Markos on the why the Don't Ask Don't Give campaign matters

Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos explains why he lent his name to our Don't Ask Don't Give campaign asking folks not to donate to the DNC, OFA or the Obama re-election until the President and the Party keep their promises to the gay community. Read the rest of this post...

9/11 Suspects Could Be Moved to New York for Trial

Finally some good news.

By Monday, according to federal sources, Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to decide that as many as nine high-value Guantanamo detainees will be returned to the United States for trial in civilian and military courts. Five individuals linked to the 9/11 terror attacks are likely to be transferred to the federal court for the Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan.

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US deports Lou Dobbs. CNN host had been living illegally in country sice 1961.

Shocking:

"No one here knew anything about Mr. Dobbs' past, and to be honest, we never asked," said a source within CNN, who asked not to be identified. "All we knew was that he was willing to take the job most American newscasters didn't want—namely, speaking out hysterically against immigration at every turn to help us gain ratings points against Fox News."....

Immediately before press time, "Dobbs" arrived in Mexico City, and was surrounded by members of the international press.

"¡Esos hijos de puta sufrirán por esto!" a handcuffed Dominguez shouted at reporters from the tarmac. "Sin mi vigilancia, mis hermanos y yo nos apresuraríamos a la frontera a robar sus carros y a violar sus mujeres. ¡Arriba!"

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Nate Silver: Democrats should panic, but only a little

From Nate Silver at 538.com:

My 30,000-foot view is that between the pressures of the jobs situation and the health care debate, the Democrats are in fairly bad shape. But, there's a long way to go before next year, and their situation does not seem to be quite as bad as it was in August.

Certainly, if I were the Democrats, I'd be adopting a fairly defensive posture, putting money into defending seats -- especially those held by non-Blue Dog incumbents -- rather than getting cute and trying to pick off more than a handful of potentially vulnerable Republican seats. I'd also be thinking about policies -- like a jobs package and financial regulation -- that tap a little bit into the populist spirit and might result in somewhat awkward Republican positioning.

So, should the Democrats be panicking? Yeah, maybe a little. But the fundamentals -- particularly the poor labor situation and the Republican enthusiasm advantage -- should be the reasons for their concern, rather than the results of any one particular poll.

I'd also suggest that it wouldn't kill the Democrats to go back to their roots. It never helps Democrats in elections when they try to be Republicans. They come off as phony and weak, and unwilling to defend what they truly believe in. Read the rest of this post...

RNC's own health care plan covers abortions

Oops. Read the rest of this post...

Health insurance companies asking their employees to lobby Congress on health care reform

Conflict of interest much?

The nation's largest health insurance carrier is urging its employees to lobby the Senate against reform proposals that would hurt the firm's bottom line, according to copies of e-mails released Thursday by a liberal advocacy group.

UnitedHealth Group, which is based in Minnesota, sent an e-mail message (PDF) to its 75,000 employees on Tuesday asking them to write their senators and local newspapers in opposition to a public insurance option, alleging that "government-run health care" will force "millions of Americans" to drop their current coverage.

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Will Lefty Web Get Any Credit For Lou Dobbs Ouster?

Greg Sargent at Plum Line:

When right wing bloggers got Dan Rather fired from CBS, traditional news orgs widely hailed the role of right blogostan in exposing the shortcomings of Rather’s story on Bush and the National Guard and gave the right full credit for bringing him down.

Now that Lou Dobbs — also a major media figure — has quit CNN, it remains to be seen whether the online left will get anywhere near the same level of credit.

Whatever you think of Media Matters, there’s no denying that the group led a campaign against Dobbs that had to have played some kind of role in his departure. CNN president Jonathan Klein reportedly told Dobbs months ago that he wanted Dobbs to tone down his opinions. It’s hard to imagine that the constant drumbeat of attention paid by Media Matters, Think Progress, HuffPo, TPM and other sites to Dobbs’ more outlandish opinions — and the damage they were doing to CNN’s news brand — didn’t put Klein and CNN on edge.

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White House censored "pro-gay" video for two days while deciding whether to issue permanent gag order to college

It's a gang-buster of a story. You can read the entire thing over at AMERICAblog gay. After your done, I think you might want to join our "Don't Ask Don't Give" pledge to boycott the DNC, OFA and the Obama re-election campaign until the Democrats keep their promises to the gay community. Read the rest of this post...

Giving congress a greater say in setting interest rates worries me

Senator Dodd wants politicians to have a greater say in setting interest rates, and has a proposal which would give Senators a lot more power than they now have to do just that. To be clear, at the moment they have no power whatsoever, other than the Senate must confirm the nomination for head of the Federal Reserve. They can demand that Ben Bernanke come and sit in a hearing room, but they can't make him do a damn thing after he walks out the door.

That independence is extremely important. Americans tend not to think about whether or not there is a problem with confidence in the value of the US dollar. They simply assume that our currency is as solid as gold, that the sun will rise tomorrow, grass is green, the sky is blue, etc. They would benefit from a look at how things happen in other countries. I have done a lot of consulting with governments in small countries about how to run their exchange rate and monetary policies (among other things), and there can be major opportunities not just for mismanagement, but also for corruption, if politicians have the power to influence monetary policy.

For one thing, who ever heard of a politician wanting higher interest rates? Yet, unfortunately, we need them sometimes to avoid inflation and to avoid devaluing the currency. Would politicians allow it? Maybe, maybe not. At a minimum there would be built in bias toward inflation. And as for corruption, just imagine the money you could rake in if you knew ahead of time that Senator X was going to engineer the nomination of a known easy-money candidate to the Federal Reserve. This isn't imaginary. Such things have happened in other countries, and the profiteers on Wall St. wouldn't blink for a second if they thought there was a profit opportunity.

Even Senator Dodd's proposal to limit the powers of the Fed to make emergency loans worries me. I don't like for one second the terms under which the Fed has essentially given away huge sums to Wall St. in the past year or so. But I would like it even less if they didn't do it at all. What is needed is willingness to enforce regulations on Wall St., not injecting political grandstanders into situations where quick action is needed to bail us out of the incompetent economic management of morons like the Bush administration.

So count me as a fan of regulation but also a fan of independence of the central bank. Some things are just so obviously beyond the ability of politicians to get right that we shouldn't even let them hint at doing it. Read the rest of this post...

How the Catholic Bishops took control of the health care debate

For whatever reason, politicians give undue power to the protectors of child sex abusers. The picture is beginning to emerge of just how much the Catholic Bishops shaped the health insurance reform debate:

They don't spend a dime on what is legally defined as lobbying, but lawmakers and insiders recognize that the bishops' voices matter — and they move votes. Representatives for the bishops were in Pelosi's Capitol suite negotiating with top officials for three hours last Friday evening as they reached final terms of the agreement. That was just hours after Pelosi, a Catholic abortion rights supporter, took the call from McCarrick.

Boston's Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley personally appealed to President Barack Obama about the issue near the church altar at the late August funeral for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass. Bishops quietly called their congressmen and senators to weigh in.

"The Catholic Church used their power — their clout, if you will — to influence this issue. They had to. It's a basic teaching of the religion," said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., a leading abortion foe and architect of the health measure's restrictions.

How many members of Congress challenged the Bishops back? How many asked them about all the lawsuits and the bankruptcies? This part of the analysis is precious:

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the church's Washington-based advocacy organization, which is staffed by more than 350 lay people, derives its power in large part from the sheer number of Catholics in this country — 68 million — but also from the special moral and religious standing of its members.

"Special moral and religious standing" of the bishops? Unbelievable. Anyone who thinks that should check out this website.

Most of those 68 million Catholics in the country don't pay a bit of attention to what the Bishops tell them. It's pathetic that so many Democratic lawmakers do. Read the rest of this post...

Digby takes on the Little Blue Pill

And she's right. If the boys are going to get all hot and bothered about health care reform possibly paying for a woman to terminate a pregnancy (uh, it is a medical procedure, and it is legal, Mr. President), then why not ban the government from subsidizing plans that cover Viagra? Read the rest of this post...

Thursday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Your president is heading to Asia today. On the way, he's making a stop in Anchorage. It will be his first visit to the home state of his potential 2012 opponent.

How about that Lou Dobbs news? He either ends up at FOX or runs for office. Either way, he's not done spewing his hate. But, it won't be from that plum perch at CNN.

And, the Catholic Church is continuing its unrelenting assault on gays. In DC, the leaders of the church are threatening to give up helping the poor and the sick over same-sex marriage. It's stunning how much the Catholic Church hates the gays.

Start threading the news... Read the rest of this post...

Ezra Klein says putting $900bn ceiling on health care reform was a big mistake

From Ezra Klein:

But once that number [$900bn] entered the process, it began guiding the process. Sources on the Hill aren't really clear how the sum transformed from an estimate of the president's plan to a hard limit for their plan. Few recall that the original language included the qualifier "around." Even so, the number stuck. It strengthened the hand of moderates in both chambers and allowed them to create a ceiling. It also seemed clear that if the White House was comfortable with $900 billion, then it wasn't going to fight to protect the spending in any bill that exceeded that cap, so there was no point in the liberals bothering to push the issue.

The problem is that the number, which was chosen at a point of political weakness for health-care reform and the Obama administration, is too low. Most experts think you need closer to $1.1 trillion for a truly affordable plan. Limiting yourself to $900 billion ensures that the subsidies won't be quite where you need them to be, and means that virtually every spare dollar has to be spent strengthening them. If you want to add $30 billion to the bill creating coordinated care teams across the country -- a project that could transform chronic care in this country and eventually save many times its start-up cost -- there's little budgetary flexibility even if you could find the revenue, because each dollar is in a zero-sum competition with each other dollar so the entire plan comes in under the limit.

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