Bad Times and a New Year Dawns, as Our Delusional, Optimistic Leader, W, Tells Us What Made His Year Special....

The Media disconnect occurs somewhere between the New York Times lauding blogger Steve Gillard in this week's Sunday magazine, and inviting Bill Kristol to become a regular columnist. The paper hopes to stir up some controversy and sell some papers, not realizing that probably what will sell papers is some cold hard truth, rather than the words of a man who is wrong at every turn, with every prediction, and every comment; has he ever been right about anything?

Its been a lousy as hell year all around. Good riddance to 2007! I cant think of anyone who has had an easy go of it, not family or friends, not Paris Hilton or Anna Nicole...and especially not the brave military families and veterans who are serving so patiently and bravely in a war with no purpose and no end. New and old friends; even strangers tell me that its been bad. I don't know if they're referring to the overwhelming barrage of lies, deceit, and misconduct that we have been subjected to from our government, or if its the growing effect of that misconduct on our every day lives. Surely the failing economy, lack of healthcare, loss of lives in Iraq, and stress from the empathy that we cant help but feel for all of those who are worse off beyond our own situations, weighs heavily on us all...the depths of despair, the illness, the loss; the loss of feeling like being an American means something.

Well, it turns out that as the year ends and the ball drops, George W. Bush feels pretty damned good about things. According to an article in this pastSunday's Parade Magazine penned supposedly by the king himself, He has a list of things that made his year special, and his sneering, squint-eyed self glaring stupidly from the cover tells the story of how out of touch the man is. There is no downcast glance and teary statement of how we appreciate the sacrifice of our boys and girls in harm's way. There is not a thoughtful nod towards the people who have lost their homes to bad loans or medical crisis, or who no longer have jobs.
No, our president is an "optimist" who takes strength from the few, well screened people that he meets when he is on the very edge of his bubble, and can sort of see through the opaque mask that is the boundary of his understanding.

So sometime after the staff begins to take down the decorations at the White House,Laura and Dubya muse on the few people that they have been allowed to meet in person and how great and inspirational they were. The brave family of a soldier who gladly died for his country while on a mission in Afghanistan, an entrepreneur who has changed her life by opening a small bakery in Nashville, the director of the Human Genome Institute, who is especially special because he is a man of God, and so he wont mess with stem cells to try to cure anything (because the Human Genome will cure Cancer, you know!)....and the list goes on....an AIDS mother from South Africa (he touched her AIDS free child!)the wife of an imprisoned Cuban who was jailed for democracy in evil Cuba, and "other Americans" who have shown W and Laura that America is strong....despite what he has done to us.

There is no mention of the mess in Iraq and the mounting deaths every day. There is no mention of the lies and corruption in his party. No mention of our lost standing in the world and the scorching lack of diplomacy that has colored every move that this administration has made; we are irreparably damaged, and there is no way to tell if we can regain what we've lost in the past 7 years.

On the edge of the year in which we will kick these bums out of office, we know that we will likely do so without proper documentation on the books of their crimes. We will move ahead with the knowledge that the memory of moist Americans is so short, that this war will become the property of the next administration, as if they had started it and run our country into the ground from scratch.

He is optimistic? Optimistic?
What a word to throw around in light of all that's happened this year.

The comments following the online version of the story say it all. There is really nothing I can add to the voices of real Americans, commenting in this Sunday newspaper magazine that is distributed inside national and local papers across the country. Does this magazine have a political side? If anything, Ive viewed it as a Good Housekeeping-ish conservative fluff rag. I'm not sure; judge for yourself. All I can see out here in the world is that the American people are speaking up, and they don't much like the way things have been going :

George W Bush
By Johnnyjoeymickey@aol.com on 12/31/2007 8:57:PM

When I Saw Bush war criminal on the cover of Parade, I cried, I really cried. I cant believe you put a picture of the devil himself on your magazine. Shame on you!!!! Shame on you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Abominable Cover of the Monster-in-Chief
By tumerica@gmail.com on 12/31/2007 4:45:PM

Place a murderer--an actual monster--on your cover. Let him drone on about his "optimism," show complete disregard for your readership . . . do all of these things, and what do you expect you will achieve? Will it buy you a coveted place in the regard of this person's last few months in office? Will it endear Parade to future readers? I felt a visceral and real nausea when I saw whom you had placed on your cover. In return, I have no respect left for Parade and will hereby boycott reading your publication. May many other Americans follow suit.
George Bush gave me a Nightmare and I got sick!
By Leomoon80@msn.com on 12/31/2007 2:18:PM

I've read a few of the other comments, such as "He should have talked about his Accomplishments",and I understand why he did not. What he has accomplished has being responsible for the deaths of thousands and thousands of people, invading a country that was NO threat to us, as not one Iraqi attacked us on 9-11. Running our country into virtual bankruptcy, bringing the dollar to the lowest value ever in the world. But I can see the Smile from ear to ear, as he and his fellow rich friends and family continue to reap thanks to his laws, "Record Profits" from the suffering of others. Sad indeed! The only picture in the future I'd like to see of G.W. Bush, is one behind bars.
Worse Cover
By Wathen on 12/31/2007 2:02:PM

It is easy to be an optimist if you have health insurance and your children have health insurance. Is Bush smiling because he is thinking of all the children that have and will die because spending billions in Iraq is a higher priority than saving the lives of children in the U.S. by providing health insurance? Or is he smirking because of the suffering he has caused by not providing all the help he can on stem cell research? He has destroyed any legacy that his father may have had and he certainly has done nothing that his twins can be proud of. What a sad evil person we have for a "president".
You who voted twice for this thing
By mark223@hotmail.com on 12/31/2007 11:37:AM

hell yes i'm a voter... as for you you **** head i bet i can describe you to the "t"... your a male and your race is white, you been divoce maybe more than once you always have to have the last saying (because your mr. perfect). people talk behind your back and you know it. you are surely are not like. and because of you whom vote for bush you made the republican party history... hurrah!!!
What Made My Year Special
By leighpc@hotmail.com on 12/31/2007 9:43:AM

Seeing George Bush smiling on the cover of Parade Magazine yesterday and seeing the words "What Made My Year Special" made me physically ill. Does this man have no heart or soul? How can someone who has brought so much death and misery to the innocent civilians of Iraq and Afghanistan sleep at night, let alone smile placidly for the camera? All I can say is "Praise God" that 2008 will be the last year this small, terrible man will be in a position to inflict his evil policies on our nation and the world.
Ongoing
By sambrown.6@gmail.com on 12/31/2007 2:23:AM

With every word Bush "writes" and every word he says, the words maintain the obvious that he sees the world in black and white and uses religion as a front for his lack of imagination, intelligence, and reality. I have lived through many presidential era's and even talked with some Presidents. Never have I seen someone who so lacked the capability to be a President. I have been disgusted by Presidents only twice in my life and both have existed in the last 16 years.
Bush is a human rights violator.
By shildahl@gmail.com on 12/30/2007 9:00:PM

As a VN vet, I am critical of you featuring the Bush war criminal on your cover. Keep in mind that he, and Cheney, Rove, and Rice are all folks who have no clue about "service" to their country's military. Rumsfeld did serve, but left when the VN war was heating up. Shame on Parade Magazine! Let's send them all to the World Court.

With 1 or 2 out of 21 comments being pro-Bush, for no real reason besides that he is The Decider, the captions cry out...its really quite unbelievable:

Bush's' "Special Year".
Very disappointing.
Too Sick to Read On.
what were you thinking?
Could'nt get Al Gore to do your cover?
Unreal.
Are You Kidding Me?

But my favorite comment of them all and one that represents my feelings exactly:

By odziana@charter.net on 12/30/2007 2:32:PM

This man has lead by fear and lies and you ask him anything. He is as deep as a toenail. Our countries greatest assets are our deversity and open heartedness. He represents none of that. Why not ask a mass murderer what made his year special, at least they would have health care and meals. something this president does not seem to even know we need. Well when you never have to touch the middle class, nor care to, I guess you can be optimistic. If he really , really cared about us, he would let go of his stubborness (fear) and stop killing us in oh so many ways. Verta Odziana, michigan

An interesting addendum to the Parade issue is that Parade's upcoming issue was supposed to contain the last interview of Benazir Bhutto that had been scheduled to be released on the first Sunday in January. It was written by Gail Sheehy, who traveled to Pakistan and followed Bhutto as she campaigned across the country, interviewing her twice at her residence. In light of Bhutto's assassination, Parade has published the piece online this weekend.
I will be interested to see if she still appears on the cover next weekend.

c/p RIPCoco

Coming soon to this space

The 2007 Brilliant List. Coming soon. Maybe even tomorrow.

Happy new year, everyone. May it be full of joy, love, peace, prosperity, and universal, single-payer health care.

The Pakistani government is rife with liars, just like ours

Good thing the BBC World News is willing to set the record straight.

Skull fracture from bumping her head my ass.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Steve Gilliard

Those of you who don't spend your waking non-working hours waist-deep in the Big Muddy that is Lefter Blogtopia may not know why I quote Steve Gilliard in the masthead and why I've posted about him, given that I never met the man, never exchanged e-mails, and was only linked by him once.

It's because everyone who blogs on our side of the fence can trace his/her inspiration back to him, even if indirectly.

For those who don't know what the fuss is about, Jesse Wendel, one of the Four Carriers of the Gilliard Torch, has a compendium of some of his best work. Pour yourself a cup of coffee, start clicking, read and enjoy. And know why although the Group Newsbloggers do their best to channel the man, someone who could blog coherently and in great detail about the history of colonialism and then wax just as eloquently about the foods we eat on Thanksgiving is just plain irreplaceable.

(UPDATE: And still more good stuff on the New York Times Magazine piece from The Gazetteer, James Wolcott, and B@B bud The Galloping Beaver.

And if you're interested in how the Good Christians on the right speak of the dead, you can take a gander at this. There is no doubt about it -- today's right wingers are ugly, ugly, evil people. They have a fetid, ulcerating, suppurating cancer in their souls that no amount of Bible-thumping can possibly heal.

This is good, but it's too late and doesn't in any way make up for hiring William Kristol

Editorial, today's New York Times:

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

[snip]

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

[snip]

These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

Now if whoever wrote this excellent editorial would inform the Powers that Be in the executive suite that every atrocity mentioned therein was applauded by the very man they've just hired as a columnist.

Thank you, Kate Zernike

Thank you for writing an article about John and Elizabeth Edwards that mentions neither haircuts nor houses nor hedge funds. Thank you for writing an article that doesn't even allude to the kind of foul rumors that those afraid of having a president who might represent people other than the most monied interests have spread. Thank you for recognizing that there are still people for whom politics is a calling, a way to make a difference on a large scale, rather than a way to stuff one's pockets or aggrandize one's ego.

John Edwards has received precious little coverage like this, and rarely been covered with this little skepticism.

This is one of those times when I wish I'd been able to put away more money when I was young and could afford to retire. I'd be in Iowa right now.

New Year's Movie Weekend: Why women love John Cusack

Ask any smart woman in the U.S. who the male celebrity she adores most is, and the chances are pretty good that the answer will be "John Cusack."

When you think about all of the guys who were around during the heyday of John Hughes, and if you go back and watch Sixteen Candles, it's hard to believe that that the sex symbol of mid-to-late boomers and gen-x women would be the gangly guy in this short collection of clips:

But then of course that guy turned into this one:

...and this one:

...and now this one:

And as Melissa informs us, the nicest man in Hollywood:

Now that's a guy who would never embarrass you in public by telling you there's a booger attached to your nose.

Let the other girls have the chiseled hunks. For us thinking girls, THIS is what a dreamboat looks like. Smart, progressive, funny, polite, never shows up in the gossip pages, and eyes that you could forgive just about anything for.

Sunday night toons

In which we learn that Daffy Duck is a Republican Uh....wrong caption, or wrong cartoon. But this one, by the late, great Tex Avery, is worth sitting through his trademark cruelty to get to the end, an anding that made me laugh so hard when I saw it at either the Thalia or at Leonard Maltin's old history of animation class at the New School in the early 1980's that I wondered how I'd ever get home:

Ali Baba Bunny Bad Luck Blackie

Note to Hillary: The plastic sheeting and duct tape crowd is NOT going to vote for you

In the closing days before the Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton, just like Rudy Giuliani, wants you to know that only she can keep you safe from the boogeyman:

Eldridge, Iowa - Barack Obama and John Edwards might want to change the world. But Hillary Clinton wants to protect you against it.

That's the unmistakable message that Senator Clinton is pounding out in this final phase of the campaign to capture the Iowa caucuses. In a world brimming with danger and uncertainty, she argues as she blitzes the Hawkeye State, there's no time to waste daydreaming about pie-in-the-sky promises of reform.

Instead, the American people must choose a leader ready to immediately start fixing the problems that already exist and one who is immediately ready to face the inevitable and "unpredictable" crises looming right over the horizon. And that would be Clinton.

"We know some of the challenges that await the next president," Clinton told a packed crowd at a junior high school Saturday morning. "But no matter how much we know, we can't possibly anticipate all the problems."

The razzamatazz cheerleading, sloganeering style that punctuated her earlier campaign events has now been replaced by a sedate, somber, even grave tone coming from the podium. Clinton never raised her voice, never elevated the mood, and at times sounded like a concerned, responsible parent telling the kids that something terrible was taking place outside the door but not to worry because Mom and Dad - or in this case Hill and Bill- would take care of it.

Becoming president, she said in a hushed tone, is "an awesome responsibility. And it was thrown into relief with the events last Thursday with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto."

This may come as a surprise to the conservatives who have spent the last six years in a state of pee-in-your-pants terror that Islamic terrorists are plotting to kill us every single day, but those of us who are going about our lives are not uncognizant of the very real dangers in the world today. And neither are John Edwards and Barack Obama. But because nothing else has seemed to work, Hillary Clinton is spending the final days leading up to Iowa trying to tap the reptilian brain in Iowa voters by taking a page from the Republican playbook and playing the fear card. And it's a distasteful sight.

Hillary'c campaign has played right into everything that those of us who will not vote for have found repulsive all along -- that every move she makes, every statement out of her mouth, comes not from a place of conviction but from whatever the focus groups, polls, and Washington pundits say will work on any given day. One minute she's being America's Mother. The next she's "the put upon girl being beaten up by the Big Mean Men. Then she's ripping off John Edwards' health care plan. Now she's decided to try to out-Giuliani Giuliani.

When Bill Clinton was president, I thought the obsession with Hillary's ever-changing hairstyles was petty, Mean Grrlz of the Press bullshit. But perhaps they were on to something, but that something had nothing to do with her hair. It has to do with the reason I can't vote for: because I don't know who the hell she is. I don't know what she stands for. I don't trust her to end the Iraq war. I don't trust her to not bomb Iran and follow a neocon foreign policy. I don't trust her to not negotiate away reproductive freedom. I don't get the sense that there are any values she feels strongly enough about to take the heat when the Republicans and the Washington press corps line up against her.

We've seen many Hillarys during this campaign. But who the hell is she?

Firefighters for Dodd burst 9iul11ni's balloon

How dare these firefighters question the leadership of a man who declares himself an expert on terrorism because he happened to show up on 9/11/01 to watch the command center he'd ordered placed in a building that had already been attacked once, and who had five years to get workable radios for firefighters and didn't do it:

OK, so not all firefighters are gorgeous after all. But they've got guts and they dare to speak the truth.

Images of Christmas, 2007

Homemade gingerbread men, baked by Veruca, decorated by Speedster and IHow was your Christmas?Mine with filled with plenty of food, family and friends -- all the good things that make Christmas special although a couple of pressies never hurt either.Was that not the coolest Christmas ever for Sydneysiders? Yes, I'm talking about the weather. We had Christmas lunch outside and at one point I was

Awesome.

Not that I would have known it if Melina hadn't sent me the link (because my fucking New York Times delivery guy hasn't delivered the Goddamn paper on Saturday since he got his Christmas tip and what's the point of home delivery if you don't get the fun sections a day early?), but the Grey Lady pays tribute to the late, great Steve Gilliard in its annual "Lives they Lived" edition of the Magazine.

Not, however, that this makes up for them bringing on WILLIAM FUCKING KRISTOL as a columnist....

And of course it would be even more awesome if Steve Gilliard were still here, but kudos to the Times for recognize how important he was to the blogging community. Now if they only got it right about his life. Group News Blogger Jesse Wendel sets the record straight. I never even knew the man and I miss him every day, though not as much as I would if the GNB-ers weren't doing such a fine job carrying on his legacy.

More from Driftglass, Liberty Street USA, Tom Watson, Barbara O'Brian at Mahablog, BlueGal at Crooks and Liars, Lindsay Beyerstein, Matt Browner-Hamlin, Kevin Hayden, Pachacutec at FDL, and the usual suspects.

Just wonderin', is all

I wonder: What percentage of those voters who say that Hillary Clinton is the most electable Democrat are confusing her with her husband and think it's Bill Clinton who's actually running?

Pronouncing Democracy

It would be hyperbolic to say that, when Benazir Bhutto was pronounced dead at that Rawalpindi hospital at 8:16 (EDT) yesterday morning, democracy in Pakistan was similarly pronounced. However, it was put on life support and is currently in stasis. If George W. Bush is to make any New Year’s resolutions, it ought to be to not attempt to install democracy anywhere in the world for the next 13 months.

The Bhutto tragedy, if nothing else, is focusing the world’s attention back to terrorism and its still-potent ability to change world history. It doesn’t even matter, for now, whether terrorists or other extremists are responsible for this cowardly, shocking act of murderous misogynism. We are at least for the moment refocused on terrorism as we ought to be.

Yet, Ms. Bhutto’s violent murder makes some of us also focus on the Bush administration’s infallible instinct for disaster in both combating terrorism and in trying to install democracies in some of the most violent and unstable nations on earth.

Professor Juan Cole reminded us yesterday that the Bush administration was more proactive in Ms. Bhutto’s attempted comeback than we may remember. As Prof. Cole summed it up,

US Secretary of State Condi Rice tried to fix Musharraf's subsequent dwindling legitimacy by arranging for Benazir to return to Pakistan to run for prime minister, with Musharraf agreeing to resign from the military and become a civilian president. When the supreme court seemed likely to interfere with his remaining president, he arrested the justices, dismissed them, and replaced them with more pliant jurists. This move threatened to scuttle the Rice Plan, since Benazir now faced the prospect of serving a dictator as his grand vizier, rather than being a proper prime minister.

It can’t be said that the former prime minister’s arm was twisted by George W. Bush or Condoleezza Rice. Ms. Bhutto was 54 years-old, a big girl old enough to make up her own mind and was very well aware of the dangers that faced her everywhere she went. Her love and concern for Pakistan and its fate, it must be noted, was her biggest impetus for flying back to Karachi those ten short weeks ago.

Yet, with the seal of approval from the Bush administration and Rice State Dept., is it unreasonable to speculate that American backing played a significant role in her decision to end her exile?

However, there’s one troubling aspect to this Bush/Rice backing of Bhutto: One would assume that if our government truly had Ms. Bhutto’s best interests at heart, wouldn’t they have been more proactive regarding her security? The Bush administration is infamous for this: Making proposals ranging from bold to idiotic then adopting a hands-off attitude. Since Musharraf’s Pakistan is such a huge ally in the war on terror, would Pakistan’s president squawk too much if we’d sent along a few troops to safeguard Ms. Bhutto’s life? But doing so would’ve tipped our hand at how deeply distrustful the Bush administration has to be of Musharraf’s government.

Or would it have looked too imperialistic? Heaven forbid we should ever give off that impression. Even if the State Dept. had handed Blackwater USA another multimillion dollar contract to guard Bhutto (and, you have to give the Devil his due- Blackwater’s main claim to fame is that not one charge of theirs has ever been killed under their protection), it still would’ve been preferable to yesterday’s outcome.

The attempted re-installation of Benazir Bhutto, I’m confident, will remain as the Bush administration’s and its State Department’s best and most sincere effort to implement a peaceful working democracy in a foreign land (Ironically making the diplomacy-loving Barack Obama’s calls for pre-emptive air strikes into Pakistan seem almost cartoonishly hawkish and neocon-sounding by conspicuous relief).

Whether through intelligent design, serendipity or sheer dumb luck, the Bush administration would’ve been hard-pressed to find a more fertile and willing environment in which to midwife a democracy:

We’re seeing in Pakistan, as we have historically in Latin America and elsewhere, a level of political passion and involvement that easily puts our own on its best day to shame. Consider that when Benazir Bhutto arrived in Karachi on October 18th, an estimated three million people showed up to greet her.

Since we’re talking about a nation of 165,000,000, or just over half our population, that would be like 5-6 million people thronging Andrews AFB to cheer Al Gore. Which has to make you wonder which people are more deserving of democracy: They or we? The bombs and the hundreds killed beginning with Bhutto’s Karachi arrival only made their passion, and Bhutto’s, even more determined.

The administration’s understandable concern for the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and for the long-term stability of neighboring Afghanistan and India notwithstanding, the Bush/Rice courting of a popular, charismatic and experienced world leader such as Ms. Bhutto was a dramatic and welcome departure from the mindless, brutal regime change that we’ve inflicted on Iraq with no follow-through.

Unfortunately, with its infallible and unerring magnetism to failure and disaster, even this administration’s seemingly transparent and honest effort at stabilizing Pakistan through peace, democracy and perhaps even gradual regime change had figuratively blown up in George W. Bush’s face.

And, literally, in Benazir Bhutto’s.

Sick child? Bad Credit? Too bad....no medical care for you (or your child)

Sound like one of those "Oh, they'd never do that" scenarios?

Guess again:

Mortgage lenders aren't the only ones showing more interest in your credit score these days – the health industry is creating its own score to judge your ability to pay.

The new medFICO score, being designed with the help of credit industry giant Fair Isaac Corp., could debut as early as this summer in some hospitals.

Healthcare Analytics, a Waltham, Mass., health technology firm, is developing the score. It is backed by funding from Fair Isaac, of Minneapolis; Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp.; and venture capital firm North Bridge Venture Partners, also based in Waltham. Each kicked in $10 million for the project.

The score is already raising questions from consumer advocacy groups that fear it will be checked before patients are treated. People with low medical credit scores could receive lower-quality care than those with a healthy medFICO, they argue.

"How much assurance do I have that they're not going to look at this medFICO first, before they decide whether to treat or not?" asked Linda Foley, founder of the Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego.

Post-discharge checking

That will not happen, says Stephen Farber, chairman and chief executive of Healthcare Analytics. Hospitals will check the score, which will be based on the patient's medical bill payment history, only after the patient is discharged, he said.

"We only come into play once the patient has been treated and discharged, and the bill already exists," said Mr. Farber, who has visited hospital executives nationwide over the last six months to sell the concept. "We just help figure out what sort of relief a hospital should grant the patient."

And I am Marie of Rumania.

Do you honestly believe that hospitals are only going to look at this AFTER the bill exists?

Let's look back at Nataline Sarkysian again, shall we? Here's a situation where the hospital deemed that a liver transplant was appropriate, and CIGNA Insurance refused to pay for it. The wingnut apologists for the highly profitable insurance industry insist that it's the hospital's fault that she died because they didn't go ahead and do the transplant anyway. Given the battles that hospitals are fighting with insurance companies; battles that eat up physician time and hospital resources, why shouldn't the hospital just evaluate the patient's ability to pay beforehand and make a decision based on that?

Dday over at Hullabaloo nails it:

Seriously, this is hideous. It used to be that the medical care industry, particularly the insurance companies had to use some prior injury as a basis to deny coverage. Now it's some years-old debt that hospitals can use to hang over your head and deny care. Enough. Health care is a human right. It's not a privilege of the wealthy. Willingness to pay is a metric that can be abused to the nth degree to deny treatment to the sick. It will create another tier to the medical system; you have the uninsured, the wealthy who can afford the best, and now the discount class who can't afford access to the good stuff.

This is what we get if Rudy 9iu11ani is elected president

Can you imagine THIS being the message we present to the world?

John Deady, Co-Chair for New Hampshire’s Veterans for Rudy:

…(Rudy Giuliani has) the knowledge and judgment to attack one of the most difficult problems in current history. And that is the rise of the Muslims. And make no mistake about it, this hasn’t happened for a thousand years. These people are very, very dedicated. They’re also very smart, in their own way. And we need to keep the feet to the fire and keep pressing these people ‘til we defeat them or chase them back to their caves, or in other words, get rid of them.

That, my friends, is Rudy Giuliani's message: mass genocide. Of course it's the message of the entire Republican party, he's just more up front about it than most.

So is Bin Laden really creating U.S. policy, yanking our chains, or in cahoots with the Administration?

Isn't it funny that whenever it seems George W. Bush is in trouble, Osama Bin Laden comes to his rescue by releasing a recording?

Joe Sudbay remembers here how a Bin Laden tape released right before the 2004 election played right into that reptilian brain of the voters and put George W. Bush in office for a second, even more disastrous term. He's saying that the Bhutto assassination could have the same effect, but just in case the destabilization of Pakistan isn't enough to assure the most bellicose Republican the nomination, now we have -- you guessed it -- the announcement of another Bin Laden recording:

DUBAI, Dec 28 (Reuters) - An Islamist Web site said on Friday it would carry a new recording from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden about "foiling plots" in Iraq.

The Web site said the 56-minute recording would also be about the Islamic State in Iraq, an al Qaeda-linked group in the country.

It did not say when the video or audio recording, produced by al Qaeda's media arm As-Sahab and entitled "The Path to Foiling Plots in Iraq", would be posted.

Al Qaeda messages have been often released within three days of their announcement on Web sites.

It doesn't matter when it's posted, the important thing is to get it out there at the last possible minute before an important U.S. electoral event, in this case, the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.

And it happens EVERY FUCKING TIME.

Now, if this were a sane world, Americans would respond to this by thinking that if this group is still out there, and if Osama Bin Laden is still out there, maybe that means the tough-talking Bush Administration doesn't know what the hell it's doing, and maybe it's time to try another approach. But this isn't a sane world, and Americans, like Pavlov's dogs, do tend to go for the tough rhetoric when they feel scared. So just in case the mandatory media meme that the assassination helps Bush's hand-picked successor, Rudy 9iu11iani, doesn't work by itself, here comes Bush's good friend Osama to hammer the point home.

You can't buy friends like that

No terrorist attacks since 9/11? What the hell do you call this?

A rash of attacks on abortion and family planning clinics has struck Albuquerque this month, the first such violence there in nearly a decade.

Two attacks occurred early Tuesday at two buildings belonging to Planned Parenthood of New Mexico, according to Albuquerque police and fire officials. An arson fire damaged a surgery center the organization uses for abortions, and the windows of a Planned Parenthood family planning clinic 12 blocks away were smashed, the officials said.

Neither building sustained significant damage, and activities at both of them resumed Wednesday, a spokeswoman said.

The attacks came just weeks after the Albuquerque clinic run by a nationally known abortion provider, Dr. Curtis Boyd, was destroyed by arsonists on Dec. 6.

On Wednesday, agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, along with local arson investigators, arrested two suspects in the fire at Dr. Boyd’s clinic, which has provided abortions to women from throughout the region and Mexico since 1972.

The suspects, Chad Altman and Sergio Baca of Albuquerque, both 22, were arrested on arson charges after the authorities received a tip, said Jake Gonzales, the agent in charge of the firearms agency’s Albuquerque office.

This is precisely why Rudy Giuliani is the WRONG choice to succeed George W. Bush

Rudy Giuliani, has a new ad where he once again climbs on top of almost 3000 9/11 corpses, including firefighters who died because he wouldn't give them radios that worked, to toot his own horn and declare himself the terrorism expert because he happened to show up in front of a microphone on 9/11. But the reality is that Giuliani promises policies in the Middle East that are just like those of the Bush Administration, only perhaps even more steroidal and more bellicose. That six years of having the face we present to the world be that of an inarticulat, boorish buffoon who lied to his own people to get us into an unnecessary war and spent his country into near-bankruptcy has turned the U.S. into a paper tiger never occurs to him. But as Robert Parry points out, it is precisely the Bush Administration policies that Giuliani wants to continue -- and escalata -- that are the problem:

The chaos spreading across nuclear-armed Pakistan after the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is part of the price for the Bush administration’s duplicity about al-Qaeda’s priorities, including the old canard that the terrorist group regards Iraq as the “central front” in its global war against the West.

Through repetition of this claim – often accompanied by George W. Bush’s home-spun advice about the need to listen to what the enemy says – millions of Americans believe that Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders consider Iraq the key battlefield.

However, intelligence evidence, gathered from intercepted al-Qaeda communications, indicate that bin Laden’s high command views Iraq as a valuable diversion for U.S. military strength, not the “central front.”

[snip]

So, instead of seeking a quick ouster of U.S. forces from Iraq and using it as a base for launching a global jihad – as Bush and his supporters claim – al-Qaeda actually saw its strategic goals advanced by keeping the United States bogged down in Iraq.

To some U.S. analysts, the logic was obvious: “prolonging” the Iraq War bought al-Qaeda time to rebuild its infrastructure in Pakistan, where the Islamic fundamentalist extremists have long had sympathizers inside the Pakistani intelligence services dating back to the CIA’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Charlie Wilson’s Blowback

That CIA war, lionized in the new movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” funneled billions of dollars in U.S. covert money and weapons through Pakistani intelligence to Afghan warlords and to Arab jihadists who had flocked to Afghanistan to drive out the Russian infidels. One of those young jihadists was a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden.

[snip]

Though Bush eventually acknowledged that most of Iraqi resistance was homegrown, he still asserted that al-Qaeda planned to use Iraq as the launching pad for a global “caliphate” from Spain to Indonesia, another alarmist claim that scared some Americans into backing Bush’s war policies.

“This caliphate would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia,” Bush said in a typical reference to this claim in a Sept. 5, 2006, speech. “We know this because al-Qaeda has told us.”

But many analysts saw Bush’s nightmarish scenario as preposterous, given the deep divisions within the Islamic world and the hostility that many Muslims feel toward al-Qaeda, including its recent much-heralded rejection by more moderate Iraqi Sunnis in Anbar province.

Also, according to a National Intelligence Estimate representing the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community in April 2006, “the global jihadist movement is decentralized, lacks a coherent global strategy, and is becoming more diffuse.” [Emphasis added.]

The NIE also concluded that the Iraq War – rather than weakening the cause of Islamic terrorism – had become a “cause celebre” that was “cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”

The grinding Iraq War – now nearing its fifth year – also prevented the United States from arraying sufficient military and intelligence resources against the reorganized al-Qaeda infrastructure in Pakistan and the rebuilt Taliban army reasserting itself in Afghanistan.

The problem is that those who need most to read articles like this one; those who remember feeling reassured by Rudy 9iu11ani when the President of the United States was fleeing to Nebraska on Air Force One and Cheney was in his bunker planning the Iraq invasion and his apparatus of his fascist state, aren't going to. They're instead going to get their analysis from the mainstream press and from cable news, where even Keith Olbermann, who laudably came back from vacation last night to do a live show on the Bhutto assassination, allowed Dana Milbank to parrot the meme that this assassination helps the hawkish Hillary and the goonish Ghouliani without any kind of rebuttal, and without even mentioning that alone of all the candidates, it was John Edwards who had the history of meeting with Pervez Musharraf to be able to actually talk to him.

As Herman Kahn used to say, you can't uninvent nuclear weapons. And we can't go back and undo the horrific damage done by the Bush Administration in making the world a far more dangerous place. What we can do, however, as voters, is prevent the next president from pouring gasoline on the flames.

Music you Missed

If Skippy can have a Thursday Night Music Club, so can I. My musical tastes are pretty varied, so just enjoy the ride.

Peter Karp, "The Arson's Match"

Lightweight this, bitchez!

So John Edwards is put at a disadvantage as a result of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto today because he's "a lightweight" on foreign policy, eh?

Not so fast, Joe Scarborough:

Edwards spoke in Waukon this afternoon about having calls in to Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf. Then, at his second event in Decorah, he told Iowans that he got his call returned.

“He called me,” Edwards said, “because I told the ambassador I’d like to speak to him. I met him a few years ago, which I think I told you earlier, and we had a conversation in which I urged him to continue the democratization process. He told me, he gave me his assurances that he intended to do that, and we also spoke about having international independent investigators allowed into the country for transparency purposes, for credibility purposes, and we spoke briefly about the elections.”

Edwards is the only candidate to have said publicly that he received a call from Musharraf today. Edwards did not join in the fight between rivals Clinton and Obama over which candidate has the best foreign policy advisers, and asked what this conversation does for his own foreign policy credibility, Edwards referred back to the complexity of the issue.

“I think that the most important thing is to understand what’s actually happening within Pakistan, the complex nature of the problems there, and to be visionary about what America needs to be doing,” he told reporters.

While Rudy Giuliani is out there running yet more ads on which he climbs once again on top of the pile of 9/11 corpses and says that only he will kill enough Muslims to satisfy the bloodlust of the Republican base, and Hillary and Obama are playing "Mine's bigger" on foreign policy, old Johnny the Tortoise is on the phone with Musharraf. As Marc Ambinder says in the Atlantic: "That's one heck of a talking point."

The RadioIowa blog has an MP3 of Edwards talking about the situation in Pakistan.

Even the National Review Online is rendered speechless that the guy they thought was just a pretty face was the go-to guy on the Democratic side today.

More from Cliff Schecter at Brave New Films, at MyDD, and at Le Grand Orange,

Your Reading Assignment

Go ahead...take all weekend. But don't miss Jon Swift's Best Blog Posts of 2007 (as chosen by their authors). Yes, Your Humble Blogger is on it, but take the time to read all of them. And for dessert, laughter -- via Lord Swift's own take on Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism -- illustrated with LOLCats for extra giggly goodness.

RIP Benazir Bhutto

The Pakistani newspaper guys at Bulls Head were holding a printout of the BBC report about body parts and shredded clothes. They had tears in their eyes and not much to say. You couldn't call it unexpected.

Benazir Bhutto was shot in the neck and chest before the suicide bomb attached to the shooter exploded, taking him to his just rewards.
Simply Left Behind cuts to the quick with an inbox notice asking "why are we allied with a terrorist?;" echoed over blogtopia (tm skippy,) this news rolls over us; a capper on a pretty horrific year.

International affairs are messy, you know? messy enough for Herr Bush to interrupt his holiday at the ranch in Crawford to make a statement. That's all we need....why cant he just shut the fuck up? Considering that Bushco is expected to stay aligned with Musharraf....oh well....Any idea that we had put forth about our middle east policy being about democracy has fallen by the wayside. Elections will be suspended and the country will, no doubt, be held under martial law. Bush, thankfully, hasn't got that much to say at this point, which may be the smartest thing that has come out of the White House in a while.

Bhutto represented hope for the region, and some sort of idealistic leadership for the world. She was imperfect, and held up to scrutiny for what might have been her mistakes, but she was selfless and courageous in the face of her desire for a progressive Pakistan.

This calls into question the safety of all leaders who represent change in this world. How many more visionary leaders are there left in the world willing to put themselves on the line? Who else wants to face down an army or look sideways at the crowd waiting for someone to pull a gun? The ones who stand up and march towards danger in the interest of greater ideals for humanity deserve the protection of all of us. Why is it that we tend to end up supporting the bad side of these things? How much longer can we continue to label our aims in the Middle East as democratic or humanitarian in any way?

Regardless of the amount of aid that we have pumped into his administration, Musharraf did not set up the necessary democratic infrastructure for any idea that has been put forth to be successful in the region. No matter how much "support" we throw his way he is not going to use it in a way that will allow the country to go forward. This guy is a dictator and Pakistan is a force to be reckoned with; they do have a nuclear weapon and they do represent a threat to the world. I say that as someone who strongly believes that these issues must be policed by the United Nations. We have proved beyond a doubt that any one country acting on its own in world matters such as this cannot succeed.

Zbignew Brezinsky called in to his daughter Mika on MSNBC this morning, and simply, clearly stated that we can't possibly expect to meddle in the complex affairs of countries that are so far away physically and from the realm of understanding of an administration with such a narrow world view, and not have these sorts of things happen. The situation is so much more complex than we have treated it, and the days of throwing money and weapons at one side or another are long gone...long gone, with the radical ideals of an insecure country that offers little in the way of a life, and the promise of a better reward in heaven....almost like the rapture, huh?

Ann Curry, who recently interviewed Bhutto for MSNBC, said that Bhutto had wanted to restore power to politicians in regions of Pakistan that had been suppressed. She was anti-extremist and wanted to give rights to the people; she wanted to save Pakistan by saving democracy there. Bhutto publicly named extremist leaders who were working against the better interest of an inclusive and progressive Pakistan society. When asked why she would give up her comfortable life to jump back into the dangerous political fray, Bhutto said that it was just that she loved Pakistan and wanted to make it a better place. She looked into the eyes of the people and that was the answer for her. The joy and hope of the people who greeted her upon her return was enough proof for her that the struggle that she was driven to was the right thing to do; anything beyond that was unimportant.

RIP Benazir Bhutto. The world will sorely miss you .



c/p RIPCoco

Nope...this has nothing to do with our friend Pervez Musharraf...

Just two days after we get the news that billions of dollars in aid the U.S. gave to Pervez Musharraf for combatting al-Qaeda was used instead to build weapons systems to use against India, we find out this morning that Musharraf's leading opponent, Benazir Bhutto, has been assassinated:

Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a suicide bombing that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally, a party aide and a military official said.

An Associated Press reporter at the scene saw body parts and flesh scattered at the back gate of the Liaqat Bagh park in Rawalpindi where the rally was held. He counted about 20 bodies, including police, and could see many other wounded.

The road outside was stained with blood and people screamed for ambulances. Others gave water to the wounded lying in the street. The clothing of some of the victims was shredded and people put party flags over their bodies.

The bomb went off just minutes after Bhutto spoke to thousands of supporters and she appeared to be the target of the attack. Farahtullah Babar, the spokesman for her party, said her vehicle was about 50 yards away from blast which went off as she was leaving the rally venue.

Around the blogroll and elsewhere - short but special Very Serious Journalists edition

Slow news day, so here's some good stuff to read:

Glenn Greenwald has a recap of the kind of insightful "journalism" delivered by Your News Media this year.

Driftglass on how Rich Lowry and George Will can't run away from the Christofascist Zombie Brigade they helped rise to power.

Someone better take that stake away from TRex before he sticks it in his own forehead after assembling this compendium of idiocy from the Usual Suspects.

Kevin Hayden on the New York Times' latest hit on John Edwards: ZOMG....he's sometimes late! Stop the presses and call the police.

Howie Klein is in Myanmar/Burma and has some thoughts on the local newspaper.

Media Matters has a roundup of Dubious Political Punditry of 2007.

Karl Rove's legacy: Win by whatever means necessary

Yesterday one of the topics of discussion on Mark Riley & Richard Bey's show on WWRL in New York was the requirement for photo identification in order to vote. The idea that illegal immigrants are lining up by the tens of thousands to illegally vote may be ridiculous, but the Republicans have also been successful in getting this meme out there where many people have come to believe it's a real problem. Does anyone actually believe that large numbers of people who are in constant danger of being deported are going to show up to participate in something as bureaucratic as voting?

The very REAL problem of "vote rigging" has morphed into the imaginary problem of "voter fraud." But the real problem, the problem that gave us George W. Bush in the White House in the first place, is Republicans deciding that only those likely to vote Republican should be permitted to vote. Greg Palast has been writing about this for years, and Brad Friedman is on the case as well.

The Republicans have become so good at this that they no longer even feel they have to try to cover their tracks. Blue Tide Rising (via Crooks and Liars) reveals that the Chairman of the Kansas Republican Party sent an e-mail last week BOASTING about his vote-suppression efforts:

Earlier today Kris Kobach, chairman of the Kansas GOP, sent out a self-congratulatory litany of accomplishments. Among them was one particularly eye-catching item:

To date, the Kansas GOP has identified and caged more voters in the last 11 months than the previous two years!

We're going to move past the fact that any amount of voter identification would be more than the amount the GOP has done in the last two years, or four for that matter. The practice of caging is what caught out eye.

Caging is a particularly devious and underhanded method of purging likely Democratic voters from the pollbooks. It's also illegal.

How does it work?

The use of direct mail caging techniques to target voters resulted in the application of the name to the political tactic. With one type of caging, a political party sends registered mail to addresses of registered voters. If the mail is returned as undeliverable - because, for example, the voter refuses to sign for it, the voter isn't present for delivery, or the voter is homeless - the party uses that fact to challenge the registration, arguing that because the voter could not be reached at the address, the registration is fraudulent. A political party challenges the validity of a voter's registration; for the voter's ballot to be counted, the voter must prove that their registration is valid.

Voters targeted by caging are often the most vulnerable: soldiers deployed overseas, those who are unfamiliar with their rights under the law, and those who cannot spare the time, effort, and expense of proving that their registration is valid. On the day of the election, when the voter arrives at the poll and requests a ballot, an operative of the party challenges the validity of their registration. Ultimately, caging works by dissuading a voter from casting a ballot, or by ensuring that they cast a provisional ballot, which is less likely to be counted.

Slate.com has the best comprehensive write-up on how the Republican Party employs caging techniques to suppress the votes of the poor, the deployed, and college students. (You know, likely Democratic voters.)

Did we mention it's illegal? And that Kris Kobach is proud to be doing it?

Since Kris Kobach can't expand his own party or force his own Party's members to support his candidates he's shamelessly trying to keep Democrats from voting instead. This is the stratagem of a desperate and shrinking party.

And it isn't that something is the matter with Kansas. As [ ] at C&L points out, Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers wrote in September how Ohio and Florida have passed laws since 2004 designed to help Republicans keep minorities away from the polls next November:

Ohio and Florida, which provided the decisive electoral votes for President Bush's two razor-thin national election triumphs, have enacted laws that election experts say will help Republicans impede Democratic-leaning minorities from voting in 2008.

Backers of the new laws say they're aimed at curbing vote fraud. But the statutes also could facilitate a controversial Republican tactic known as ``vote caging,'' which the GOP attempted in Ohio and Florida in 2004 before public disclosures foiled the efforts, said Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief in the Bush administration who's now with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.

Caging, used in the past to target poor minorities in heavily Democratic precincts, entails sending mass mailings to certain voters and then using the undelivered letters to compile lists of voters for eligibility challenges.

As the high-stakes ground war escalates heading into next year's elections, Republicans have led the charge for an array of revisions to state voting rights laws, especially in key battleground states. Republican political appointees in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division have endorsed some of these measures.

Over the last three years, the Republican-controlled state legislatures in Indiana, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have passed laws requiring every voter to produce a photo identification card — measures that civil rights groups contend were aimed at suppressing minority voting.

[snip]

In Ohio, which swung the 2004 election to Bush, new Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said in a phone interview that an election law passed last year and signed by former Republican Gov. Bob Taft effectively ``institutionalized'' vote caging.

The law requires that the state's 88 county election boards send non-forwardable, pre-election notices to all 7.8 million registered Ohio voters at least 60 days before the election. Undelivered letters are public record, she said, meaning that effectively, ``now the counties are paying for'' the data needed to compile challenge lists.

Especially if it starts looking like Barack Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee, expect Republicans in swing states to feverishly work overtime to enact laws designed to keep African-Americans away from the polls.

Conservatives love to point to doddering old Robert Byrd and his long since renounced KKK past to paint the Democrats as the party of racism. What they don't say is that during the Civil Rights era of the 1960's, the racist Dixiecrats became disgusted with their party's embrace of the civil right's movement -- and became Republicans. The Republican Party always wants to know why black Americans don't vote for their candidates. Perhaps it's because the Republican Party has re-embraced the notion of Jim Crow laws. Never forget that this is the party that returned Trent Lott to a leadership position -- a man who said that this country would have been a better place if the racist Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948.

There's no getting around it: The Republican Party is the party of racism and disenfranchisement. If they can't win elections via their platform and policies, they'll steal them. The only question is whether the American people will let them do it a third time.

Sen. Obama? Until you've been a 4'10" descendant of Eastern European peasants, just STFU

This man has never had to be concerned about his weight a day in his life

I'm really glad I was too sick on December 13 to watch the Democratic debate, or I would have put my fist through the damn TV. Because it seems that Barack Obama said this:

“If we could go back to the obesity rates of 1980 we could save the Medicare system a trillion dollars.”

He really HAS gone to the Joe Lieberman School for the Development of Pat Answers, hasn't he?

Meowser thinks that this view warrants some more questions:

“Do you believe in reducing the number of fat people by any means necessary? What if people really make an effort to exercise and ‘eat right’ but are still ‘obese’? Do you favor requiring them to have bariatric surgery, or putting them in weight-reduction prisons, or having a police state in which people get their homes broken into and their pantries cleaned out and forced at gunpoint to work out until they drop, or being barred from all restaurants and grocery stores and all public places until they slim down? How far are you willing to go?”

And bonus question:

“If certain medications have been demonstrated to foster weight gain, do you favor taking them off the market, even if they make it possible for a person to live something approaching a ‘normal’ life in every respect except weight? There are, after all, many more of these drugs on the market than in 1980, and many have attained very high levels of usage. Do you really want to take them away from people to make them thin?”

Not that I expect real, informed answers from any of ‘em. They’ll probably mumble something about how, of course they don’t want to round us all up and amputate our stomachs, of course they don’t want to impinge upon our personal freedoms, of course of course of course. All they want is for us fatasses to eat our vegetables and exercise, and most all of us will magically get and stay thin and never have costly health problems again! And if they’re Democrats they’ll probably also mumble something about how they’ll give the veggies away, if they have to, along with the pots, pans, stoves, cooking classes and electricity required to prepare all those nummy orange-and-greens. Oh, and of course, we must think of the children, and take all the skin off their chicken before they are doomed to a life of FAAAAT! Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha.

I get exercise about five times a week. I do yoga. I walk at lunchtime. I watch Dirty Sexy Money while on the stationary bike. No, I don't go to the gym for two hours a day because frankly, there are other things I'd rather do with my time than run on a treadmill like a fucking hamster. I like broiled marinated skinless chicken and grilled salmon and orange roughy, the latter baked with a very light coating of seasoned panko breadcrumbs. I like beans. I rinse the ground beef after browning it before I put it in the sauce. I haven't fried anything since I think 1978. I eat fruits and/or and vegetables with every meal. If I eat chocolate, it's a small square of 71-73% organic dark chocolate from Trader Joe's, and that's really quite enough. I haven't touched a doughnut in at least a decade. I haven't touched a Twinkie in probably 40 years, probably because they're nauseating. I don't eat fast food. The very thought of a brownie with vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, and whipped cream makes me sick. My idea of a great dessert is a cookie. My blood pressure is 120/70. My HDL is fine and my LDL is maybe a wee tad high -- if the blood is drawn on a day I've eaten. My totals are just over 200. I can walk 2.2 miles on my short legs in 43 minutes even with the last 1/4 mile being all uphill. I have over 72 days of accumulated sick time that I haven't taken.

So I don't need some skinny-ass politician who's never had to think about his weight ever in his life telling me that I'm driving up health care costs.

Sen. Obama? I'd been thinking that if John Edwards isn't the nominee, I could vote for you without too much regret. I guess I was wrong. I hope Michelle gave you a good verbal swatting when you got home that night.

Coming soon: a new "Critics over Coffee"

Those of you who remember my movie review days, or who were around last year around this time, remember the "Critics over Coffee" feature that ModFab and I used to do before he became modern and fabulous and I started ranting every morning in a vain attempt to keep my sanity. For those new to this neighborhood, COC is simply a transcription of our conversation after we see a movie, and like most conversations, it often veers from the topic of the film we've just seen, and like most conversations involving me, it often takes a turn to the political.

Now that ModFab's a big shot at the Drama League and I'm old and crabby and just want to be home, it's been over a year since we took in Happy Feet, so we've decided it's time to giggle our way through another movie.

Because he keeps his thumb on the cultural scene while I'm at home plowing through the Sunday papers, or refacing kitchen cabinets, or building TV stands, or trying to get through the piles of clutter, he's seen everything worth seeing in this awards season that may or may not culminate in the Night of a Thousand Bad Evening Gowns and Face Lifts™.

So we're going to see Enchanted. As ModFab so succinctly put it, "I haven't seen Enchanted, and I think seeing it with you might be a lot of fun...the
two old liberal feminists at the Disney Princess movie!"

No accountability on Wall Street

I hate January. I hate it because that's when I get my annual review at work. I don't know about you, but my innate paranoia always gives me an (unnecessary) sense of impending doom every year at this time. The review is simply a discussion, because like most people in my department, I'm no longer eligible for performance increases. But I'm always glad when it's over and I can exhale for another year.

Wall Street chief executives have no such worries, because this year has proven that no matter how badly they screw up in running their big brokerage houses, bonuses will always be nice and fat.

Four of the biggest U.S. investment banks -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. -- will pay out about $49.6 billion in compensation this year. Of that, bonuses are traditionally estimated to represent 60 percent, or almost $30 billion.

But that might not sit well with investors who held on to investment bank stocks this year -- and watched them plunge by up to 45 percent. Investment houses have been slammed by the credit crisis, and top executives this past week said they've yet to see a bottom.

[snip]

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein reportedly is in line for a bonus of up to $70 million this year, as the nation's largest investment bank has largely navigated past any mortgage-related losses. Lehman Brothers' CEO Richard Fuld was granted a $35 million stock bonus for 2007, up 4 percent from last year.

There had been some predictions the increase in bonuses would have been significantly higher. However, layoffs and top managers giving up their bonuses have curtailed that.

For the army of bankers and traders on Wall Street, it remains to be seen what their bonus checks will offer when they're handed out over the next several weeks. Top performers will still see some significant compensation as an incentive to not defect, while underperformers will suffer, executives at the banks said.

"If you were to normalize our business … you would see we had a record year across the whole enterprise," said Morgan Stanley Chief Financial Officer Colm Kelleher.

Morgan Stanley, the second-largest U.S. investment bank, reported compensation rose 18 percent to $16.6 billion from $14 billion a year earlier. This comes after the investment bank reported Wednesday the first quarterly loss in its history amid a $9.4 billion write-down due to the credit crisis.

Bear Stearns, the fifth-biggest securities firm, posted the first loss in its 84-year history yesterday after a $1.9 billion write-down. It reduced compensation this year by 21 percent to $3.4 billion from $4.3 billion in 2006 -- and members of its executive management committee, such as Cayne, won't be collecting year-end bonuses.

"Compensation levels need to be maintained to reflect market levels," said Chief Financial Officer Sam Molinaro.

At Lehman, compensation rose 9.5 percent to $9.5 billion, with bonuses accounting for an estimated $5.7 billion. The firm booked losses last week but managed to offset most of its mortgage write-downs and beat Wall Street expectations. Head count at the investment bank rose by 10 percent this year.

The bankers in the best position this year are at Goldman Sachs.

The nation's largest investment bank said Tuesday it was able to chalk up another record-breaking year with higher investment banking fees and smart bets on mortgage-backed bonds. It beat fourth-quarter projections.

In response, compensation at Goldman rose 20 percent to $20.1 billion. That means roughly $12 billion has been set aside for bonuses.

Still nervously waiting to find out about bonuses are the employees of Merrill Lynch & Co. The nation's largest brokerage won't report fourth-quarter results until next month, and there has been some speculation newly appointed CEO John Thain might shake up the bonus structure.

Thain won't get a year-end bonus since he took the job on Dec. 1 after Merrill Lynch ousted Stanley O'Neal because of significant subprime losses. But he did take home a $15 million cash bonus just for taking the job.

Imagine getting a $15 million signing bonus. Imagine getting a year-end bonus of $35-$70 million, on top of your salary. I don't know about you, but for me a $1000 bonus would seem just dandy, especially in light of that check for over $900 I just wrote last night for our escrow shortage, thanks to those wonderful people in my town who decided that we should be reassessed for property taxes based on peak October 2005 market prices.

I consider us fortunate in the Brilliant household, because we've been able to absorb the price increases for food, fuel oil, eletricity, gasoline, and the ridiculous property taxes that are increased by 8-10% every year in non-reassessment years (and 33% after the reassessment) thanks largely to one-party rule in my town and a structure in which jobs are filled by and contracts given exclusively to friends and cronies of those running the town. I wonder what those laid off by these firms think about these bonuses. I wonder what the Circuit City employees who were laid off and replaced by cheaper workers only to see the company's profits fall even more think about these bonuses. I wonder what those Republican loyalists who have been waiting now for over two decades for "trickle down" economics to "trickle" their bounty onto them think of these bonuses.

If this country were sane, John Edwards would be running away with the Democratic nomination for president, because he's the only one pointing out how these new robber barons are amassing more wealth than they or their children can spend in twenty lifetimes at the same time as the vast majority of Americans are seeing their own prospects and those for their children dwindle. How long are Americans going to cling to their optimism that every generation will do better than the one before when we're drowning in debt? How long are Americans going to regard "moral values" as only applying to sexual behavior, not even questioning a system in which executives can run a company into the ground and be rewarded by a multimillion dollar bonus, or even if they're fired, a multimillion dollar severance package? How long are people going to buy the notion that you can give these people a seat at the policy table and they aren't going to sweep ALL of the chips into their own pile? When does the greed end?

A scene from my favorite Christmas movie

The Ref

Not me. I finished putting together a Craftsman TV stand

And last night, it wasn't Chinese food, it was Indian food, at Teaneck's famous Taj Palace, where the Lamb Saag was even better than usual, and the place doing a brisk business dishing up curries for Jews, Indians, and other heathen.

I don't have that "Little Match Girl" thing that some Jews have on Christmas. I long ago learned that the way to deal with the notion that everyone has a big Norman Rockwell Christmas except you is to demystify the holiday and turn it into a day off from work and an excuse to make evil things like ham and macaroni and cheese. And finish putting together that damned TV stand so that when the Dish guy comes the week after New Year's, there's something to put the set on.

But for those who still feel left out, here's a little something for you (via Sam Seder)

And this oldie but goodie:

Buck up, folks! In 3-1/2 hours it'll all be over, and you'll be the one at work tomorrow without post-Christmas letdown.

Well, it's about freakin' time

Imagine that you're, say, in charge of evaluating proposals from a variety of vendors for a product or service. Only instead of your goal being to obtain the best product or service for the lowest price, you're evaluated at the end of the year based on how much of the company's money you spent -- the more you spent, the bigger your bonus.

Yeah, like that'll happen.

Except that it does -- in the Democratic Party.

After John Kerry's loss in 2004, I remember reading about how Democratic consultants like eight-time loser Bob Shrum don't get paid for how well their media strategies work; they get paid based on how much they spend. But it's worse than I even knew, and at least this year's Democratic candidates have finally realized how this strategy has failed:

It was the spring of 2004, and Senator John Kerry had just secured the Democratic presidential nomination. But as huge sums of money began pouring into his campaign, his top strategists had more on their minds than just getting ready for a tough race against President Bush.

Behind the scenes, they were fighting over the lucrative fees for handling Mr. Kerry’s television advertising. The campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, became so fed up over the squabbling that she told the consultants, led by Robert Shrum, one of the most prominent and highly paid figures in the business, to figure out how to split the money themselves.

Divvy it up they did. Though the final tally has never been publicly disclosed, interviews and records show that the five strategists and their firms ultimately took in nearly $9 million, the richest payday for any Democratic media consultants up to then and roughly what the Bush campaign paid its consultants for a more extensive ad campaign.

Mr. Shrum and his two partners, Tad Devine and Mike Donilon, walked away with $5 million of the total. And that was after Ms. Cahill, in the closing stages of the race that fall, diverted $1 million that would otherwise have gone to the consultants to buying more advertising time in what turned out to be an unsuccessful effort to defeat Mr. Bush.

Questions about how the Kerry campaign could have become such a bonanza for one small group of advisers — and whether the fees squandered money that could have been used for courting voters — are still reverberating inside Democratic circles as the 2008 campaign moves into high gear. And with more money than ever on the line this time around, resentment has been building, donors and other operatives say, at how, win or lose, presidential elections have become gold mines for the small and often swaggering band of media consultants who dominate modern campaigns.

As a result, the Democratic presidential hopefuls are seeking to impose more controls on the consultants. In doing so, they are moving more into line with their Republican counterparts, who by and large have kept tighter rein on how they handle their media teams, which shape the candidates’ messages, produce their television ads and buy the air time.

The three leading Democrats — Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards — are all clamping down. They are following what has become an almost standard practice among Republican presidential nominees by paying their media advisers flat fees, or placing a cap on their payments, rather than making payments based on a percentage of the amount they pay television stations to broadcast their commercials.

[snip]

In interviews, aides said Ms. Clinton, of New York, and Mr. Edwards, of North Carolina, had negotiated flat fees with their top consultants. And Mr. Obama, of Illinois, has capped what his consultants can earn, which will convert their more traditional percentage deal into a flat fee once his ad spending passes a certain threshold, his aides say.

“That is a startling change in the way major Democratic presidential candidates operate,” said James A. Thurber, a professor at American University in Washington who has studied political consultants.

And it's long overdue. Perhaps this is why Bob Shrum is spending his time promoting his book and serving as a dinosaur/pundit on cable news. It's still not perfect; there's still too much money being funnelled into the pockets of a few high-profile consultants with spotty-at-best records of success. But at least it's a start.

What Happens When Even Santa's Job Gets Outsourced by the Bush Administration?

Happy Holidays to all at Brilliant @ Breakfast.

Some thoughts from a nonbeliever on Christmas Eve

I do a lot of what could be called Christian-bashing on this blog. While my own spiritual leanings are a kind of hodgepodge of Buddhism and various forms of paganism, my roots are Jewish and I respond viscerally as a Jew to things like anti-Semitism, klezmer music, and having other religions forced down my throat.

The mainstream Christian denominations around which I grew up seemed to have left the "spreading the word" part of Christianity behind. I knew about the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, of course, but back then they seemed remote and historical; not something that could happen today. When I was a kid, the only proseletyzing and conversion attempts I experienced were from a Catholic friend when I was around eight or nine, who educated me about heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo, and where I was likely to end up if I didn't become a Catholic. This was pretty disturbing stuff for a kid whose parents weren't religious and who seemed to alternate between having a Christmas tree or a menorah, depending on the year.

In recent years, the proseletyzing and conversion part of Christianity has come roaring back, with attempts to put Christian prayer (and yes, the Lord's Prayer that we baby boomers still said in school is a Christian prayer) back into the schools, declare this a Christian nation, and make Jesus the head of state. I don't think someone who is even a mainstream Christian can understand how threatening this is to nonbelievers, especially given Christianity's history of massacres of those who do not believe. Why people who insist that their religion is truth aren't content with their own faith, but need for everyone else to affirm that same faith all the time is a mystery to me. But all too often, Christian faith does seem to be that insecure, and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to believe that in these days of Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly and televangelists that if they could still get away with it, they would.

I've also written that because of my penchant for mocking and questioning the intelligence of those who have blended the religious with the political, I feel obligated to examine the Judeo-Christian tradition every now and then and see if anything's changed; to see if it speaks to me. And it never does. Part of the reason I studied Biblical Hebrew in college (at the Moravian Theological Seminary, no less) was because I wanted to read the Old Testament in its original language so I could read it as originally written, not as a bunch of translators with their own agendas decided it said. That class was where I learned things like how what's in the English OT as "God" starts out as "elohim", which is a plural form and then becomes YHWH; and how the first woman starts out as (transliterating here) "ishah" (woman) and doesn't become "chevah" (Eve) until the second telling of the creation story in Genesis -- an inconsistency that gave rise to the notion of Lilith as Eve's predecessor. A relative gave me an Old Testament with English on one side and Hebrew on the other, but I never got very far with my project, and alas, I've long since forgotten all the Hebrew I knew.

But no matter how many times I revisit this spiritual system, with its punitive, capricious alpha male deity who tests Abraham's faith by telling him to take his beloved son Isaac up to Mount Moriah and sacrifice him -- and at the last minute says "Kidding! Just wanted to see if you'd do it!"; its virgin birth and a man walking among us as the literal son of this anthropormophized deity, who died so that David Vitter could patronize prostitutes and Jim Bakker could have sex with Jessica Hahn and embezzle money from tens of thousands of people and so that Larry Craig could decry homosexuality while cruising in airport bathrooms, the answer always comes back "Naah."

But on Christmas Eve, I understand why people believe. I love Christmas Eve. I love it because it is the quiet after the storm of shopping; after the stores are closed and the horn honking and fighting over parking spaces and the orgy of consuming takes a break before becoming an orgy of acquisition the next morning. Most people are at home, with the lights on both inside and outside their homes. On my street, many people line the sidewalk with luminaria. I can step outside, and if it's a clear night, I can see stars in the sky and hear nary a sound, save the slight white noise from the highway three miles away.

And if I stand very still and listen to the quiet, I can visualize a young couple in a makeshift shelter, surrounded by well wishers from afar, with a newborn whose arrival they don't quite understand but that they know promises great things for mankind. They're a little bit frightened, but also awed at the huge responsibility they face in caring for this tiny child and nurturing him into the man whom some will believe is a god. As this couple looks up at the same sky I do, they also feel insignificant, and inadequate to the task they face -- not much different from what all new parents must feel. Tonight, millions of people think about this tableau that even I can see. And for a brief time, it reminds them of what they've often forgotten during the shopping frenzy of the last four weeks; of what they celebrate tonight and tomorrow.

For those who believe, I wish you all a joyous Christmas filled with love and wonder.

And for the rest of us, well, it's a good day to watch The Lord of the Rings.

Sorry, Rudy, but when you're running for president, your health is important

Mayor 9/11 continues to display flashes of the arrogance that made people in New York glad to see him go:

Asked if he would disclose all his health records after Christmas, Mr. Giuliani said, “He’s going to put out everything that’s appropriate to show that I’m in good health.”

Speaking to reporters after holding a town-hall-style meeting here, Mr. Giuliani said that he had had a bad headache, and that he did not know why his campaign told reporters that he had “flulike symptoms.”

“You’re going to have to ask them,” he said, when asked about their statement. “I’m telling you what actually happened. I had a very, very bad headache. It got worse on the plane. I then got checked out. Went through a lot of tests. All the tests came back 100 percent normal. That’s the bottom line.”

And what about things that may be problematic, Rudy? He's not going to disclose those?

The fact of the matter is that a president's health IS an issue, and if a presidential candidate has cancer, he's going to be subject to more scrutiny. It
s true that the public didn't know about FDR's cancer or JFK's Addison's Disease, but a secretive White House that puts out a story about a president with a history of drinking problems choking on a pretzel and passing out is not a standard that should be acceptable, particularly with Giuliani demonstrating clearly that he shares George W. Bush's notion that nothing a president does is the public's business.

When women are released from the hospital within hours of giving birth or having mastectomy surgery, a headache that requires a jet to turn around and land and an overnight hospital stay isn't something for which you just take an Aleve and carry on. If this was simply setting up a health-related excuse for Giuliani to drop out after a poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire, then he's wasted a lot of medical practitioners' time and presumably his insurance policy's money. If he does have a health problem, he owes it to the American people to have his doctor tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.