A Wicked Week in the Hopeless Maze of Children's Healthcare

TGIF!

I've been running round on the ground in the health care wars this week, and let me tell you, friends <*snark*,> its not pretty. The overwhelming reality of what too many parents live with; the trade- offs and choices that go round on a roulette wheel, with the possibility of a disastrously wrong choice as the winning number. It may be a necessity for some parents to just turn a blind eye to what is missing in the struggle just to keep a roof over their heads, but the tragic legacy is allaround the neighborhoods where impossibly young girls push strollers and young thugs shuffle by with pants around their knees speaking in an indecipherable language. When you relegate an entire portion of society to a certain part of town you cant really expect them to be able to integrate themselves back into general society on command; at some point they are going to make their own culture, and that will ensure their separateness forever.

And much like I'll talk to people about dogs...and say that the doggy dental was SO expensive, as well heeled pure-bred dog owners will say, matter offactly, that they don't go in for that dental stuff, because we never used to do that for our pets in the old days. Well, I guess you couldn't say that about a child, could you? But what if you come from a country where medical or dental care is not readily available, and what if the clinic lines, hours away from work, and co-pays, and even the daunting process of applying for state aid, are an impenetrable wall. What difference will it make for an inner city kid to lose his teeth, as he or she is growing up and trying to get themselves out of the neighborhood? What puts someone over the edge? Is it the lack of skills? The lack of language or growing up around people who are not really aware of what is going on in the world? The lack of just having someone to talk to and some small choices in life?... The lack of any empowerment at all.

So, why do Medicaid, and similar services for the very poor, only provide for the pulling out of teeth and not for the saving of teeth? Isn't it incredibly short sighted for the government to not realize the ramifications of saving a tiny bit of money now only to have to spend heavily later? Its not just the bone loss in the face from not having teeth. Its the loss of self assurance and the loss of clear speech in some cases. Its all of the complications that happen later in life regarding nutrition and health. This should not happen to anyone, much less a child! Oh, there are programs to find out there to help with these tough cases. What I've found here are far away clinics that demand transportation and time to sit on line. You take the appointment you're given, and you don't complain...and hope that your job is still going to be there when you're done. And then, of course, the specialist only comes in once a month, so the first available appointment is months away.

Some people are not going to be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and realize the American Dream in the way that has been advertised, but their kids might be able to. So, in the interest of giving the second generation, at least, a chance, and in the interest it seems, of maintaining the maze of bureaucracy that is involved in getting care, why not let the parents care for the kids rather than making them work a minimum wage job that is not possibly enough to lift their family out of poverty, but which does assure that their children spend an inordinate amount of time either alone and wandering, or in daycare, cared for by others who are getting maybe just above the minimum.

Here we have a mother who is working 24/7 as a home health aide. Because she is making some amount below the poverty line her children are able to get the Husky plan,here in CT. Because her income surpasses some line in the sand, her children are forced off of the A plan, which is reserved for the very poor and which has no premium, and on to the B plan, which is for the slightly less poor and has reduced premiums based on what she makes. Because she makes so little there is no premium. The difference? The A program covers many more services, more fully. Why is that? Would the citizens of Connecticut want to cover the children of the very poor more than the children of the slightly less poor? The maze to even get into this program is daunting, and there certification every year is a nightmare.

To hear the mayor of this town boasting about his lean machine, reminds me of how Rudy notes cutting the budget of New York City partly by making the maze to social services more difficult to navigate so that people had to give up on trying to get services. Where is the morality in trying to deny care to anyone? How does that provide for a happy life for anyone? How does someone who boasts of that sort of behavior sleep at night?

If there is a God, which seems pretty unlikely in the face of all of this, maybe this is just a huge test....and really, it could go either way. because if what science has learned is true in that the fittest need to survive in order to better the race, then it's wrong to bring along the weaker members; they should be cut loose on an ice floe, and I'm the overly empathetic weak one. What I see happening here though, is that many of the kids of the very rich, raised in a bubble and unaware of how things fit together in the world, are more likely to be the weak links in a Darwinian sense. The hard working immigrants are tough as nails and those who work hard can really make a life. Take away the cushy surroundings from most of the rich kids around here and they couldn't survive. There is seemingly an active campaign against the poor brown kids pouring into this country, because they are tougher, and it could be that the only way that we have to fight them is to keep them part of the underclass, lest they overtake us.

With an eye to the crumbling middle class, and many in the upper classes having to downsize, it will be a pretty telling time regarding who is resilient enough to survive. Money is a construct that used to based on something valuable kept in a vault somewhere, but its so much more abstract than that. Just as a foreign government can buy our debt or an official can raise or lower interest rates, or print more money, its all just an idea. The only truth worth holding on to is that we are really only one or two steps removed from the homeless person on the street or the hardworking immigrant trying to scrape together enough money to take their kid to the doctor. Just as we don't torture people because we don't want our soldiers tortured in other lands, we cant deny care to anyone lest we be denied ourselves.

There is no doubt that this country needs a single payer health care system with no qualifiers. it needs to cover everyone and it needs to cut the insurance corporations out of the process. There are enough issues to overcome as a human being on this planet, without having to worry about what should be a right to everyone; not just the rich.

I don't know why, but to me the saddest part was that after the tooth cleaning, the kids didn't even get a new tooth brush, much less that array of samples which is like a prize for being good.

That was the dentist...next came the pediatrician, the blood lab, the psychologist...and school...




c/p RIPCoco

The Splurge is Working, Comrades!

It’s not a tax cut. It’s not a tax rebate or a deferment. Let’s call it the fuck what it is: This $168 billion stimulus package, or what I call “The Splurge”, is a tax loan.

Not only do I resent Congress and the Bush administration conjuring another way for us to live beyond our means (borrowing against next year’s return) I resent the out-of-touch assumption by all parties that all Americans get back more than the $600 we single people will receive this May.

I’m living proof that we all do not.

Without getting into specific figures, based on my income and the tax structure these past several years, I get back on average about $420 from the federal treasury every February. That means, when this $600 note comes due less than a year from now, not only will I not get my usual return, I’ll wind up owing the IRS about $180.

And how many of us can confidently say that the tax cuts for small businesses such as the one for which I work will benefit them personally?

This stimulus package was designed, don’t forget, to stimulate the economy (read: the corporate sector), not our personal finances. By pretending to fling $168 billion at us like Jack Nicholson’s Joker and his poison gas balloons, he’s positioning himself to take credit for giving us momentary spending power.

To paraphrase Wordsworth, it has nothing to do with getting- it’s about spending. Or, rather, buying. Buying gasoline. Buying heating oil. Buying groceries. Paying for HMO premiums, car and home insurance, credit card payments, sinking this tax loan back into the home lending industry and the banks to forestall the inevitable crash another month. In other words, taking $168 billion of our 2009 returns and making us stuff the money $600-1200 at a time into the pockets of Bush’s base of Haves and Have Mores in the corporate sector.

Of course, even if reinjecting this money into the economy was in itself a good idea, it only works as far as the working poor (formerly known as the middle class). We’re what you’d call “raging economic engines.” Meaning, middle class and lower income people, when coming into a windfall, naturally pump that money back into the economy to keep the wolves from the door a little while longer. Rich fucks who’re used to getting six and seven figure income tax refunds will just sock their $1200 in the bank, safely out of the reach of the economy. They also won’t miss the $1200 that’ll be due back next year.

But those of us who dare not grumble about this so-called windfall… we’re going to be the ones to foot the bill.

It’s like being force-fed methamphetamines and having to wait for the crash.

It’s sheer genius when you think about it, people. Through his actions, misactions and inactions, George Bush continually created or presided over emergencies like spiraling deficits created through endless wars and endless tax cuts, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and he always manages to find a way for private industry to make out like the bloated bandits that they are and at taxpayer expense.

Except Bush won’t be stuffing their already bulging, bottomless pockets, as usual- it’ll be you and me who’ll be tribally committing this latest trough-filling.

It’ll just take the cute balloons a year to start hissing out that payback.

And Congress is talking about a second stimulus package 2-3 months before the checks from the first one are even cut while Daddy says, “Finish what’s on your plate and let’s wait and see if you’re still hungry.”

Yesterday’s press conference was so delusional and out of touch with basic, blaring, glaring reality that it made me openly wonder why Helen Thomas and the rest of the press pool even bother showing up for these dog and pony shows. What do they expect to hear?

“Well, yeah, I lied us into a war. Tough shit. Yeah, we torture. Tough shit. Yeah, the stimulus package, in lieu of putting your social security retirement fund on Wall Street, was specifically designed to help out my buddies in the corporate sector and you’re going to have to pay for that little spending splurge next year.”

Instead, all we got was an impassioned speech about why we need to give the telecoms immunity to hedge against the 40 “abusive lawsuits”, as he’d termed it to we can make retroactively legal what was legal all the time.

That we’re not heading for a recession, despite the fact that virtually every economist in the land is saying the exact opposite. And why shouldn’t we believe him over the economists? After all, this is coming from the same guy who singlehandedly, in the space of a year, turned a nine figure surplus into a nine figure deficit and lost $317 million for all the companies that he’d ever headed up starting with Arbusto.

What’s that hiss, comrades? Is it the hiss of hatred for the Joker? Sadly, no. Look up at the balloons high above. Hold your breath and party and spend like it’s 1999.

I miss him.

John Edwards may be out of the presidential race, but he is not going to sit down and he is not going to shut up.

In fact, he's out there educating Americans (and hopefully the members of Congress who have aided and abetted George W. Bush's Perpetual War Without Point in Iraq that you simply cannot spend trillions of dollars on a war after you've cut taxes for your wealthy friends without the rest of the economy (and the middle class) paying a terrible price:

A coalition announced Monday and called Iraq Campaign 2008 seeks to tie anxiety over the faltering economy to anxiety over the duration of the war. Part of its agenda is targeting what it calls "obstructionist" members of Congress—Democrats as well as Republicans—that don’t seek a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. The campaign has an attention-getting front-man: former presidential candidate John Edwards. The effort, however, is not without problems—not least of which is the conundrum of whether antiwar activism turns out to be counterproductive to ending a war.

People don’t understand why we’re spending $500 billion and counting in Iraq," Edwards said in a Monday conference call, "when at the same time we’ve got 40-plus million Americans with no health care coverage, 37 million-plus living in poverty. It doesn’t make sense to them."

The effort is the brainchild of a group of liberal organizations: MoveOn.org, the Service Employees International Union, the VoteVets progressive veterans network, USAction and the Center for American Progress.

Countering both wars will require a variety of offensives. On Mar. 19, the fifth anniversary of the invasion, USAction, says executive director Jeff Blum, will mobilize thousands of protesters "from Bangor to Los Angeles" for candlelight vigils. Legislatively, the coalition has two priorities through the election: pressing Congress not to fund the war without tying money to a date for withdrawal and preventing President George W. Bush from signing a long-term security agreement with the Iraqi government, as he intends to do by the summer.

Politically, the effort is to be even sharper. "If they don’t act," Berger said, referring to Congress, "we will make it clear that they will have opposition, and we will take them out." She did not elaborate, and a spokeswoman for Iraq Campaign 2008 did not return a call today for comment.

MoveOn’s Eli Pariser said the coalition will target four Republican senators in particular who have "stood up against the interests of voters": Susan Collins of Maine; Norm Coleman of Minnesota; John Sununu of New Hampshire; and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Political analysts consider the first three to be among the Senate’s most vulnerable GOP incumbents. McConnell has an approval rating of 52 percent, which, if not actually poor, is a somewhat surprising choice, considering his 24 years in the chamber and ascendancy to the body’s most visible Republican. The coalition is still deciding which House districts to target.

Finally, the coalition will launch a field network it calls Operation Democracy. The multimillion-dollar effort will fund "door to door" campaigns—"people will talk to their neighbors about the moral, strategic and economic folly of Bush’s war in Iraq," Blum said.

The costs of the war have been far higher than the Bush administration forecast. White House Economic Adviser Larry Lindsay was forced to resign after publicly pegging the Iraq war’s price tag at $100 billion to $200 billion. In February 2003, a then-deputy defense secretary told a House panel that Iraq "could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." The prediction was less than prescient. In September, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the war could cost up to $2 trillion. Thursday, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz will testify to the congressional Joint Economic Committee that the war will cost $3 trillion, building off research for a forthcoming book.

Independent economists have found a connection between the war and the performance of the U.S. economy. Last May, the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that "after an initial demand stimulus, the effect of higher defense spending turns negative around the sixth year." That sixth year begins Mar. 19. The economists found harmful impacts on inflation and interest rates, annual truck and car sales, and the housing market, as well as job losses in construction and manufacturing. "Manufacturing is projected to lose 44,200 [jobs] after five years," the study found, while the construction sector would have a net gain of 8,500 jobs during the same time frame, but "it is projected to lose 144,200 after ten years."

Meanwhile, Mr. We'll Be In Iraq For 100 Years has an economic plan to just make things worse: more corporate tax cuts. Because everyone knows that when you give really really really really rich corporations even more money, they are so generous that they won't use it to stuff the pockets of their CEOs and other senior executives, and they'll stop sending all the high-paying jobs overseas. After all, isn't that the result of the Bush tax cuts of the last seven years that have gotten us into this mess?

Maybe in the Candyland of Gumdrops and Lollipops in which the Republican brain resides. Good thing we have people out there like John Edwards who still live in the real world.

(h/t: Melissa)

Smokin' Aces

Mets. Cardinals. At Port St. Lucie. 1 PM. Today. On SNY.

(h/t and photo: Metsgrrl)

And if he'd been killed, Drudge would have his blood on his hands

Someone please tell me why it was so important that we know Prince Harry was serving in Afghanistan:

An American website, the Drudge Report, broke a news blackout yesterday by revealing that Prince Harry has been serving in Afghanistan for more than two months.

To the fury of the Ministry of Defence and condemnation from the head of the British Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, the website announced a "world exclusive" and proclaimed: "They're calling him 'Harry the Hero!".

The article brought to an end an agreement with the media that the Prince's deployment to Helmand be kept quiet in the interests of his safety and that of the soldiers with him.

The decision to send Prince Harry, 23, to Afghanistan under a cloak of secrecy came after the furore that followed the revelation of his proposed deployment to Iraq. Much to the Prince's frustration, General Dannatt announced in May last year that it would be too risky, fearing the Prince and his comrades in the Household Cavalry would become top priority targets for insurgents.

Immediately, officers decided the only way the third-in-line to the throne could continue to do his duty without creating an additional security risk was to send him secretly, calling on the media to co-operate in a news blackout.

By July, editors of key newspapers and broadcasting organisations were sounded out to see if such assistance would be forthcoming. Without dissent, all agreed that it was the only sensible and safe solution.

In December, days before Cornet Wales – as the Prince is known in The Blues and Royals – deployed to Helmand, editors met MoD officials and signed an understanding setting out the terms of the news blackout. While not a legally binding document, it was a statement of faith from the British press.

It is thought the source for the Drudge Report article was a story printed last month in an Australian women's magazine, New Idea. The Drudge Report is most famous for breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal after Newsweek decided not to publish the story.

At 3.30pm yesterday the MoD received a call, confirming fears that a foreign news organisation would break the silence. A decision was taken to make a formal statement confirming the Prince had been in Afghanistan.

"I am very disappointed that foreign websites have decided to run this story without consulting us. This is in stark contrast to the highly responsible attitude that the whole of the UK print and broadcast media, along with a small number of overseas outlets, who have entered into an understanding with us over the coverage of Prince Harry on operations," General Dannatt said.

A scoop is one thing...but by publicizing this, Drudge put every man Harry is serving with in danger.

Say what you will about the royals, Harry's commitment to his military service is laudable. But when said royal is serving with other men, it puts ALL their lives in danger to reveal that he's on active duty.

Does Drudge's need to scoop trump soldiers' lives? Now, thanks to Matt Drudge's need for attention, the British army has to get him out of there. Drudge may not have been the first to get the story, but he described it as an exclusive, and since Drudge gets more traffic than the smaller outlets who blew the cover earlier, he bears a great deal of the responsiblity.

And shame on the rest of the U.S. press for pulling this story from Drudge and running with it.

Because Americans can find a way to make a buck off anything

You Walk Away.

This is a company that for $995, will help people cede their houses to the bank in foreclosure:

You Walk Away is a small sign of broad changes in the way many Americans look at housing. In an era in which new types of loans allowed many home buyers to move in with little or no down payment, and to cash out any equity by refinancing, the meaning of homeownership and foreclosure have changed, economists and housing experts say.

Last year the median down payment on home purchases was 9 percent, down from 20 percent in 1989, according to a survey by the National Association of Realtors. Twenty-nine percent of buyers put no money down. For first-time home buyers, the median was 2 percent. And many borrowed more than the price of the home in order to cover closing costs.

“I think I could make a case that some borrowers were ‘renting’ (with risk), rather than owning,” Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, said in an e-mail message.

For some people, then, foreclosure becomes something akin to eviction — a traumatic event, and a blow to one’s credit record, but not one that involves loss of life savings or of years spent scrimping to buy the home.

“There certainly appears to be more willingness on the part of borrowers to walk away from mortgages,” said John Mechem, spokesman for the Mortgage Bankers Association, who noted that in the past, many would try to save their homes.

In recent months top executives from Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wachovia have all described a new willingness by borrowers to walk away from mortgages.

Carrie Newhouse, a real estate agent who also works as a loss mitigation consultant for mortgage lenders in Minneapolis-St. Paul, said she saw many homeowners who looked at foreclosure as a first option, preferable to dealing with their lender. “I’ve had people say to me, ‘My house isn’t worth what I owe, why should I continue to make payments on it?’ ” Mrs. Newhouse said.

“You bought an adjustable rate mortgage and you’re mad the bank is adjusting the rate,” she said. “And sometimes the bank people who call these consumers aren’t really nice. Not that the bank has the responsibility to be your friend, but a lot are just so uncooperative.”

The same sorts of loans that drove the real estate boom now change the nature of foreclosure, giving borrowers incentives to walk away, said Todd Sinai, an associate professor of real estate at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

“There’s a whole lot of people who would’ve been stuck as renters without these exotic loan products,” Professor Sinai said. “Now it’s like they can do their renting from the bank, and if house values go up, they become the owner. If they go down, you have the choice to give the house back to the bank. You aren’t any worse off than renting, and you got a chance to do extremely well. If it’s heads I win, tails the bank loses, it’s worth the gamble.”

In the boom market, homeowners took their winnings, withdrawing $800 billion in equity from their homes in 2005 alone, according to RGE Monitor, an online financial research firm.

Since the Depression, American government policy has encouraged homeownership as an absolute good. It protects people from increases in rent and allows them to build equity as they pay off their mortgages. And it creates stability in communities, because owners are invested in their neighbors.

But new types of loans like interest-only mortgages and cash-out refinance loans mean buyers do not pay down their mortgages. And adjustable rate mortgages, which accounted for 39 percent of mortgages written in 2006, expose owners to rent-like rises in their housing costs.

The value of homeownership, then, has increasingly shifted to the home’s likelihood to rise in value, like any other investment. And when investments go bad, people tend to walk away.

Didn't people who didn't pay back loans used to be called "deadbeats"? On the one hand, it's tempting for me to sit here in the house we bought at the bottom of the market in 1996 and since refinanced into a 4.75% fixed rate and say "Well, I did my homework and we didn't buy until we could afford it." On the other hand, there was such an element of using the middle class and the poor as cash cows for lunatic investment vehicles designed to make banks and the wealthy even more filthy rich that it's gratifying to see them get THEIR comeuppance for a change. If only it didn't mean that the inevitable bank failures and other signs of coming economic collapse would impact those who were careful with their money as well as those who were reckless.

Are those who bought homes with these option ARMs and interest-only mortgages and have absolutely no reason, other than the commitment they made to the bank, to actually pay the mortgage now that the home is in a negative equity position, any more unethical than the wealthy who have had access to more ways to game the system for a longer time? Working- and middle-class Americans have opened savings accounts in banks that started out with one interest rate and now pay significantly less. They've taken credit cards that started out with a 9.9% fixed rate and have now gone up to 15%. They've seen their representatives and Senators in Congress pass bankruptcy legislation to benefit the banking community at their expense. So aside from a personal moral code that may say "This is wrong", can you blame them for wanting to be able to have a way to game the system too?

I'm not saying all these people are worthy of our sympathy. As someone waited till the age of 40 to buy a house and is still living with the 40-year-old bright red carpet left by the previous homeowners and a kitchen that is going to be updated piecemeal and an original first-floor bathroom tiled in black and sage green, it's hard for me to have any sympathy for those who bought houses they couldn't have afforded if they'd had to make an equity commitment. It's hard to sympathize with people dumb enough to not see that a 1950's 1500 square foot Cape Cod just wasn't a half-million dollar house by anyone's measure. It's hard for me to sympathize with people who took an extra $50,000 when they bought their houses so that they could have the new kitchen with the granite and stainless RIGHT NOW, and it's even harder to sympathize with people who tapped their equity to buy Escalades and luxury vacations.

But when you have a president who took us to war on a lie, who has allowed incompetent contractors to gain generous government contracts; when you have a vice president who helped blow the cover of a CIA operative working on nuclear proliferation; when you have White House officials who don't think they have to respond to subpoenas, can you blame ordinary Americans to want their own piece of the "no accountability pie"?

Look on the bright side. At least it means less pressure on McCain to put Huckabee in the #2 spot

After all, if you had any doubts about Mike Huckabee's Utterly Batshit Krazy Kredentials, his support of a proposed Colorado law that would bestow personhood on every fertilized egg pretty much seals the deal. And you thought I was being overly dramatic when I talked about a world in which women would be prosecuted for having menstrual periods and would have to risk death rather than end an ectopic pregnancy that can't be viable anyway.

But McCain really doesn't need Huckabee anymore, now that he has the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, another Christofascist huckster (heh) who trumpets his support of Israel, not telling people that it's all so he can sit next to Jesus when the End Times come, sharing nachos and pop while the Jews burn. Hagee advocates war with Iran, the sooner the better, so as to expedite the coming of Armageddon:

Hagee speaks simultaneously to two audiences about Iran's nuclear capabilities: one that fears a terrorist attack by Iran and another that embraces a biblically mandated apocalypse. To impress the fearful, he mimics Bush's deceptions about Iraq's capacity to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction, Condoleezza Rice's warnings of mushroom clouds, and Dick Cheney's dissembling about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. Comparing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler, Hagee argues that Iran's development of nuclear weapons must be stopped to protect America and Israel from a nuclear attack. Preying on legitimate worries about terrorism, and invoking 9/11, he vividly describes a supposed Iranian-led plan to simultaneously explode nuclear suitcase bombs in seven American cities, or to use an electromagnetic pulse device to create "an American Hiroshima."

When addressing audiences receptive to Scriptural prophecy, however, Hagee welcomes the coming confrontation. He argues that a strike against Iran will cause Arab nations to unite under Russia's leadership, as outlined in chapters 38 and 39 of the Book of Ezekiel, leading to an "inferno [that] will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon." In Hagee's telling, Israel has no choice but to strike at Iran's nuclear facilities, with or without America's help. The strike will provoke Russia -- which wants Persian Gulf oil -- to lead an army of Arab nations against Israel. Then God will wipe out all but one-sixth of the Russian-led army, as the world watches "with shock and awe," he says, lending either a divine quality to the Bush administration phrase or a Bush-like quality to God's wrath.

But Hagee doesn't stop there. He adds that Ezekiel predicts fire "upon those who live in security in the coastlands." From this sentence, he concludes that there will be judgment upon all who stood by while the Russian-led force invaded Israel, and issues a stark warning to the United States to intervene: "Could it be that America, who refuses to defend Israel from the Russian invasion, will experience nuclear warfare on our east and west coasts?" He says yes, citing Genesis 12:3, in which God said to Israel: "I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you."

To fill the power vacuum left by God's decimation of the Russian army, the Antichrist -- the head of the EU -- will rule "a one-world government, a one-world currency and a one-world religion" for three and a half years. (Hagee adds that "one need only be a casual observer of current events to see that all three of these things are coming into reality." The "demonic world leader" will then be confronted by a false prophet, identified by Hagee as China, at Armageddon, the Mount of Megiddo in Israel. As they prepare for the final battle, Jesus will return on a white horse and cast both villains -- and presumably any nonbelievers -- into a "lake of fire burning with brimstone," thus marking the beginning of his millennial reign.

Hagee doesn't fear a nuclear conflagration, but rather God's wrath for standing by as Iran executes its supposed plot to destroy Israel. A nuclear confrontation between America and Iran, which he says is foretold in the Book of Jeremiah, will not lead to the end of the world, but rather to God's renewal of the Garden of Eden. But Hagee is ultimately less concerned with the fate of Israel or the Jews than with a theocratic Christian right agenda. When Jesus returns for his millennial reign, he tells his television audience, "the righteous are going to rule the nations of the earth When Jesus Christ comes back, he's not going to ask the ACLU if it's all right to pray, he's not going to ask the churches if they can ordain pedophile bishops and priests, he's not going to ask if it's all right to put the Ten Commandments in the statehouses. He's not going to endorse abortion, he's going to run the world by the word of God The world will never end. It's going to become a Garden of Eden, and Christ is going to rule it."

So is MSNBC going to ask John McCain to repudiate the more lunatic views of Pastor Hagee? Or does the IOKIYAR Rule apply? Or for that matter, is there an IOKIYCTBAC (It's OK If You Claim To Be A Christian) Corollary to the IOKIYAR Rule?

We're still waiting.

But McCain's embrace of the Hagee endorsement is hardly surprising, for whether he believes it or not, he's perfectly willing to sign on to the lunacy of Christian nationalism, as he indicated in an interview with BeliefNet last year (red text emphasis mine):

Has the candidates’ personal faith become too big an issue in the presidential race?
Questions about that are very legitimate.... And it's also appropriate for me at certain points in the conversation to say, look, that's sort of a private matter between me and my Creator.... But I think the number one issue people should make [in the] selection of the President of the United States is, 'Will this person carry on in the Judeo Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?'"

It doesn't seem like a Muslim candidate would do very well, according to that standard.
I admire the Islam. There's a lot of good principles in it. I think one of the great tragedies of the 21st century is that these forces of evil have perverted what's basically an honorable religion. But, no, I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles.... personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith. But that doesn't mean that I'm sure that someone who is Muslim would not make a good president. I don't say that we would rule out under any circumstances someone of a different faith. I just would--I just feel that that's an important part of our qualifications to lead.*

[snip]

A recent poll found that 55 percent of Americans believe the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation. What do you think?
I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation. But I say that in the broadest sense. The lady that holds her lamp beside the golden door doesn't say, “I only welcome Christians.” We welcome the poor, the tired, the huddled masses. But when they come here they know that they are in a nation founded on Christian principles.

As McCain becomes the Republican nominee, it's worth everyone's time to check out Talk2Action, a group blog devoted to monitoring, reporting on, and analyzing the religious right. In 2006, Michelle Goldberg outlined what Christian Nationalism is. The eschatology of John McCain certainly indicates that he subscribes to this vision. So if you're a Jew (and don't let this "Judeo-Christian crap fool you; the Judeo- is just there to lull you into a false sense that they aren't going to persecute YOU), a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Wiccan, a Druid, or subscribe to any other spiritual system, You Will Not Count As An American under this lunatic worldview.

Friday Cat Blogging

I am really starting to like this guy:

"We are not standing on the brink of recession because of forces beyond our control," Obama told a town hall forum in Austin. "This was not an inevitable part of the business cycle. It was a failure of leadership in Washington — a Washington where George Bush hands out billions of tax cuts to the wealthiest few for eight long years, and John McCain promises to make those same tax cuts permanent, embracing the central principle of the Bush economic program."

So is Maggie:

Idiocy. He haz it.

Thursday Silly Blogging: 10 Thoughts On Naming Children

This list grew out of a discussion on why every male of a particular age is named Michael or Matthew. If any of you are planning to reproduce, please keep these concepts in mind. Thank you. That is all.

1) Benjamin, Solomon, and Jacob are old Jewish guys. Not children. No teenager is going to want to be called "Benny", and no toddler should be part of a circle of friends that sounds like a bunch of guys playing pinochle around the pool at Century Village in Boca Raton.

2) If your child has more than one friend with the same name as his/hers, you are a sheep and you have lost all right to consider yourself a nonconformist.

3) Avoid the temptation to give your daughters names that sound like they're out of romance novels. That means names like Alexa, Alanna, Alexandra, Ashley, Brianna.....etc.

4) If you are passing your male pattern baldness or endomorphic genes to your son, please give him an ordinary sounding name. If I had been a boy, I'd be 52, overweight, bald, and my name would be Seth. I probably would have put a bullet in my head 10 years ago. 'nuff said.

5) No naming your kids after pop stars. There are 2,047,682 Britneys in this country right at this moment who want to kill their parents.

6) Don't get the idea that the answer to all this is to have a revival of names like "Betty", "Gladys", and "Ethel."

7) "Tallulah" is the coolest girls' name ever. Save it for a child who can handle the special *je ne sais quoi* required to be a Tallulah.

8) When a Google image search on the name you want to give your daughter brings up more photos of cats than of children, it's time to reconsider.

9) If you insist on naming your son after a Gospel, choose "Luke". The others are overused.

10) Not everyone in the world is Irish. If you are two Ashkenazic Jews, you may not name your child "Sean", "Caitlin", "Patrick", "Ewan" or "Meghan." "Caitlin Meghan Leibowitz" is a ridiculous name. Note that being Jewish does not give you an exemption from #1, either.) If you want Biblical, you have David, Daniel, Joshua, and Jesse at your disposal for boys, and Rachel, Deborah, Leah, and hell, even Bathsheba available for girls. Jonah is no longer permitted because Jonah Goldberg has soiled that name for all eternity.

Coming soon to your Aetna health policy: The "Only wusses need sedation" doctrine

Last year, after much anxiety and trauma, I finally had the colonoscopy you're supposed to have when you turn 50. It was done at an outpatient surgical center, with sedation (propofol) administered by a board-certified anesthesiologist. I felt woozy, and the next thing I knew I was awake. Piece of cake.

Given that propofol has no reversal agent, and I am terrified of anesthesia, the fact that an anesthesiologist was on the case helped alleviate any fear of never waking up.

Some people have reported waking up during the procedure, others tell horror stories about memories of the procedure occurring later on, despite the amnesia effect of the other, more commonly used drug, Versed.

Colonoscopy is one of the procedures people dread most. That dread is the reason most people put off having one, when any polyps that are found can be removed before they become cancerous. That mine was so trauma-free is the main reason why I don't have any qualms about having another one when it's time. In theory, this should reduce my risk of incurring large bills for cancer treatment later on.

The other reason I have no qualms about another colonoscopy is that my insurance provider is not Aetna. Because it took a serious outcry to get Aetna to back off its plans to stop covering the use of anesthesiologist-administered propfol for colonoscopy:

owing to critics who contended it was putting profits before patients, Aetna said Wednesday that it had suspended — at least temporarily — a plan to stop paying for routine use of a powerful anesthetic in a procedure to screen for colon cancer.

The drug, propofol, provides quick and reliable sedation for patients who are undergoing a colonoscopy, an examination of the lower intestine with a flexible probe that provides the most thorough form of screening for colon cancer.

Because of federal regulatory recommendations and, in some cases, specific state regulations, propofol is often administered by an anesthesiologist instead of the doctor performing the colonoscopy.

Aetna said in December that it would stop paying for the use of propofol in routine cases as of April 1 because research showed the participation of an anesthesiologist added $300 to $1,000 to the screening costs without improving outcomes.

Aetna cited the practice as an example of unnecessary spending. It said doctors in many parts of the country who used propofol in just 10 percent of their cases were achieving the same results as those in areas like the New York City region, where close to 80 percent of patients received the drug.

Critics had said that restricting use of propofol would discourage patients from undergoing a colonoscopy. Cancers of the colon and rectum trail only lung and prostate cancer in cancer deaths among Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but survival rates are high when they are caught early.

Insurers have been split on whether to cover propofol for colonoscopies. Humana and WellPoint are among the large players that, like Aetna, have sought to curtail coverage while UnitedHealthcare, which has 26 million members, has advertised its intent to support propofol in all screenings. Medicare leaves the decision up to its local carriers, most of which have restrictive policies.

Some doctors maintain that propofol helps them by keeping patients calmer during screenings than the traditional cocktails they administered of sedatives like Versed and tranquilizers like Valium. And, because it wears off sooner, patients can go home more quickly.

Propofol has no reversal agent, so it must be administered by someone who knows what s/he is doing. On the plus side, it has a short half-life so overdosing is unlikely. But it must be titrated continually through the procedure.

This is a perfect example of insurance companies trying to cut corners at the expense of patient care. Colonoscopy is so effective in improving outcomes for patients where cancer is found because it can be detected early, and also effective in finding polyps before they can become cancerous or precancerous, you'd think that methods that make the procedure less frightening would be a no-brainer.

But then you'd have to believe that health insurance companies are in the business of health. And by now we all know that it's more profitable to cover patients who die younger than to cover procedures that might keep them around longer.

I wish Ann Richards were still here too, but this is ridiculous

Eric Wattree has found what is arguably the most preposterous campaign ad of the Democratic presidential race this year:

Look, I adored Ann Richards. I don't think there's a progressive woman in the country who didn't. She was loud, profane, impeccably groomed, spoke her mind, and was just plain all-around fabulous. It's no wonder Hillary Clinton would want a piece of that Richards magic.

But the idea that voting for Hillary Clinton is somehow "winning one for the Gipper", when said Gipper isn't even alive to make an endorsement, is just beyond the pale. And I'm not sure I'd want to highlight that faux-Southern thing Hillary does either. I mean, we've heard Hillary speak a lot lately. And she Just Does Not say "mah hay-er". A selective twang doesn't make you a Texan. I keep being reminded of that line Joan Cusack has in Working Girl: "Sometimes I dance around the house in my underwear. Don't make me Madonna. Never will." I wish Hillary would just figure out who she is and present us with that Hillary, rather than throwing an incoherent mess of campaign tactics up against the wall in a desperate attempt to try and find one that sticks and digging colorful characters who WERE authentic out of their graves to be posed with them like cardboard cutouts.

All I can say is, they'd just better not be planning to fuck with Molly. Of course Molly took care of this well before she left us.

Oh, come on...what ELSE were you planning to do that day?

Seriously. What else is there to do March 15? Watch Grapefruit League baseball? Isn't there plenty of time to have your heart broken by the Mets in April through September? Maybe you were going to listen to Jonathan Schwartz' weekly selections from the American songbook. Well, why not instead spend the afternoon knocking back a few and listening to the song stylings of the handsome and talented Dennis Blackwell and Jason Hart? You might even meet some of your favorite bloggers there.

Particulars:

• Saturday, March 15, 2:30 PM (there's also a show Wednesday evening, March 12, at 7:30 PM for those of you who work in NYC)
  
• The Metropolitan Room
  
• 34 West 22nd St Betw. 5th & 6th Ave, New York, NY 10010
  
• Phone (call for reservations): 212-206-0440
  
• $15 cover, 2 drink minimum
  

And still more!

Lolbama

I Can Has Nomination?

This is really meta, but what the hell

At the risk of having it appear as if I'm doing some kind of infinite blog post project, Melissa's link to my post about thousands of foreign students enrolled at U.S. flight schools is worth noting. Because not only are flight schools looking remarkably like pre-9/11, but there's something else about those days that's deemed newsworthy again.

The time to expose these tactics for what they are is NOW

Josh Marshall says, don't be fooled by John McCain's "repudiation" of talk radio lunatic Bill Cunningham's bigoted introduction rant the other day. As we now know from Countdown, McCain knew damn well who this guy was, and the "good cop/bad cop" racist strategy of the erstwhile Straight Talk Express is already clear:

The core is to drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American,BLACK, terrorist, Arab. Maybe a little hustler and shifty thrown in, but we'll have to see. The details and specific arguments are sort of beside the point. They're like the libretto in a Wagner opera, nice for some narrative structure. But it's the score that's the real essence of it, the point of the whole exercise.

Now, a good deal has been made out of John McCain's repudiation of talk radio yakmeister Bill Cunningham, who led off for McCain at one of his rallies with the full run of Obama sludge. But don't be distracted or fooled. This is more like an example of what the digital commerce folks refer to as 'channel conflict'. You've got your multiple distribution channels. You've got the way McCain's selling the product. Broadcast. Broad and thematic about McCain. But you've got a number of other product channels to sell through, most of them a lot grittier, but no less essential for ultimate success.

[snip]

If McCain really wants to repudiate this stuff, he can start with the Tennessee Republican party which dished all the slurs and smears about Obama being a Nation of Islam-loving anti-Semite, just today. And once he's done talking to the people who will be running his Tennessee campaign, we'll have a number of others he can talk to, like the head of his Ohio campaign, former Sen. Mike DeWine, who gave that Cunningham guy his marching orders.

Let's just not fool ourselves, not lie to ourselves about what's happening here and who's in charge.

Instead of taking the bait and virally marketing crap from Drudge, what we need to be doing RIGHT NOW is digging out and exposing the direct links between these so-called "surrogates" for the McCain campaign and the man himself. Why John McCain still has this reputation as being an honest broker is a mystery, but he does. I'm not saying we dig into everyone who ever served McCain a cup of coffee, but if he's going to lie and say he never met guys like Cunningham before, when it's clear he did and knew damn well what they stood for, as a means of trying to keep his hands clean, then those connections should be exposed.

What Skippy said.

I'm no saint...I didn't reprint the photograph because I didn't want to participate on the "OMIGOD THIS IS AN ISSUE BECUZ HE'S WEARING A TURBAN!!!!!" pileon, but Skippy's points are well taken.

But hey, at least they're back to listening to your phone conversations

After all, what's really important to preventing another terrorist attack? Gathering every phone call and internet search of everyone in America, or keeping potential terrorists out of American flight schools?

Take a guess:

Thousands of foreign student pilots have been able to enroll and obtain pilot licenses from U.S. flight schools, despite tough laws passed in the wake of the 9/ll attacks, according to internal government documents obtained by ABC News.

"Some of the very same conditions that allowed the 9-11 tragedy to happen in the first place are still very much in existence today," wrote one regional security official to his boss at the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration.

"Thousands of aliens, some of whom may very well pose a threat to this country, are taking flight lessons, being granted FAA certifications and are flying planes," wrote the TSA official, Richard A. Horn, in 2005, complaining that the students did not have the proper visas.

Under the new laws, American flight schools are only supposed to provide pilot training to foreign students who have been given a background check by the TSA and have a specific type of visa.

But in thousands of cases that has not happened, according to the documents and current and former government officials involved in the program.

"TSA's enforcement is basically nonexistent," said former FAA inspector Bill McNease, in an interview for ABC News' "World News With Charles Gibson."

(h/t)

It's almost enough to make you think they want another terrorist attack to take place, like maybe.....right before the election?

Because Someone Had To Do It, Part II

Yes We Can Has.

(h/t: Group News Blog)

Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting Your Republican Party

I don't care that McCain "apologized" later on. He should have renounced this guy right then and there. If he didn't know who the guy was, he should have made it his business to know. You want to ask Barack Obama to renounce and denounce guys like Lewis Farrakhan? Then McCain needs to take a stronger stand against guys like William Cunningham. He can't "regret the comments", he has to denounce them as the ignorant, bigoted, unacceptable swill they are.

As always, Keith and Rachel have it right about Saint John:

Just like a criminal that goes my many aliases...

...so are the neocons who were associated with or supported the Project for a New American Century. They're back, with a spanking new name: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Yes, democracies...like, say, Qatar, which is controlled by an unelected emir. And it's got an associated organization, Defense of Democracies, which is devoted entirely to advocacy of the U.S. government spying on its own citizens in the name of "keeping America safe." The group's mission:

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) is the only nonpartisan policy institute dedicated exclusively to promoting pluralism, defending democratic values, and fighting the ideologies that drive terrorism.
FDD was founded shortly after 9/11 by a group of visionary philanthropists and policymakers to engage in the worldwide war of ideas and to support the defense of democratic societies under assault by terrorism and Militant Islamism.

FDD uniquely combines policy research, democracy training, strategic communications, and investigative journalism. We focus our efforts where opinions are formed and, ultimately, where the war of ideas will be won or lost: in the media, on college campuses, and in the policy community, at home and abroad.

I wonder how they reconcile "democratic values" with authoritarian government spying on its own people.

Its Board of Directors is a who's who of neocon crazies:

Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick (founders)
Louis Freeh, Newt Gingrich, Max Kampelman, Holy Joe Lieberman, and R. James Woolsey, "Distinguished (sic) Advisors."

Check out the rest of them.

Why don't these guys don uniforms, pick up guns, and go defend democracies in a REAL way?

Unbelievable

The "real Floridians" seem to have had quite enough of all them damn New York Jews coming to their state, and so a Florida legislator has decided the state should embrace its heritage. BlueGal has a peek at the proposed "Confederate Heritage" license plate -- and a suggested variation.

(And what's with the Star of David in the lower-right corner, anyway?)

No knockout punches on either side

Well, it was a subdued Hillary Clinton on display in last night's debate, at least as compared to the kind of ranting we've seen out of her in recent days. And we saw an increasingly confident Barack Obama, who seems to have shed the fumfering tentativeness of his early debate performances. But nothing happened that's likely to affect the campaign either way.

Brian Williams asked the intelligent questions, leaving Sweaty Tim Russert to play "Gotcha", as if this were a special weekday edition of Press the Meat. Clinton chose to portray herself once again as a victim of favoritism towards her opponent. Perhaps she is; certainly the existence of Barack Obama as the kind of rock star we arguably haven't seen since the Beatles hit the U.S. in 1964 takes any wind out of the sails of being "the first viable woman candidate." I think she, understandably, figured she'd have the "groundbreaking" territory all to herself. But once faced with perhaps an even more groundbreaking candidate, especially one as charismatic as Obama, she has had no idea what to do. Perhaps there was nothing TO do, especially given the press' animosity towards All Things Clinton. But as Niall Stanage of the New York Observer notes in this post about an interview with Clinton loyalist and former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta:

Mr. Panetta, who served as chief of staff in the White House from July 1994 to January 1997, and who has contributed $2000 to Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, complained that Mr. Penn “is a political pollster from the past.”

”I never considered him someone who would run a national campaign for the presidency,” he said.

He asserted that Mr. Penn “comes from an old school, like Karl Rove—it’s all about dividing people into smaller groups rather than taking the broader approach that was needed.”

Referring to Barack Obama, he said, “I think he really captured early on this deep feeling in the country about needing change in Washington. And people have underestimated how deep that sense was, just how much people felt the need for change.”

Mr. Panetta added that “for the money they brought in” the Clinton campaign “should have done a much better job.”

On the now-deposed campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, Mr. Panetta said, “Solis was someone who was obviously close to the [former] First Lady and had good relations with her, but again she didn’t have the experience that you need.”

[snip]

Aside from his criticisms of specific people at the top of Mrs. Clinton’s team, he also asserted that the campaign in general had neither created an efficient ground operation nor shown tactical wisdom in its deployment of available resources.

“It seems to me like they rolled the dice on Super Tuesday, thinking that would end it,” he said. “And when it didn’t end it, they didn’t have a plan. And when it came to the caucus states, they did have a plan—which was to ignore them. I think those were serious mistakes.”

[snip]

Asked about Mrs. Clinton’s closing statement at the Feb. 21 CNN debate in Austin, Texas, where she spoke of being “absolutely honored” to be sharing the stage with Mr. Obama and expressed concern for the nation’s future, Mr. Panetta said, “I think that was her strongest moment, and I would have recommended taking that kind of approach a long time ago. I think that idea of talking about the country and showing some emotion is much more effective.”

By contrast, Mr. Panetta was unimpressed by the former First Lady’s sharpest attack on Mr. Obama, in which she accused him of plagiarism and, in a mocking reference to his campaign slogan, asserted, “That’s change you can Xerox.”

“There should be much less of those kinds of moments,” he said.

It's difficult to imagine that someone as smart as Hillary Clinton would repeat the same mistakes Democrats have been making in presidential races for decades -- this kind of top-down, large-donor, pay-the-consultants-based-on-what-they-spend model that blows through money at an alarming clip and accomplishes very little. It appears that those running the Clinton campaign were so blinded by the defeat of Howard Dean's grassroots candidacy in 2004 by John Kerry's consultants and hacks that they forgot all about how that model may have gained Kerry the nomination, but didn't get him the White House.

What they didn't factor in was the growth and maturing of the grassroots model over the last four years.

The kids and novices and bloggers of the Dean candidacy are now far more savvy about Washington and the media and the existing horserace infrastructure surrounding this exercise we go through every four years. Since 2004, they've helped to elect Senators and Congresspeople. This winter bloggers have helped topple a corporatist Congressman whom Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer strongly supported, and now Donna Edwards is in all likelihood going to Congress in Maryland's 4th district.

The problem was never with building a war chest fifty bucks at a time and putting a bat up on your web site, it was sheer inexperience. Add to that maturity and experience a candidate to whom young voters relate, one who's intelligent, charismatic, and very much like the very same biracial people prevalent in their circles, and you have a campaign that may have to tap its donors multiple times, but that offers the kind of free foot soldiers that allow you to manage money more effectively. Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson can't BUY viral video like this.

Yes we can, indeed. I've been one of these true believers. I may never be one again because when what you believe in doesn't succeed, you want to take to your bed and never get up again. But you can't buy these true believers to work on your campaign. You can't buy your way into support like this. I'm not going to say you have to earn it; it's like catching lightning in a bottle. But when it happens, if you're the other side, you have to be able to do something other than mock those true believers.

This isn't over, not by a long shot. As Michael Winship notes over at Buzzflash, the Clintonistas are applying the strongarm not just to the superdelegates, but to the elected ones as well:

Even if she's defeated soundly in Ohio and Texas, she's counting on yet another kind of firewall, and therein lays a potential danger that could jeopardize the Democrats' chances at taking back the White House and increasing its majorities in Congress.

The way events continue to evolve, to get the delegates either candidate needs for the nomination, Clinton or Obama must receive the votes of a large number of the party's superdelegates -- 795 men and women who will be at the August convention in Denver not because they were chosen via the primary or caucus system, but because they hold office in government or the Democratic Party.

Clinton strategists see the superdelegates as a final firewall, believing many of the superdelegates -- even some committed to Obama -- are susceptible to persuasion. After all, many of them owe their positions to the largesse of the Bill Clinton presidency. Pressure would be brought to bear.

But cash talks, too. According to a new report from the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, "While it would be unseemly for the candidates to hand out thousands of dollars to primary voters, or to the delegates pledged to represent the will of those voters, elected officials who are superdelegates have received at least $904,200 from Obama and Clinton in the form of campaign contributions over the last three years...

"Obama, who narrowly leads in the count of pledged, 'non-super' delegates, has doled out more than $698,200 to superdelegates from his political action committee or campaign committee since 2005... [Hillary Clinton's] PAC, and campaign committee appear to have distributed $205,500 to superdelegates...

"In cases where superdelegates had received contributions from both Clinton and Obama, all seven elected officials who received more money from Clinton have committed to her. Thirty-four of the 43 superdelegates who received more money from Obama, or 79 percent, are backing him."

Yet many believe that back rooms filled with smoke and dollar-laden powerbrokers won't be a decisive factor. "If you're going to use your best judgment," Congressman and Superdelegate Charles Rangel told the New York Daily News, "you've got to take into consideration what your constituents are saying," and endorse whoever has the most primary and caucus delegates.

Democratic primary voters agree. According to Tuesday's New York Times/CBS News poll, more than half said superdelegates should vote for whoever receives the most votes in the caucuses and primaries.

But superdelegates aren't the only targets. Senator Clinton also is trying to get the party to recognize delegates she won in Florida and Michigan -- even though both states' delegations have been disqualified because their primaries were held early, in violation of party rules. The Democratic National Committee's credentials committee, which will make a ruling, is evenly divided between Clinton and Obama supporters, but as the Washington Times recently reported, "At first blush... [it] looks like it could be in Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's hip pocket. Its three chairmen served in Bill Clinton's administration."

What's more, although the Clinton campaign denies it, according to Politico.com columnist Roger Simon, writing on February 19, "Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign intends to go after delegates whom Barack Obama has already won in the caucuses and primaries if she needs them to win the nomination...

"This time, one candidate may enter the convention leading by just a few pledged delegates, and those delegates may find themselves being promised the sun, moon and stars to switch sides."

Clinton does this at her peril, because you simply Do Not Fuck With True Believers. Most of us who supported Howard Dean made the decision to be good soldiers as we held our noses and voted for John Kerry in 2004, even though we knew he and Dick Gephardt had double-teamed our guy in Iowa. But do you think that those tens of thousands of people in each and every city in which Obama appears are going to be good soldiers and vote for Hillary Clinton if she uses her connections and influence to steal the nomination from a Barack Obama who goes into the convention with more delegates?

It's possible to win the battle and lose the war. And if Hillary Clinton does this, she WILL lose in November, because there's going to be no being a good soldier for someone who thwarts the will of the people like this.

For decades, young voters have been apathetic because they felt their vote didn't matter; that their voice didn't matter. But while Obama's support isn't as completely youth-based as either the media or young voters themselves want to believe, they are the ones who are most involved this time, if only because they're the ones who have the luxury of time. And that's how it should be. But if you nominate a candidate who, fairly or not, represents a generation that was at one time synonymous with change, and that candidate uses hack tactics to gain this nomination, you will show all of these newly-involved voters that the cynics were right -- that it's all bullshit and they have no voice.

Live Debate Chat tonight at Hoffmania

I didn't have time to clean or bake, so instead of hosting debate chat here, we're all going over to Hoffmania's place. Join us there at 9 PM Eastern Time.

Bill Gates Road Show

Is Microsoft's Bill Gates even relevant anymore? He just finished up a 6-university tour where he's still trying to browbeat students into majoring in information technology. It remains to be seen whether his speeches will inspire anyone to change their career field.

The first paragraph of this article from eSchool News was enough to make me puke:

A widespread shortage of information technology (IT) graduates across North America is forcing Microsoft Corp. and other software companies to look to developing countries such as China to meet their needs, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says.

“When we want to hire lots of software engineers, there is a shortage in North America—a pretty significant shortage,” Gates said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We have this tough problem: If you can’t get the engineers, then you have to have those other jobs be [relocated to] where the engineers are.”

Trust Gates to try to blame the American public for causing this "problem". According to Bill Gates and his Strong American Schools and Skills Commission cohorts, we are a nation of drooling idiots who weren't smart enough to keep our jobs during the dot-com bust, and aren't able to handle anything much above simple arithmetic when we graduate from high school. In reality, the only "problem" was the public relations fiasco suffered by Gates and other tech company CEO's when forced to confront the fact that the disappearance of IT workers and graduates was part of an elaborate plan to drastically lower labor costs. If you can downsize an entire generation of IT workers and scare their kids from any sort of technical career fields, it will be easier to contract the work out to lower-paid H-1B or L-1 visa workers, or offshore the jobs to lower cost overseas labor markets altogether. From Gates' point of view, things probably couldn't be better.

Could Bill Gates and others hire older workers who are still roaming our streets since the dot-com bust? Hmmh. It doesn't seem possible. According to David Vaskevitch, Microsoft's Senior Vice-President and Chief Technical Officer,

....younger workers have more energy and are sometimes more creative. But he adds there is a lot they don't know and can't know until they gain experience. So he says his company recruits aggressively for fresh talent on university campuses and for highly experienced engineers from within the industry. One is not at the expense of the other, he insists. For him, it is all about hiring the best and brightest—age and nationality are not important. He acknowledges that the vast majority of Microsoft hires are young, but that is because older workers tend to go into more senior jobs and there are fewer of those positions to begin with.

In other words, Microsoft needs an almost endless supply of college graduates, and needs a black hole to shovel the older workers into when they start demanding pay raises.

Why bother touring the universities and telling kids to major in IT fields? It's probably just an elaborate dog and pony show set up to convince us that Microsoft products should be appearing in every facet of our lives, and we need to be educated to use these products. As long as we keep up with our skills, and as long as he keeps nagging us that we're falling behind if we're not using all of his software, we'll keep buying his products. He can then devote his philanthropic life to destroying public schools and giving millions of dollars to private schools to make sure there are enough children who know enough about Microsoft products to keep his company afloat.

You knew someone was going to do it

Pollcats.

Tough Enough

Barack Obama's response to the Flag Pin Fracas is giving me more confidence that in a quiet way, he's got the goods to fight back against whatever crap is dished out at him:

"A party that presided over a war in which our troops did not get the body armor they needed, or were sending troops over who were untrained because of poor planning, or are not fulfilling the veterans' benefits that these troops need when they come home, or are undermining our Constitution with warrantless wiretaps that are unnecessary?

"That is a debate I am very happy to have. We'll see what the American people think is the true definition of patriotism."

Yeah, baby. Bring it on.

Meanwhile, CNN is still carrying the lunatics' water:

The reporter also noted that the Illinois senator does not wear an American flag lapel pin, has met with former members of the radical anti-Vietnam War group, Weather Underground, and his wife was quoted recently as saying she never felt really proud of the United States until recently.

[snip]

Obama did not respond to the question about the Weather Underground, a group whose members bombed the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon during the 1970s.

Last week, the New York Sun reported that as an Illinois state senator in 2001, Obama accepted a $200 contribution from William Ayers, a founder of the group who was not convicted for the bombings and now works as a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

But the paper said that, in a statement, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, William Burton, said, "Sen. Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence ... But he was an 8-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost 40 years ago is ridiculous."

Exactly. William Kristol's father Irving was a Trotskyite, but I don't see anyone bashing Kristol because his father was a leftist 60 years ago.

So far I'm liking what I'm seeing from Obama on these attacks. He's framing them as ridiculous and desperate while recognize that they DO require a response.

Palace Chinese Restaurant, Sydney

It's funny how every family has its own yum cha traditions. We have our own list of must-have dishes that need to be consumed before there can be any thought of mid-air hand signals calling for the bill.So it's only when I have yum cha with friends that everyone tends to break out a little, various nods around the table bringing a motley of surprise dishes to the

See? Hillary Clinton IS divisive after all

And the campaign of John McCain, who is benefitting from the IOKIYAR rule as it pertains to his ongoing pattern of doing favors for lobbyist, is going to laugh all the way to the White House.

Perhaps the Ted Kennedy/Jimmy Carter primary race of 2000 was similarly nasty, and perhaps this just seems worse because of the undercurrents of sexism and racism running through it, but I don't recall ever seeing this kind of nastiness going on in a Democratic primary race.

Just watching Countdown last night was enough to give me a headache, particularly finding out that the Clinton campaign is behind the release of a photograph of Barack Obama from a few years ago in Somali dress during a visit to that country a few years ago. Mark Karlin had a reminder this morning of the Clinton campaign's strategy of leaking stories to Matt Drudge, so Maggie Williams' protestations that the photograph is not intended to be divisive ring completely hollow.

I keep going back to the friend who asked me whether I thought Obama has enough loyalty to this country to be president and wondering what she, and people like her, make of this photograph when presented without context and without reminder that American dignitaries donning the garb of their overseas hosts is nothing new. Like this one:

Of course the Usual Suspects had the vapors about this too, but it's called "courtesy."

The real point, however, is not what one does when presented with local clothing while on an overseas trip. The point is the depths to which Hillary Clinton and her campaign are willing to sink in order to gain this nomination. I posted just over a week ago about how her tactics are reminding me of Scarlett O'Hara's vow to tear down Tara and sow every acre with salt rather than see Jonas Wilkerson live there. And by joining with our old friend, that Republican water-carrier Nedra Pickler in deciding that the most moronic, xenophobic, and ignorant memes of the right wing constitute legitimate points for debate, she reinforces everything the right has said about her for nearly two decades -- that she is so power mad that she'll destroy the Democratic Party if she has to, in order to gain the presidency.

Today the New York Times tells us more about how Hillary Clinton plans to hand the presidency to her good friend John McCain in the coming weeks:

After denouncing Mr. Obama over the weekend for an anti-Clinton flier about the Nafta trade treaty, and then sarcastically portraying his message of hope Sunday as naïve, Mrs. Clinton delivered a blistering speech on Monday that compared Mr. Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience to that of the candidate George W. Bush.

“We’ve seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech on foreign policy at George Washington University. “We can’t let that happen again.”

[snip]

But the attack that received the most pop, on cable television and blogs, came after a photograph of Mr. Obama in ceremonial African garb appeared on the Drudge Report, and the item’s author, Matt Drudge, claimed that the image was provided by a Clinton staff member.

Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, said that the Clinton campaign had “engaged in the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we’ve seen from either party.” It has not been independently verified that the photograph came from the Clinton campaign.

Mrs. Clinton’s new campaign manager, Maggie Williams, recently appointed to bring a tougher hand to the operation, issued a withering reply, not taking responsibility for the photograph but attacking the Obama campaign for suggesting that the photograph amounted to fear-mongering imagery.

“Enough,” Ms. Williams’s statement began. “If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.”

“This is nothing more than an obvious and transparent attempt to distract from the serious issues confronting our country today and to attempt to create the very divisions they claim to decry,” she added. “We will not be distracted.”

Clinton advisers said the attacks were partly an effort to knock Mr. Obama off balance before the debate on Tuesday.

They also said they were sending a signal to supporters that Mrs. Clinton was still resolutely fighting to win the presidential nomination, despite news reports in recent days about her dispirited campaign operation and her own somber outlook on the race.

To bolster her case at the George Washington speech, Mrs. Clinton stood on stage with a half-dozen retired military officials, including Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who introduced her. “I’m convinced that when the going gets tough, Hillary Clinton will never let America down,” General Clark said.

Mrs. Clinton pointed to her time in the Senate and in the White House as the first lady as evidence that she was the candidate who was most knowledgeable and prepared for the presidency.

I'm sure that to some of the female bloggers who are supporting Hillary Clinton, what I'm writing no doubt makes me a sellout to the memes of the male-dominated political system and the media. And if that's the case, so be it. I respect that someone might think that Hillary Clinton is the best candidate, and also that it might be important to them to have a woman president. Perhaps I have so much 1950's and early 1960's in my background that it doesn't seem as important to me. What I cannot agree with, though, is the rationale used by a caller to Randi Rhodes last week, that because black Americans were given the right to vote before women, they've been subject to less discrimination.

It also may very well be that when I find myself yelling at the television "Stop shrieking at me, dammit!" at her, I'm falling for the branding of Hillary Clinton as "shrill". But the fact of the matter is that this is a woman who hasn't had the kind of vocal training that would allow her to raise her voice without her throat tightening, and the result is that her tirades of the past few days ARE coming across as "unhinged" in a way that a deeper voice wouldn't. And if I, who was there for the early days of feminism, long before young women started blithely voting Republican because "Oh, they'll never make abortion illegal again", see it, so do the voters.

Last week, when Hillary Clinton said how proud she was to be up there next to Barack Obama, it was the kind of moment that could almost have made me support her. It was kind and generous without being one bit weak. When Hillary Clinton presents herself in such a way as to represent the best of what women are, rather than trying to out-guy the guys, she's a much more appealing candidate. It isn't that I find strength unappealing in a woman, it's that female strength just looks different. And what we're seeing out of Hillary Clinton right now isn't even strength, but desperation. It may be no different from the kind of desperation we saw out of Rudy Giuliani in the waning days of his campaign, but when filtered through the electronic box from which most Americans get their news, it looks as if she's about to shatter into a million pieces.

Last night Dee Dee Meyers was on Countdown talking about Hillary Clinton. This is a woman who wrote a book called Why Women Should Rule the World. We've long liked to believe that when women run things, the world is a kinder place. Perhaps in the absence of having to fight things like the glass ceiling, it would be. But as it stands now, Hillary Clinton is resorting to the worst tactics of men to try to gain the office she wants. And if that's what she's doing, then what advantage does a woman in the White House offer at all?

Do I have to start a new blog, "Sweet Jesus I Hate Maureen Dowd"?

MoDo's column yesterday left me too speechless with rage to do much of anything besides wonder if she likes to be beaten to a pulp while wearing a Catholic school uniform. (Oh, wait, that's Michelle Malkin. Sorry.) But still, you have to wonder what kind of psychopathology lumps men into two categories -- bellicose assholes like George W. Bush, or pussies. First she did it with John Edwards, and now she's decided that Barack Obama is just too metrosexual to be president.

I know this is very much like what He Who Must Not Be Named does, but why fuck with perfection? Driftglass says it all:

Like a block of keys stripped from your keyboard, what you are conspicuously absenting from your column stands out in such sharp relief because it is so conspicuously absent from the instrument you are using to create it. From your own emotional lexicon.

Because what Senator Obama appears to be is...a gentleman.

Imagine that? And how spiritually famished you must be, Modo, not to recognize one when he’s standing right there?

Not Slick Willie II. Not Jebus. Not Obambi. None of the tired, cloying, Dowdian archetypes that cobweb you like so much Blanche DuBois-brand Spanish Moss, and not whatever, clever, diminutive you cobble up next week.

Just a gentleman.

Relaxed. Comfortable in his own skin. Articulate. Flawed. Confident. At ease in the company of strong, accomplished women. Courteous, but not one to be shoved around. Casually brilliant, but not frantically “Oh! Oh! Oh! PickMe!PickMe!PickMe!”

And for the record, no, to the extent this gentleman is succeeding it is not because he is running away from “hard-power locker-room tactics to a soft-power sewing circle approach.”

Je-zus, Maureen; do you ever just give your neuroses $20 and send them off to the movies?

Not when there's a schmuck named Bill Keller who's willing to pay her a six-figure salary to play them out in public print she doesn't.

Sometimes the good guys (and gals) do win

Congratulations to Cynthia Wade and Vanessa Roth, who won an Academy Award last night for their short film documentary Freeheld, about Ocean County police officer Laurel Hester's fight to leave her pension to her partner, Stacie Andree:

Sorry, but I ain't buying it

Not when we could have had the real thing:

Clinton is trying to assume the populist mantle of Edwards -- whom she described in December as "screaming," in his critiques of special interests -- with March 4 looming as the decisive day for her candidacy. Four states will vote that day, but Bill Clinton, among others, has said that his wife must win the two largest -- Ohio and Texas -- to continue her campaign.

Her campaign aides say wooing both working-class voters and middle-income people concerned about the economy is crucial, particularly in Ohio.

[snip]

During the campaign, Clinton has often criticized trade agreements and the movement of jobs overseas. Over the weekend, she adopted a far more pointed tone and spent a lot of time emphasizing her populist message, reducing mentions of issues such as balancing the budget that have been standard in her speeches. She spent less time on the intricacies of her health-care plan and her proposal to withdraw troops from Iraq, heeding advice from aides who have urged her to speak in broader terms.

[snip]

Edwards's campaigns in 2004 and 2008 targeted working-class voters, and both Obama and Clinton have adopted some of his language about the plight of low-income voters as they seek to win over the group. In the weeks since Edwards dropped out of the race, Clinton and Obama have enthusiastically courted his endorsement and noted their support for reducing poverty, one of the key planks of his candidacy.

At a debate Thursday night in Austin, Clinton closed with a statement similar to one Edwards often used.

"Whatever happens, we're going to be fine. . . . I just hope that we'll be able to say the same thing about the American people, and that's what this election should be about," she said.

At a Dec. 13 debate, Edwards said: "All of us are going to be just fine, no matter what happens in this election. But what's at stake is whether America is going to be fine."

So someone please tell me why this message is OK when it's coming from Hillary Clinton when it wasn't OK coming from a white guy?

Piss, leg, raining, etc.

That which unites us is far more important than that which divides us

By "us", I'm referring to those of us living in the U.S. and those trying to make ends meet in the oil-rich countries of the Middle East. After 9/11, it became popular (and still is in some circles) to tar all of the peoples of the Fertile Crescent and environs as terrorists. I hope that one of the first orders of business for the next president is going to be to try to heal relations with these people. Because they are getting as screwed over economically by the greed of their leaders as we are by ours:

Even as it enriches Arab rulers, the recent oil-price boom is helping to fuel an extraordinary rise in the cost of food and other basic goods that is squeezing this region’s middle class and setting off strikes, demonstrations and occasional riots from Morocco to the Persian Gulf.

Here in Jordan, the cost of maintaining fuel subsidies amid the surge in prices forced the government to remove almost all the subsidies this month, sending the price of some fuels up 76 percent overnight. In a devastating domino effect, the cost of basic foods like eggs, potatoes and cucumbers doubled or more.

In Saudi Arabia, where inflation had been virtually zero for a decade, it recently reached an official level of 6.5 percent, though unofficial estimates put it much higher. Public protests and boycotts have followed, and 19 prominent clerics posted an unusual statement on the Internet in December warning of a crisis that would cause “theft, cheating, armed robbery and resentment between rich and poor.”

The inflation has many causes, from rising global demand for commodities to the monetary constraints of currencies pegged to the weakening American dollar. But one cause is the skyrocketing price of oil itself, which has quadrupled since 2002. It is helping push many ordinary people toward poverty even as it stimulates a new surge of economic growth in the gulf.

“Now we have to choose: we either eat or stay warm. We can’t do both,” said Abdul Rahman Abdul Raheem, who works at a clothing shop in a mall in Amman and once dreamed of sending his children to private school. “We’re not really middle class anymore; we’re at the poverty level.”

I think some of the very same Americans who have spent the last seven years calling for the entire Middle East to be turned into a sheet of glass would be able to relate.

Just as declining economic conditions here have led to a rise in the kind of evangelical religions that vaguely promise some kind of bliss and prosperity in the afterlife, the decline of the middle class in countries in which Islam is the dominant religion leave the door open for similar radicals to take power, especially if those affected manage to topple the oil sheikhs. There's a huge opportunity for the U.S. here if we are only smart enough to take it.