side note: Got this over at the Huffpost, but if you haven’t already been to Media Matter’s site, you should check it out. They are a wonderful watchdog of those morons on conservative radio and tv. As for Savage, I don’t know if any of you have heard his show before, but this guy is filled with anger. You can even tell who the Savage audience is when you’re driving home, and you accidently cut someone off and that person wants to get out of the car and fight you on the side of the road!

side note: We at NT couldn’t agree more with Maher. These fuckin Democrats in DC are not liberals. They aren’t even slightly to the left……these people need to be voted out b/c they do not represent values that most think Dems should defend.

side note: Shocker that big interest groups….who can spend the money lobbying DC politicians don’t want any change….they’re making huge money screwing over Americans with shitty healthcare. Why the fuck are we ranked #37 in the world? Wake up folks, we do not have the best heath care in the world…..unless you’re a politician or are rich.

By Robert Reich
Salon.com
Those opposing a public option — Big Pharma, the AMA, the insurers — are doing so out of economic self-interest

Without a public option, the other parties that comprise America’s non-system of healthcare — private insurers, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and medical suppliers — have little or no incentive to supply high-quality care at a lower cost than they do now.

Which is precisely why the public option has become such a lightning rod. The American Medical Association is dead set against it, Big Pharma rejects it out of hand, and the biggest insurance companies won’t consider it. No other issue in the current healthcare debate is as fiercely opposed by the medical establishment and their lobbies now swarming over Capitol Hill. Of course they don’t want it. A public option would squeeze their profits and force them to undertake major reforms. That’s the whole point.

Critics say the public option is really a Trojan Horse for a government takeover of all of health insurance. But nothing could be further from the truth. It’s an option. No one has to choose it. Individuals and families will merely be invited to compare costs and outcomes. Presumably they will choose the public plan only if it offers them and their families the best deal — more and better healthcare for less.

Private insurers say a public option would have an unfair advantage in achieving this goal. Being the one public plan, it will have large economies of scale that will enable it to negotiate more favorable terms with pharmaceutical companies and other providers. But why, exactly, is this unfair? Isn’t the whole point of cost containment to provide the public with healthcare on more favorable terms? If the public plan negotiates better terms — thereby demonstrating that drug companies and other providers can meet them — private plans could seek similar deals. (more…)

side note: Come on people….everyone should be on board for this bill! Our states and local communities are going bankrupt, what else needs to happen? Even LA couldn’t afford a parade for the Lakers after they won the title……why are we wasting resources on a pothead watching Family Guy and eating Cheetos?

WBZtv.com

A controversial law in Massachusetts could go national if Congressman Barney Frank gets his way.

Frank has filed a bill that would eliminate federal penalties for personal possession of less than 100 grams of marijuana.

It would also make the penalty for using marijuana in public just $100.

“I think John Stuart Mill had it right in the 1850s,” said Congressman Frank, “when he argued that individuals should have the right to do what they want in private, so long as they don’t hurt anyone else. It’s a matter of personal liberty. Moreover, our courts are already stressed and our prisons are over-crowded. We don’t need to spend our scarce resources prosecuting people who are doing no harm to others.” (more…)

In a decision announced this morning, the Supreme Court upheld the 1965 Voting Rights Act — a law that has done more to expand and strengthen our democracy than any other.

But the fight to protect voting rights doesn’t end there. Attacks on this critical law will not stop. And voter suppression tactics will continue to plague our elections.

In the wake of an historic election, it’s easy to reflect on how far we’ve come. But our democracy is still a work in progress.

Donna Brazile learned that first-hand as Al Gore’s campaign manager in 2000.

Watch Donna’s video on the fight to protect voting rights — then share it with your friends.

side note: I hope Chait is right. I haven’t agreed with everything Obama has done thus far…especially the continuation of dubya “war on terra” strategies, but then again, he’s a hell of a lot better then bushie and his band of criminals!

Jonathan Chait
The New Republic
First he did it to Boehner, now Ahmadinejad.

The thing that people haven’t figured out about President Obama’s conduct of foreign policy is that it’s the same as his conduct of domestic policy. Obama believes in the power of negotiation and public dialogue to split his adversaries–Republicans at home, Islamists abroad–and strengthen his own position. Obama’s speech in Cairo to the Muslim world was simply the foreign analogue of his dealings with the GOP.

Obama’s method begins with attempts to find common ground, expressions of respect for the adversary’s core beliefs, and profuse hope for cooperation. In his iconic 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, Obama famously announced that Democrats, too, “worship an awesome God.” In his Cairo speech, Obama pointed to the contributions and freedoms of American Muslims. In both speeches, Obama signaled cultural respect by adapting the other side’s own rhetorical formulations–invoking “a belief in things not seen” (2004) or calling the Middle East the region where Islam “was first revealed” (Cairo).

This rhetoric removes the locus of debate from the realm of tribal conflict– red state versus blue state, Islam versus America–and puts it onto specific questions–Is the American health care system fair? Is terrorism justified?– where Obama believes he can win support from soft adherents of the opposing camp.

Naturally, Obama’s pacific expressions tend to alarm the more hawkish elements of his own camp, who interpret his idealistic rhetoric as naivete or weakness. A few months before the 2008 presidential primary, columnist E.J. Dionne reported, “Several Democrats also said Clinton’s claim that she can deal with the Republican ‘attack machine’ rings truer to an angry party than Obama’s call for an end to partisan polarization.” (more…)

side note: Hmmm….doesn’t seem to difficult a task to me!

side note: This goes right in line of what’s already been released to the public….remember The Downing Street Memos? We just have to make sure that we take the necessary steps to assure this doesn’t happen again. This is why I’ve been deeply disappointed in the President’s statements of: “We need to look forward, not backward”. This is just another way of protecting criminals.

by: Jamie Doward, Gaby Hinsliff and Mark Townsend
The Observer UK

Former President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. A confidential record of a meeting between Bush and Blair showed plans to provoke Iraq into a war. (Photo: Getty Images)

A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the UK’s role in toppling Saddam Hussein.

The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan “to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover”. Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.

The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be “brought out” to give a public presentation on Saddam’s WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed even without a second resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was “solidly with the president”. (more…)

side note: What I’m amazed about is that Americans actually realize there’s a problem with health care even though most of the media is blasting the President’s goals. This means that a majority of those folks have been affected in one way or another with their own shitty health care plan, or they just don’t have one. B/c…as we see with the war, if most (not all by any means) people aren’t affected….they just don’t give a shit. They have their stories to watch in the evening….and they don’t want to be bothered!

By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times

America’s political scene has changed immensely since the last time a Democratic president tried to reform health care. So has the health care picture: with costs soaring and insurance dwindling, nobody can now say with a straight face that the U.S. health care system is O.K. And if surveys like the New York Times/CBS News poll released last weekend are any indication, voters are ready for major change.

The question now is whether we will nonetheless fail to get that change, because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like it’s 1993.

And yes, I mean Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogans — Government-run health care! Socialism! Europe! — hoping that someone still cares.

The polls suggest that hardly anyone does. Voters, it seems, strongly favor a universal guarantee of coverage, and they mostly accept the idea that higher taxes may be needed to achieve that guarantee. What’s more, they overwhelmingly favor precisely the feature of Democratic plans that Republicans denounce most fiercely as “socialized medicine” — the creation of a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers. (more…)

By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times

Would the Obama administration’s plan for financial reform do what has to be done? Yes and no.

Yes, the plan would plug some big holes in regulation. But as described, it wouldn’t end the skewed incentives that made the current crisis inevitable.

Let’s start with the good news.

Our current system of financial regulation dates back to a time when everything that functioned as a bank looked like a bank. As long as you regulated big marble buildings with rows of tellers, you pretty much had things nailed down.

But today you don’t have to look like a bank to be a bank. As Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, put it in a widely cited speech last summer, banking is anything that involves financing “long-term risky and relatively illiquid assets” with “very short-term liabilities.” Cases in point: Bear Stearns and Lehman, both of which financed large investments in risky securities primarily with short-term borrowing. (more…)

side note: I couldn’t agree more! These righty media outlets are fueling the hate in this county. I don’t think they realize what they are doing……..or they just have no conscience. I unfortunetly think that money and power has blinded most and it’s probably the latter of the two.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times

Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment. (more…)

side note: I do my best to know what type of food I’m eating…….it really makes a huge difference if you can actually make that shift in your life. Just like anything else….once you add it to your routine, it just becomes another thing, like brushing your teeth, taking a shower, working out….etc

Andrew O’Hehir
Salon.com
Michael Pollan and director Robert Kenner talk about “Food, Inc.,” the movie agribusiness doesn’t want you to see.

Two warring conceptions of the American food and agriculture business collide in the gripping agitprop documentary “Food, Inc.,” the result of a collaboration between filmmaker Robert Kenner and writers Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan. I’m using “agitprop” as a descriptor, not a pejorative, since I personally agree with nearly all the arguments made in the film. Furthermore, if “Food Inc.” comes off as a one-sided project, it’s easy to know where to point the finger, since the biggest meat-processing companies and agribusiness firms profiled in the film — Smithfield, Tyson, Perdue, Monsanto — universally declined to provide any access or on-camera interviews.

On one hand, we’ve got the fact that, as Pollan puts it, the production of food has changed more in the last 50 years than it did in the previous 10,000. With the massive application of fertilizers, pesticides and economies of scale after World War II, raising crops and animals for food ceased to be a rural lifestyle based on many small farmers and ranchers, and rapidly became a heavily mechanized (and lightly regulated) industry dominated by a handful of big companies who run on low-wage labor. “Food, Inc.” attempts to lift the veil of secrecy from this process. In one remarkable example Pollan provides, the meat in a single fast-food burger might have come from 400 different cows.

This change has had obvious benefits for consumers, a point that leftists, foodies and environmentalists sometimes overlook but that Kenner’s film takes pains to notice. While chronic food shortages threaten the poor of Africa and South Asia with starvation, food in America is plentiful, various and exceptionally cheap. (Expressed as a proportion of the average family’s budget, food prices have fallen by half in 30 years.) In the movie, Kenner spends some time with a working-class Latino family who say they simply don’t spend enough time at home together to shop or cook. While dropping the kids at school and then driving themselves to work, Mom and Dad can feed the whole family at Burger King — for about $11. (more…)

side note: One of my biggest disappointments with the Obama Administration. There have been quite a few instances now where he has marched in lockstep with Dubya and his illegal policies.

Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com
Arguments for suppressing torture photos are grounded in the worst aspects of the Bush/Cheney mindset.

(updated below – Update II)

Yesterday, there was a potentially temporary though still quite significant victory for those who believe in open government and transparency: as Jane Hamsher first reported, House leaders and the White House were forced to remove the Graham-Lieberman photo suppression amendment from the war supplemental spending bill, because widespread opposition to that amendment among progressive House Democrats was jeopardizing passage of the spending bill. Readers here and those of various blogs who bombarded House members with opposition calls on Friday obviously played an important role in forcing the withdrawal of this pernicious amendment. Successes of this sort are rare enough that — even if fleeting — they warrant some celebration.

Whether there is value in disclosing these specific torture photographs is a secondary issue here, at most [though in light of the ongoing debate in this country over torture and accountability, as well as the irreplaceable value of photographic evidence in documenting government abuses (see Abu Ghraib), the value of these sorts of photographs seems self-evident]. A much more critical issue here is whether the President should have the power to conceal evidence about the Government’s actions on the ground that what the Government did was so bad, so wrong, so inflammatory, so lawless, that to allow disclosure and transparency would reflect poorly on our country, thereby increase anti-American sentiment, and thus jeopardize The Troops. Once you accept that rationale — the more extreme the Government’s abuses are, the more compelling is the need for suppression — then open government, one of the central planks of the Obama campaign and the linchpin of a healthy democracy, becomes an illusion. (more…)

side note: I couldn’t agree more with Krugman. The Dems did little to stop the massive bleeding that was occurring with the Housing and Financial markets. They didn’t lead the charge….but you could say they were part of the 2nd wave. What we need are people who can’t be bought off……but how do you do this if that’s the way the system is setup?

By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times
LONDON

What would have happened if hanging chads and the Supreme Court hadn’t denied Al Gore the White House in 2000? Many things would clearly have been different over the next eight years.

But one thing would probably have been the same: There would have been a huge housing bubble and a financial crisis when the bubble burst. And if Democrats had been in power when the bad news arrived, they would have taken the blame, even though things would surely have been as bad or worse under Republican rule.

You now understand the essentials of the current political situation in Britain.

For much of the past 30 years, politics and policy here and in America have moved in tandem. We had Reagan; they had Thatcher. We had the Garn-St. Germain Act of 1982, which dismantled New Deal-era banking regulation; they had the Big Bang of 1986, which deregulated London’s financial industry. Both nations had an explosion of household debt and saw their financial systems become increasingly unsound.

In both countries, the conservatives who pushed through deregulation lost power in the 1990s. In each case, however, the new leaders were as infatuated with “innovative” finance as their predecessors were. Robert Rubin, in his years as the Treasury secretary, and Gordon Brown, in his years as the chancellor of the Exchequer, preached the same gospel. (more…)

side note: I came across this article today from a February edition of the New York Times by accident, while doing an unrelated Google search. I’m sorry if I won’t shed a tear for bankers receiving stimulus money who will have their salries capped at $500,000. I’m appalled these people would have the balls to cry poor at $500,000. Screw them, honestly!

PRIVATE school: $32,000 a year per student.

Mortgage: $96,000 a year.

Co-op maintenance fee: $96,000 a year.

Nanny: $45,000 a year.

We are already at $269,000, and we haven’t even gotten to taxes yet.

Five hundred thousand dollars — the amount President Obama wants to set as the top pay for banking executives whose firms accept government bailout money — seems like a lot, and it is a lot. To many people in many places, it is a princely sum to live on. But in the neighborhoods of New York City and its suburban enclaves where successful bankers live, half a million a year can go very fast.

“As hard as it is to believe, bankers who are living on the Upper East Side making $2 or $3 million a year have set up a life for themselves in which they are also at zero at the end of the year with credit cards and mortgage bills that are inescapable,” said Holly Peterson, the author of an Upper East Side novel of manners, “The Manny,” and the daughter of Peter G. Peterson, a founder of the equity firm the Blackstone Group. “Five hundred thousand dollars means taking their kids out of private school and selling their home in a fire sale.”

Sure, the solution may seem simple: move to Brooklyn or Hoboken, put the children in public schools and buy a MetroCard. But more than a few of the New York-based financial executives who would have their pay limited are men (and they are almost invariably men) whose identities are entwined with living a certain way in a certain neighborhood west of Third Avenue: a life of private schools, summer houses and charity galas that only a seven-figure income can stretch to cover.

Few are playing sad cellos over the fate of such folk, especially since the collapse of the institutions they run has yielded untold financial pain. But in New York, where a new study from the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research group in Manhattan, estimates it takes $123,322 to enjoy the same middle-class life as someone earning $50,000 in Houston, extricating oneself from steep bills can be difficult.

Therefore, even if it is not for sympathy but for sport, consider the numbers.

The cold hard math can be cruel.

Like those taxes. If a person is married with two children, the weekly deductions on a $500,000 salary are: federal taxes, $2,645; Medicare, $139; state taxes, $682; and city, $372. With an annual Social Security tab of $6,621, the take-home pay is about $293,000 annually, said Martin Cohen, a Manhattan accountant.
(more…)