Lots of corporate employers got Swine Flu vaccine

I was finally able to get mine a few weeks ago - end of November, and I'm in a "risk" group, asthma. These folks got it as early as October. Read the rest of this post...

Insurance industry insider on compromises from Senate Dems: We WIN

Ben Smith got an email from an insurance company insider, crowing about the way the Senate Democrats movement on the public option is heading:

"We WIN," the insider writes. "Administered by private insurance companies. No government funding. No government insurance competitor.”

The email from the rest of us is: We LOSE. Read the rest of this post...

Five top AIG employees threaten to quit if their pay is cut

Good. Let them. Like there aren't a ton of people dying to get their jobs right about now. On the contrary, I'm not sure how many companies are interested in hiring the brainiacs who made AIG what it is today. Read the rest of this post...

What's Sarah Palin doing in a Mao hat?

Might it have something to do with her desire to kill 70 million people? (The photo is real.) Read the rest of this post...

Another beef recall

How does salmonella get in beef? Ahh, the mysteries of the modern factory food world.

More than 20,000 pounds of beef have been recalled by a California company amid worries the meat is linked to two cases of salmonella, a federal food safety agency said.

Beef Packers Inc., based in Fresno, California, recalled 22,723 pounds of ground beef products produced on September 23, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service said in a statement. The labels on the beef include the establishment number "EST. 31913," the agency said.

Read the rest of this post...

Gay OPM director says he doesn't have the authority to follow a court order demanding he give a lesbian health benefits

Do you remember how the administration claimed that they simply had to defend DOMA in court in order to uphold the rule of law? Well, now they're refusing to give a lesbian health care benefits in direct violation of the rule of law. So much for that straw man.

This is one of those moments in which we all need to collectively scratch our heads. The openly-gay head of the federal Office of Personnel Management, John Berry, said this weekend that he cannot follow a court order directing him to provide health benefits to the lesbian wife of a federal employee. Why? Because he says that he doesn't have the legal authority to do so.

Neat trick. We should all try that one next time a court orders us to do something. "Sorry, your honor. Rather than appealing your decision, I'm simply going to state publicly that I don't believe I have the legal authority to obey your order."

Fortunately for the rule of law and democracy, it doesn't work that way in America. At least it's not supposed to. Court orders are to be obeyed or appealed, and when you appeal you ask the appellate court to stay the lower court judgment pending appeal (so you don't have to follow the order until the entire case is appealed). And if you can't appeal any longer, then you obey the court's order. What you do not get to do, what no one in America gets to do, is to tell a judge that you're simply not going to obey a court order because you just don't like it.

That's what George Bush used to do.

And George Wallace. Read the rest of this post...

Republicans are simply beside themselves over the fact that Harry Reid mentioned slavery today

It's understandable that GOP Senators don't like it when the subject of civil rights comes up. Though it is more than a tad ironic that one of the Senators upset about the civil rights mention is none other than Tom Coburn, the homophobe from Oklahoma. You'll recall that it was Mr. Coburn who recently worried that lesbians had taken over Oklahoma's girls bathrooms. (It's still unclear what Coburn was actually doing in a girl's bathroom.)

Here is Reid spokesman Jim Manley:

"It is hard to believe Senate Republicans are making these charges with a straight face.

For the past eight days they’ve done nothing but obstruct health care on the Senate floor and throughout this year have played politics with this and virtually every other issue of importance to the American people.

Today’s feigned outrage is nothing but a ploy to distract from the fact they have no plan to lower the cost of health care, stop insurance company abuses or protect Medicare.

And for those who are counting, Republicans have now held one press conference on manufactured anger and have issued one manual on how to grind the Senate to a halt – but have held zero press conferences and issued zero plans on how to help Americans afford to live a healthy life."

Read the rest of this post...

Health care reform update

Lots going on today as Senators are meeting privately trying to work out a compromise. Ezra Klein reports some possible compromises he likes, including letting younger people (down to 55, say) buy into Medicare (an idea which seems to be picking up steam).

Why not let all of us buy into Medicare? Read the rest of this post...

Signs that Obama may be serious about confronting global warming

Interesting observation by Ben Smith:

The White House says Obama will meet former Vice President Al Gore this afternoon in Oval Office.

That meeting, Obama's later Copenhagen visit, and a series of other symbolic moves to focus on climate -- at time when the political operation really wants to focus on jobs -- seem to signal a fairly real commitment to pushing legislation through the Senate next year, midterms or not.

Before anyone says this is too small a sign, the Gore visit is symbolic, but still huge. It does in fact steal the news cycle away from "jobs jobs jobs," which is something that Rahm and company likely do not want. At the very least, this is a signal that Obama feels the need to make some gesture towards the issue, and that is at least a step in the right direction. Read the rest of this post...

If you give away the public option, what do you get?

Ezra Klein argues, correctly I think, that with the current watered down state of the public option in the Senate negotiations it might be better to just give up on it entirely IF in exchange we get something much better. Now, there's still the issue of the House-Senate negotiation-to-come, so one could argue that we want to keep even a weak public option in the Senate bill, for the negotiation with the House. But the bad guys can still filibuster a conference report (the final bill that merges the House and Senate legislation). So if we get a strong, or even a weak, public option out of conference, the same bad Democrats in the Senate will try to torpedo the bill. If we are expected to give up on the public option - and maybe we should, rather than accept crap in its stead - then we should get something huge in return. The problem is, it takes someone demanding something huge in return, in order to get it. Read the rest of this post...

It's all about Joe

Yesterday, Obama met with Democratic Senators. After the meeting, John posted Ryan Grim's report, which noted that Joe Lieberman was "beaming" because Obama didn't mention the public option. Doesn't matter that most residents of Connecticut want a public option. Nor does it matter that Barack Obama, who saved Lieberman's butt last November, wants a public option. In Joe's world, it's all about Joe. And, the PCCC has a new ad on that very subject:

UPDATE: Josh Orton wrote a post over the weekend that captures this subject perfectly:

Lieberman's ideology IS self-interest, and in DC that's usually good enough.

Read the rest of this post...

Wanda Sykes: "Mr. President, remember 'yes we can, yes we can.' Well I wish you would."

I got a tip that Wanda Sykes really went off on President Obama on her show this past weekend. And she did.



Never underestimate the power of comedians on TV. I remember when I was volunteering in Sen. Kennedy's office in the early 90s. I don't remember the data now, but there was some kind of survey showing that a ridiculously large number of people got their "news" from the late night shows like Letterman and Leno. Now only can they sway the public against you, but they're also a good barometer of what the public is thinking, and feeling. Comedians don't get laughs by telling the audience something they don't believe. Add in the fact that Sykes is a liberal, and black, and things start to get even more interesting. It would be one thing if she were a conservative preaching to a conservative audience. But she's a lesbian and a Democrat, and African-American to boot. Her message could resonate with a lot of Democrats, across various constituencies. And it's one more piece of evidence to suggest that discontent is spreading beyond just beltway Democrats. Read the rest of this post...

For Afghanistan, a deadline isn't a deadline

So, last week, if you listened to Obama's speech on Afghanistan, you might have thought we'd begin withdrawing troops from that war in July of 2011. But, this week, we learn that's not what Obama really meant according to his "war council":

The Obama administration sent a forceful public message Sunday that American military forces could remain in Afghanistan for a long time, seeking to blunt criticism that President Obama had sent the wrong signal in his war-strategy speech last week by projecting July 2011 as the start of a withdrawal.

In a flurry of coordinated television interviews, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top administration officials said that any troop pullout beginning in July 2011 would be slow and that the Americans would only then be starting to transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces under Mr. Obama’s new plan.

The television appearances by the senior members of Mr. Obama’s war council seemed to be part of a focused and determined effort to ease concerns about the president’s emphasis on setting a date for reducing America’s presence in Afghanistan after more than eight years of war.

The Afghanistan speech had to be one of the most intensely vetted speeches of the Obama presidency. Yet, the issue of leaving Afghanistan, arguably one of the most important elements of the speech for most American people, somehow got misconstrued or misinterpreted. How did that happen?

If what we learned yesterday holds, then there really is no exit strategy. Read the rest of this post...

Monday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Today is "a date which will live in infamy." Pearl Harbor was attacked 68 years ago.

Busy week ahead. The Climate Change conference gets underway in Copenhagen. Obama will be there next week, on December 18th. This week, he's heading to Oslo to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize.

The Senate continues its work on the health insurance reform bill. There could be a vote on an anti-choice amendment either later today or tomorrow. I'm sure the Catholic Bishops are working overtime on that one -- to show all us that they control the Senate, as well as the House. Most Catholics completely ignore their bishops. But, Congress kowtows to them. How those sexual predator protectors and enablers have any moral authority is beyond me. Besides that, this should be a pivotal week for the legislation.

Let's get threading... Read the rest of this post...

56 newspapers around the world carry climate change editorial

It's the same editorial being used around the world as leaders prepare for the Copenhagen talks. One - yes one - newspaper in the US participated. What a pathetic joke though it shows just how powerful the teabagging, anti-science crowd has become in the US. John had an interesting post yesterday about how these groups work to manufacture doubt. How exactly does a country show leadership in the world when there's such a rejection of the modern world? The teabaggers don't care if the US is the laughing stock of the world, as long as they have their Bible.

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Read the rest of this post...

Report: Russian secret service eyed for climate change email hacks

If true, this would hardly be much of a surprise. Considering how critical petroleum is to the Russian economy, any substantial change would not be viewed very kindly by the regime. The Independent:

The news that a leaked set of emails appeared to show senior climate scientists had manipulated data was shocking enough. Now the story has become more remarkable still.

The computer hack, said a senior member of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, was not an amateur job, but a highly sophisticated, politically motivated operation. And others went further. The guiding hand behindhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif the leaks, the allegation went, was that of the Russian secret services.

The leaked emails, which claimed to provide evidence that the unit's head, Professor Phil Jones, colluded with colleagues to manipulate data and hide "unhelpful" research from critics of climate change science, were originally posted on a server in the Siberian city of Tomsk, at a firm called Tomcity, an internet security business.

Read the rest of this post...