Adultery: It's okay if you're a Republican

PPP polled South Carolina voters and took a closer look at "values" voters. Guess what? They're hypocrites. VVs have less of a problem with Mark Sanford than the average South Carolinian. For example:

While 45% of all South Carolina voters want Sanford to resign, only 33% of the 'moral and family values' crowd wants him to.

Which led PPP's Tom Jensen to write:

Where do you think these folks stood on impeaching Bill Clinton? It's clear there is forgiveness for politicians who cheat on their wives and abuse state resources to do so- as long as they're Republicans.

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Best of Twitter

@pourmecoffee: Tonight is Hanukkah. Remember, it is traditional to set an extra place at the table for the Salahis in case they come. Read More......

The Medicare buy-in provision looks to be in trouble too

Though as McJoan over at DailyKos notes, it's not clear that the provision was any good anyway:

It's seeming likelier and likelier that Medicare buy-in won't survive, with Snowe out and out saying no, and Lieberman and Bill Nelson, making serious noises against it. Not to mention the fact that it's looking like a fake Medicare buy-in anyway.

And remember what we learned earlier this afternoon, that Senator Reid snuck the lifetime annual caps back in the bill, so if you get really sick, you lose your coverage, just like now. Why? Because the bill still permits insurance companies to raise your premiums through the roof (which was news to me). So, the Dems (and CBO) are afraid that if they take away the annual caps, then the insurance companies will just increase rates, a lot. Which begs the question of why the legislation still permits insurance companies to increase rates through the roof, like the 20% to 25% a year that mine currently increases? Read More......

Jenny Sanford slammed the door on her husband's interest in getting back together

Yesterday, the philandering Governor of South Carolina intimated he wanted his wife back:

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford said Thursday he still wants to reconcile with the first lady even though Jenny Sanford has made clear she won't be standing by his side in the wake of his affair.

Today, she filed for divorce:

First Lady Jenny Sanford issued a statement this morning saying she is filing for divorce from Gov. Mark Sanford.

In a two-page filing made this morning in Charleston County family court, Jenny Sanford asked for a divorce on grounds of adultery.

Joe.My.God's post on this one has the best title, SC Gov. Mark Sanford's Wife Hits The (Non-Appalachian) Trail. Read More......

Happy Hanukkah

We're told this is "the first ever Jerusalem flash mob in honor of Hanukkah."

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Obama's pay czar allows multiple exceptions to pay restrictions

It's not that I'm against exceptions that prove the rule, but really. Wasn't it exceptional enough to let these people keep their jobs and not have their industry collapse? To them it may be painful to "only" make $900,000 or even over $1 million in one particular case. It's perhaps not quite as convincing outside of Wall Street. Also, doesn't the public who funded the bailout deserve to know precisely who is being paid here? Again, the public funded this bailout. The Obama administration could stand to be a bit more open about what is happening though time after time, they more closely resemble the Bush administration. What a pity.

Nearly a dozen individuals "deemed to be very essential" will be granted paychecks of more than $500,000. Most of them will earn between $500,000 and $950,000 annually. Only one indivual received over $1 million. Feinberg would not sy which companies these executives work for.

The desire to get out from under this latest installment of pay curbs may very well explain why large financial institutions have been so anxious to return bailout money back to the government recently.

If there are exceptions that are truly brilliant, the public should really know who these people are. As for the others, they sound pretty disposable so ditch them and bring in new blood. Anyone who wants to rush out and create their own company and risk their own capital, now would be the time to go. Read More......

Kid actually gets his tongue stuck to frozen flag pole

In lighter news...


(H/t Perez Hilton) Read More......

Lead climate change denialist, Viscount Monckton, wanted to test entire population for AIDS and lock up anyone infected, for life

Media Matters has the story, we have a few excerpts from his piece, as do they. (This is when he's not calling Jewish kids "Hitler youth.") Read More......

2nd bombshell of the afternoon. White House shuts down Senate health care debate in effort to kill drug importation amendment on behalf of Big Pharma

Hey, the White House finally woke up. It seems their friends in Big Pharma almost had something included in the bill that they didn't like. So the White House is working with a Democratic Senator to shut down the entire Senate debate on the bill until the offending amendment, that Big Pharma doesn't like, is killed. From Ryan Grimm at Huffington Post.

The White House, aided by Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), is working hard to crush an amendment being pushed by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) to allow for the reimportation of pharmaceutical drugs from Canada, Senate sources tell the Huffington Post.

As a result, the Senate health care debate has come to a standstill: Carper has placed a "hold" on Dorgan's amendment and in response, Dorgan tells HuffPost, he'll object to any other amendments being considered before he gets a vote on his.

So the White House is finally getting engaged, but only in an effort to ensure that you pay three to five times more for your prescription drugs, because the big pharmaceutical companies' monstrous profits are more important to this administration than the health and financial welfare of you and your family. This is something George Bush's White House would do. It's something that Barack Obama railed against during his run for the presidency. And now he's doing the same thing.

And don't miss how the Democrats snuck a nasty provision into the Senate health care "compromise" that will let insurance companies kick you off if you get cancer or any other catastrophic illness. Read More......

THIS JUST IN: Senate health care bill reinstates annual caps - insurance companies can kick you out if you get cancer and treatment costs too much

UPDATE from McJoan over at Daily Kos. She found a very interesting paragraph in the AP story:

Adding to the puzzle, the new language was quietly tucked away in a clause in the bill still captioned "No lifetime or annual limits."

You don't say.

And another update from Jane Hamsher, who quotes President Obama on September 10th of this year:

They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime. We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses, because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they get sick.

Or not.

Wasn't that the entire point of this reform effort? To make it so that people with serious diseases, like cancer, wouldn't lose their insurance because the treatment was too expensive? Ezra Klein explains:

"A loophole in the Senate health care bill would let insurers place annual dollar limits on medical care for people struggling with costly illnesses such as cancer," reports the AP. The Senate Finance Committee barred annual caps altogether. The merged Senate bill only erases "unreasonable" annual caps. What's "unreasonable?" Hard to say.

Hill sources explain that this was inserted because CBO said premiums would "go through the roof" if insurers couldn't cap benefits. The official quote from Jim Manley, Harry Reid's spokesperson, says much the same thing. "We are concerned that banning all annual limits, regardless of whether services are voluntary, could lead to higher premiums," he explained.

Two interesting revelations. The first, that this problem was solved in the Senate Finance Committee bill - mind you, that was the crappy conservative Democratic bill. But the revelation that's just as large is that Senator Reid's own staff admits that there are no serious controls in this legislation on how high insurance companies can raise your premiums. Obviously this is the case, since Reid's own staff admitted that insurance companies might retaliate against getting rid of the annual caps by simply sending our premiums through the roof.

This is why Joe, Chris and I have been so upset about the way health care reform has been heading. We no longer trust the Democrats in Congress or the administration to do the right thing because they have proven that they cannot be trusted. What else is hidden in the bill that we won't find out about until it's too late? And what is the point of the entire bill if our premiums can still soar and the insurance companies can still kick us off if we get really sick? (Or in my case, shut down my prescription drug coverage for the year because I had a whopping (and I jest with the word "whopping") $1500 in prescriptions that they had to pay in one single year. Read More......

Baucus gave mistress raise

Politico, via Taegan:

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), "chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, gave a nearly $14,000 pay raise to a female staffer in 2008, at the time he was becoming romantically involved with her, and later that year took her on a taxpayer-funded trip to Southeast Asia and the Middle East, though foreign policy was not her specialty," Politico reports.

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A few stories to get you through the day

Spanish Episcopal leaders say that abortion caused the global financial meltdown, kind of. (Sorry, it's in español.)

Jon Stewart on Glenn Beck.

FDL says the Medicare buy-in is a bunch of hooey.

Palin's goofy climate change bashing op ed was one of the most read Wash Post opinion pieces of the year. Not that this is surprising. It was highly controversial. If the Post had published an op ed about how to give a woman an orgasm, with pictures and embedded video, I suspect it would have been the most highly read piece of the year. Doesn't make it appropriate.

Freaky lights appear in Norwegian sky. CNN has some very cool pics.

ACLU loses its biggest donor. Says it's because of the economy, but coincidentally it happens day after his anonymity was violated by the NYT. (Thanks NYT.)

At Huffington Post, SEIU's Eliseo Medina writes about a new study from America's Voice Education Fund showing that anti-immigrant Members of Congress, who claim to support workers, actually vote against workers. Hypocrites.

Some very interesting Swine Flu numbers:

Swine flu has sickened about 50 million Americans, and killed about 10,000, according to new estimates released by federal health officials on Thursday....

Flu estimates are also difficult to compare. Seasonal flu kills about 36,000 Americans each year, according to a long-standing estimate. But that number includes many elderly people who had not only seasonal flu and related pneumonia but also heart attacks and strokes. The new CDC swine flu estimates do not include heart attacks and strokes, mainly because there hasn't been time to collect that kind of data.

So it's likely the new estimate is conservative, and undercounts elderly deaths, CDC officials acknowledged.

Even so, the number of hospitalizations and deaths of younger people from swine flu far exceed what normally occurs in the same ages from the winter flu.

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Lead climate change denialist rants about how Jewish kid is just like Hitler youth, on camera (this is the second time)

I reported earlier on the intellectual leader of the climate change denialists, and his theory that:

"The number of people being killed by this misplaced belief in climate change is, if anything, greater than the number of people killed by Hitler."

Well he's done it again, and again on camera. This is not just another guy making goofy Hitler analogies. He's the intellectual leader of the anti- Climate Change forces. Apparently Monckton got upset because some kids started chanting at his meeting. Monckton then claimed that the kids "invaded" his meeting just like the Nazis invaded Copenhagen. The guy is like Monty Python. About 2 minutes and 50 seconds into the video Monckton started explaining to a very polite young Jewish student why he is like the Hitler Youth. The Guardian has the transcript, read it - and watch the video:

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Robert Reich on why the health care compromise isn't all that

Robert Reich:

But we still end up with a system that's based on private insurers that have no incentive whatsoever to control their costs or the costs of pharmaceutical companies and medical providers. If you think the federal employee benefit plan is an answer to this, think again. Its premiums increased nearly 9 percent this year. And if you think an expanded Medicare is the answer, you're smoking medical marijuana. The Senate bill allows an independent commission to hold back Medicare costs only if Medicare spending is rising faster than total health spending. So if health spending is soaring because private insurers have no incentive to control it, we're all out of luck. Medicare explodes as well.

A system based on private insurers won't control costs because private insurers barely compete against each other..... In light of all this, you'd think the insurance industry would be subject to the antitrust laws.... But no. Remarkably, the Senate bill still keeps Big Insurance safe from competition by preserving its privileged exemption from the antitrust laws.

So much for Senator Reid's charge to change the law. He is only the Majority Leader. Read More......

"The number of people being killed by this misplaced belief in climate change is, if anything, greater than the number of people killed by Hitler."

"The number of people being killed by this misplaced belief in climate change is if anything greater than the number of people killed by Hitler." - Viscount Monckton, the chief architect of climate change denialism.

He also said that young people who are pro climate change are akin to the Hitler youth. "I don't care whether the Hitler youth thought they were doing the right thing. I don't care whether the Hitler youth of today think they're doing the right thing. The consequences in both cases are deaths of people that we don't care about as much as we should."

This is who is leading the battle against climate change. We have a far larger problem than the fact that some people are denying climate change. Conservatives in this country have taken to a rather disturbing extremism that embraces McCarthyism (labeling everyone a socialist and a Maoist, and doing it with a straight face), and literally believing that climate change advocates are worse than Hitler - not just making the dumb comparison, but actually believing it. These people are certifiable. And dangerous. And they're the intellectual leaders of today's Republican party. And at some point, the Republicans are going to be back in office, with these people guiding them. And then we're all in trouble. (Oh, and this wasn't the first time he's done this. Here's some great video of when he did it previously, and accused a Jewish kid of being like Hitler youth.)

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Obama admin's sweetheart deal with drug companies holding up vote on cheaper drug import

When you make deals with the devil, there's a price. Unfortunately, the price is paid by American consumers. We first wrote about the secret deal between the White House and the drug industry's lobbying group on August 6, 2009 when the New York Times exposed it. Now, we're seeing that deal's negative implications. Democrats are blocking a vote on an amendment to the health care bill on drug imports:

A deal between the White House and the pharmaceutical industry is holding up a bipartisan amendment to allow the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from abroad, according to a member of the Senate Democratic leadership.

The Senate has been debating the amendment, sponsored by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), since Tuesday but has not held a vote, which is contributing to a stall in the floor action on healthcare reform.

Dorgan’s measure, which would permit bulk exports of medicines from countries such as Canada, enjoys broad and bipartisan support and likely has the backing of more than 60 senators, which would guarantee its adoption on the healthcare reform bill.

Tension between the White House and Democratic supporters of the so-called drug reimportation amendment is primarily behind the delay, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Thursday.

As a Senator, Obama supported this legislation. But, Obama's top staffers, Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina, cut a deal with Pharma and it's holding up the process.

Drugs could be cheaper in the U.S. if the federal government bargained like those countries from which we'd be buying drugs if the Dorgan amendment passed. Ezra Klein explained:

Many of these drugs were invented by American companies and produced in American factories. But Canada gets them at a discount. Why?

Well, Canada's government bargains its prices down. So does the French government, and the German government, and the British government. The results of this strategy are not in doubt: These countries pay far less than we do for the exact same drugs. Our solution? We will go to these countries and buy these drugs!

Yeah, that's the American solution, instead of having our government bargain. But, not letting the federal government bargain was believed to be part of the White House deal with Pharma, too. And that's why John pays nearly $290 a month for his asthma drugs when he bought the same drug, produced by the same company, for 60 euros (90 bucks) in France. Read More......

Friday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

The President returns from Oslo today, with his Nobel Peace Prize in hand. I don't know how the President and other leaders can travel so much and not get wicked jet lag. They travel overseas constantly and never stop working. I know that's not an earth-shaking issue, but it was on my mind.

The Senate is in session this weekend. Democratic leaders are still waiting for the CBO to score the latest compromise, so there's still no actual bill. But, it was apparently the Republicans who wanted to keep working this weekend. They need more time to obstruct the nation's work. Senate Dems. are hoping to finish the health care bill before Christmas. Senate GOPers are going to use every trick in the book to prevent that. But, as we all know, what's most important in the Senate is what Joe Lieberman thinks. He's usurped the role of Senator Snowe.

The House is scheduled to recess next week. But, the Speaker would bring the House back before Christmas if there's a possibility of passing a final health care bill (which sure sounds like the House Democrats are willing to accept the weakened Senate bill.)

It's a cold one here in D.C. The temperature is 25 degrees, but feels like 15 with the wind. I'm really looking forward to walking Petey in a few minutes (although he does have a snazzy new jacket, courtesy of my parents.)

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

Germany and France to join UK banker bonus tax

And they are completely right in doing so. It remains an embarrassment that the US has not yet joined as well. Forget about the ridiculous PR stunt from Goldman where they are forgoing bonuses for thirty people - out of 31,000 - because it's a joke. Others sacrificed to save the bankers from ruin so why not let the bankers now fund employment projects for others? It's interesting to hear that they're complaining about harsh treatment yet somehow ignore the fact that they were all standing on a cliff just over a year ago. Do they have any decency? Silly question, I know.

Let them leave for Dubai or Shanghai or wherever they think they can get the best deal. Maybe then they will discover just how good they have it today with the handouts and cozy government relations.

The warm international reception for Brown's bonus tax held out the prospect that the prime minister could secure a much-needed political boost, as he did when other countries followed his lead on recapitalising the banks last year.

The momentum building up in Europe behind the clampdown on bonuses followed conversations between Treasury officials and those in G7 countries on Wednesday after the pre-budget report outlined the 50% tax on bankers' bonuses of more than £25,000.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France decided to follow the UK in imposing the one-off penalties on bonuses over €27,000 after weeks of feuding between London and Paris over the regulation of European markets.

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Ocean acidification at fastest rate in history

This is yet another negative result of CO2 in the environment. Then again, the deniers probably don't see any problem because their aquarium at home seem just fine. Wait, that's their screen saver on their PC that only looks like an aquarium. Oh well. Things will surely balance out in the next 55 million years. Another tea bag for the road?

A report by more than 100 of Europe's leading marine scientists, released at the climate talks this morning, states that the seas are absorbing dangerous levels of carbon dioxide as a direct result of human activity. This is already affecting marine species, for example by interfering with whale navigation and depleting planktonic species at the base of the food chain.

Ocean acidification – the facts says that acidity in the seas has increased 30% since the start of the industrial revolution. Many of the effects of this acidification are already irreversible and are expected to accelerate, according to the scientists.

The study, which is a massive review of existing scientific studies, warns that if CO2 emissions continue unchecked many key parts of the marine environment – particularly coral reefs and the algae and plankton which are essential for fish such as herring and salmon – will be "severely affected" by 2050, leading to the extinction of some species.

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