Washington politician's mind is this sobering fact: Unless Congress acts, the temporary tax cuts it passed when George W. Bush was president will expire at the end of next year. If the Democrats who control Congress do nothing and let the tax rates on the highest income brackets return to their pre-2001 levels, their Republican rivals and many Americans will slam them as tax hikers."
Read the Article

Tsunami Recovery Hit by Corruption, Apathy
Marwaan Macan-Markar, Inter Press Service: "Questions that have dogged the tsunami recovery effort through 2006 coalesced in a crop of media stories and critical reports as affected countries remembered in prayer and reflection the over 220,000 people killed in that December 2004 natural disaster. The Dec. 24 headline in the lead story of a Thai English Language daily, 'The Nation,' could not have expressed this concern more bluntly. 'Where did our tsunami cash go?'"
Read the Article

Dick Meister | A Lesson Too Long Unlearned
Dick Meister, Truthout: "Despite the importance of unions in our lives, our schools pay only slight attention to that importance - or even to their existence. Little is done in the classroom to overcome the negative view of organized labor held by many Americans; little is done to explain the true nature of organized labor."
Read the Article

The Sidney awards

By DAVID BROOKS

Every year, I give out Sidney Awards to the best magazine essays of the year. In an age of zipless, electronic media, the idea is to celebrate (and provide online links to) long-form articles that have narrative drive and social impact.

The first rule of the Sidneys is that they cannot go to any article that appeared in The Times. So David Rohde does not get a Sidney for his unforgettable series on being held captive by the Taliban. But those pieces possess exactly the virtues that the Sidneys are meant to honor, and they make one proud to be a journalist.

This year, magazines had a powerful effect on the health care debate. Atul Gawande’s piece, “The Cost Conundrum,” in The New Yorker, was the most influential essay of 2009, and David Goldhill’s “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” in The Atlantic, explained why the U.S. needs fundamental health reform. But special recognition should also go to Jonathan Rauch’s delightful essay, “Fasten Your Seat Belts — It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Flight,” in The National Journal.

Rauch described what the airline industry would look like if it worked the way the health care industry works. The piece takes the form of a customer trying to book a flight with a customer service representative. The customer wants to fly from Washington, D.C., to Oregon on Oct. 3, but the airline lady can squeeze him in only in January or February. He can call each of two dozen other airlines if he wants to check other availability.

When he finally gets on a flight, he finds that his airline will only take him to Chicago, since it’s an eastern-region specialist. He’ll have to find a western-region specialist to get to Eugene. In addition, he’ll have to fax in a 30-page travel history questionnaire, make arrangements with a separate luggage transport provider and see if he can find a fuelist who might be free to make fuel arrangements on that date. That is, if the airline is in his insurance company’s provider network, which it isn’t.

The most powerful essay I read this year was David Grann’s “Trial by Fire” in The New Yorker. Grann investigated the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for murdering his three children by setting their house on fire.

In the first part of the essay, Grann lays out the evidence that led to Willingham’s conviction: the marks on the floor and walls that suggested that a fire accelerant had been splashed around; the distinct smoke patterns suggesting arson; the fact that Willingham was able to flee the house barefoot without burning his feet.

Then, in the rest of the essay, Grann raises grave doubts about that evidence. He tells the story of a few people who looked into the matter, found a miscarriage of justice and then had their arguments ignored as Willingham was put to death. Grann painstakingly describes how bogus science may have swayed the system to kill an innocent man, but at the core of the piece there are the complex relationships that grew up around a man convicted of burning his children. If you can still support the death penalty after reading this piece, you have stronger convictions than I do.

I try not to give Sidneys to the same people year after year, but the fact is, talent is not randomly distributed. Some people, like Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard, just know how to write. His piece, “A Rake’s Progress” was a sympathetic and gripping profile of Marion Barry, the former Washington, D.C., mayor, crack-smoker and recent girlfriend-stalker.

At the start of his first interview, Labash, making small talk, asked Barry if he still has a scar from an old bullet wound: “ ‘Let’s see,’ he says, lifting his shirt, so that within ten minutes of arriving, I’m eyeball to areola with Barry’s left nipple. It’s a move that’s very Barry. Most times, he reveals nothing at all. Then he reveals too much.”

Labash delights in Barry’s rascally nature, but also captures why the voters of Barry’s ward don’t merely vote for him, they possess him and cherish him.

The region around Afghanistan is now regarded as a global backwater, but S. Frederick Starr’s “Rediscovering Central Asia,” in The Wilson Quarterly, is an eye-opening look at what once was. A thousand years ago, those mountains were the intellectual center of the world. Central Asians invented trigonometry, used crystallization as a means of purification, estimated the Earth’s diameter with astonishing precision and anticipated Darwin’s theory of evolution. Starr describes glittering cities and a flowering of genius. He also describes the long decline — the Sunni-Shia split played a role — and modern glimmers of revival.

On Tuesday, we will publish another batch of Sidney winners, so turn off “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Read these today.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Truthout 12/26

Top Army Commander Rescinds Controversial Order Criminalizing Pregnancy
Jason Leopold, Truthout: "A controversial policy implemented last month by the Army general commanding soldiers in Northern Iraq that criminalized pregnancy was rescinded following an outcry from women's groups and fierce criticism by four Democratic lawmakers."
Read the Article

Passengers Thwart Attempted Terrorist Attack on Plane
Matt Renner, Truhtout: "A man attempted to ignite an incendiary device aboard a Delta Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit Friday, an incident government officials are classifying as 'an attempted act of terrorism,' according to an unnamed White House source quoted in various reports."
Read the Article

David Sirota | What Happens When We Can't Trust the Verifiers?
David Sirota: "This month, a British government report admitted that one of the major rationales for invading Iraq - the claim that Saddam could deploy WMDs in 45 minutes - probably came from a cab driver. Had the public originally been told about this sketchy sourcing, there may have been a more, ahem, forceful mass opposition to pre-emptive war in the Middle East. It's a good lesson about the need for transparency."
Read the Article

What Congress' Health Care Overhaul Likely Means for You
Jordan Rau, Kaiser Health News: "Now that the Senate has passed a hotly debated health care bill, Congress is headed to the next step: House of Representatives-Senate negotiations in January to hammer out a final version. Given the Senate's difficulty in passing a bill, the final legislation is likely to tilt strongly toward that chamber's version. Here's where things stand and how you might be affected."
Read the Article

A Peek Inside Sarah Palin's Diary
Bernard Weiner, Truthout: "Dear Diary: It's been helter-skelter around here these days. Actually, there is no 'here.' I'm on the road every day, mostly at book signings for 'Going Rogue.' Turns out I'm real popular in the real America. You betcha."
Read the Article

Argentina's "Disappeared:" Justice At Last or Reneging on Amnesty?
Sam Ferguson, The Christian Science Monitor: "Just outside Buenos Aires, in the depths of the Rio de la Plata and the South Atlantic, lie the remains of thousands of bodies. A generation ago, officials from Argentina's Naval Mechanics School, known by its Spanish acronym, ESMA, secretly loaded drugged prisoners into aircraft and threw them out over the brown and frigid waters. As many as 5,000 people were 'disappeared' at the hands of ESMA, perhaps the most horrifying symbol of South American repression in the 1970s."
Read the Article

Tsunami Anniversary Marks Fragile Peace in Aceh
Peter Gelling, GlobalPost: "It was five years ago today that a tsunami, triggered by a 9.1-magnitude earthquake, ripped through Indonesia’s northernmost province of Aceh and 10 other countries, killing more than 226,000 people. It was Aceh that would bear the brunt of the tsunami’s force, which killed 170,000 people here, 35,000 of whom were never found."
Read the Article

Friday, December 25, 2009

Tidings of comfort

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Indulge me while I tell you a story — a near-future version of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” It begins with sad news: young Timothy Cratchit, a k a Tiny Tim, is sick. And his treatment will cost far more than his parents can pay out of pocket.

Fortunately, our story is set in 2014, and the Cratchits have health insurance. Not from their employer: Ebenezer Scrooge doesn’t do employee benefits. And just a few years earlier they wouldn’t have been able to buy insurance on their own because Tiny Tim has a pre-existing condition, and, anyway, the premiums would have been out of their reach.

But reform legislation enacted in 2010 banned insurance discrimination on the basis of medical history and also created a system of subsidies to help families pay for coverage. Even so, insurance doesn’t come cheap — but the Cratchits do have it, and they’re grateful. God bless us, everyone.

O.K., that was fiction, but there will be millions of real stories like that in the years to come. Imperfect as it is, the legislation that passed the Senate on Thursday and will probably, in a slightly modified version, soon become law will make America a much better country.

So why are so many people complaining? There are three main groups of critics.

First, there’s the crazy right, the tea party and death panel people — a lunatic fringe that is no longer a fringe but has moved into the heart of the Republican Party. In the past, there was a general understanding, a sort of implicit clause in the rules of American politics, that major parties would at least pretend to distance themselves from irrational extremists. But those rules are no longer operative. No, Virginia, at this point there is no sanity clause.

A second strand of opposition comes from what I think of as the Bah Humbug caucus: fiscal scolds who routinely issue sententious warnings about rising debt. By rights, this caucus should find much to like in the Senate health bill, which the Congressional Budget Office says would reduce the deficit, and which — in the judgment of leading health economists — does far more to control costs than anyone has attempted in the past.

But, with few exceptions, the fiscal scolds have had nothing good to say about the bill. And in the process they have revealed that their alleged concern about deficits is, well, humbug. As Slate’s Daniel Gross says, what really motivates them is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is receiving social insurance.”

Finally, there has been opposition from some progressives who are unhappy with the bill’s limitations. Some would settle for nothing less than a full, Medicare-type, single-payer system. Others had their hearts set on the creation of a public option to compete with private insurers. And there are complaints that the subsidies are inadequate, that many families will still have trouble paying for medical care.

Unlike the tea partiers and the humbuggers, disappointed progressives have valid complaints. But those complaints don’t add up to a reason to reject the bill. Yes, it’s a hackneyed phrase, but politics is the art of the possible.

The truth is that there isn’t a Congressional majority in favor of anything like single-payer. There is a narrow majority in favor of a plan with a moderately strong public option. The House has passed such a plan. But given the way the Senate rules work, it takes 60 votes to do almost anything. And that fact, combined with total Republican opposition, has placed sharp limits on what can be enacted.

If progressives want more, they’ll have to make changing those Senate rules a priority. They’ll also have to work long term on electing a more progressive Congress. But, meanwhile, the bill the Senate has just passed, with a few tweaks — I’d especially like to move the start date up from 2014, if that’s at all possible — is more or less what the Democratic leadership can get.

And for all its flaws and limitations, it’s a great achievement. It will provide real, concrete help to tens of millions of Americans and greater security to everyone. And it establishes the principle — even if it falls somewhat short in practice — that all Americans are entitled to essential health care.

Many people deserve credit for this moment. What really made it possible was the remarkable emergence of universal health care as a core principle during the Democratic primaries of 2007-2008 — an emergence that, in turn, owed a lot to progressive activism. (For what it’s worth, the reform that’s being passed is closer to Hillary Clinton’s plan than to President Obama’s). This made health reform a must-win for the next president. And it’s actually happening.

So progressives shouldn’t stop complaining, but they should congratulate themselves on what is, in the end, a big win for them — and for America.

Truthout 12/25

Anniversary of TVA Coal Ash Spill as Forgotten as the Disaster Itself
Glynn Wilson, Truthout: "On the third day before Christmas in 2008, the people living along the Emory River in East Tennessee were listening to songs about a 'white Christmas' like everybody else in the country, trying to look forward and not back. A new president was in the White House who promised 'hope' after eight years of war and unprecedented corruption, as well as the increasing economic hardship that was squeezing the middle class like a juggernaut. Instead of a white Christmas, though, people like Steve Scarborough of the Dagger Kayak and Canoe Company woke up to a black-gray mess of epic proportions, a river full of toxic coal ash from the Tennessee Valley Authority's coal-fired power plant at Kingston, Tennessee."
Read the Article

GOP's McConnell Vows to Keep Battling Health Care Overhaul
Halimah Abdullah, McClatchy Newspapers: "Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to keep fighting efforts to pass a massive health care overall even as Democratic leaders declared victory following an early morning Christmas Eve vote on the Senate version of the legislation."
Read the Article

Video: Pope Assaulted, but Not Injured at Christmas Mass
Truthout: "As Pope Benedict XVI entered St. Peter's Basilica to celebrate Christmas Eve Mass, a woman jumped the guard rail and dragged him to the ground. The Pope was not injured and preformed the ceremony and delivered the traditional Christmas message to the thousands gathered for the event."
Read the Article

The Christmas Truce of 1914
Paul J. Magnarella, Truthout: "Although World War I ranks as one of the most horrific in history, causing about 40 million casualties and up to 20 million military and civilian deaths, it also included a famous and spontaneous peaceful interlude inscribed in chronicles as the unofficial Christmas truce of 1914."
Read the Article

In Cuba, Christmas Makes Cautious Return
Nick Miroff, GlobalPost: "It’s been more than a decade since Christmas was restored to national holiday status on this communist-run island, but don’t confuse the kindly old man with the bushy white beard on government billboards for the jolly fellow in the flying sleigh. That’s Karl Marx up there, not Kris Kringle."
Read the Article

Eugene Robinson | Christmas Cheer at Last
Eugene Robinson, Op-Ed: "Christmas came early for journalists this year. Thank you, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, for being the gift that keeps on giving. The gate-crashers who upstaged President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama at the administration's first White House state dinner turned out not to be mere garden-variety poseurs."
Read the Article

In Romania, Ceausescu's Death Haunts Christmas
Sinziana Demian, GlobalPost: "Twenty years ago, as Romanians were celebrating their first free holiday in decades, they rejoiced at the news that dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena had been shot dead on Christmas day. It was the ultimate proof that the communist regime had crumbled irrevocably and that the late-December revolution had indeed succeeded."
Read the Article

McClatchy Washington Report 12/25

What Congress' health care overhaul likely means for you

Now that the Senate has passed a hotly debated health care bill, Congress is headed to the next step: House of Representatives-Senate negotiations in January to hammer out a final version. Given the Senate's difficulty in passing a bill, the final legislation is likely to tilt strongly toward that chamber's version. Here's where things stand and how you might be affected.

A gift of renewed life: How do you thank someone for that?

It was no secret that Mark Rhodes was on dialysis and needed a kidney. He had been on the church's prayer list for months. He never expected, however, a fellow church member he barely knew to offer him one of her own.

GOP's McConnell vows to keep battling health care overhaul

The Obama administration and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won a critical and protracted battle over the shape and scope of Senate health care legislation that raged for weeks. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, however, he plans to make certain the Democratic victoryis not the last word on health care.
Senate health care bill also has benefits for Florida seniors

It's not just the so-called Nebraska compromise that has raised hackles about the Senate's version of health care overhaul. In addition to a provision to pay Nebraska's costs of expanded Medicaid coverage, won by Sen. Ben Nelson in exchange for his support of the bill, the Senate bill also has a provision that would let 800,000 Florida seniors keep their Medicare Advantage plans.
Rare Christmas blizzard roils travel in central U.S.

The center of the country awoke to a white Christmas — it was the first time more than a sprinkling of snow had fallen in the Dallas-Fort Worth area on Christmas Day since 1926 — amid warnings that travel would be hazardous. Air travel was disrupted throughout the Midwest on Thursday by snow and high winds.
The upside to California's budget crisis: Fewer new laws

California's budget coffers are emptier than a politician's promise, but there may be a silver lining to the state's dark financial clouds: Fewer new laws. Legislators approved only 872 bills in their 2009 regular session, and just 632 have become or will become law by Jan. 1. While that may seem like a lot of laws, it's the fewest bills passed in more than 40 years.
Police still investigating how NFL's Chris Henry fell from truck

The investigation into the death of NFL wide receiver Chris Henry is still open, with Charlotte-Mecklenburg police planning to re-interview his fiancee and other witnesses who may have heard or seen the couple arguing. Loleini Tonga, 25, was driving the Ford F150 pickup Henry was standing in Dec. 16 just before he was injured and then later died.
Copper theft disables part of Sacramento's lightrail system

Early Christmas Eve morning, thieves stole copper wire from light-rail tracks along the Gold line in Rancho Cordova, bringing train traffic to a standstill through much of Thursday. The thief or thieves appear to have used a cable cutter to cut sections of wire that normally carry 750 to 900 volts of electricity, meaning the theft was both costly and dangerous.
Report says big Florida utility needs much smaller rate hike

A 518-page report by the staff of the state's Public Service Commission rejected Florida Power & Light's argument that it needs more than $1 billion in rate hikes to pay for operations and avoid layoffs. The staff report says the company can get by with a third of that.
Commentary: It's time to give peace a chance

In this season of peace, disappointment fills the peace movement because of President Obama. People thought he'd be different from the cowboy who had occupied the White House. From the candidate of hope, people expected peace to at long last have a chance.
Commentary: Carrying the spirit of the season into 2010

Every holiday season, people get nicer. Some of the edge comes off of us. We give people the benefit of the doubt. We let perceived slights roll off our backs. We reach out to those in need. We commit little acts of kindness. We feel better and others feel better, too. We recognize our friends — and we tell them how special they are to us.
Custom-made stoves blend warmth, art in Kabul

When snow covers the mountains north of Kabul and temperatures drop below freezing, many residents of Afghanistan's capital rely on their bukhari stoves to heat their homes. The stoves burn wood, sawdust, diesel fuel and kerosene. Each is made by hand.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Truthout 12/24

It's Done: Senate Approves Health Care Overhaul, 60-39
David Lightman and William Douglas, McClatchy Newspapers: "The Senate Thursday voted 60 to 39 to overhaul the nation's health care system - President Barack Obama's top 2009 domestic priority - moving the nation closer to near-universal health care coverage early in the next decade. It was a vote, said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, 'to live a healthy life.'"
Read the Article

Report: Obama Now Aims to Close Guantanamo by 2011
Jason Leopold, Truthout: "President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison facility by 2010 was dealt a major blow when lawmakers refused to earmark funds in a military spending bill Congress approved last week that would have allowed the federal government to purchase a near-empty maximum security prison in Illinois to house some detainees. As a result, Guantanamo will not be shut down until 2011 at the earliest, according to a report published Wednesday in the New York Times."
Read the Article

Michael Winship | Where Are the Snows - and Shovels - of Christmas Past?
Michael Winship, Truthout: "We had our first snowstorm of the winter in Manhattan this past weekend and it served to remind me that I have not actually shoveled snow in decades - the result of living in a city where other people are hired to do it for you. It once was said that the definition of a city was a place where one could keep a mistress and buy a violin; to me it's a place where someone else does the sidewalks."
Read the Article

Ellen Hodgson Brown | Compulsory Private Health Insurance: Just Another Bailout for the Financial Sector?
Ellen Hodgson Brown, Truthout: "The health reform bills now coming through Congress are not focused on how to make health care cheaper or more effective, how to eliminate waste and fraud or how to cut out expensive middlemen. As originally envisioned, the public option would have pursued those goals. But the public option has been dropped from the Senate bill and radically watered down in the House bill. Rather than focusing on making health care affordable, the bills focus on how to force people either to buy health insurance if they don't have it, or to pay more for it if they do."
Read the Article

Jeremy Brecher | Gloom and Doom
Jeremy Brecher, Truthout: "As world leaders return from Copenhagen without an agreement that will protect the earth's atmosphere from devastating climate change, we ordinary people are forced to confront not only what we think, but also what we feel. When I was in elementary school in the early 1950's, we had air raid drills. Sirens would sound and we would be instructed to 'duck and cover' under our desks. There were plenty of jokes among the kids about our instructions. 'In the event of nuclear attack bend over, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye.' Such a blase attitude concealed the fact that I and my friends, like many of our contemporaries, took it for granted that we were likely to die in a nuclear war."
Read the Article

Schools Have Trouble Tapping Stimulus Funds
Christopher Flavelle, ProPublica: "Jones Senior High School has one of the best boys' basketball teams in eastern North Carolina, but its gymnasium is on the verge of collapse..... After the federal stimulus passed in February, North Carolina school officials thought they had found a way to repair the 58-year-old gym and other crumbling school structures. The stimulus provided money for Qualified School Construction Bonds, which is intended to let school districts raise capital through interest-free bonds to fund construction. The program also was expected to boost North Carolina's construction industry. Ben Matthews, director of school support for North Carolina's Department of Public Instruction, estimated it would create 11,000 jobs. But the bond program has become entangled in financial and bureaucratic red tape."
Read the Article

McClatchy Washington Report 12/24

It's done: Senate approves health care overhaul, 60-39

The bill passed at 7:15 a.m. during the Senate's first Christmas Eve session in 46 years. Now it must be merged with a version passed last month by the House of Representatives.

Karzai impersonator tests limits of Afghan free speech

Everyone around the Afghan capital seems to recognize his voice, but almost no one knows his face. In the weeks since Hamid Karzai secured his hold on a second term in the presidency after a dubious election, this anonymous Karzai impersonator has become the newest voice of underground political dissent in Afghanistan. The satire isn't sophisticated. Some might even say his impersonation is crass.

Health plans' impact confuses constituents and lawmakers

The health-care legislation scheduled for a Senate vote early Thursday is a complex grab-bag of ideas and strategies, and a lot of senators are just as confused about the impact as the general public. Nevertheless, the Senate Wednesday kept the political momentum going, agreeing 60 to 39 to once again cut off a Republican-led debate.
Tanning salons burned over proposed health care tax

Tanning salon owners say a 10 percent tax on tanning bed use, proposed in the Senate health care overhaul bill, is anti-woman. Women make up 85 percent of tanning bed clients, according to the industry. The proposed tax was suggested after doctors objected to a tax on cosmetic surgery. Women comprise 93 percent of cosmetic surgery patients.
South Carolina attorney general leads legal attack on health bill

Henry McMaster said he's rounded up 10 state attorney generals — all Republicans — to challenge the health care legislation if it passes with the so-called Nebraska Compromise intact. McMaster is making the effort at the suggestion of South Carolina's U.S. senators, both Republicans.
Goldman Sachs chief will face bipartisan financial crisis panel

Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, will be among the first business leaders grilled by the bipartisan panel that Congress established to investigate the near meltdown of the nation's financial system. Last month, a four-part McClatchy investigative series detailed Goldman's profiting from risky mortgages.
Army's new all-terrain vehicle debuts in Afghanistan

First there was the MRAP, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle that was intended to blunt the effectiveness of insurgents in Iraq. Now there's the M-ATV — the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected All Terrain Vehicle — designed for use in Afghanistan, where the MRAP proved too cumbersome. The Pentagon has ordered 5,000 for the battlefield.
Census: Texas remains country's fastest growing state

Texas gained 478,000 people between July 1, 2008, and July 1, 2009, the Census Bureau said. The next-biggest gainers were California (378,000), North Carolina (134,000), Georgia (131,000) and Florida (114,000). With 37 million residents, California remains the most populous state. Texas is second with 24.8 million, followed by New York (19.5 million), Florida (18.5 million) and Illinois (12.9 million).
Governor's killing signals return of Colombia's FARC rebels

The killing this week of a provincial governor by suspected leftist rebels suggests that a seven-year effort to rein in the violence that has plagued Colombia for decades could be in peril. For the first time since 2002, homicides, rebel attacks and paramilitary activity are on the rise.
California not likely to see end of furloughs for state workers

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to save $1.6 billion in state employee costs by extending monthly furloughs past June, according to sources familiar with the governor's forthcoming budget proposal. The governor also is considering whether to seek a federal waiver to cut school funding below what stimulus guidelines allow.
Man claims he smothered father with pillow in self defense

Detectives in St. Petersburg, Fla., are trying to determine why a man from Davis, Calif., who was visiting relatives for the holidays, allegedly suffocated his 83-year-old father with a pillow and claimed it was self-defense. "We're still working on a motive. We have no idea why he did what he did," said Jennifer Dawkins, a spokeswoman with the St. Petersburg Police Department.
Alaska homecoming: Levi's mom, with ankle monitor, back at home

Sherry Johnston is back in her Wasilla home after a judge agreed to let her serve a three-year jail sentence with an ankle monitoring device, according to her attorney. Johnston is the mother of Levi Johnston, the father of former Gov. Sarah Palin's grandson, Tripp.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Truthout 12/23

Wednesday 23 December 2009

Henry A. Giroux | Reclaiming Public Values in the Age of Casino Capitalism
Henry A. Giroux, Truthout: "This is a difficult time in American history. The American people have every right to demand to live in peace, enjoy the comforts of economic security, have access to decent health care, be able to send their children to quality schools and live with a measure of security. And yet, at a time when public values are subordinated to the rationality of profits, exchange values and unbridled self interest, politics and the institutions and culture that support it become corrupt, devoid of agents and reduced to empty rituals largely orchestrated by those who control the wealth, income, media and commanding institutions of American society."
Read the Article

Army General Who Implemented Pregnancy Policy Responds to Truthout Report
Jason Leopold, Truthout: "The Army general commanding US military personnel in northern Iraq who implemented a controversial policy last month that said female soldiers who become pregnant, and the men who impregnate them, could be court-martialed and sent to prison issued a lengthy response to Truthout explaining his order following the publication of our report on the matter Monday."
Read the Article

William Fisher | One Court's Catch-22
William Fisher, Truthout: "Last August, a federal judge threw out a lawsuit challenging the government's right to spy on Americans' international emails and telephone calls without warrants or suspicion of any kind because the folks who brought the suit couldn't prove what may be unprovable."
Read the Article

Norman Solomon | Flares in the Political Dark
Norman Solomon, Truthout: "The winter solstice of 2009 arrived as a grim metaphor for the current politics of health care, war, and a lot more. 'In a dark time,' wrote the poet Theodore Roethke, 'the eye begins to see.' After a year of escalation in Afghanistan, solicitude toward Wall Street and the incredible shrinking health care reform, we ought to be able to see that the biggest problem among progressives has been undue deference to the Obama administration."
Read the Article

Probe Confirms CIA Operated Secret "Black Site" Prisons in Lithuania
Jason Leopold, Truthout: "Lithuanian government officials confirmed that the country's intelligence agency helped the CIA set up secret black site prisons in the country where alleged high-value al-Qaeda operatives were to be rendered for interrogation."
Read the Article

Roguishly Rouge: A Review of "Going Rouge: Sarah Palin - American Nightmare" Entirely in Quotes
Leslie Thatcher, Truthout Book Review: "I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. Few things draw in readers and garner clicks more reliably than articles (or, even better, pictures) of Sarah Palin. We can't look away. Like everyone else, I can barely take the waves of embarrassment that come from watching someone do something so badly. My cringe reflex is exhausted."
Read the Article

Michael Ferguson | Why Have an Estate Tax?
Michael Ferguson, Truthout: "Last year, I had a dream I was called before the Senate to testify on the 'reform' of the estate tax. Admittedly, the dream was odd. Although I've been practicing estate and trust law for more than 40 years, and teach the subject at Berkeley Law (formerly Boalt Hall), it seemed strange that they should call me. I'm no Washington insider, and what happens in Berkeley doesn't often have any significant national impact - much to our chagrin. But it was my dream, so I was in the spotlight."
Read the Article

Tom Engelhardt | A Holiday Season of War
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com: "Excuse the gloom in the holiday season, but I feel like we're all locked inside a malign version of the movie Groundhog Day. You remember, the one in which the characters are forced to relive the same 24 hours endlessly. Put more personally, TomDispatch started in November 2001 as an email to friends in response to the first moments of our latest Afghan War. More than eight years later ... well, you know the story."
Read the Article

Herve Kempf | A Copenhagen Dictionary
Herve Kempf brings back a dictionary from Copenhagen (Translation: Leslie Thatcher): "American way of life: outmoded, disgusting or decadent? Banks: are doing very well, thank you...."
Read the Article

Ray McGovern | Break the CIA in Two
Ray McGovern, Truthout: "After the CIA-led fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, President John Kennedy was quoted as saying he wanted to 'splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.' I can understand his anger, but a thousand is probably too many."
Read the Article

Wall Street's Fingerprints Evident on Financial Reform Bill
Gail Russell Chaddock, The Christian Science Monitor: "Since the near meltdown of Wall Street in late 2008, Congress has pledged to tighten regulations on the finance industry. That exercise is now half over, with the House approving a reform package Dec. 11."
Read the Article

Save Social Security - Ten Questions for the Deficit Commission
Dave Johnson, The Campaign for America's Future: "It is possible that there is going to be a “deficit commission” to look for ways to reduce our country's budget deficits. I have some questions for them to ask to help get things started in the right direction."
Read the Article

The "Official" response to GK

Merry Christmas, Garrison Keillor!

By Fred Small

I’m the pastor of First Parish in Cambridge, Unitarian Universalist, where we were honored to host Garrison Keillor last week. Many in my congregation attended and enjoyed his talk.

So we were hurt and disheartened to read his ill-tempered attack on our church and our faith in his syndicated column in newspapers throughout the country and at Salon.com.

As a longtime fan of A Prairie Home Companion, I’ve often laughed aloud in rueful recognition at Keillor’s ribbing of Unitarian Universalists. (Who wouldn’t giggle at his Unitarian monastery in New Hampshire? “The rule there is complete silence, but if you think of something really good you can go ahead and say it.”)

Most of Keillor’s jokes about us have been good-natured and fair-minded. But in his latest column, apparently it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy. He calls us out as “arrogant and unlovable people [who] imagine that their unpopularity somehow [is] proof of their greatness.” He accuses us of “spiritual piracy and cultural elitism.” (He isn’t very nice to “Jewish guys,” either.)

What launches Keillor ballistic is “Silent Night” as printed in our hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition, which closes each verse with “Sleep in heavenly peace.” Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect on Keillor.

As a folk music maven, Garrison Keillor knows the folk process. Music is constantly evolving, adapted by various communities with various needs. Somebody can copyright it (although “Silent Night” is in the public domain), but nobody ever owns it, not really.

Spirit is the same way.

Religions may try to dictate it in dogma or capture it in creed, yet “the wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).

Unitarian Universalists welcome worshippers of every age, color, sexual orientation, and religious belief (or unbelief). At First Parish in Cambridge, you’ll sit next to Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Pagans, atheists, agnostics, and seekers of every variety. (No wonder we adapt our hymns!)

We have only one absolute requirement: We covenant to treat each other with respect.

As we call each other to spiritual growth, we also challenge each other to build Beloved Community—not just in our congregations, but in the wider world. We stand on the side of love—for marriage equality, for immigrant rights, for climate justice.

I invite Garrison Keillor to come back to First Parish in Cambridge this Christmas Eve for our Candlelight Service. On this holy night, we’ll relate the ancient Nativity story (using the King James Bible), light candles in the darkness, and sing “Silent Night”—the old-fashioned way, with “Christ the Savior is born” and “Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth.”

That’s one of the great things about Unitarian Universalism. Just as we don’t all pray from the same prayer book, we don’t all sing from the same hymnal!

While he’s in town, maybe Keillor can help out at our Tuesday Meals Program, which serves a free hot dinner to hungry and homeless people, or ring our church bell 350 times to sound the alarm on global warming, or stand vigil to protect immigrant families from raids that split them apart. We take seriously Jesus’s radical message of hospitality, justice, and compassion for “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40).

We close every Christmas Eve service with a benediction by the Rev. Howard Thurman, the great twentieth-century African-American preacher and theologian:

When the song of angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among the brothers [and sisters],
To make music in the heart.

Yup. We changed those words, too—for gender inclusiveness.

Amen, and Merry Christmas!

McClatchy Washington Report 12/23

With health care bill all but passed, time for backroom deals

With Senate passage of health-care legislation now virtually certain, Washington lawmakers and interest groups are scrambling to influence one of Congress' most mysterious but most powerful institutions — the conference committee.To most Americans, the conference process is an enigma, rarely taught in history or civics lessons. Even the "School House Rock" classic animated step-by-step primer, "I'm Just a Bill,'' skipped over the conference committee's role.

In Russia, foreboding about America's war in Afghanistan

Thirty years ago this week, the Red Army began its invasion of Afghanistan, a move that sank the Soviet Union in a decade of guerrilla war and hastened the collapse of the Cold War empire. Today, as former Soviet soldiers watch American troops trying to pacify the same stretches of Afghan land they once fought for, aging Soviet generals and grunts alike are reminded of a war they'd rather forget.

GOP may sue over health care bill's 'Nebraska compromise'

The deal, which would have the federal government pick up Nebraska's Medicaid expansion costs forever, was critical to winning Sen. Ben Nelson's vote to break the Republican filibuster in the Senate. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott says he and his GOP counterparts in six other states believe the arrangement, if it becomes law, would be unconstitutional.
Help us vet the Senate's health care proposal

The Senate health care bill is lengthy, more than 2,000 pages, and the so-called manager's amendment, which contains Majority Leader Harry Reid's compromises, is another 383 pages. That's a lot to read and digest. So here's an opportunity to help us. Take a look through the pages of the bill and let us know what strikes you as interesting or newsworthy.
It's a long way from Alaska to Mississippi on religion, too

Mississippi is, far and away, the most religious state in the country — ranking first among the 50 states in a nationwide poll in four categories: the importance of religion to residents; the frequency of prayer; the attendance at worship services and the certainty of a belief in God. Most Southern states ranked high in the poll, with New England and Alaska at the opposite end.
Sarah Palin wins: 'Death panels' declared 'Lie of the Year'

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's claim about so-called "death panels" has landed her on the political equivalent of Santa's naughty list: PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year." Joe Biden's claim that a sneeze could travel the length of the airplane was a very distant runner up.
Judge: Roeder can't use 'necessity defense' in Tiller murder trial

A Kansas state judge ruled Tuesday that Scott Roeder's murder trial will begin next month in Wichita and limited the use of the so-called "necessity defense." But Judge Warren Wilbert said he would "leave the door open" for Roeder's defense to present other evidence and arguments that he killed Wichita abortion provider George Tiller in belief that he was saving the lives of unborn fetuses.
Alaska pols seek study to show beluga whales aren't endangered

The issue is what's causing beluga whales to disappear from Alaska's Cook Inlet. Congressman Don Young and Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan said Alaska should finance research to counter a federal conclusion that the whales need special habitat protection.
Search renewed for missing girls, 35 years after they vanished

Thirty-five years ago today, 17-year-old Mary Rachel Trlica, Trlica's 14-year-old friend Lisa Renee Wilson, and Julie Moseley, 9, went to the Seminary South shopping center in Fort Worth. They were supposed to be home by 4 p.m. They never came back. This week, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va., and Fort Worth police again appealed for the public's help in locating the girls.
For ex-cons, a job at the car wash may be a Christmas gift

Nearly 700,000 people are released from federal and state prisons to their communities each year. Where do they go? Some end up with a job and pick up a rag at the bright orange and blue All Seasons Car Wash in Kansas City. It's one of the grittier tales of good will toward men — as practiced by Gene Krahenbuhl, owner of that car wash.
Woman faces trial for extorting University of Louisville basketball coach

Karen Sypher hasn't been able to reach a plea agreement with prosecutors and probably will go to trial on charges involving her alleged extortion of University of Louisville men's basketball coach Rick Pitino. The bizarre case has had a number of unusual twists and turns, including a claim from Sypher that her husband, longtime Pitino assistant Tim Sypher, was paid to marry her.
Commentary: Old journalism values still relevant for new media

The toughest challenges facing the news business may have more to do with values than finances. News will survive. Whether it'll be good and whether it'll do good — that's what the public should worry about.

Garrison Keillor and the hypocritic oath

Don Wheeler

As I read Garrison Keillor's recent column "Nonbelievers, please leave Christmas alone", one thing I was reminded of was that Mr. Keillor's humor rarely translates well to the written page. If you've ever struggled through one of his books, you'll know what I mean. What is said in a gentle tone of voice can be taken as a good-natured ribbing, while on the page it can appear merely obnoxious.

Keillor's oral style of story telling also is important. It's reminiscent of watching a drunk trudge through eighteen inches of snow looking for his car. When he gets to the car, he discovers that it's not his car at all - just a similar color. Off he sets in a different direction, but with a similar result. Still, he always finds his car eventually and the audience has great fun all the while. (To be clear, this is meant as a compliment.)

I'm a Unitarian Universalist, and I've typically found Keillor's jokes about Unitarians (as he refers to us) on his show pretty clever. But many UUs have suggested that Keillor suffers from a serious case of unitarianphobia, and this rant of his (published at least in the Baltimore Sun) gives real credence to their contention.

I'll be the first to say I'm not a fan of the many sanitized (adapted) Christian hymns contained in our hymnal. But why in the world would anyone care what we sing in the friendly confines of our churches, besides us? Here's his contention:

Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that's their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite "Silent Night." If you don't believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn "Silent Night" and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough.

Who's the elitist here? On top of which, the first statement is false - we often made statements of belief in unison - and beside the point if it were true. And this complaint seems particularly inappropriate coming from someone who week in and week out ruins other people's music. Not to put too fine a point on it, but few people tune into his show to hear Keillor sing - or to admire his lousy arrangements of other people's work.

And how about this:

Christmas is a Christian holiday - if you're not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don't mess with the Messiah.

I guess UUs should that request Christians return their evergreen trees - that custom comes from pagan rituals.

I also found this interesting:

You can blame Ralph Waldo Emerson for the brazen foolishness of the elite. He preached here at the First Church of Cambridge, a Unitarian outfit (where I discovered that "Silent Night" has been cleverly rewritten to make it more about silence and night and not so much about God),

I had no idea Keillor was old enough to have heard Emerson preach. It explains a lot.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Truthout 9/22

Helen Caldicott Slams Environmental Groups on Climate Bill, Nuclear Concessions
Art Levine, Truthout: "Dr. Helen Caldicott, the pioneering Australian antinuclear activist and pediatrician who spearheaded the global nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s and co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), has joined with left-leaning environmental groups here in an uphill fight to halt nuclear power as a 'solution' to the global warming crisis."
Read the Article

Women Soldiers in Iraq Who Become Pregnant Face Court-Martial
Yana Kunichoff, Truthout: "Under a controversial new Army policy, female soldiers serving in northern Iraq may face a court-martial and possible jail time if they become pregnant and male soldiers and civilians employed by the Army who impregnate the women may also be charged with crimes."
Read the Article

Peace Activists to Set Up Encampment in Washington
Scott Galindez, Truthout: "In August of 2005, Cindy Sheehan, who had lost her son in Iraq, set up camp outside George Bush's vacation home in Crawford, Texas. She had a simple question; she wanted to know what the 'noble cause' was for which her son had died. Thousands of people joined Cindy in Crawford, and Camp Casey became a national story that breathed new life into the antiwar movement."
Read the Article

Hell No, We Won't Go ... Again
Camillo "Mac" Bica, Truthout: "After years of war and occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, with the sacrifices of battle borne by less than one percent of the American people, and with no real indication that President Obama has a legitimate plan or a sincere intention to end combat operations anytime soon, increasing numbers of people from both sides of the political spectrum are calling for reinstatement of the draft."
Read the Article

Turning Activists Into Voters in Uruguay: The Frente Amplio and Jose Mujica
Benjamin Dangl, Truthout: "Torrential rain didn't keep voters away from the polls on Sunday, November 29 when Jose 'Pepe' Mujica was elected president with 52 percent of the vote. The 74-year-old agricultural minister spent 14 years in jail for his participation in the Tupamaro guerrilla movement, and has pledged to continue the policies of his predecessor, current left-leaning president Tabare Vasquez. Mujica also promised that while president, he would return to his farm outside the capital city at least five hours a week to tend his flowers and vegetables."
Read the Article

Adequate, Negative, Sustainable: What Kind of Growth?
Jacques Attali in L'Express, the authors writing as Favilla in Les Echos and Guillaume Duval in Alternatives Economiques all consider what sort of economic "growth" is consistent with environmental prudence (Translation: Leslie Thatcher).
Read the Article

Twenty Years After US Invasion, Panama Still in Search of a Body Count
Agencia Telam, La Voz del Interior (Translation: Ryan Croken): "Rallies, religious ceremonies and visits to cemeteries took place in Panama this past weekend to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Operation Just Cause, the US invasion of the country that removed Gen. Manuel Noriega from power and led to the deaths of a still yet undetermined number of Panamanian civilians."
Read the Article

Greed, Corruption and Hate Crimes in Northeastern Pennsylvania
Walter Brasch, Truthout: "Dick Wolf, who created 'Law & Order' and its two successful spin-offs, 'Law & Order: SVU' and 'Law & Order: Criminal Intent,' should probably consider establishing a branch office in Pennsylvania. It seems that whenever any of the New York City cops take a road trip to find a fugitive or track down a witness, they go to Pennsylvania. Apparently, New Jersey is only a buffer zone."
Read the Article

Progressives: Don't Scream, ORGANIZE
E.J. Dionne Jr.: "For progressives, the question on the health care battle going forward is not whether they have a right to be angry but whether they can direct their fury toward constructive ends. The alternative is to pursue a temporarily satisfying and ultimately self-defeating politics of protest."
Read the Article

Foreign Interpreters Hurt in Battle Find US Insurance Benefits Wanting
T. Christian Miller, ProPublica and The Los Angeles Times: "After the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the U.S. military discovered that rebuilding the country and confronting an insurgency required a weapon not in its arsenal: Thousands of translators."
Read the Article

Modern-Day Slavery in Mexico and the United States
Megan McAdams, Council on Hemispheric Affairs: "On December 3, Mexico City police freed 107 human trafficking victims who were forced to manufacture shopping bags and clothespins under 'slave-like' circumstances. Officials reported that the victims exhibited signs of physical and sexual abuse, and were also malnourished, as they had been given only chicken feet and rotten vegetables. Twenty-three individuals were arrested and charged with human trafficking after one of the workers escaped and informed the authorities about the dire situation."
Read the Article

FP morning brief 12/22

The Copenhagen backlash begins

Editor's note: This will be the last Morning Brief this week. We will resume next Monday. Happy holidays fom FP.

Top Story: Just days after countries agreed to a face-saving agreement at the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen, accusations have begun to fly about who was responsible for the disappointing conference. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva criticized the United States for failing to commit for emissions reductions. South African negotiators, who participated in the drafting of the final agreement, nonetheless attacked it as "not acceptable."

E.U. environment ministers will meet today to discuss how to proceed in the wake of the Copenhagen "disaster." Writing in the Guardian on Sunday, British climate secretary Ed Miliband accused China of having "hijacked" the proceedings for its own goals. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman responded that Miliband's accusations were just a way "to shirk responsibilities that should be assumed towards developing countries."

At least one minister seemed happy with how the talks turned out. Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh told parliament that India had been able to resist international pressure to agree to binding emissions cuts. The markets were less upbeat with carbon prices plunging on the European exchange on Monday.

He's back: Controversial Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's approval ratings are increasing again after his nose was broken by a mentally disturbed man last week.

Middle East

In a speech to supporters, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed a U.S. deadline for agreeing to an internationally negotiated nuclear enrichment deal.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says there won't be another intifada, as long as he's in office.
Israel would reportedly be willing to agree to a prisoner swap with Hamas for captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, as long as some of the Palestinian prisoners are deported.

Asia

A WTO arbitrator upheld a ruling that China illegally restricts U.S. media imports.
U.S. and Afghan troops engaged in a four-hour firefight with Taliban militants -- including suicide bombers -- in the city of Gardez.
Japan plans to resolve the dispute over the U.S. military base in Okinawa by May.

Americas

Mexico City legalized gay marriages and adoptions.
A Colombian state governor was kidnapped by FARC guerrillas. was kidnapped by FARC guerrillas.
At least 23 people were killed from drug-related violence in the Northern Mexican state of Chihuahua from Sunday to Monday.

Europe

A Lithuanian investigation found that the CIA used at least two secret detention centers in the country for interrogating prisoners after 9/11.
The United States and Russia are planning "unprecedented cuts" in their nuclear arsenals, according to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.
Serbia will formally submit its EU membership application today.

Africa

A U.N. panel recommended that member's of Guinea's ruling junta be referred to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
Zimbabwe's rival leaders Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai reached an agreement on forming committees to oversee human rights, the media and elections.
Ethiopia sentenced five people to death for planning to kill government ministers.

-By Joshua Keating

http://link.email.foreignpolicy.com/r/JIIYDVQ/CXH1/3MTL/4KPV/56GG/PJ/h

McClatchy Washington Report 12/22

With Senate health care win likely, Dems now must woo public

Senate passage of a health care bill is all but certain, with the next milestone vote starting at 7 a.m. Now strategists are wondering whether Democrats can win popular support for whatever measure finally is cobbled together from House and Senate versions of the legislation. There's good news for Democrats: a CNN poll shows a six percent gain in public approval of the plan. The bad news: 56 percent of those polled still oppose it.

Health care overhaul or no, rural Texas will still lack doctors

Despite efforts to increase the number of physicians in rural and other underserved areas, 22 counties, mostly in West Texas and the Panhandle, were without a doctor as of October, and more than two dozen counties listed just one physician. Most of the new doctors licensed in the past five years in the state have set up practice in the state's largest urban areas.

Health care overhaul bill raises hackles of S.C. lawmakers

With the clock ticking toward a Christmas Eve Senate vote on health care reform, South Carolina Republicans lashed out Monday at the proposed legislation, and also took swipes at Democrats for the tactics used in moving the bill forward. With the Senate seemingly poised to approve a final version of its bill Christmas Eve, who is right may be less the question than who will prevail in the continuing, strident health care debate of 2009.
California DOT's stimulus jobs data was inflated, according to auditor

Under fire for mismanaging its vehicle fleet, Caltrans, or the California Department of Transportation, was rapped anew on Monday for grossly overstating the number of jobs it created or preserved with federal stimulus money. The criticism came from state Auditor Elaine Howle, who revealed the department's inflated numbers in a report.
U.S. troops in Iraq are doing detective work

In Iraq, U.S. soldiers increasingly find themselves in detective-like roles. They investigate crimes, chase leads and build cases against suspects. They gather enough information so that an Iraqi court can order an arrest warrant, and then Iraqi security forces can arrest the suspect. It is one of the ways the American military's mission in Iraq has transformed in the last several months into an advisory and training capacity.
Florida's Senate candidates agree on Cuba

The four candidates for Florida's U.S. Senate seat affirmed their support for democratic reforms in Cuba and took a tough line on American policy toward the island nation.
Some California lawmakers send holiday greetings with plea for cash

'Tis the season for giving, right? California Assemblyman Pedro Nava, running for attorney general, apparently hopes so. Mixing business with pleasure, Nava sent out a greeting card Monday featuring his family photo, a warm holiday message, a written hope for peace — and a link to click for donating to his campaign coffers.
N.C. program is helping homeowners sidestep foreclosure

A program established last year has enabled more than 2,500 North Carolina homeowners to avoid foreclosure and is working with thousands more, according to the N.C. Office of the Commissioner of Banks.
Kansas City WWI museum gains new artifacts for its collection

As Kansas City's Liberty Memorial has gained acclaim with its World War I museum, the flow of donated artifacts has also greatly increased. But officials are reeling from the immensity of a recent gift from the widow of a lifelong collector. A semi-trailer truck was needed to haul in the roughly 1,700 items, most of them related to the ferocious machine guns of that era.
Tower Records finds second life online

Tower Records is still out there, on the Internet, under new management that's itching to increase its Web presence. Richard Flynn, a Wilmington businessman, said he was hired a month ago as president of Tower.com Inc. The Web site is owned by a European investment group named Cumberland Corporate Services, he said. Flynn's appointment represents a new twist in the saga of Tower.com, one of the few remaining pieces of the global retail music chain founded in Sacramento.
Commentary: Where the preaching against homosexuality goes too far

Mega-minister Rick Warren has become a reluctant actor in the most instructive morality play of his highly televised ministry.
In December, Warren had to smite the creature he had nourished and come forward to denounce efforts by Christian lawmakers in Uganda to impose draconian penalties on homosexuals.
Commentary: 'Defense' of Christmas isn't necessary

Politicians can do some pretty useless things, sometimes because they are clueless, sometimes because they are sincere but misguided, sometimes because the reality is that they have to play the game of politics or risk becoming irrelevant. I can't tell you in which of the categories above Rep. Henry Brown's House Resolution 951 to "recognize the importance of Christmas" falls. It has 72 Republican co-sponsors and one Democrat. I'll be generous and say Brown's move is a sincere but misguided attempt to ... to fix something that's not broken.

Monday, December 21, 2009

A dangerous dysfunction

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Unless some legislator pulls off a last-minute double-cross, health care reform will pass the Senate this week. Count me among those who consider this an awesome achievement. It’s a seriously flawed bill, we’ll spend years if not decades fixing it, but it’s nonetheless a huge step forward.

It was, however, a close-run thing. And the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate — and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional.

After all, Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.

Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that — or, I’m tempted to say, any of it — if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate?

Some people will say that it has always been this way, and that we’ve managed so far. But it wasn’t always like this. Yes, there were filibusters in the past — most notably by segregationists trying to block civil rights legislation. But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn’t like, is a recent creation.

The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

Some conservatives argue that the Senate’s rules didn’t stop former President George W. Bush from getting things done. But this is misleading, on two levels.

First, Bush-era Democrats weren’t nearly as determined to frustrate the majority party, at any cost, as Obama-era Republicans. Certainly, Democrats never did anything like what Republicans did last week: G.O.P. senators held up spending for the Defense Department — which was on the verge of running out of money — in an attempt to delay action on health care.

More important, however, Mr. Bush was a buy-now-pay-later president. He pushed through big tax cuts, but never tried to pass spending cuts to make up for the revenue loss. He rushed the nation into war, but never asked Congress to pay for it. He added an expensive drug benefit to Medicare, but left it completely unfunded. Yes, he had legislative victories; but he didn’t show that Congress can make hard choices and act responsibly, because he never asked it to.

So now that hard choices must be made, how can we reform the Senate to make such choices possible?

Back in the mid-1990s two senators — Tom Harkin and, believe it or not, Joe Lieberman — introduced a bill to reform Senate procedures. (Management wants me to make it clear that in my last column I wasn’t endorsing inappropriate threats against Mr. Lieberman.) Sixty votes would still be needed to end a filibuster at the beginning of debate, but if that vote failed, another vote could be held a couple of days later requiring only 57 senators, then another, and eventually a simple majority could end debate. Mr. Harkin says that he’s considering reintroducing that proposal, and he should.

But if such legislation is itself blocked by a filibuster — which it almost surely would be — reformers should turn to other options. Remember, the Constitution sets up the Senate as a body with majority — not supermajority — rule. So the rule of 60 can be changed. A Congressional Research Service report from 2005, when a Republican majority was threatening to abolish the filibuster so it could push through Bush judicial nominees, suggests several ways this could happen — for example, through a majority vote changing Senate rules on the first day of a new session.

Nobody should meddle lightly with long-established parliamentary procedure. But our current situation is unprecedented: America is caught between severe problems that must be addressed and a minority party determined to block action on every front. Doing nothing is not an option — not unless you want the nation to sit motionless, with an effectively paralyzed government, waiting for financial, environmental and fiscal crises to strike.

Truthout 12/21

Marjorie Cohn | Obama's Af-Pak War Is Illegal
Marjorie Cohn, Truthout: "President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize nine days after he announced he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. His escalation of that war is not what the Nobel committee envisioned when it sought to encourage him to make peace, not war. In 1945, in the wake of two wars that claimed millions of lives, the nations of the world created the United Nations system to 'save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.'"
Read the Article

Senate Democrats Win Key 60-40 Vote on Health Care
David Lightman, McClatchy Newspapers: "The Senate early Monday voted 60 to 40 to cut off extended debate on the Democratic-authored health care overhaul bill, the first major step toward passing the measure later this week. The vote, which saw all 58 Democrats and two independents vote to end the latest debate while all 40 Republicans opposed the maneuver, ended at 1:19 a.m. and capped a day of debate that turned partisan and often angry."
Read the Article

Dean Baker | Tobacco Lobbyists Join Wall Streeters on Debt Crusade
Dean Baker, Truthout: "Millions of people around the country have been treated to the anti-debt ads run by one-time tobacco industry lobbyist Richard Berman. Mr. Berman, who has also worked to thwart minimum wage increases and managed to get on the opposite side of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is now working alongside the Wall Street types who wrecked the economy."
Read the Article

Rick Cabral | Debunking California's Water Myths
Rick Cabral, Truthout: "Myths have been surfacing in recent months about California's water crisis, becoming so serious that the state's Public Policy Institute (PPIC) was forced to address the issue in a new report, 'California Water Myths,' where the agency tackles eight of the most common misperceptions."
Read the Article

Stephen Soldz | The "Ethical Interrogation": The Myth of Michael Gelles and the al-Qahtani Interrogation
Stephen Soldz, Truthout: "Several public accounts of abusive interrogations at Guantanamo have praised psychologist Dr. Michael Gelles for his opposition to these abuses. Similarly, the American Psychological Association (APA) has repeatedly pointed to actions of Dr. Gelles to instantiate their claim that psychologists played a crucial role in opposing abuses and protecting detainees. Gelles also has been a regular public presence, discussing the errors at Guantanamo while advocating for the APA's 'policy of participation' in interrogations."
Read the Article

Rebecca Solnit | Terminator 2009: Judgment Days in Copenhagen
Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch.com: "It's clear now that, from her immoveable titanium bangs to her chaotic approximation of human speech, Sarah Palin is a Terminator cyborg sent from the future to destroy something -- but what? It could be the Republican Party she'll ravage by herding the fundamentalists and extremists into a place where sane fiscal conservatives and swing voters can't follow. Or maybe she was sent to destroy civilization at this crucial moment by preaching the gospel of climate-change denial, abetted by tools like the Washington Post, which ran a factually outrageous editorial by her on the subject earlier this month."
Read the Article

Howard Dean Walks It Back
Suzy Khimm, Newsweek: "After setting off a political firestorm last week for telling legislators to kill the Senate health-care bill, progressive leader Howard Dean walked back his opposition this morning on NBC's 'Meet the Press.' Instead of advising Congress to vote against the bill for not containing the public option, as he stridently declared on Thursday, Dean said the Senate bill had actually 'improved' over the past few weeks, and that he would wait until the House and Senate bills were combined in the conference before passing judgment."
Read the Article

The Energy Crisis: A Conversation With Jonathan Schell About Invigorating the Climate Movement
Bryan Farrell, Waging Nonviolence: "Last June was the 27th anniversary of one of the largest protests in history, when upwards of one million people gathered on the Great Lawn in New York's Central Park to rally against nuclear weapons while the UN held a Special Session on Disarmament. Two days later 1,600 demonstrators were involved in acts of civil disobedience at the consulates of five countries."
Read the Article

FP morning brief 12/21

Thousands protest Iranian regime at Grand Ayatollah's funeral

The funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri -- a leader of Iran's 1979 revolution turned prominent regime critic -- became a flashpoint for the country's opposition as thousands of opposition protesters wore green and shouted "death to the dictator" in the Iranian holy city of Qom. Thousands also marched in Montazeri's home town of Najafabad. Witnesses say clashes have broken out between security forces and protesters.

Internet access is reportedly slow and cell phone service unreliable in Iran today as authorities attempted to disrupt communications during the funeral. A number of senior opposition leaders were also arrested on their way to attend the funeral on Monday. Iran's Supreme leader praised Montazeri for his scholarship but also noted the tension between the regime and the man once designated for his position.

Montazeri was an acolyte -- and once designated successor to -- Iran's original Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei and helped draft the country's Islamic constitution. But Montazeri long criticized the regime for its consolidation of power and suppression of civil liberties and women's rights.

In the months since Iran's disputed election, he argued that the current government had lost legitimacy and accused the Basij militia of following the "path of Satan." Considered the most knowledgeable Islamic scholar among Iran's senior clerics, Montazeri was largely protected from reprisals by the regime.

Gitmo: Twelve Guantanmo detainees were transferred to Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somaliland, bringing the total number of detainees in the facility under 200.

Middle East

The Iranian troops who were reportedly occupying a disputed oil field inside Iraq have reportedly withdrawn.
Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri arrived in Damascus for talks with Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Israeli authorities threatened to use force to enforce a ban on West Bank settlement construction.

Asia

Afghanistan's parliament began debate on President Hamid Karzai's cabinet picks.

Nepalese police clashed with Maoist protesters, arresting 70.
The weapons-packed plane from North Korea impounded in Thailand this month may have been heading for Iran. heading for Iran.

Americas

The U.S. has charged three suspected al-Qaeda associates with orchestrating a massive drug deal to finance terrorist activities.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says an unmanned Colombian plane violated Venezuelan airspace.
U.S. envoy Hugo Llorens visited deposed Honduran leader Manuel Zelaya at the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa.

Europe

President Obama says the United States is "quite close" to a new nuclear arms reduction agreement with Russia.
Polish police have recovered the famous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign that was stolen from the Auschwitz concentration camp last week.
The EU eased travel restrictions on citizens of three former-Yugoslavian countries.

Africa

Madagascar leader Andry Rajoelina has abandoned a negotiated power-sharing agreement.
Islamist militants fired mortars at the police headquarters in Mogadishu, Somalia.
Dozens were killed in clashes between farmers and nomads in central Nigeria.

http://link.email.foreignpolicy.com/r/A77ZAT5/DKB4/AY0O/FNHT/KDWJ/XL/h

McClatchy Washington Report 12/21

1:19 a.m.: Senate Dems win key 60-40 vote on health care

The Senate early Monday voted 60 to 40 to cut off extended debate on the Democratic-authored health care overhaul bill, the first major step toward passing the measure later this week. The vote, which saw all 58 Democrats and two independents vote to end the latest debate while all 40 Republicans opposed the maneuver, ended at 1:19 a.m. and capped a day of debate that turned partisan and often angry.

Charitable organization not needed for this outreach

Orlando Mendez heard a speech by Bono and a sermon by his priest, and that was all he needed to begin his own outreach to the hungry. Soon, four of his friends were helping him in an effort as important to their spirits as it is to the people they feed.

Here's how S.C. Gov. Sanford avoided impeachment

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford survived the threat of impeachment largely because of a sound legal strategy and splintered opinion — among both lawmakers and the public — over whether the two-term Republican's actions merited his removal from office.
Health care overhaul has AARP's Cramer busy

Bonnie Cramer was on the hot seat again this month, testifying before a congressional subcommittee about the rising cost of prescription drugs. As chairwoman of the national board of AARP, the petite woman speaks with a big voice. AARP is one of the most influential lobbies in the United States, representing nearly 40 million Americans over the age of 50.
Turmoil in Pakistan threatens Obama's new Afghan strategy

Less than a month after he unveiled it, President Barack Obama's Afghanistan strategy is in trouble, overtaken by new political turmoil in Pakistan that threatens to distract its bickering leaders from the fight against al Qaida and its Afghan and Pakistani allies.
Hate crimes against gays on rise in Honduras

The recent killing of gay activist Walter Trochez in Honduras shows a troubling increase in hate crimes in the past six months in the Central American nation that has been marred by a political crisis.
California unit prepares bases for Afghanistan surge

As more U.S. troops prepare for deployment to Afghanistan following President Barack Obama's decision to build up forces there, many Americans will be watching the efforts of the nation's front-line warriors. But long before those troops take their first steps in that arid, rugged nation, a little-known but critically important unit based at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif., will already be there. Its job: to make sure the Air Force's massive fleet of transport aircraft has safe places to take off and land in areas known as forward operating bases.
Plight of contractor raped in Iraq spurs push in Congress

Under a proposal before Congress, the federal government would not be able to do business with companies with $1 million or more in contracts that require the people they hire to agree to arbitration for claims of assault, false imprisonment or emotional distress. The proposal was prompted by the plight of a woman who worked for KBR in Iraq who couldn't seek restitution in court after fellow contractors assaulted her.
McCain acknowledges GOP can't stop health care plan

With the decision by Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska to back the Democratic health care proposal, there's almost no way the GOP can stop the bill from winning approval later this week, Sen. John McCain said Sunday. McCain vowed, however, to continue to fight the bill. A cloture vote that the Democrats are expected to win is likely after midnight tonight.
'Barrel Monster' artist takes on a jumbo project

In a nondescript office just off Millbrook Road, there stands a 7-foot-tall beast built of secondhand computer monitors, washed-up motherboards and picked-apart keyboards — a towering elephant constructed by Joe Carnevale, creator of Raleigh's famous Barrel Monster.
Arctic research pushes scientists to extremes

If you want to know how polar bears are doing, it's not enough to spy on them with satellite telemetry and other technology. You have to go where they live. To get some answers, they traveled to a part of the world few get to see, and far fewer get to see from beneath the sea ice. Or would want to.
Kentucky considering prescriptions for pseudoephedrine to halt meth labs

Kentucky has joined a growing national debate on whether to require a prescription for some cold and allergy medicines in an attempt to eliminate dangerous methamphetamine labs. The Kentucky Narcotics Officers' Association recently voted in favor of requiring a prescription to get medicine containing pseudoephedrine. The association is looking for a state lawmaker to sponsor the prescription proposal in the 2010 legislative session, which starts in January

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Truthout 12/20

Why has Congress Set a Christmas Deadline for Health Care Reform?
Gail Russell Chaddock, The Christian Science Monitor: "The prospect of losing momentum is what's driving Democrats to complete the bill even in the face of blizzards, late nights, and ruined holiday plans, says Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J."
Read the Article

Bringing the World Out of Denial: The Power of Passion, The Fallacy of Fear
James A. Cusumano, Truthout: "Although most people are aware of the devastating consequences of critical global issues such as oil depletion, climate change, nuclear proliferation, and poverty, why are we are doing so little to address them as the clock ticks forward?"
Read the Article

The Week the IAEA Applied a Nuclear Double Standard
Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service: "In 2004, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) revealed that a member state had violated its Safeguards Agreement by carrying out covert uranium conversion and enrichment activities and plutonium experiments for more than two decades … If that sounds like a description of Iran's troubled relationship with the IAEA up to 2004, that's because it bears striking resemblance to it. In fact, however, it is a description of the deception of the IAEA by the government of South Korea."
Read the Article

To Sway Nelson, a Hard-Won Compromise on Abortion Issue
Paul Kane, The Washington Post: "The Democrats wouldn't even sit in the same room. At one end of the majority leader's office, Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), the antiabortion senator whose support was crucial to health-care legislation, huddled with White House staff in a conference room. At the other end, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the chamber's leading advocates of abortion rights, hunkered as far from Nelson as possible, in the office of Reid's chief of staff."
Read the Article

Plight of Contractor Raped in Iraq Spurs Push in Congress
Maria Recio, McClatchy Newspapers: "Four years ago, Jamie Leigh Jones, a 20-year old Texas contract employee working in Iraq, was drugged, stripped, beaten and gang-raped by her co-workers on her fourth day in country. She finally managed to get a phone call out from the shipping container where she was being detained - by her employer, KBR, then a Halliburton company … Now, a move by Congress last week, jump-started by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., would protect contract employees by ensuring they have legal recourse."
Read the Article

Ayatollah Montazeri, Iranian Cleric, Dies at 87
Robert F. Worth, The New York Times: "Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the plain-spoken senior Shiite cleric who helped forge Iran’s system of religious government and went on to become a fierce critic of its hard-line rulers, died Sunday morning at the age of 87. He died of heart failure in his sleep, his son Ahmad told Iran’s official IRNA news agency."
Read the Article

More Taxes = More Democracy
Christian Chavagneux, Alternatives Economiques, "For conservatives who go around repeating that more taxes are always equivalent to less individual freedom, two researchers recall Montesquieu's opposite teaching. And demonstrate, with the support of the numbers, that the French philosopher's observation still holds true two and a half centuries later."
Read the Article

VIDEO: GRITtv on Media as Establishment
Host Laura Flanders speaks with John Nichols of The Nation, Peter Hart of FAIR, and Karend Fragala of Newsweek about the past week of media coverage on topics ranging from the Federal Reserve to the climate summit in Copenhagen.
Read the Article

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Truthout 12/19

Reid Has 60 Votes Needed to Pass Health Care Bill
Jason Leopold, Truthout: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid unveiled a final compromise Saturday morning to a health care bill that numerous progressive Democrats, labor unions, and grassroots organizations said has been gutted of any meaningful consumer reforms and amounts to a bailout for the insurance industry."
Read the Article

Michael Winship | Happy Holidays from America's Banks
Michael Winship, Truthout: "Never mind Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope. It's the audacity of the banks that takes your breath away. Mean old Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life seems like Father Christmas by comparison."
Read the Article

Copenhagen Summit: Major Powers Broker Compromise Voluntary Climate Pact
Peter N. Spotts, The Christian Science Monitor: "The US, China, India, South Africa, and Brazil agreed to a voluntary climate pact. President Obama acknowledged that 'we have much further to go.' The deal did not produce commitments on emissions reductions."
Read the Article

Nelson Will Vote for Health Care Overhaul, Breaking Logjam
David Lightman and William Douglas, McClatchy Newspapers: "Sen. Ben Nelson, the last apparent obstacle to giving Democrats the votes they need to move forward with historic health care legislation, Saturday said he had agreed to compromises that would allow him to vote for the measure."
Read the Article

Joe Conason | The Democrats Blinked
Joe Conason, Truthout: "By bowing to Sen. Joseph Lieberman and his obstructive pals in both parties on health care reform, President Obama has confirmed what Republicans always say about Democrats: They simply aren't strong enough to govern. Or at least the Democrats elected last year -- and their colleagues in the Senate leadership -- don't seem to be."
Read the Article

Victoria Kennedy: The Moment Ted Kennedy Would Not Want to Lose
Victoria Reggie Kennedy, The Washington Post: "My late husband, Ted Kennedy, was passionate about health-care reform. It was the cause of his life. He believed that health care for all our citizens was a fundamental right, not a privilege, and that this year the stars -- and competing interests -- were finally aligned to allow our nation to move forward with fundamental reform. He believed that health-care reform was essential to the financial stability of our nation's working families and of our economy as a whole."
Read the Article

Chris Genovali | Hopenhagen or Dopenhagen?
Chris Genovali, Truthout: "In the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 15) in Copenhagen, an eclectic group made up primarily of corporations and media outlets put forward the notion of 'Hopenhagen.' ...At this juncture, it appears COP 15 will end up being remembered more as 'Dopenhagen,' as opposed to 'Hopehangen,' and Canada will have contributed to that outcome in a significant way through its intransigence on the climate change file."
Read the Article

Treacherous Snow Storm Strikes East Coast
The Associated Press: "A treacherous, frightful wintry storm slammed the East Coast on Saturday and dumped more than a foot of snow in some areas, hampering travelers and shoppers on the weekend before Christmas."
Read the Article

Friday, December 18, 2009

Truthout 12/18

William Rivers Pitt | Palin the Pundit
William Rivers Pitt, Truthout: "Dealing with Sarah Palin, in the immortal words of Pee Wee Herman, is like unraveling a giant cable-knit sweater that someone just keeps knitting, and knitting and knitting. There is no end to it, no bottom to this ocean of idiocy, as evidenced by the latest iteration of the Palin phenomenon: out of the cold, clear blue sky, the former Alaska governor and internationally-renowned dunderhead, has declared herself an expert on global climate change in general, and on the Copenhagen summit in particular."
Read the Article

Jeremy Scahill | Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know
Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports: "Contrary to popular belief, the US actually has 189,000 personnel on the ground in Afghanistan right now - and that number is quickly rising."
Read the Article

Evo and Hugo Heat Up Climate Talks in Copenhagen
Rafael Mendez, El Pais (Spain): "Wednesday morning opened with a bang here at the Climate Summit in Copenhagen, with heated speeches coming from Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales."
Read the Article

Obama Cracks the Whip at Copenhagen Global Warming Talks
Peter N. Spotts, The Christian Science Monitor: "At Copenhagen global warming talks, President Obama urged heads of state to agree on a new pact this weekend and move beyond 'the same stale arguments' that countries have rehashed for 20 years."
Read the Article

Pierre Barbancey | They Are Afghan; They Decry NATO's War
Pierre Barbancey reports from Kabul for L'Humanite: "The Taliban surf on the population's rejection of a corrupt government sustained by foreign armies that kill civilians. Women make the point that violence against them increases incessantly."
Read the Article

Winslow Myers | Earn This!
Winslow Myers, Truthout: "President Obama's speech in Oslo was powerful, subtle, honest and provocative - provocative in that it cries out for thoughtful citizen response, especially in the context of the cognitive dissonance which he sought to finesse: a leader at war receiving a peace prize."
Read the Article

John LaForge | Nuclear Power: Too Expensive, Too Risky
John LaForge, Truthout: "Lofty claims about the benefits of nuclear power are coming from the Nuclear Energy Institute and others. Meanwhile, news, financial and energy journals make clear that boiling water with uranium is the costliest and dirtiest energy choice. Even Time magazine reported December 31, 2008, 'It turns out that new [reactors] would be not just extremely expensive but spectacularly expensive.'"
Read the Article

Pelosi Says Kucinich Resolution Will Satisfy Need for Afghanistan Vote
Sabrina Eaton, The Plain Dealer: "Rep. Dennis Kucinich's proposed resolution to pull troops out of Afghanistan seems to be getting a favorable reception from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi."
Read the Article

Stephen Rohde | The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison, Outside the Law
Stephen Rohde, Truthout: "At once shocking, frustrating and inspiring, the book [The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison, Outside the Law] chronicles the courageous and hard-working lawyers who took time from law firms, small and large, human rights organizations and military assignments to step up and provide legal aid to people whom the Bush administration was calling 'the worst of the worst' after 9/11."
Read the Article

Eugene Robinson | At the Plate, Some Whiffed
Eugene Robinson: "It always amuses me to hear people call Pelosi a 'San Francisco liberal,' because while the description is objectively true, it suggests a certain delicacy of sensibility. In fact, Pelosi was born and raised in the bare-knuckles world of big-city machine politics -- her father was Tommy D'Alesandro, a legendary Baltimore mayor. She knows how to count votes, and how to keep them counted."
Read the Article

Health care bill wouldn't bring real reform

Howard Dean
from the Washington Post

If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill. Any measure that expands private insurers' monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform. Real reform would insert competition into insurance markets, force insurers to cut unnecessary administrative expenses and spend health-care dollars caring for people. Real reform would significantly lower costs, improve the delivery of health care and give all Americans a meaningful choice of coverage. The current Senate bill accomplishes none of these.

Real health-care reform is supposed to eliminate discrimination based on preexisting conditions. But the legislation allows insurance companies to charge older Americans up to three times as much as younger Americans, pricing them out of coverage. The bill was supposed to give Americans choices about what kind of system they wanted to enroll in. Instead, it fines Americans if they do not sign up with an insurance company, which may take up to 30 percent of your premium dollars and spend it on CEO salaries -- in the range of $20 million a year -- and on return on equity for the company's shareholders. Few Americans will see any benefit until 2014, by which time premiums are likely to have doubled. In short, the winners in this bill are insurance companies; the American taxpayer is about to be fleeced with a bailout in a situation that dwarfs even what happened at AIG.

From the very beginning of this debate, progressives have argued that a public option or a Medicare buy-in would restore competition and hold the private health insurance industry accountable. Progressives understood that a public plan would give Americans real choices about what kind of system they wanted to be in and how they wanted to spend their money. Yet Washington has decided, once again, that the American people cannot be trusted to choose for themselves. Your money goes to insurers, whether or not you want it to.

To be clear, I'm not giving up on health-care reform. The legislation does have some good points, such as expanding Medicaid and permanently increasing the federal government's contribution to it. It invests critical dollars in public health, wellness and prevention programs; extends the life of the Medicare trust fund; and allows young Americans to stay on their parents' health-care plans until they turn 27. Small businesses struggling with rising health-care costs will receive a tax credit, and primary-care physicians will see increases in their Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates.

Improvements can still be made in the Senate, and I hope that Senate Democrats will work on this bill as it moves to conference. If lawmakers are interested in ensuring that government affordability credits are spent on health-care benefits rather than insurers' salaries, they need to require state-based exchanges, which act as prudent purchasers and select only the most efficient insurers. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) offered this amendment during the Finance Committee markup, and Democrats should include it in the final legislation. A stripped-down version of the current bill that included these provisions would be worth passing.

In Washington, when major bills near final passage, an inside-the-Beltway mentality takes hold. Any bill becomes a victory. Clear thinking is thrown out the window for political calculus. In the heat of battle, decisions are being made that set an irreversible course for how future health reform is done. The result is legislation that has been crafted to get votes, not to reform health care.

I have worked for health-care reform all my political life. In my home state of Vermont, we have accomplished universal health care for children younger than 18 and real insurance reform -- which not only bans discrimination against preexisting conditions but also prevents insurers from charging outrageous sums for policies as a way of keeping out high-risk people. I know health reform when I see it, and there isn't much left in the Senate bill. I reluctantly conclude that, as it stands, this bill would do more harm than good to the future of America.

The writer is a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and was governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2002.

The hardest call

By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times

The first reason to support the Senate health care bill is that it would provide insurance to 30 million more Americans.

The second reason to support the bill is that its authors took the deficit issue seriously. Compared with, say, the prescription drug benefit from a few years ago, this bill is a model of fiscal rectitude. It spends a lot of money to cover the uninsured, but to help pay for it, it also includes serious Medicare cuts and whopping tax increases — the tax on high-cost insurance plans alone will raise $1.3 trillion in the second decade.

The bill is not really deficit-neutral. It’s politically inconceivable that Congress will really make all the spending cuts that are there on paper. But the bill won’t explode the deficit, and that’s an accomplishment.

The third reason to support the bill is that the authors have thrown in a million little ideas in an effort to reduce health care inflation. The fact is, nobody knows how to reduce cost growth within the current system. The authors of this bill are willing to try anything. You might even call this a Burkean approach. They are not fundamentally disrupting the status quo, but they are experimenting with dozens of gradual programs that might bend the cost curve.

If you’ve ever heard about it, it’s in there — improved insurance exchanges, payment innovations, an independent commission to cap Medicare payment rates, an innovation center, comparative effectiveness research. There’s at least a pilot program for every promising idea.

The fourth reason to support the bill is that if this fails, it will take a long time to get back to health reform. Clinton failed. Obama will have failed. No one will touch this. Meanwhile, health costs will continue their inexorable march upward, strangling the nation.

The first reason to oppose this bill is that it does not fundamentally reform health care. The current system is rotten to the bone with opaque pricing and insane incentives. Consumers are insulated from the costs of their decisions and providers are punished for efficiency. Burkean gradualism is fine if you’ve got a cold. But if you’ve got cancer, you want surgery, not nasal spray.

If this bill passes, you’ll have 500 experts in Washington trying to hold down costs and 300 million Americans with the same old incentives to get more and more care. The Congressional Budget Office and most of the experts I talk to (including many who support the bill) do not believe it will seriously bend the cost curve.

The second reason to oppose this bill is that, according to the chief actuary for Medicare, it will cause national health care spending to increase faster. Health care spending is already zooming past 17 percent of G.D.P. to 22 percent and beyond. If these pressures mount even faster, health care will squeeze out everything else, especially on the state level. We’ll shovel more money into insurance companies and you can kiss goodbye programs like expanded preschool that would have a bigger social impact.

Third, if passed, the bill sets up a politically unsustainable situation. Over its first several years, the demand for health care will rise sharply. The supply will not. Providers will have the same perverse incentives. As a result, prices will skyrocket while efficiencies will not. There will be a bipartisan rush to gut reform.

This country has reduced health inflation in short bursts, but it has not sustained cost control over the long term because the deep flaws in the system produce horrific political pressures that gut restraint.

Fourth, you can’t centrally regulate 17 percent of the U.S. economy without a raft of unintended consequences.

Fifth, it will slow innovation. Government regulators don’t do well with disruptive new technologies.

Sixth, if this passes, we will never get back to cost control. The basic political deal was, we get to have dessert (expanding coverage) but we have to eat our spinach (cost control), too. If we eat dessert now, we’ll never come back to the spinach.

So what’s my verdict? I have to confess, I flip-flop week to week and day to day. It’s a guess. Does this put us on a path toward the real reform, or does it head us down a valley in which real reform will be less likely?

If I were a senator forced to vote today, I’d vote no. If you pass a health care bill without systemic incentives reform, you set up a political vortex in which the few good parts of the bill will get stripped out and the expensive and wasteful parts will be entrenched.

Defenders say we can’t do real reform because the politics won’t allow it. The truth is the reverse. Unless you get the fundamental incentives right, the politics will be terrible forever and ever.

Pass the bill

By PAUL KRUGMAN

message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy. Declare that you’re disappointed in and/or disgusted with President Obama. Demand a change in Senate rules that, combined with the Republican strategy of total obstructionism, are in the process of making America ungovernable.

But meanwhile, pass the health care bill.

Yes, the filibuster-imposed need to get votes from “centrist” senators has led to a bill that falls a long way short of ideal. Worse, some of those senators seem motivated largely by a desire to protect the interests of insurance companies — with the possible exception of Mr. Lieberman, who seems motivated by sheer spite.

But let’s all take a deep breath, and consider just how much good this bill would do, if passed — and how much better it would be than anything that seemed possible just a few years ago. With all its flaws, the Senate health bill would be the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare, greatly improving the lives of millions. Getting this bill would be much, much better than watching health care reform fail.

At its core, the bill would do two things. First, it would prohibit discrimination by insurance companies on the basis of medical condition or history: Americans could no longer be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, or have their insurance canceled when they get sick. Second, the bill would provide substantial financial aid to those who don’t get insurance through their employers, as well as tax breaks for small employers that do provide insurance.

All of this would be paid for in large part with the first serious effort ever to rein in rising health care costs.

The result would be a huge increase in the availability and affordability of health insurance, with more than 30 million Americans gaining coverage, and premiums for lower-income and lower-middle-income Americans falling dramatically. That’s an immense change from where we were just a few years ago: remember, not long ago the Bush administration and its allies in Congress successfully blocked even a modest expansion of health care for children.

Bear in mind also the lessons of history: social insurance programs tend to start out highly imperfect and incomplete, but get better and more comprehensive as the years go by. Thus Social Security originally had huge gaps in coverage — and a majority of African-Americans, in particular, fell through those gaps. But it was improved over time, and it’s now the bedrock of retirement stability for the vast majority of Americans.

Look, I understand the anger here: supporting this weakened bill feels like giving in to blackmail — because it is. Or to use an even more accurate metaphor suggested by Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, we’re paying a ransom to hostage-takers. Some of us, including a majority of senators, really, really want to cover the uninsured; but to make that happen we need the votes of a handful of senators who see failure of reform as an acceptable outcome, and demand a steep price for their support.

The question, then, is whether to pay the ransom by giving in to the demands of those senators, accepting a flawed bill, or hang tough and let the hostage — that is, health reform — die.

Again, history suggests the answer. Whereas flawed social insurance programs have tended to get better over time, the story of health reform suggests that rejecting an imperfect deal in the hope of eventually getting something better is a recipe for getting nothing at all. Not to put too fine a point on it, America would be in much better shape today if Democrats had cut a deal on health care with Richard Nixon, or if Bill Clinton had cut a deal with moderate Republicans back when they still existed.

But won’t paying the ransom now encourage more hostage-taking in the future? Maybe. But the next big fight, over the future of the financial system, will be very different. If the usual suspects try to water down financial reform, I say call their bluff: there’s not much to lose, since a merely cosmetic reform, by creating a false sense of security, could well end up being worse than nothing.

Beyond that, we need to take on the way the Senate works. The filibuster, and the need for 60 votes to end debate, aren’t in the Constitution. They’re a Senate tradition, and that same tradition said that the threat of filibusters should be used sparingly. Well, Republicans have already trashed the second part of the tradition: look at a list of cloture motions over time, and you’ll see that since the G.O.P. lost control of Congress it has pursued obstructionism on a literally unprecedented scale. So it’s time to revise the rules.

But that’s for later. Right now, let’s pass the bill that’s on the table.

FP morning post 12/18

Obama in Copenhagen: You can't always get what you want

Top story: A frustrated U.S. President Barack Obama addressed U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen on Friday and urged countries to accept an agreement, even if imperfect, though he stopped short of promising new U.S. emissions cuts. "No country will get everything that it wants," he said.

Obama also met privately with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. China has been criticized throughout this week for its resistance to binding emissions targets or outside monitoring of its environmental efforts. An official said the two leaders "took a step forward and made progress,” though neither has changed its negotiating position. Without specifically mentioning China, Obama said that an agreement without outside verification would be a "hollow victory."

Obama maintained in his remarks that "We are ready to get this done today," but with talks in disarray on Friday, the United Nations has reportedly advised negotiators to make arrangements to extend their stay through Sunday.

World leaders arriving on Friday were irritated that there was no agreement on the table prior to their arrival and seemed to believe that the chances of a deal were slim.

"I am not sure if such an angel or wise man will come down to this plenary and put in our minds the intelligence that we lacked," Brazilian President Lula Inacio Lula da Silva said. "I believe in God. I believe in miracles."

Cyber attack: Iranian hackers briefly blocked access to Twitter early this morning, redirecting users to the page of the "Iranian Cyber Army."

Asia

Afghan officials say President Hamid Karzai will keep half of his current cabinet.
India says it has withdrawn 30,000 troops from Kashmir.
The Obama administration has proposed setting up a permanent U.S. liaison office in North Korea.

Europe

A French judge filed corruption charges against former President Jacques Chirac.
Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev will meet briefly in Copenhagen in Friday, hoping to finalize a nuclear arms control deal.
The Vatican accepted the resignation of an Irish Bishop implicated in a sex abuse investigation.

Middle East

Iranian troops reportedly briefly crossed into Iraqi territory and took control of an oil well before withdrawing.
Iran's nuclear chief says the country is building more advanced centrifuges which will be put into operation by 2011.
Six Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo Bay will be repatriated.

Africa

A record 74,000 African fled across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen in 2009, according to the U.N.
Eritrea's entire national soccer team has requested asylum in Kenya.
The archbishop of Zambia has been defrocked by the Vatican for getting married, attempting to ordain married priests, and faith healing activities.

Americas

Hugo Chavez accused the Netherlands of helping the U.S. prepare for an attack on Venezuela.
Brazil's supreme court overturned a custody ruling in favor of an American father who is attempting to bring his son back to the United States.
Mexican authorities say yesterday's killing of drug lord Beltran Levya could spark more bloodshed.

-By Joshua Keating

McClatchy Washington Report 12/18

Homeowners often rejected under Obama's loan plan

The homeowners do everything they're supposed to, but still are rejected for modification of their loans, often with no explanation. Worse, the fine print of the Obama program allows banks not to inform borrowers they've been rejected and lets them move straight to auctioning off a home without warning.

Republicans increasingly are becoming congressional players

Remember the Republicans? Congressional Democrats increasingly are concerned that their constituents are doing just that as the Senate health care plan's prospects for passage before Christmas look more uncertain and polls find that the legislation is becoming more unpopular.

Battle against human trafficking gets boost from new funding

America's war on human trafficking got its biggest-ever one-year boost in federal funding following President Barack Obama's signing of an appropriations bill, one of several significant anti-trafficking developments this week. Included in the omnibus appropriation bill signed into law Wednesday is money to provide services to U.S.-born human trafficking victims — mainly underage girls forced into the sex trade.
Death sentences are down but Texas still leads in executions

Texas juries are following a nationwide trend of sending fewer convicted criminals to death, but the state still leads the country in executions by a wide margin, according to a new study released today. Both in Texas and across the country, death sentences declined for the seventh straight year, according to a report from the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-capital-punishment group.
Napa Valley Wine Train supporters say criticisms from McCain, Beck are 'flatly wrong'

Townsfolk in Napa say Sen. John McCain of Arizona has uncorked sour information about their wine town in a new report on alleged waste of federal stimulus dollars. The December report out of the offices of McCain and fellow Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma listed 100 projects that raised questions about "silly and shortsighted" federal spending. The Napa Valley Wine Train, which ferries tourists about, was listed at No. 11.
Boehner: Guantanamo could be deal breaker on Afghan funds

House Republican Leader John Boehner warned on Thursday that he wouldn't back emergency funding for President Barack Obama's Afghanistan troop surge if the White House request includes money to transfer Guantanamo detainees to the U.S.
Alaska Sen. Begich surprises colleagues while presiding over Senate

Normally when senators preside over the Senate, they do little but direct traffic, showing little partiality or emotion as they allow their colleagues to yammer on at length. So when Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, asked Sen. Mark Begich. D-Alaska, for additional time to keep talking about health care Thursday afternoon, it wasn't the kind of request usually denied in the polite Senate, where long-windedness is generally tolerated. But Begich objected because he had been asked to limit everyone to ten-minute speeches.
Aide for ex-N.C. Gov. Easley takes the Fifth before Elections Board

A top aide to former North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley who helped gather campaign donations from politically connected businessmen declined Thursday to testify before the State Board of Elections, citing his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself.
Haiti is converting garbage into energy to slow deforestation

Using a technique that is as frugal as it is green, Haitians are turning garbage into slow-burning logs, a cheap alternative known as briquettes. For a country like Haiti, where back-to-back hurricanes and tropical storms cut a deadly path last year, projects like turning garbage into energy, while small, are in the vanguard of efforts to slow and reverse deforestation.
Stowaway frogs find their way to Alaska in Christmas trees

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is urging residents to check their Christmas trees for "amphibious hitchhikers they may be unaware they purchased." Pacific Chorus frogs have infiltrated trees being bought in the Anchorage area and state wildlife officials have ordered them killed on sight.
Promoting democracy in Cuba can lead to jail

The recent arrest of an American subcontractor underscores the danger democracy groups and humanitarian organizations face distributing aid and democracy materials in Cuba. The American arrested was working for Development Alternatives Inc., (DAI) a suburban Washington firm supervising $40 million in U.S. government aid for pro-democracy programs in Cuba.
Commentary: Happy, Merry Chrisholidays...Oh, whatever!

Season's greetings and happy holidays!
Oh, I know that all-purpose salutation makes some people squirm. They are the ones who believe we need to be militantly Merry Christmasing everyone in sight.

[Part 2] Keith Olbermann Special Comment: Not Health, Not Care, Not Reform - 12/16/09

[Part 1] Keith Olbermann Special Comment: Not Health, Not Care, Not Reform - 12/16/09

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Common Dreams headlines 12/17

Headlines...

Copenhagen Conference on the Brink of Collapse as World Leaders Arrive at Talks
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/17

Two-Degree Temperature Rise Could Flood Wide Areas of Planet, Study Says
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/17-7

Pelosi Says Kucinich Resolution Will Satisfy Need for Afghanistan Vote
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/17-3

Will Progressives 'Push Back' or Help Kill Health Bill?
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/17-8

Leaked UN Report Shows Cuts Offered at Copenhagen Would Lead to 3C Rise
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/17-10

Nation's Largest Union: Change Health Care Bill Or Else
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/17-11

and more...

****************************************************

Video...

Olbermann: Ruined Senate Bill Unsupportable
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2009/12/17-1

Maude Barlow on the World Water Crisis
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2009/12/17-0

****************************************************

Views...

John Gibbons | Six Reasons Why Earth Won't Cope for Long
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/17-0

Jo Comerford | Afghanistan: $57,077.60 - Surging by the Minute
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/17-5

John Nichols | 'Party of No' Blocks Debate on Bernie Sanders' Real Reform
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/17-2

Pat LaMarche | Holiday Hit: The Five Lies of Congress
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/17-3

George Monbiot | Mr Obama, Here's Your Copenhagen Speech
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/17

Keith Olbermann | Special Comment: Ruined Senate Bill Unsupportable
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/17-4

Bill McKibben | Hungry in Copenhagen
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/17-8

and more...

Truthout 12/17

Jason Leopold | Documents Suggest Bush White House Failed to Search for Libby's "Missing" Emails Subpoenaed in CIA Leak Probe
Jason Leopold, Truthout: "Between late 2005 and January 2006, the Bush administration tried to recover 'lost' emails from staffers who worked in the Office of the Vice President (OVP), an effort that centered on a critical week - October 1 through October 6, 2003 - that coincided with an announcement by the Justice Department that it had launched an investigation into the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson."
Read the Article

Art Levine | With a Third of Workers Risking Job Losses, House Passes $154 Billion Jobs Bill
Art Levine, Truthout: "With heavy defections from Blue Dog Democrats, the House of Representatives still narrowly passed Wednesday evening, 217 to 212, a $154 billion jobs package. It included funds for states to retain front-line workers, aid to the unemployed and transportation projects. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) declared on the House floor, 'This legislation brings jobs to Main Street by increasing credit for small businesses, rebuilding the infrastructure of America, and keeping police and fireman and teachers on the job. As we create jobs for Americans, we are doing so in a fiscally responsible way. These investments are fully paid for by redirecting TARP funds from Wall Street to Main Street.'"
Read the Article

Anne Elizabeth Moore | The World's First Meaningful Billboard Tax Passes in Toronto
Anne Elizabeth Moore, Truthout: "Corporate creep, the profit-minded takeover of public space, is not unlike a roach infestation: stomach-churning, not pretty, and always a losing battle. Yet the battle rages on. The issues underlying many current debates re-exert the right of the public over public space, whether real or virtual: Social networking site privacy uproars, state and city university walk-outs, the low-power FM radio movement, sponsored public transit stations. And the sad fact is, despite that they greatly outnumber the, ah, vermin - the public is losing this fight against the corporate creeps."
Read the Article

Allen McDuffee | Policy Report: Obama Should Learn Defense Budget Lessons From French
Allen McDuffee, Truthout: "In an era when defense contractors monopolize technical expertise and determine pricing while Congress protects parochial interests, President Obama would do well to adopt lessons from French Defense, according to a recent Washington, DC, think tank report."
Read the Article

Yana Kunichoff | Report Reveals Scope of Government Contracting
Yana Kunichoff, Truthout: "According to a new government report, more than 50 percent of the Department of Defense workforces are military contractors and the Obama administration's troop surge in Afghanistan is set to only increase these numbers."
Read the Article

Robert Borosage | Bernanke: Time's Man of the Year
Robert Borosage, The Campaign for America's Future: "Time Magazine's naming Ben Bernanke 'Man of the Year' is a little bit like celebrating an arsonist for his heroics in putting out a fire that he set. Bernanke has done creative and bold work in staving off a financial free fall. But he would also be on any list of the 10 people most responsible for creating the free fall."
Read the Article

Jo Comerford | $57,077.60 Surging by the Minute
Jo Comerford, TomDispatch.com: "$57,077.60. That's what we're paying per minute. Keep that in mind - just for a minute or so. After all, the surge is already on. By the end of December, the first 1,500 US troops will have landed in Afghanistan, a nation roughly the size of Texas, ranked by the United Nations as second worst in the world in terms of human development."
Read the Article

Obama Administration Launches Open Government Initiative
Mary Susan Littlepage, Truthout: "As part of the Obama administration's plan to change the culture of secrecy in Washington, the White House last week issued the Open Government Directive, requiring federal agencies to take immediate, specific steps to open their work up to the public."
Read the Article

Robert Reich | Slouching Toward Health Care Reform
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog: "'Don't make the perfect the enemy of the better,' say the president and Congressional insiders when confronted with the sorry spectacle of a health-care bill whose scope and ambition continue to shrink, and whose long-term costs to typical Americans continue to grow. They're right, of course. But by the same logic, neither the White House nor Congressional Democrats will be able to celebrate the emerging legislation as a 'major overhaul' or 'fundamental reform.' At best, it's likely to be a small overhaul containing incremental reforms."
Read the Article

VIDEO | Keith Olbermann: Ruined Senate Bill Unsupportable
Keith Olbermann, MSNBC: "Finally, as promised, a Special Comment on the latest version of H-R 35-90, the Senate Health Care Reform bill. To again quote Churchill after Munich, as I did six nights ago on this program: 'I will begin by saying the most unpopular and most unwelcome thing: that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, without a war.'"
Read the Article

Global Economic Apartheid Is Obstacle to Fair Climate Deal
Claudia Ciobanu, Inter Press Service / TerraViva: "'Climate change is an opportunity to deal with all the issues of equity and justice that we have been struggling for all along,' said Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International, in an interview with IPS on Thursday in Copenhagen."
Read the Article

Voting-Machine Firm Merger Investigated
Marc Caputo, The Miami Herald: "Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum is conducting an antitrust investigation of a voting-machine company merger that would create a near-monopoly over the levers of democracy in Florida and much of the United States."
Read the Article

Appropriations Bill Marks Victory for Sexual Health
James Wagoner, RH Reality Check: "After a decade of denial and ideological assault on science-based public health, the passage of the omnibus appropriations bill this past weekend represents a major win for youth advocates who support rights-based, evidence-based sexual and reproductive health programs. Not only did the legislation 'flip the switch' on $114 million in federal spending from abstinence-only-until-marriage programs to comprehensive teen-pregnancy prevention and sex education programs, it also established an office on adolescent health within the office of the Secretary at HHS."
Read the Article

E.J. Dionne Jr. | The Democrats' Bush Nostalgia
E.J. Dionne Jr.: "Here's what Democrats need to ponder: Can they prosper in the absence of George W. Bush? His presidency was a tonic for Democrats and led to a blossoming of political creativity on the center-left not seen since the 1930's. No tactic, no program, no leader ever did more to catalyze the party than the rage Bush inspired."
Read the Article

Ask Questions Later: Victims Are Too Often Deported
Mike McGraw, The Kansas City Star: "In a dingy reception center across from the new terminal at La Aurora International Airport, Guatemalan immigration agents don surgical masks and brace for another day of controlled chaos. A US government passenger jet - one of up to seven a week - taxis to a stop. More than 100 disheveled deportees shuffle down the stairs and head for the center. Agents check for criminal records and swine flu and return shoelaces confiscated stateside, usually as a suicide precaution."
Read the Article

Bill Moyers Journal | Washington for Sale?
Bill Moyers Journal: "Amid fading hopes for real reform on issues ranging from high finance to health care, economist Robert Kuttner and journalist Matt Taibbi join Bill Moyers to discuss Wall Street's power over the federal government."
Read the Article

FP morning post 12/17

Clinton's last-minute bid to save Copenhagen

Top story: In an 11th hour proposal to save the ailing UN Climate talks in Copenhagen and have some agreement on the table by the time U.S. President Barack Obama comes to town tomorrow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed that developed countries including the United States come up with $100 billion per year over the next decade to help poor countries fight climate change. This represented a tactical shift from the Obama administration, which has been reluctant to put a dollar amount on aid as climate legislation remains stuck in the senate.

"We're running out of time," Clinton said.

The "Group of 77" developing nations -- actually about 130 countries including superpower China -- has effectively stalled discussions this week, voicing dissatisfaction over previous aid proposals and rejecting any deal that would force them to make binding emissions cuts.

While the U.K. and several African nations welcomed the proposal, China appeared less enthusiastic with a spokesman noting a "lack of clarity in Clinton's promises. China remains adamant that its emissions reduction efforts not be subjected to external monitoring. Chinese officials now feel that an operational agreement is unlikely to be reached this week.

The drama continues: U.N. officials tell the New York Times that recently departed UN No. 2 Peter Galbraith proposed deposing President Hamid Karzai with the help of the White House.

Asia

Pakistan's supreme court struck down a controversial amnesty for corruption charges against government officials, including President Asif Ali Zardari.
The Philippines military is evacuating thousands because of fear of a major volcanic eruption.
Two were killed in a suspected U.S. drone strike in North Waziristan.

Europe

Russia and the United States are unlikely to sign a hoped-for arms reduction treaty this week.
A suicide bomber attacked a group of policemen in Russia's North Caucasus.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was released from the hospital.

Americas

The Mexican navy killed a the major drug cartel boss Beltran Levya in a shootout.
Colombia's two largest rebel groups say they may join forces.
Mexican authorities say animal rights activists are behind a series of recent car burnings in Mexico City.

Middle East

Yemeni forces attacked al Qaeda forces within the country and claim to have foiled a major attack.
Former Israeli Prime Minsiter Ehud Olmert reportedly offered to swap Israeli land near Gaza and the West Bank in exchange for Israeli settlements.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says Iraqi security forces are linked to last week's terrorist attacks.

Africa

The UN is ending a controversial joint operation with D.R. Congo forces.
A Nigerian court dropped 170 corruption charges against a former governor.
The International Crisis Group says North and South Sudan are headed toward a "violent breakup."

-By Joshua Keating

http://link.email.foreignpolicy.com/r/KEEIY29/0OEH/8K68/6YDX/MI5I/XL/h

http://link.email.foreignpolicy.com/r/KEEIY29/0OEH/8K68/6YDX/KD7Y/XL/h

Sex, Drugs, and Skimming off the Top in Afghanistan

http://link.email.foreignpolicy.com/r/KEEIY29/0OEH/8K68/6YDX/LY5Q/XL/h

Fake Country Watch: It Takes One to Know One

http://link.email.foreignpolicy.com/r/KEEIY29/0OEH/8K68/6YDX/NEWR/XL/h

Can Computers Predict Middle East Wars?

http://link.email.foreignpolicy.com/r/KEEIY29/0OEH/8K68/6YDX/8CB5/XL/h

Why Neda Is the Real 'Person of the Year'

HENNING BAGGER/AFP/Getty Images

McClatchy Washington Report 12/17

Stimulus II: Congress ponders aid for cash-strapped states

Washington soon could come to the aid of California, New York and other cash-strapped states that face the need to raise taxes or cut spending again next year to balance their books.

Even in cases the U.S. wins, Guantanamo evidence is suspect

The Pentagon got split decisions this week in its defense of continued detention of Guantanamo detainees. On Wednesday, it lost when a Washington, D.C. judge ruled a Yemeni was being held illegally. On Monday, it won. But even then, the judge said the detainne wasn't a threat and the government's evidence should never be admitted "in any fashion, in any court."