London lawyers get the Christmas spirit

They can be so sentimental sometimes.

In an unusual take on the season of giving, a London law firm is offering Christmas gift vouchers for divorce advice.

The firm, Lloyd Platt & Company, which normally charges 325 pounds ($530) an hour, said it had been swamped with enquiries since it launched the vouchers early last week.

So far, more than 60 have been sold -- a snip at 125 pounds for a half hour session with a divorce lawyer.

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Sketchy Santa, set to music

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Raul Castro thinks Obama is trying to overthrow Cuba

Step away from the gas leak, Raul. Obama is too timid to fight for promises he made in the US so somehow it sounds like a stretch to imagine him wanting to overthrow Cuba. Unless there's another side of Obama that we don't know about, Raul Castro sounds as loony as his brother.

Offering Cuba's first public acknowledgment of the arrest of an American contractor, Castro said the case shows "the United States won't quit trying to destroy the revolution and bring a change to our economic and social regime."

"In the last few weeks we have witnessed the stepping up of the new administration's efforts in this area," he told parliament. "They are giving new breath to open and undercover subversion against Cuba."

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DC police learn a lesson about new media

We've had a teachable moment here in D.C. Our police force learned about this new thing called the new media. Better late than never:

The call went out on a Web site and over Twitter, and hundreds of 20- and 30-somethings, tired of being cooped up, gathered at 14th and U streets NW on Saturday for a little restless indulgence.

Snowball fight!

People squealed as they hurled balls of snow across the largely deserted road. Then, a snowball or two slammed into a Hummer. The driver, a plainclothes detective whom D.C. police refused to identify, got out, drew his gun and exchanged angry words with revelers, according to video footage and witnesses.

Police said initially that the detective had not flashed his weapon. On Sunday, the officer was placed on desk duty after Twitter, blogs and YouTube appeared to show otherwise.

Yeah, all those witnesses didn't matter to the Metropolitan PD. But, all the videos did. There are many. Here's one:
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Obama at his core

A bit more from the Drew Westen piece that Joe linked to earlier:

Leadership, Obama Style

Consider the president's leadership style, which has now become clear: deliver a moving speech, move on, and when push comes to shove, leave it to others to decide what to do if there's a conflict, because if there's a conflict, he doesn't want to be anywhere near it....

Leadership means heading into the eye of the storm and bringing the vessel of state home safely, not going as far inland as you can because it's uncomfortable on the high seas. This president has a particular aversion to battling back gusting winds from his starboard side (the right, for the nautically challenged) and tends to give in to them. He just can't tolerate conflict, and the result is that he refuses to lead....

This President just doesn't have the stomach to make anyone do anything they don't want to do (except women to have unwanted babies because they can't afford an abortion or live in a red state and don't have an employer who offers insurance), and his advisors are enabling his most troubling character flaw, his conflict-avoidance.

Like most Americans I talk to, when I see the president on television, I now turn change the channel the same way I did with Bush. With Bush, I couldn't stand his speeches because I knew he meant what he said. I knew he was going to follow through with one ignorant, dangerous, or misguided policy after another. With Obama, I can't stand them because I realize he doesn't mean what he says -- or if he does, he just doesn't have the fire in his belly to follow through. He can't seem to muster the passion to fight for any of what he believes in, whatever that is. He'd make a great queen -- his ceremonial addresses are magnificent -- but he prefers to fly Air Force One at 60,000 feet and "stay above the fray."

It's the job of the president to be in the fray. It's his job to lead us out of it, not to run from it. It's his job to make the tough decisions and draw lines in the sand. But Obama really doesn't seem to want to get involved in the contentious decisions. They're so, you know, contentious. He wants us all to get along....

Am I being too hard on the president? He's certainly done many good things. But it would be hard to name a single thing President Obama has done domestically that any other Democrat wouldn't have done if he or she were president following George W. Bush (e.g., signing the children's health insurance bill that Congress is about to gut to pay for worse care for kids under the health insurance exchange, if it ever happens), and there's a lot he hasn't done that every other Democrat who ran for president would have done....

I don't honestly know what this president believes.

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If one can ignore the major broken promises in the insurance bill, the bill is just what Obama promised.

Ezra Klein thinks the Senate health care bill reflects Obama's campaign promises. But, he begins his post with this:

The public option did not survive the Senate. The individual mandate, which Obama campaigned against, was added after key members of Congress and the administration realized that the plan wouldn't function in its absence. Drug reimportation was defeated, and a vague effort to have government pick up some catastrophic costs was never really mentioned.

There's also the tax on so-called "cadillac" health care packages, which McCain supported and Obama campaigned against.

Now, I don't purport to be a policy wonk. I look at issues through a different lens. But, I do know all of those provisions have great import for real people, if not the pundits, wonks or politicos. And, those are among the reasons people voted for Barack Obama. In DC, it's just perfectly acceptable for politicians not to keep their promises. In fact, those of us who expect pols to do that are considered naive. But, it's just another reason why Americans outside of DC loathe politicians, something that is lost on people here.

But, hey, the insurance companies are happy that the public option was dropped and they get millions of new customers because of the mandate. And, the drug companies are really, really pleased with the sweetheart deal they got from Team Obama. During the campaign, did any Obama voter really think the insurers and Pharma would love his insurance bill? I sure didn't.

That's not what voters expected from Barack Obama. And, that's a problem. Sure, there are some good things in the bill, but that doesn't change this equation. It remains to be seen what this bill actually does and how it helps. I'd like to think there's a framework upon which to build. But, after watching the way Democrats in the White House and Congress caved to the insurers and drug makers, I'm not sure who will do the fix in the future. Read the rest of this post...

Stiglitz warns on economic contraction in 2010

Unlike the "everything is rosy" Larry Summers, Joseph Stiglitz is a serious economist. He's also been a lot more right about this economy than the White House economic team. Throwing wads of cash at Wall Street and expecting them to do the right thing has been a serious mistake. To date, we have yet to see a significant change in attitudes from Wall Street. This is why they are on pace to make the same amount of money this year as the year before the crisis hit. Sure, Goldman pulled a PR stunt and told us that 30 out of 31,000 will not receive bonuses but that is hardly a dent in the bonus pool.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz warned there's a "significant" chance the U.S. economy will contract in the second half of next year, and urged the government to prepare a second stimulus package to spur job creation.

"The likelihood of this slowdown is very, very high," Stiglitz told reporters in Singapore. "There is a significant chance that the number will be in the negative range."

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The White House is supporting drug reimportation again, after they killed it last week.

Oh please.

Speaking on CNN's "State of the Union," David Axelrod, Obama's top political aide, said the White House still favors drug re-importation and wants to move forward on it.

"Let me be clear. The president supports re-importation. As he said, safe re-importation of drugs into this country. There's no reason why the Americans should pay a premium for pharmaceuticals that people in other countries pay less for," Axelrod said. "We will move forward on it."

Sure. Obama supported it during the campaign, then killed it during debate of the health care reform bill, and now he's in support of it again. And we're supposed to believe him.

As Drew Westen wrote this morning in the Huff Post, Obama's talk is cheap. He will always settle for the lowest common denominator. He will always avoid a conflict. He will never fight for anything. Yes, the White House is finally worried that they've turned off the millions of Democratic party loyalists who busted their butts to get this President elected. It's going to take far more than hollow words to win us back after so many broken promises. Read the rest of this post...

Howard Dean and Lieberman agree on one thing: Obama didn't push public option

While everyone is patting themselves on the back for the movement on the health insurance bill, here's something we rarely see. Agreement from Howard Dean and Joe Lieberman. Unfortunately, what they agree upon is the lack of support from Obama for the public option. No doubt, the White House brain trust thinks that since Obama didn't fight for it, it's not a loss for him. But, we were repeatedly told Obama was "committed" to the public option. From Dean and Lieberman, we learn how Obama defines committed.

Howard Dean:

The administration is to blame for the public option's exclusion from healthcare legislation, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Monday.

"Yes," Dean flatly answered during an appearance on MSNBC when asked if the Obama administration was culpable for losing the public option.

Joe Lieberman:

Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) insists that the White House did not pressure him to get in line behind either a public health insurance option or a Medicare buy-in compromise during the health care debate this year.

"Well, no. I think I got pressure from the president to be for health care reform," Lieberman said when asked by HuffPost about any pressure from the administration to support either the public option or the Medicare buy-in. "I'd have to think about this, but I didn't really have direct input from the White House on this."

He added that Nancy-Ann DeParle, a top administration health care aide, downplayed the public option's significance early in the debate.

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Summary of the health care bill

McJoan at DailyKos goes through the highlights of the bill for us, the good, the bad and the ugly. Read the rest of this post...

70 percent: That's how often GOP Senators use filibuster-type tactics

Paul Krugman looks at how the Senate "has become ominously dysfunctional":

Yes, there were filibusters in the past — most notably by segregationists trying to block civil rights legislation. But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn’t like, is a recent creation.

The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

Some conservatives argue that the Senate’s rules didn’t stop former President George W. Bush from getting things done. But this is misleading, on two levels.

First, Bush-era Democrats weren’t nearly as determined to frustrate the majority party, at any cost, as Obama-era Republicans. Certainly, Democrats never did anything like what Republicans did last week: G.O.P. senators held up spending for the Defense Department — which was on the verge of running out of money — in an attempt to delay action on health care.

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How Barack Obama undermined the Obama presidency

NOTE FROM JOHN: Read this essay that Joe links to. I've not read anything so spot on about the President, and what makes him tick.

A post at Huffington Post by Drew Westen, the political psychologist/neuroscientist, is sure to cause a stir today. Westen has gained a reputation as one of those scholars as an expert on political communication. His work in 2008 is often compared to what George Lakoff did in 2004.

Today, Westen provides a brutal, but accurate, assessment of the Obama presidency. It's worth a read. But have some coffee first, but you'll see things you've thought yourself over the past few months -- and you're going to be annoyed:

Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn't hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry). In fact, the president's leadership style, combined with the Democratic Congress's penchant for making its sausage in public and producing new and usually more tasteless recipes every day, has had a very high toll far from the left: smack in the center of the political spectrum.

What's costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn't a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.

What's costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.

The problem is not that his record is being distorted. It's that all three have more than a grain of truth. And I say this not as one of those pesky "leftists." I say this as someone who has spent much of the last three years studying what moves voters in the middle, the Undecideds who will hear whichever side speaks to them with moral clarity.

I agree, as one of those pesky leftists.

How the Obama brain trust (who are the smartest people in the world in case you didn't know) destroyed the Obama brand of Hope and Change is going to be studied for years to come. Ultimately, the fault lies with Obama, but he got a lot of help from Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina along the way.

Westen's analysis is painfully on point. Read the rest of this post...

Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" remained clueless during crisis

It remains a mystery how Obama could even think of staying the course with Bernanke. An even larger mystery is how Congress could confirm him for another term. Nobody forced Obama to run a campaign based on "change" so is it really asking too much for him to implement some kind of change? Renominating Bernanke is an insult to the American public who suffered in no small part as a result of his incompetence. Then again, they did tolerate Greenspan who was also hailed as a champion.

The problem now, just as it was during Bush and before that Clinton, is that there continues to be a firm belief in maintaining the same system and the same people who ushered in this failure. There is too much fear in Washington about tapping into anyone new. If this last recession couldn't shake confidence in the old guard, nothing will. The public has offered little support for this system or the same old people, but in Washington that doesn't count since it won't fund expensive political campaigns. For now, Washington will continue to fear change and stay the course.

Bernanke, who was in charge of regulating the nation's largest banks, told the audience that these firms were not at risk. He said most were not even involved in subprime lending. And the broader economy, he concluded, would be fine.

"Importantly, we see no serious broad spillover to banks or thrift institutions from the problems in the subprime market," Bernanke said. "The troubled lenders, for the most part, have not been institutions with federally insured deposits."

He was wrong. Five of the 10 largest subprime lenders during the previous year were banks regulated by the Fed. Even as Bernanke spoke, the spillover from subprime lending was driving the banking industry into a historic crisis that some firms would not survive. And the upheaval would shove the economy into recession.

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Monday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

So, the Senate health insurance bill is moving. There was a key vote early this morning to invoke cloture on the "manager's amendment," which contained all the latest fixes and compromises. It got the necessary 60 votes, all from the Democratic caucus. There will be three more critical votes this week, spaced thirty hours apart because of the Senate's archaic rules. Two will require 60 votes, then final passage, which should occur at around 7:00 PM on Christmas Eve, will require 51 votes. As irritated and angry as I am at Democrats in the Senate -- and at the White House -- for producing such a weak bill and wasting so much time and political capital to do it, watching the GOPers in action is painful. I keep thinking that Mitch McConnell has to be one of the most hypocritical -- and destructive -- political figures in the nation's history. But, then I remember that McConnell only has 40 Senators in his GOP caucus and shouldn't have any power. He's only able to play these games because the likes of Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, among others, aid and abet him.

The federal government is closed today. That means a lot of D.C. will be closed, because many organizations and businesses follow the government schedule. The city is slowly digging out from the blizzard. I have to say that my neighborhood isn't too bad by D.C. standards. By Maine standards, it's a mess. And, I can report that Petey, the dog, is loving the snow. It's a whole new adventure for him.

Let's start threading the news... Read the rest of this post...

Silly socialists negotiate drug prices and win concessions

Don't they understand this is now how freedom-loving capitalism works? See, in the new capitalism, whatever price the seller offers, you don't ask questions and simply buy. Negotiating is for commies because that will only trigger competition and/or efficiency and we all know how bad that can be for capitalism. Do we really need bad influences like this on the American system? Imagine the purchasing power of what could be the largest buyer on the planet. Surely such purchasing power would mean price cuts from the companies that already charge half the price in other countries. Oh the humanity.

Pharmaceutical companies are being forced to cut the price of high cost cancer drugs for the first time as a result of a tough new approach by the NHS medicines watchdog, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice).

In the latest example, Nice has today announced approval of trabectedin, a drug for soft tissue sarcoma, a rare cancer that can occur anywhere in the body, after the Spanish manufacturer, PharmaMar, agreed a deal which could halve the cost to the NHS.

It is the third time in the past year that companies have lowered the price of cancer drugs in order to get them approved by Nice. Similar deals were done in August with the makers of a drug for kidney cancer and in June for multiple myeloma.

One drugs expert said: "Whereas in the past companies went off in a huff when Nice refused to approve their drugs because of their high cost, now they are returning to the negotiating table to work out an acceptable deal."

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Far right town in Italy performs house-to-house searches

Operation White Christmas? Really? Banning "foreign food" was odd, especially because quite a few foods eaten there are not indigenous to Italy. (Think tomatoes, corn, even olives for example.) Then there was that strange village that caused outrage because Jesus was dark skinned. And now the Italian far right is organizing house-to-house searches for illegal immigrants. Just in time for Christmas. These people are disturbed.

But in this town of 8,000 inhabitants between Milan and Venice, the approach to Christianity's most sacred festival has been marked in a very special way. On orders from the local council, controlled by the conservative Northern League, police have been carrying out house-to-house searches for illegal immigrants in an action dubbed Operation White Christmas. The operation is due to finish on December 25.

Some 3,000 people have marched through the town in protest at the operation, which the Vatican called "sad and distressing". But it has been endorsed by Silvio Berlusconi's government. Visiting nearby Brescia, where he announced the opening of a detention camp for suspected illegal immigrants – a so-called centre for identification and expulsion – Berlusconi's interior minister, Roberto Maroni, a leader of the League, complimented Coccaglio's mayor.

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Democratics Senators end GOP filibuster on key amendment to health insurance bill

There was a major step forward for the health insurance bill working its way through the Senate. The Democratic caucus in Senate just voted for cloture on Majority Leader Harry Reid's "manager's amendment." This was considered the key vote after weeks of negotiations. Invoking a rarely used rule, Reid had the Senators vote from their desks as the roll was called.

The vote was 60 - 40. Every GOPer voted no.

The Senate will take two more cloture votes this week, spaced thirty hours apart (that's the period of time designated under Senate rules for "post-cloture" debate on the underlying question for which cloture was achieved.) So, we'll see another vote for the substitute amendment on Tuesday morning at around 7:00 a.m., then one on Wednesday afternoon at approximately 1:00 P.M. for the final bill. Both of those will need 60 votes. That will clear the way for final passage, which only needs 51 votes, should take place on Christmas Eve at around 7:00 PM.

That schedule is needed because the Republicans are using every obstructionist tactic provided by the archaic Senate rules to prevent the insurance bill's passage. All Republicans, even former President Olympia Snowe, are opposing the legislation at every step of the way. There were lots of speeches from Republicans today bemoaning the lack of bipartisanship. What a joke. Mitch McConnell had the gall to say that if Democrats weren't ashamed of this vote, they wouldn't have forced it in the middle of the night. Um, the reason the Democrats had to vote in the middle of the night was because of the GOP's tactical games. In his remarks, Harry Reid flat out said, "Everyone knows we're here at one o'clock in the morning because of my friends on the other side of the aisle."

We'll see Republicans getting crankier by the day. Keep an eye on John McCain. He's looking like he's going to blow his top. Read the rest of this post...