The 60-to-39 party-line vote, on the 25th straight day of debate on the legislation, brings Democrats a step closer to a goal they have pursued for decades. It clears the way for negotiations with the House, which passed a broadly similar bill last month by a vote of 220 to 215.
If the two chambers can strike a deal, as seems likely, the resulting product would vastly expand the role and responsibilities of the federal government. It would, as lawmakers said repeatedly in the debate, touch the lives of nearly all Americans.
The bill would require most Americans to have health insurance, would add 15 million people to the Medicaid rolls and would subsidize private coverage for low- and middle-income people, at a cost to the government of $871 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
President Obama said after the vote that the health care bill is "the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act" was adopted and that it represents "the toughest measure ever taken to hold the insurance companies accountable."
The Hill: "The 60-39 tally split directly along partisan lines, with Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) absent, underscoring not only the great divide between Democrats and Republicans but also the deftness with which Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) at long last united his fractious conference by offering key compromises to centrists but keeping liberals in the fold."
WaPo: "Difficult issues must be still resolved in final negotiations with the House, which has passed more liberal health-care reform legislation. Those talks could stretch through January and perhaps into February, Democratic leaders said."
TPM: "In an interview today with PBS, President Obama said he plans to begin working on merging the Senate and House health care bills before Congress returns from Christmas recess. ... Obama is expected to work with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to merge the bills."
Rep. Slaughter explains what's wrong with the Senate bill, and fears what ails it will not be cured in reconciliation.
Because wacky situations caused by the "differences" between men and women have never been used in sitcoms. And that title? Pure gold, baby.
ABC has made an early jump on the pilot-pickup season with a second comedy order in three days.
The network Monday gave the green light to "Women Are Crazy, Men Are Stupid," a multicamera comedy from ABC Studios. The project is based on Howard Morris and Jenny Lee's book.
Morris and Lee also wrote the pilot script for "Women," about a new couple who both have survived failed marriages and are determined to get it right this time.
You smell that? It's the smell of fresh entertainment ideas.
[Transcript below from full show transcript here.]
In totally unrelated news, the parents of "Balloon Boy" have been sentenced for perpetrating an elaborate media hoax which involved their innocent son.
Okay, obviously I'm being snarky, but my point is this: Let's just say, for shits and giggles, that 11-year-old James Leininger is indeed a reincarnated WWII pilot. Isn't that his story to tell, should he so choose, when he is old enough to make a decision like that fully comprehending all the possible consequences, good or bad, of being publicly (and forever) known as someone who claims to be a reincarnated WWII pilot?
Despite this segment ostensibly being part of a panel on "near death experiences" with Dr. Sanjay Gupta (author of Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles That Are Saving Lives Against All Odds), Dr. Deepak Chopra (author of Life After Death), and Dinesh D'Souza (author of Life After Death: The Evidence), it's just a big commercial for a bunch of books (the quality and accuracy of which I will not assess in this post), including the book James' parents have written about him, called Soul Survivor. (Get it? Har har.)
That his parents are trying to cash in on this story is not in question. The question is: Why do we consider that their right, rather than James'—a right he can exercise only when he is old enough to give truly informed consent?
We have a culture that encourages parents to exploit their children, with good intentions or without them. We take parents like the Leiningers at their word when they say things like "James wants to tell his story!" and don't question whether maybe, even if that's true, it's impossible for James to grasp the totality of what that means.
I wonder whether having parents' breaching the boundaries of their children's informed and uncoerced consent communicates to those children that consent isn't important and exploitation of others is acceptable. I wonder what a culture that communicates that message to more and more and ever more children might look like…
JEFF PROBST (filling in for Larry King): Andrea, when did you first realize that something was -- was not right, that James was having ideas or stories that he wanted to share about this?
ANDREA LEININGER, AUTHOR, "SOUL SURVIVOR": Well, initially it started off -- James always had a fascination with airplanes. And that seemed just like something that a little boy would be fascinated with, like big trucks or something like that.
The real problem started about two weeks after James' second birthday. He had a -- a night terror, which he had never had before. And this first nightmare began a series of nightmares that started occurring every other night, every night. Four or five times a week he would have these screaming nightmares where he'd be laying on his back, kicking his feet up at the ceiling like he was in a box, trying to kick his way out.
And after several months of this, he was having a nightmare and I came down the hallway and I was able to finally determine what he was saying. And he was saying, "airplane crash on fire, little man can't get out."
PROBST: Well, and Bruce, even at three, he was -- James was drawing pictures of an airplane crashing. In fact, I -- I think we have one.
Do you -- did you talk to him at that point?
He was very young then.
Did he have an idea what was going on?
BRUCE LEININGER, AUTHOR "SOUL SURVIVOR": Well, by the time he started drawing those pictures, he'd been talking about this and -- for several months. That didn't start until seven or eight months after he really began talking about what was happening. Prior to that, in the dreams or after the dreams or before he'd go to bed or in a dreaming state, mostly, he started to tell us things about what would happen. And he essentially gave us three items of information over about a three month period. One, he gave us the name of the ship, which I verified through research on the Internet (INAUDIBLE)...
PROBST: This is this ship the airplane took off from?
B. LEININGER: That's...
A. LEININGER: Yes.
B. LEININGER: That's correct. Natoma Bay. He gave us a name Natoma. I asked him one night where his ship came or where -- where his airplane came from, because he told us it was shot down by the Japanese. And he said it came from a boat. So in another question, he then -- I asked him the name of the boat. He said, Natoma. And I did a Google search on the word "Natoma" and found, 300 or 400 hits down, a history of a WWII ship that was in the Pacific.
About a month later, he gave us the -- the name of a guy he said he flew with. When we asked him if there was anyone else in his -- in his dream that he could remember.
PROBST: So I want to be clear on this, Bruce.
He gave you the name...
B. LEININGER: Yes.
A. LEININGER: Yes.
PROBST: ...of somebody he had flown with?
B. LEININGER: That's right. Jack -- Jack Larson.
A. LEININGER: I kept asking him if he remembered what his name has been -- had been in his last life or in his dreams. And he said his name was James. But that is his name. So I finally gave up on that line of questioning.
And I finally asked him, do you remember anybody else that you flew with or any friends?
And he said, Jack. Jack Larson.
PROBST: James, you're 11 now. You're a little older. You've been -- been dealing with this for a while.
What do you make of it now?
Do you still have these dreams?
Can you connect this to anything or are they starting to -- to lessen for you?
JAMES LEININGER, SON OF BRUCE AND ANDREA LEININGER: It has diminished.
PROBST: So you're not remembering it as clearly as you were when you were younger.
J. LEININGER: No.
A. LEININGER: And, Jeff, it wasn't like he had cognitive memory. It wasn't like he could just sit and I could say, Jeff, tell me about when you were on the last season "Survivor." These memories weren't active in his mind. It was just -- it was usually a trigger or something that would happen or he would see or smell or hear something. And then he would just come out with this little piece of information and that was it.
Then it was pretty much gone forever. There was probably only three or five instances where we were able to sit down and question him and ask him questions. The rest of the time when we tried to do that, if he didn't initiate that conversation, he didn't seem to know what we were talking about. It was a very interesting phenomenon.
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Yesterday I submitted without comment President Obama's contentions that "Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in [the healthcare] bill" and "I didn't campaign on the public option."
Other people have comments.
Zaid: "In the 2008 Obama-Biden health care plan on the campaign's website, candidate Obama promised that 'any American will have the opportunity to enroll in [a] new public plan'."
Krugman: "Obama's claim that he never campaigned on the public option has received a lot of flack, and rightly so. It was in his official campaign proposal, and he did invoke it many times this year. What is true is that the Obama inner circle never, in fact, cared much about the public option. But they allowed, you might say encouraged, progressive activists to believe otherwise."
TPM's Brian Beutler: "In fact, though the public option wasn't a regular part of his stump speech, Obama appointed the public option's intellectual father, Jacob Hacker, to his health care advisory committee, and his campaign's health care white paper prominently featured a government run plan, with no mandate requiring uninsured people to buy insurance. The bill he will likely sign next year will do the opposite."
Sam Stein and Alex Koppelman ran thorough reports late yesterday on Obama's record as a candidate in 2007 and 2008, and to make a long story short, Obama clearly endorsed the public option and included it as part of his larger policy agenda -- the plan as published online specifically touted a "public health insurance option" -- but it wasn't an element he invested much time in before Election Day.
As Stein summarized, "An examination of approximately 200 newspaper articles from the campaign, as well as debate transcripts and public speeches shows that Obama spoke remarkably infrequently about creating a government-run insurance program."
Indeed, for all the concerns that Obama should have pushed the measure more aggressively during this year's congressional deliberations, it appears the president advocated on behalf of the public option far more after getting elected than before it.
All accurate. Obama did not overtly campaign on the public option, but his team certainly allowed the belief to exist that he was a strong supporter of the public option. There were people at the time who tried desperately to point out that we were being hoodwinked. Like Krugman, who ended a Feb. 08 column with the point-blank assessment: "If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance—nobody knows how big—that we'll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won't happen." I remember that piece because it was linked from Shakesville at least half a dozen times.
Initially, both Clinton and Obama disappointed. Without Edwards in the race, we'd still be in some insurance-pandering Stone Age on that. However, he pulled them out of it. Clinton had the sense to just co-opt his plan wholesale. Obama tried to talk the talk while walking a more industry-friendly walk. Shades of the liquefied coal mess. Krugman in op-eds and his blog and Ezra Klein have analyzed this thing to the last comma. Bottom line: "Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700" and "One plan achieves more or less universal coverage; the other, although it costs [nearly twice] as much, covers only about half of those currently uninsured."
Turns out that this echoes what Obama actually did in Illinois. "We radically changed [the health care bill] in response to concerns that were raised by the insurance industry," Obama said. One of those radical changes was that universal healthcare became merely a policy goal instead of state policy.
Part of the reason Obama was able to hoodwink so many people across the nation in precisely the same way he did in Illinois is because those of us who pointed out that he, indeed, wasn't campaigning on the public option got accused of being in the bag for Clinton, even if we simultaneously conveyed we'd support either candidate.
This was a fact about Barack Obama. It was obfuscated beneath ten metric fucktons of accusations of hidden agendas.
I am not doing an "I told you so." I am saying that there were people who tried to convey this fact in good faith because they felt it was an important piece of information, and they were shouted down. And I am saying it in the hope that it won't happen again, with the certain fear that it will.
Scene of cab pulling up to apartment building in a city setting, and Ralph Macchio Jaden Smith (son of superstars Will and Jada) is saying goodbye to friends/family. His mother, Taraji P. Henson, says, "I feel like we're on a quest to start a new life." They fly on Air China to Beijing, China—their new home, where they have relocated because of his single mother's job. Jaden is positively Macchio-like in his surly petulance. Scenes of Jaden getting picked on by meanie Chinese kids. (Please disregard that this is a rather different cultural message than a poor East Coast Italian white kid getting picked on by rich West Coast "non-ethnic" white kids—and please try not to notice that this a clunky-ass metaphor for US insecurities about its own failing empire and emergent Chinese dominance.) Mr. Miyagi Mr. Han, aka Jackie Chan, steps in to save Jaden. "The only way to stop them is to face them; I will teach you," he says, and Jaden's training begins. The iconic "wax on, wax off" scene has apparently been replaced with "take your jacket off and hang it up; take it down and put it on; now take it off and hang it up" which is so not as cool. Montage of training scenes set against hip-hop music. Jaden will totes learn to beat up Chinese kids—yeah! Hey, why is this film called The Karate Kid when he's being taught kung fu? Maybe they should have just called it Japanese, Chinese, Whatever! And then, just in case you were still considering seeing this film, they give you one more reason not to: Jackie Chan goes after a fly with chopsticks; when it lands on a wall, he smacks it with a flyswatter. It's like that classic moment in Raiders of the Lost Arc when Indy exasperatedly shoots a dude wielding a scimitar—what a humorous reversal!—except without the inconvenience of actually being surprised by it in the film.
Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, widely regarded as a potential GOP presidential candidate in 2012, recently gave an interview to Newsweek in which he talks about his regret for having voted in favor of a 1993 state bill, the first of its kind in the nation, that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
I know you are opposed to gay marriage, but what about medical benefits for same-sex couples? I have not supported that.
Why not? My general view on all of this is that marriage is to be defined as being a union of a man and a woman. Marriage should be elevated in our society at a special level. I don't think all domestic relationships are the equivalent of traditional marriage. Early on we decided as a country and as a state that there was value in a man and a woman being married in terms of impact on children and the like, and we want to encourage that. To borrow a phrase, have your views evolved over time? In 1993 I voted for a bill prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation in public accommodation, housing, and employment. That was 16 years ago.
Yes, gay-rights activists regarded you as a pretty cool guy at the time. We overbaked that statute, for a couple of reasons. If I had to do it over again I would have changed some things.
Overbaked? That statute is not worded the way it should be. I said I regretted the vote later because it included things like cross-dressing, and a variety of other people involved in behaviors that weren't based on sexual orientation, just a preference for the way they dressed and behaved. So it was overly broad. So if you are a third-grade teacher and you are a man and you show up on Monday as Mr. Johnson and you show up on Tuesday as Mrs. Johnson, that is a little confusing to the kids. So I don't like that.
Has the law been changed? No. It should be, though. So you want to protect kids against cross-dressing elementary-school teachers. Do you have any in Minnesota? Probably. We've had a few instances, not exactly like that, but similar.
Oh noes! What about the childrenz?! We might accidentally teach them empathy for trans people. Worse yet, we might accidentally communicate to the trans children sitting in those teachers' classrooms that being trans is okay! This is the worst thing to happen in the history of America! [/little_edie]
I don't guess I even need to point out the stunning ignorance (or, more likely, mendacious and deliberate misrepresentation) of what being trans actually is—one day a man and then poof! the next day a lady—nor what an utterly bullshit example he gives: I've never heard of anyone, in any professional position, just showing up to work one day smack in the middle of transitioning without having discussed it with hir employer.
Pawlenty's suggestion that such a thing happens with some frequency masks the reality that most trans people can't just show up at work in transition even if they wanted to, because they risk anything from being pushed out of their jobs to physical violence in retaliation.
And, as the daughter of schoolteachers, I find it particularly appalling that he would use imaginary schoolteachers as the example of trans professionals who show up on the job in transition willy-nilly, the implicit suggestion being that they cared enough about children to become teachers in the first place, but not enough to take care with their students' possible confusion about a publicly transitioning teacher. In Pawlenty's hypothetical, trans teachers are happy to teach their kids math, but unwilling to teach their kids about being trans. No, in his transphobic fever dreams, trans teachers just SHOW UP ONE DAY AND SHOVE THEIR CRAZY TRANS BUSINESS IN KIDS' FACES!
(It's always, always, about shoving something in somebody's face with these people.)
The irony is that I imagine most trans people would love to have a professional job with three months of straight vacation over which to begin a transition, making the idea of Mr. Johnson one day and Ms. Johnson the next even more laughably implausible.
But let's just say that a teacher did want to begin transitioning in the middle of a schoolyear. Most teachers take care with any inconsistency during the schoolyear, especially with young children. Teachers who get married and change their names will frequently prepare children well in advance, with discussions like, "When I leave before break, I'll be Miss Smith, but when I come back, I'll be Mrs. Jones." Pregnant teachers who will start maternity leave during the schoolyear similarly prepare students for upcoming changes including a new teacher. There is both precedence and every reason to believe that a trans teacher would take the same approach if zie wanted to begin transitioning during the schoolyear.
But Pawlenty isn't interested in what's real, or realistic, or even likely. He's interested in fear-mongering and inflaming prejudice. Because he's a transphobic jackass.
Or assumes that his supporters are, so is thus eminently willing to play one himself on TV. So to speak. Because it's all a big game to the GOP, and trampling on people's lives is a small price to pay for the votes of knuckle-dragging bigots.
Oops. My apologies. Pawlenty doesn't believe in evolution.
[H/T to Shaker Selasphorus, who got it from Andy.]
President Obama rejected in an interview Tuesday the criticism that he has compromised too much in order to secure health-care reform legislation, challenging his critics to identify any "gap" between what he campaigned on last year and what Congress is on the verge of passing.
"Nowhere has there been a bigger gap between the perceptions of compromise and the realities of compromise than in the health-care bill," Obama said in an Oval Office interview with The Washington Post about his legislative record this year. "Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill."
"In a way they're having a white Christmas—except this is sulfur ash, so it is something that can be deadly to the people if inhaled."—Fox News correspondent Mike Cohen, reporting on the Mayon Volcano in the Philippines, which is currently erupting tiny particles of sulfuric ash that can "cause respiratory problems or skin diseases, and could affect the thousands of people crammed into evacuation centers beyond the eight-kilometer danger zone," and which may emit a more serious eruption within days.
So, not like a White Christmas at all, really. Asshole.
(Btw, while Luzon, where the Mayon Volcano is located, is predominantly Christian, there are of course members of other religious communities, especially Buddhists and Muslims, and nonreligious people, who don't even celebrate Christmas, "white" or otherwise.)
Some wanker is switching parties from Democrat to Republican. Media Matters points out his record is Republican, anyway, so he's basically just committing himself to truth in advertising.
In any case, update your contact info from Rep. Parker Griffith (D-Ouchebag) to Rep. Parker Griffith (R-Eprobate).
Steve Benen notes a right-wing blog that is calling out for Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) to drop dead.
The post was headlined "All I Want Is A Byrd Dropping For Christmas." It added that if Byrd didn't die, the blogger would settle: "Even a nice coma would do."
I was also struck by the conclusion, in which "Confederate Yankee" conceded that some may be offended by such distasteful commentary. He responded:
I'd remind them that the party wheeling in a near invalid to vote in favor of this unread monstrosity of a bill is the one that should feel shame.
Except that they wouldn't have to do that if the Republicans weren't insisting on filibustering the bill in the first place, even after it is a foregone conclusion that they would lose.
Combined with the Sen. Coburn (R-OK) and his death wishes, the GOP has become the party of "death panels."
Such deliberate heartlessness would make even Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life recoil in shame.
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