A little Paris b/w photo blogging (and an eye update, to boot)

I'm still in Paris. The saga of the eye continues. All seems to be going well. I can still see, thank God, though now I often see flying insects that aren't really there (thus the French word for "floaters" is "mouches volantes" (flying flies - yes, it's a bit redundant)). I've got my one month check up with the doctor on Thursday, and hopefully she'll tell me that the surgery is holding well, and no new problems have developed.

For those not au courant, I arrived in Paris to find that I had a detached retina and needed emergency surgery on my second day here. The next week, I needed even more complicated surgery when the first one failed to hold. My French doc, who has really been wonderful (she gave me her cell phone number, for crying out loud), says I shouldn't fly for a while, because of the risk that the change in pressure and dehydration might undo the surgery (I'm also not allowed to lift anything over 5-7 pounds for a while, so luggage is out of the question). So, I'm stuck in France for a while under doctor's orders (life should always be so bad).

I've been staying with Chris (in Paris) and his wife Joelle, house sitting for them actually, but now that they're back, I'm going to be moving either to my friend Marcus' for the next month, until I can fly back to the states around October 1, or I may rent a room for a month with another friend. In the meantime, I continue to blog (albeit 6 hours ahead of the east coast), and to take advantage of the Parisian streets to practice my photography, especially my black and white photography that I haven't toyed with in years.

Possibly my favorite photo yet of this trip is the one above. Chris, Joelle, and her brother Franck-Thierry were walking home from a Sunday afternoon stroll when we got to St. Sulpice. The sun was making some great shadows, and a kid was about to jump on the sidewalk on his scooter, so I sat back and shot a number of photos. This was the best of the lot. I need to enlarge a number of photos for the walls of my condo back home - still haven't hung anything since moving in last Feburary - and am now thinking of doing a series of black and whites from this summer in my hallway. This will almost certainly be one of them. Enjoy.

PS It's been a month and the French hospital has yet to send me a bill for the nearly $3,000 surgery. I'm going to try to just pay on my own when I go for my check up later this week. If they let me. Read More......

What Teddy would do?

From Jed Lewison:

Despite this history -- which I personally witnessed -- conservatives are trying to tell a completely different story, twisting Ted Kennedy's legacy into something unrecognizable. Perhaps the most clear cut example of this kind of propaganda found a home on Fox News Channel in the wake of Senator Kennedy's death last week.

According to Fox, one of the primary examples of Ted Kennedy's willingness to work with Republicans was his role in the passage of a prescription drug benefit under Medicare, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2003. It showed, they claim, his willingness to put aside his progressive agenda in favor of bipartisan compromise.

There's only one problem with Fox's script: it's fiction. As I wrote above, Ted Kennedy not only voted against Bush's Medicare Part D legislation, he was one its most vocal opponents.

Early in the process, Kennedy had sat down with Republicans to forge a compromise, a feat they managed to accomplish when the Senate passed legislation creating a prescription drug benefit under Medicare. But when that legislation went to House-Senate conference committee, the Senate-passed bill was thrown out in favor of legislation that Kennedy felt would undermine Medicare and line the pockets of private insurers.

As a result, Kennedy withdrew his support from the process, refusing to support the bill that emerged from conferences. In all, 44 senators -- including Kennedy and nearly all Democrats -- opposed the bill. But that didn't stop Fox from claiming that Kennedy had been a champion of Bush's bill.

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Why seniors aren't supporting health care reform

From the Wash Post, via Ezra:

What are seniors so afraid of?

From the beginning, Medicare has been named as one of the potential sources of savings that would fund subsidies for the uninsured. That sounds like service cuts, even if the specific changes don't involve anything of the kind (most of the savings would come from reducing overpayments to the private insurers that participate in the Medicare Advantage program).

So the fear is not of a welfare state but of changes in their welfare state. The result is that the coalition against reform is an odd union between people opposing government-run health care and people defending government-run health care. It's a potent combination.

Seniors are also the most conservative segment of the population and are getting more so. They constitute not only the sole age group that Obama lost in last year's election, but also the sole age group in which his results were worse than those of John Kerry in 2004. And both Obama and Kerry underperformed Al Gore's 2000 results.

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GOP candidate for Gov. in Virginia: Opposed to women working, anti-contraception and, of course, he's anti-gay

Virginia has become a much more progressive state over the past few years. It's been heading in the right direction, at least. Obama won the state last year. But, there is an ultra-conservative Republican element in the state. This year, one of them, Bob McDonnell, is running for Governor. The VA GOP has been trying to present McDonnnell as an all-around nice, moderate guy. But, yesterday, the Washington Post gave us some insight into the real Bob McConnell, based on his own writings. Here are the first two paragraphs:

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

The 93-page document, which is publicly available at the Regent University library, culminates with a 15-point action plan that McDonnell said the Republican Party should follow to protect American families -- a vision that he started to put into action soon after he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.

And, he wants to put that vision, which crosses the line into theocracy, into action if he's elected Governor.

Today, the DNC sent out a statement, which puts McDonnell's vision into context -- and very accurate context:

In Bob McDonnell's preferred Virginia, women would be stigmatized for choosing to work outside the home, access to contraception would be all but banned and women would be denied equal pay for equal work. In Bob McDonnell's preferred Virginia, the medical decisions of women and their doctors would be criminalized and the victims of rape and incest would have no medical recourse. While Virginians want to keep the Commonwealth moving forward, these devastating revelations prove that Bob McDonnell wants to take Virginia backwards.

And to be clear, these were not the musings of young student, but rather a 34-year old married man on the cusp of elected office who would go on to doggedly pursue the extreme agenda he called for once in that office.

By undermining his main argument that he's in the main stream of Virginians, not only has this revelation laid bare McDonnell's real agenda, but is nothing short of a game changer in this election.

It better be a game changer. McDonnell's opponent is Creigh Deeds. The Democrat has been down in the polls, but this latest news about the real Bob McDonnell should open up some eyes.

The Deeds campaign website is here. Read More......

White House getting tougher on anti-reform Republicans

This is good news, and it's exactly what the White House should be doing. From Political Wire:

At his briefing earlier today, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs blasted Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) -- one of the "gang of six" negotiators on the Senate Finance Committee seeking a bipartisan health care compromise -- for repeating "generic Republican talking points" in his party's weekly radio address.

Said Gibbs: "It appears at least in Sen. Enzi's case, he doesn't believe there's a pathway to get bipartisan support and the president disagrees. Sen. Enzi's clearly turned over his cards on bipartisanship."

This is perfect. The point is to win the PR war over who is striving for bipartisanship. It's unfortunately less relevant whether you are actually trying harder than the other guy to BE bipartisan, though Obama is. What matters more is convincing the public, and today's White House statement is a step in that direction. Read More......

Special election date set for Kennedy's seat

Taegan's got it covered. Read More......

US govt. earning healthy profits on TARP investments

As Yglesias notes, we've actually done really well on our $700bn TARP bailout. Read More......

Crazy is a pre-existing condition for today's Republicans

Krugman:

[T]he right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the “death panel” lies?

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Palin to make first visit to Asia in September

How much is she paying them?

Former U.S. vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, once questioned about her lack of foreign policy experience, will make her first trip to Asia in September.

The former Alaska governor will visit Hong Kong to address the CLSA Investors Forum, a well-known annual conference of global investment managers, the host announced Monday.

Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Alan Greenspan have spoken at the event, hosted by brokerage and investment group CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets.

"Our keynote speakers are notable luminaries who often address topics that go beyond traditional finance such as geopolitics," company spokeswoman Simone Wheeler said in a statement.

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Burton: Obama to be even more bipartisan

AP:

Meanwhile, Obama returned from his vacation in Massachusetts on Martha's Vineyard and, after a few days at Camp David, will redouble his efforts "toward getting a bipartisan result" on health care overhaul, said deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton. "After he gets a little time to recharge his batteries...he's going to come back as rip-roaring as he was before," Burton said.

Yes, the reason that President Obama is now starting to be perceived as a weak leader by the right, independents, and the left in all the polls is because he simply hasn't caved enough on his core principles. If only he'd given the Republicans 50% of the stimulus package as tax cuts, instead of 40%, maybe then Americans would believe him to be a true leader.

PS As rip-roaring as before? The previous "rip-roaring" lost Obama 20 points in the polls, reinvigorated a nearly-dead GOP, fractured a once unified Democratic party, and lost control of your signature issue. It's not clear that Democrats can afford much more of the White House's definition of successful leadership. Read More......

John Kerry says he's willing to cave on public option too

Here's an idea. Let's not tell the Republicans in advance what we're willing to cave on during the negotiations.

Kerry said Kennedy would fight for the public option and "do everything in his power to get it," but "if he didn't see the ability ... to get it done, he would not throw the baby out with the bathwater."

Shorter Kerry: Just hold firm and the Dems will concede.

Another thing - it's not like the Democrats are fighting for anything at the moment. The White House seems afraid to push for anything, lest they have to fight for that bill (they don't like fighting) and spend political capital (which they don't do), and lest the bill not pass and then they have to admit they "lost" on something. So they fight for nothing, then when something (anything) passes - regardless of whether it's good, bad, or even vaguely related to the promises the President made during the campaign - they'll claim victory and look towards the next election.

It's difficult to believe that Ted Kennedy would have had anything to do with such a weak-kneed approach to governance. Read More......

AP equates Bush firing US attorneys for refusing to break the law to Holder investigating war crimes

A rather glaring example today from AP's Lara Jakes of the age old problem we've documented before. Namely, that many in the media, probably because of years of conservative pressure, feel the need to equally blame Republicans and Democrats in every story, even when the Republicans are solely, or mostly, to blame.

The latest example is Jakes' story about Attorney General Holder investigating whether the CIA illegally abused detainees while interrogating them - i.e., tortured them in violation of international and US law. Jakes equates this with George Bush firing US Attorneys who refused to use their positions to help Republicans get elected.

How does she draw this equivalence? Because Dick Cheney said so.

Putting that aside for a moment, we have a larger problem. Now that the Republicans are accusing Democrats of doing what the Republicans have already done, and what Democrats aren't even doing, Democrats will now try twice as hard to appease the Republicans. It's frankly the same thing Jakes does in her story. Democrats, like journalists, have been so beaten up by the GOP over the years, that in the interest of "fairness" (read: "bipartisanship") both are willing to do almost anything to get Republicans to like them.

In other words, kiss Holder's investigation goodbye. This White House doesn't expend political capital, and it doesn't do "controversial."

(PS It is interesting to see Cheney parrot the White House's own language it uses to describe the core of the Democratic party that got President Obama elected, "the left wing of the Democratic party." The White House has yet to disavow that slur.) Read More......

Ayatollah Fiorina

San Jose Mercury News:

Over the past dozen years, Hewlett-Packard has sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of printers and other products to Iran through a Middle East distributor, sidestepping a U.S. ban on trade with the country.

Now the person who headed HP for much of that time, Carly Fiorina, is ramping up to run for U.S. Senate. And questions are emerging about what Fiorina knew about HP's growing presence in Iran during her six-year tenure at the Silicon Valley firm from 1999 to 2005.

With Iran drawing condemnation abroad for its suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons and crackdown on government dissidents, Fiorina could find herself on the defensive. Did the former CEO know that her company was selling its wares to Iran through a European subsidiary and then a Middle Eastern distributor while she was at the helm? If an HP executive had such direct knowledge, that would violate the trade embargo.

That means she would have clandestinely broken federal law in order to aid and abet a terrorist state. Should go over well in the Republican primary, let alone the general election. Read More......

Charlie Cook: "The situation this summer has slipped completely out of control for President Obama and congressional Democrats.”

We're all the left of the left now.

An increasing number of those who matter are now saying that the Obama administration, hand in hand with Democrats in Congress, have turned victory into a rather large disaster in only eight short months.

This is why Joe and I have been so ticked off at Obama lately. We both saw this coming. We saw it coming a year ago - last August, 2008 - when we fretted privately, and then publicly, that Obama wasn't willing to show some backbone and actually fight for his beliefs. And now, the president, along with Congress, has turned our biggest opportunity for change in a generation into predictions that we might lose the House next year.

Sure, there's "only" a 25% to 33% change of it happening, per Nate Silver of 538.com. But the chances shouldn't be that high at all on the heels of a GOP slaughter last November. And, considering how quickly things can change, imagine what another year and a half of the kind of leadership we've had to date will do to our chances to keep the House, let alone what it will do to our 60 vote (now 59 without Kennedy) majority in the Senate. And let's not even talk about whether Obama wins re-election.

It doesn't give either Joe or me any pleasure to be right about the Democrats' failings. We get ticked at Obama and the Democrats in Congress because we care. Because we want to win. Because we want them to succeed. That's why we supported Barack Obama long before it was cool. That's why we raised nearly $50,000 for the man during last year's election. But the unfortunate truth of politics, that I learned while volunteering for Senator Kennedy's office back in the early 1990s, is that in order to win legislatively you need to spend far more time than you'd ever imagine beating up on your own party to do the right thing.

President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have taken a rather glorious victory and made a supreme mess of things in a little more than half a year. They've not only single-handedly resuscitated a dying Republican party, they've damaged their own rather stellar brand to boot. And if anyone is troubled by our leaders' unwillingness to follow through on campaign promises now, due to an almost pathological need to be "bipartisan," just wait and see what happens if Democrats lose a ton of seats in 2010. At that point, you can kiss any remaining promises goodbye for good. Read More......

Monday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

With a late Labor Day, this is like an extra week of summer. It's actually cool in D.C. today.

The president is back in DC, but still on vacation and Congress is still in recess. It could be a low-key week, but, we really haven't had a low-key week yet. Several members of Congress are holding Town Hall meetings this week.

Let's get started... Read More......

Colombian president has swine flu

More surprises. Forecasts from the WHO now say one third of the world population could get sick from this particular flu. As it stands today, that's not necessarily a problem though the unpredictable nature of this strain is a concern for health experts.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has the swine flu and officials have advised other South American leaders who met with him at a summit of the infection, authorities said Sunday.

The 57-year-old Uribe began feeling symptoms Friday, the same day as a meeting of South American presidents in Bariloche, Argentina, and he was confirmed to have swine flu after returning home, Social Protection Minister Diego Palacio said.

"This isn't something that has us scared," Palacio said at a news conference. Uribe, a key U.S. ally in Latin America, is not considered a high-risk patient and will continue working from his computer, officials said.

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Recovery in China in question as markets plummet

Maybe their stimulus money is running out too? No particular news is driving the fall, and that has to be worrying. For China to bounce back, they desperately need western consumers to shop. For that matter, western countries also need those shoppers, but to shop, and spend money they don't have, is how we got into this mess in the first place. Reuters:

Chinese stocks headed for their largest monthly loss in 10 months, tumbling again on worries about weak market conditions and the extent of the recent rally.

The Shanghai Composite Index fell sharply, putting it on track to post a 21 percent loss for the month after recording seven consecutive monthly gains. It is down 22 percent from this year's high.

Losing Shanghai A shares outnumbered gainers by 894 to 45.

Oil refiners were hit hard for a third day as state-regulated domestic fuel prices remained unchanged despite surging global crude oil prices, disappointing market expectations of a fuel price hike.

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UK locking up children at immigration detention centers

It wouldn't be as shocking if this report was from a Charles Dickens book but sadly, this is 2009. Is this really the best way to treat young children? The Guardian:

Amanda Shah, of Bail for Immigration Detainees, said: "Fifty-six per cent of detained children were released back to their communities in the UK, their detention having served no purpose other than wasting taxpayers' money and traumatising the children involved. Children we have supported have suffered depression, weight loss, bedwetting and even self-harm as a result of their detention – that is the human reality behind the statistics."

Lisa Nandy, policy adviser at the Children's Society, said children were being detained unnecessarily because the asylum system was "chaotic" and because the UK Border Agency and private contractors who work for them often targeted families to increase their removal rates.

The Home Office said today : "UK Border Agency fully recognises its responsibilities towards children but these responsibilities have to be exercised alongside our duty to enforce the laws on immigration and asylum. If a family decide to appeal against the courts decision while being detained the removal process is halted. If a judge agrees that there are fresh grounds for an appeal the family are usually returned back to the community until the case has been reviewed."

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Oh the humanity

Ikea changed their font! If people complained about Ikea printing too many catalogs and wasting paper, it wouldn't be a surprise but this?

Ikea, the Swedish furniture chain, said Sunday it never expected such a backlash after switching typeface in its latest catalog.

The company’s decision to make its first such font change in 50 years — from the iconic Futura typeface to the Verdana one — has caused a worldwide reaction on the Internet. The catalog — which the company advertises as the world’s most printed book — was distributed last month.

“We’re surprised,” said Ikea spokeswoman Camilla Meiby. “But I think it’s mainly experts who have expressed their views, people who are interested in fonts. I don’t think the broad public is that interested.”

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