Now the final phase begins, where we see what House liberals can achieve within the confines of a broken system that gives a handful of senators from sparsely populated states a disproportionate power to shape legislation:

Democrats are already outlining a strategy to achieve a final compromise that can satisfy the more liberal House without upsetting the painstakingly assembled coalition of 60 Senate Democrats and independents.

Central to those talks, House leaders said, will be the search for an acceptable substitute for a government-run insurance plan that those without medical coverage could purchase, a provision the House designed to compete with private insurers and force them to rein in costs. While the Senate has decisively rejected the "public option," House leaders say they will demand other concessions to ensure that Americans can afford the insurance they will be required to buy if the bill becomes law.

[...] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has signaled approval for the Senate's solution: the creation of at least two nationwide insurance plans run by private companies but overseen by the Office of Personnel Management, the same federal agency that handles health insurance for members of Congress. In a conference call Wednesday, Pelosi also assured rank-and-file Democrats that they would not be asked to rubber-stamp the Senate bill and began soliciting ideas to improve it.

Among the options under discussion: pressing the Senate to increase the federal subsidies that would be offered to low- and middle-income people who do not have access to affordable coverage through an employer; having a single national marketplace for people buying insurance, rather than 50 state-based exchanges, as the Senate prefers; and moving up the launch date of those marketplaces and subsidies to 2013, one year earlier than under the Senate bill.

We're one step closer to passing this historic healthcare bill. A year ago, I would have put the odds of this passing the Senate right up there with... well, with the odds of the Vatican praising "The Simpsons."

Now it's on to the House, where hopefully the Democratic liberals will try to undo the conservative damage that's been done:

The Senate passed a landmark health-care bill Thursday morning that would provide coverage to more than 30 million people and begin a far-reaching overhaul of Medicare and the private insurance market.

Vice President Biden presided over the 60-39, party line vote, which brings Democrats closer than ever to realizing their 70-year-old goal of universal health coverage.

For the first time, most Americans would be required to obtain health insurance, either through their employer or via new, government-regulated exchanges. Those who can't afford insurance plans would receive federal subsidies. And Medicaid would be vastly expanded to reach millions of low-income children and adults.

Difficult issues must be still resolved in final negotiations with the House, which has passed more liberal health-care reform legislation, and those talks could stretch through January and perhaps into February, Democratic leaders said. But Democrats are increasingly confident that President Obama would sign a bill into law in early 2010.

"Health care reform is not a matter of 'if,' " White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday. "Health care reform now is a matter of 'when.' "

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared after Wednesday's vote that: "We stand on the doorstep of history." But he declined to speculate about negotiations with the House.

"I'm not going to talk about conference. I'm talking about passing this bill," he told reporters late Wednesday. For at least a few days after Christmas, Reid said, he would rest back home in Nevada. "I am going to just sit back and watch my rabbits eat my cactus," he said.

Republicans fought the Senate bill with every parliamentary weapon they could muster, raising a series of motions on that failed along party lines. The rhetoric grew more harsh as time ran short.

The last preliminary vote came Wednesday, when all 60 members of the Senate Democratic caucus voted down the final possibility for a Republican filibuster of the $871 billion package.

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Contessa Brewer talks to Rep. Dianna DeGette about what the House will agree to with compromises on abortion language in the health care bill. The abortion language still could be a deal breaker with the House and those who refuse to see the Hyde language weakened further.

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John Harwood in typical Villager fashion takes a shot at liberals who are not happy with the health care bill or how Harry Reid or the Obama administration have handled it.

Brewer: So in the end, how does this deal get done John?

Harwood: Contessa it was really hand to hand combat and hand to hand diplomacy one vote at a time, finally securing that vote of Joe Lieberman by ditching that Medicare buy in that he was against and Ben Nelson with the abortion language; but I gotta’ say Contessa, just because so much of the commentary I've heard has been really idiotic. Liberals who want universal health care ought to be thanking Harry Reid for getting this thing done rather than talking about what's inadequate in the bill. I'm not saying the bill's a good bill, but if you're a liberal, and you want universal coverage in this country and think that you could do better than Harry Reid, can do better than what he's done, or the White House can do better, they ought to lay off the hallucinogenic drugs because we have had a vivid demonstration of the limits of political possibilities on this issue.

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December 21, 2009 MSNBC

Our own John Amato takes on conservative blogger Matt Lewis. (Nicole) During David Shuster's news hour, Amato was asked about Sen. Tom Coburn's unconscionable comment praying that someone (presumably 92 year old Senator Robert Byrd, who despite his frail health, chided the GOP for their bad faith in health reform negotiations last week) would not make the vote.

Matt Lewis ridiculously tries to assert that what Coburn meant was a missed "alarm clock." Please. If that was the case, why do we see articles like this?

All I Want Is A Byrd Dropping For Christmas

Whether or not Lewis is willing to be honest, there's no bar too low for Republicans in trying to obstruct what the majority of Americans want, not even wishing for the death of a Senator.

Hell has officially frozen over. After more than a decade of hyper-partisanship and knee-jerk, reactionary opposition to the other, the entire political spectrum of Meet the Press's roundtable panel--Markos Moulitsas, Joe Scarborough, Ed Gillespie and Tavis Smiley--all agree on one thing: the health-care reform bill sucks. There's the vaunted bipartisanship Obama sought.

Laughing off Whiter House adviser David Axelrod's spin of the historic (and not-as-bad-as-it-seems) nature of the bill, Markos points out that all this bill does is expand an already broken system, a proven failed program in Massachusetts. Scarborough adds that for all the White House talk that the insurance companies hate the bill, there is no regulation that Congress didn't capitulate on after pushback from the insurance lobbies and if they hate it so much, why has the value of their stock gone up so much recently? Former RNC Chair Ed Gillespie can barely contain his glee at the thought of the seats the GOP will pick up, because of this bill, and Smiley notes that Candidate Obama's rhetoric doesn't measure up to President Obama's actions and bemoans the incrementalism mentality:

I do believe that you have to stand on your principle. With all due respect to the White House and the President, who deserves who deserves great credit for taking this issue on and pushing further down the field than any other seven Presidents have done, you still have to ask, where is the principle that we started out with, and how firm have we stood on that principle? I thnk the danger for this White House is this: that the President and his team appear to be incrementalists. I warned the last time I was on this program, quoting Dr. King, about taking “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”

I love that line, and it resonates as much today as it did when Dr. King tried dissuade those who wanted to take an incremental approach to civil rights and segregation.

The sad thing is how clear this is to us here outside the Beltway, and how badly calculated this was to those inside the White House. And I don't think this was some malevolent intent on their part, but just a triangulating, DLC/Centrist move that completely didn't take into account that we now inhabit the post-Clinton/Bush era. I don't think there's any question that the White House must accept responsibility for the lameness of the bill--although they'll never do it publicly and risk giving more fodder to the GOP media--Feingold and Webb are already pointing fingers.

And at this point, I don't know what can be done to make this better. Tempting as it might be to thrown in the towel, the ramifications of that politically (you throw a bone like that to the GOP and nothing will get through Congress next session) will be a nightmare, and besides which, there's no guarantee they'd be able to achieve anything, much less anything better on a second go-round. So all in all, I have to agree with Joe Scarborough, as much as it deeply pains me to do so: we've been screwed.

I don't know about you, but I'm so burned out on health care politics, I needed a little break. This story is the perfect remedy - especially since it so beautifully illustrates progressive values about community, and helping each other.

This is about one of the neighborhood diners I frequent, and I was so happy to read this story (and this one, too):

Last Saturday, Dec. 5th, something startling and wonderful happened at The Aramingo Diner in Port Richmond.

The 52-year-old landmark restaurant at 3356 Aramingo Ave. is open 24 hours a day, so it's always a-bustle. But the place really hops during weekend breakfast and lunch time. Last Saturday was no different, and both wings of the diner - the booth area and the bigger dining room - were lively.

The manager on duty, Linda (who asked that I not mention her last name here, for reasons I can't get into but let's just say everything worked out okay...), tells me that a couple in their 30s paid their check at the register, then asked the cashier to let them secretly pay the check of another couple in the dining room - a couple they didn't know.

"They just wanted to do it," she said. "They thought it would be a nice thing to do."

When the unsuspecting patrons went to pay their check, they were floored to find out that strangers had picked up their tab. So they asked the cashier to let them pay another table's check, also anonymously.

When that table's patrons approached the register, they, too, decided to pay the favor forward for yet another table of unsuspecting strangers.

You know where this is going, right?

For two hours, delighted customer after delighted customer continued to pay the favor forward. And a buzz began to grow. Not among patrons, who had no inkling what was going down at the register, but among the dining-room wait staff - Marvin, Rosie, Jasmine and Lynn - and other Aramingo workers moving in and out of the room.

"We were amazed," says Linda, adding that neither she nor her staffers that day recognized any of the participating patrons as regulars. "Nobody knew each other. But once they found out someone paid their check, they got excited and wanted to do the same thing for another table."

The checks weren't huge, says Linda. They varied between about twelve bucks and $30 (many of the sneaky do-gooders even included tip money in the gift).

But the impact made an out-sized impression on the staff, who marveled at how that initial, single act of generosity kept repeating itself.

Says Linda, "In thirty years working here, I've never seen anything like it. You might have someone pick up a check for another table, but usually it's because they know them."

All in all, about 20 checks were "paid forward" (a term coined by author Catherine Ryan Hyde, whose 2000 book, Pay It Forward was made into an earnestly schmaltzy Hollywood movie).

The lovely cycle finally ended, two hours after it began, when a lone diner, clearly unacquainted with the "pay it forward" concept, seemed befuddled that someone had picked up his check. He simply accepted the favor, grunted, and left.

Notes Linda, "He didn't even leave a tip."

Ah, well. Some people have had so little kindness in their lives, they don't know what to do with it when they see it. They don't really understand we're all in this together.

I hope some people read this and try it in their own towns. What a nice Christmas present to yourself!

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December 18, 2009 MSNBC

The Army general of U.S. forces in Northern Iraq has banned pregnancy among military personnel in his command, NBC News reported on Friday.

Anyone who becomes pregnant or impregnates another servicemember, including married couples assigned to the same unit, could face a court-martial and jail time, according to an order issued by Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo.

The order, which went into effect on Nov. 4, was first reported by the military publication Stars and Stripes.

No one has been punished or accused under the policy, according to Col. David S. Thompson, the inspector general for all soldiers in Iraq.

Military officials say the order was issued because Army policy requires the force to remove a pregnant soldier from a war zone within 14 days of learning of the pregnancy, creating a hole in a unit that makes it more difficult to complete its mission.

“It is a lawful order,” Thompson said Friday during a phone interview with Stars and Stripes.

Thompson, who has served 29 of the past 39 months in Iraq as an inspector general, told the publication that it’s the first time he can recall pregnancy being prohibited.

So far, there have been no known violations of Cucolo's order, NBC reported.

Heather: I would like to know if this is even legal. Apparently MSNBC decided to give this a blurb in their news coverage both on line and on the air and treat it like a footnote. So now on top of the number of sexual assaults we have going on within our armed forces, a woman who gets pregnant under any circumstance also has to worry about being thrown in jail as well. Isn't that special? Why more attention has not been drawn to this is beyond me.

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Wow. This is unusual. Ed Schultz does something you rarely see, criticize someone from his own network. Ed brings in Markos Moulitsas to respond to Chris Matthews insult of the netroots yesterday where he said we're not real Democrats and back-seat bitchers. John offered to debate Matthews yesterday. I wonder if we'll hear anything else from him on this now that Schultz had Moulitsas on. If Matthews wants to lob insults, I'd like to see him try to debate those he was insulting to their faces. I'm not holding my breath though. Good on Ed for giving Markos a chance to respond.

Moulitsas: You know in 2003 after ah--when Bush landed his plane on the aircraft carrier, behind the--spoke in front of the banner that said "mission accomplished", Chris Matthews had an entire show based on that event where he thought Bush was fantastic and he said "everybody knows that we won the war, except for a few critics". Well I was one of those few critics. People like me and the netroots were some of those critics and it turns out that we were right and the beltway conventional wisdom was wrong. And once again we're in a situation where people like Chris Matthews don't learn from these mistakes. They're sort of trapped in this bubble and and they think that they know better. The fact is most of the editors on Daily KOS either have worked on campaigns or worked on Hill staff and of my readers, I would venture to say the vast, vast majority knocked on doors, gave money, made phone calls on behalf of campaigns. They worked and they vote and if Chris Matthews is worried about us working and if he thinks that we're not Democrats, well then he really should be worried because he's got a thing coming.

[...]

Moulitsas: You know ActBlue is an on line clearing house for contributions to Democratic party candidates. In the last four years we have raised $115 million through ActBlue... a $115 million. Now that's not a bunch of kids in the back seat donating $115 million, at an average donation of about $30. So we're talking little dollars here and there. There's a lot of us. We're engaged. We're involved and we want a party that represents the American people and a government that represents the American people, not insurance companies, not big business and clearly we're not quite there yet but we only started this battle a couple of years ago. We're still fighting.

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Rachel Maddow responds to Dick Armey's insulting remarks about her during today's AFP tea bagger rally. As usual Rachel displays about 1000% more class than the sexist ass Dick Armey could ever hope to muster in his life time. I wonder if Dick Armey will be accepting any more invitations to appear with Rachel Maddow on Meet the Press again so he can respond to her face to face.

From Think Progress--Dick Armey sneers at ‘a woman named Maddox’ who ‘has a Ph.D. in something that doesn’t matter.’:

During today’s AFP-sponsored “Code Red” anti-health reform rally on Capitol Hill, one of the speakers — former House Majority Leader and current corporate defender Dick Armey — derided MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. Armey was prepared to introduce Sen. Tom Coburn (whom he bizarrely referred to as “Doc Colbin” a couple of times), but Coburn wasn’t there yet. So instead, he told a story that was a shot at Maddow:

ARMEY: The last time [Coburn] and I were together, I had the amazing opportunity to watch him receive a lecture on health care from a woman named, uh, uh, uh, “Maddox.” A television personality. Who I’m told has a Ph.D. in something that doesn’t matter. Who knew she was qualified to lecture the good physician on health care in America because she had actually gone to a doctor once.

Rachel replayed her exchange with Tom Coburn on Meet the Press and had this response for Dick Armey:

Maddow: That was my only exchange with Tom Coburn in front of Dick Armey. Now if Mr. Armey thinks I was not qualified to be in that discussion because Tom Coburn is a gynecologist and I'm not, I wonder why Dick Armey thought that he was qualified to be in that room?

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I'll repeat what Jeremy Scahill said about this. "What the hell is this idiot talking about?" Another non-reality based fake debate on MSNBC with both sides spouting ridiculous talking points.

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What hath Republicans wrought?

Sure, they believed, as John noted the other day, that when they were unleashing what Bill Kristol likes to call "guided populism", they were in fact opening the gates for right-wing populism. And now they're looking not only at a a phenomenon much more popular than the standard Republican brand, but a movement that is about to swallow them whole.

And the Tea Party organizers -- notably the Astroturf outfits that originated the Parties, such as FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity -- are making that perfectly clear. Two spokesmen for those groups -- Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks and the AFP's Tim Phillips, went on Hardball yesterday and made this explicit:

MATTHEWS: Matt, how about third party? What about the Tea Party? Sarah Palin is kind of hard to read. She is fascinating. Let‘s face it, we‘re all fascinated with her, because she‘s exciting as a political figure right now. But she‘s talking third party. I mean, she answered the question of Lars Larson. Maybe it just came to mind, but she said, yeah, I might go third party, something like that. Would you guys knock off an incumbent Republican by going third party? You know how the vote splits. Split the right, the Dem wins.

KIBBE: The better way to do it is to take over the Republican party. Frankly, that‘s what our goal is. We need to replace the Republican establishment with fiscal conservatives that are actually willing to cut spending.

All this talk about a "third party" is just so much smokescreen. What's actually happening is that the GOP is fast becoming a full-fledged right-wing-populist entity. Which means that the latent extremism lurking out on the right's fringes for so many years is becoming its new lifeblood, such as it is.

Funny thing is, as Matthews managed to point out early in the segment, not even the Tea Partiers' supposed hero -- Ronald Reagan -- can live up to their standards:

MATTHEWS: Has there ever been a strong conservative president, for example, in your lifetime or anybody—your grandfather‘s lifetime? Who do you look to as a good role model for the tea party people?

KIBBE: Well, obviously, Ronald Reagan is the closest thing we have.

MATTHEWS: What did he do in terms of fiscal policy?

KIBBE: Oh, he—he said that we shouldn't spend money we don‘t have, and he said that the government shouldn't get involved in things that it‘s not very good at doing.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Yes. Have you ever checked the numbers with Reagan?

KIBBE: Well, I understand. I understand...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: The national debt went from under $1 trillion to $3 trillion. He did more to increase exponentially the size of the debt of any president in history.

And he's your role model.

KIBBE: Well, President Obama is...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: No, I'm asking you. I have asked you one president that you can look up to who was good at tea party politics and ideology.

KIBBE: Right. Right.

MATTHEWS: If it's not Reagan, because he clearly didn't do it, who do you look to? Coolidge? How far do you have to look back?

KIBBE: I think we need to find somebody that can meet that standard.

MATTHEWS: So, nobody has recently?

KIBBE: No, certainly not.

Ah well. Blowing off cognitive dissonance is a special teabagger trait. It just adds to their "insane" mystique.

Republicans may have thought these guys had their backs. But now they're looking with increasing worry back over their shoulders. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind, dudes.

Rachel Maddow takes on this shyster who claims he can 'cure' homosexuality and confronts him about the way his book has been used to spread anti-gay propoganda around the world -- in particular by the members of C-Street pushing the kill-the-gays bill in Uganda. Rachel made sure to point out that Richard Cohen is not licensed by any accrediting body and when he cited his marriage as proof he'd been cured of his homosexuality, let viewers know that Mr. Cohen continued to have sex with men after being married.

Cohen defended himself saying that they don't think they can 'cure' or 'pray away the gay' and said they don't use those words. They just offering 'counseling' for those with 'unwanted same sex attraction'.

MADDOW: The subject of the interview tonight is the head of a group called the International Healing Foundation, and all reporting on a proposed law to execute people for being gay in Uganda. We turned up evidence of strong links between conservative U.S. politicians who are part of the secretive religious group, The Family, a.k.a. C Street, and people in Uganda who introduced and are pushing the kill-the-gays bill.

But we also turned up more direct connections between the kill-the-gays bill and other American activists. In March, the International Healing Foundation, which is based in Maryland, sent one of its staffers to Uganda to speak to parliament there and to speak at a conference organized by the main promoter of the kill-the-gays bill.

His message was that gay people are gay by choice and a gay person who wants to be straight can be straight. That speech to parliament and the anti-gay conference took place in March of this year.

After the conference in April, the conference organizer arranged for an anti-homosexuality petition to be delivered to the Ugandan parliament. And within a month, on April 29th, the kill-the-gays bill had been introduced with the anti-gay conference organizer sitting in the gallery for that occasion.

Here is that conference organizer and the lead proponent of the kill-the-gays bill, Stephen Langa, praising the influence and authority of our next guest.

Continue reading...

Andrea Mitchell interviewed Al Gore today to talk about climate-change deniers, since Copenhagen, with its many moving parts, has begun. And with the summit, the rash of climate-change and global-warming deniers has really stepped up. What makes these people deny proven science? Digby and Paul Krugman discuss the hatred of reality by conservative loons.

Anyway, Gore asks the question that a Sarah Palin could never answer logically: Why are the polar ice caps disappearing? The batshit crazy deniers like Palin don't know the caps exist maybe because she can't see them from her house...

MITCHELL: Congratulations on the book. You write in your new book, "Our Choice," "The global warming deniers' arguments are fraudulent and often nonsensical." Yet even today, one of the best-known voices in the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, has an op-ed in the Washington Post, and she is escalating a major attack against Copenhagen and against -- against the summit. Palin calls it "junk science." She says, "The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worst."

What's your response to that?

GORE: Well, you know, the -- the global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality. After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?

The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies -- drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths (ph) in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.

These effects are taking place all over the world exactly as predicted by the scientists, who have warned for years that, if we continue putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, the accumulation -- that's going to trap lots more heat, raise temperatures, and cause all of these consequences that are already beginning.

MITCHELL: Well, one of the things that she has written recently on Facebook is that this is doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that makes the public feel like owning an SUV is a sin against the planet.

GORE: Well, the scientific community has worked very intensively for 20 years within this international process, and they now say the evidence is unequivocal. A hundred and fifty years ago this year was the discovery that CO-2 traps heat. That is a -- a principle in physics. It's not a question of debate. It's like gravity; it exists.

Like gravity it exists. You see, there's the proven. In the mind of conservatives, it doesn't matter what's provable -- only what can be denied. And as we've come to expect from Fred Hiatt and the Washington Post, they reprinted a Sarah Palin op-ed that is littered with so much false information on climate change that it boggles the mind. They have turned the news paper op-ed section into a celebrity rag that could care less about truth and accuracy. I'm shocked the op-ed didn't come with Sarah Palin celebrity photos.

Get Energy Smart Now writes: Fred Hiatt jumps the shark in dragging Washington Post into the sewers: Publishes Sarah Palin OPED contradicted by links within the OPED

Amid the Copenhagen climate summit, Fred Hiatt has chosen to descend the paper to a new low, seeming to prove that there is somehow a balance between outright falsehoods and ignorance, on the one side, and scientific knowledge and honest discourse on the other.

Sarah Palin, fresh off a shallowly ignorant Facebook post calling on President Obama not to go to Copenhagen, has an opinion piece appearing in Wednesday’s Washington Post (following up on Palin’s ghostwritten absurdity published by the Post in July). And, the factual dissections of her falsehoods are already piling on. In terms of those dissections, what is amazing is that one doesn’t have to go beyond the Post itself to find them. I very rarely so heavily quote another blogger, but the always worth reading Tim Lambert has a brutal damning post, The Washington Post can’t go out of business fast enough....read on

And here's a response to Dean Baker at the dubious Politico:

Dean Baker: It’s amazing that the Post feels the need to print a column that is chock full of distortions and misinformation just because it was written by a celebrity (Sarah Palin’s pro-global warming diatribe).

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In an interview on "Meet the Press," Sunday, Dec. 6, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked to David Gregory about President Obama's plan to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. Clinton insisted the plan is not an "exit strategy" or "drop dead deadline":

HILLARY CLINTON: We're not talking about an exit strategy or a drop dead deadline. What we're talking about is an assessment that in January 2011, we can begin a transition. A transition to hand off -- responsibility to the Afghan forces.

ROBERT GATES: We're not talking about an abrupt withdrawal. We're talking about something that will take place over a period of time. Our commanders think that these additional forces, and one of the reasons for the President's decision to try and accelerate their deployment is-- is the view that this extended surge has the opportunity to make significant gains in terms of reversing the momentum of the Taliban, denying them control of Afghan territory, and degrading their capabilities.

Our military thinks we have a real opportunity to do that. And it's not just in the next 18 months. Because we will have a significant -- we will have 100,000 forces -- troops there. And they are not leaving-- in July of 2011. Some handful or some small number or whatever the conditions permit, we'll begin to withdraw at that time.