I've been writing for weeks that the House needs to step up and improve the Senate health care bill in conference. They are co-equal branches and when a bill is to be merged, there are usually compromises made. Sen. Conrad screamed out on FNS and said that if the House tinkers with their precious bill, it won't pass.

CONRAD: It is very clear that the bill, the final bill, to pass in the United States Senate is going to be -- have to be very close to the bill that has been negotiated here. Otherwise you will not get 60 votes in the United States Senate.

My sources on the Hill have told me that Nancy Pelosi doesn't have the votes from progressives to pass the Senate bill as it stands. I know the White House doesn't want to play hardball now, but we do. What will Lieberman say if they do make changes to strengthen the bill? Will he be the man that killed health care reform to Americans?

mcjoan had an article posted yesterday that said the progressives appeared to be caving.

It's beginning to look like the House is going to cave into Lieberman and Nelson, too. TPMDC And co-chair of the Progressive Caucus Raul Grijalva seals it.

In the interview, Grijalva confirmed that House Dems were beginning to discuss the idea of revising the Senate bill in conference to move up the implementation date for insurance coverage and make it more in line with the earlier date in the House bill. I asked Grijalva if he could support the bill if such a change were made, even if it lacked a public option or other similar concessions sought by liberals. "It would sweeten it somewhat," Grijalva said, "if they speed up the coverage mechanism."

He added: "That would be something I’d have to look at very closely."

Asked if he was suggesting that he’s open to supporting such an outcome, Grijalva answered in the affirmative, but insisted that he would have to evaluate the changes in conference before making any decision. He said House liberals would continue to push for a public component and a repeal of the anti-trust exemption for insurance companies. And he demanded that conference negotiations not merely "rubber stamp" the Senate Bill.

Moving up implementation dates would help, and that appears to be a House leadership might use as a "key arguing point" in the upcoming conference.

But today a new Politico piece paints somewhat different picture: House Dems: We won't roll over

House Democrats insisted Tuesday they have no plans to roll over for the Senate in upcoming negotiations on a health reform bill, even as they acknowledged it would be all but impossible to reinsert a public insurance option or force the so-called millionaire's tax on the Senate.

Either move would disrupt Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s no-margin-for-error 60-vote majority. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team seem to have their sights set on lower-profile - but no-less important differences, like boosting affordability credits in the final bill and starting the insurance exchange a year earlier, which they did in the House.

Members will return the next week, and aides said they would still like to pass a bill by the State of the Union at the end of January or the beginning of February. But leadership staff in the House said that that doesn't mean they're prepared to just accept the Senate bill. {..}

"We want to move a bill by the State of the Union, but we want to do it because we're ready, not because we have to," an aide said.
Here are a few key points that can be fixed in conference, but please add your own...read on

Again, I've been writing that the House needs to stand up and be counted and they seem to be listening to our calls not to roll over for the Senate. I've contacted several members of the House for comment and will get back to you soon on that.

There's plenty of info on-line that explains what's wrong with the Senate bill, but here's a few key points. Add to the list in the comments.

* National exchange (rather than state exchanges)
* Public option
* Repeal anti-trust exemption
* Wealthy surtax, rather than middle-class insurance tax
* Better affordability provisions in House bill, including level of subsidies and Medicaid to 150% poverty.
* Repeal Stupak language.

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Glenn Beck hosted one of his hourlong sessions before a studio audience talking about the role of heroes in American life. The consensus, both by Beck and his panelists, was that Americans no longer look up to their historic heroes the way they should. Instead, as Beck suggested, we have "Mao Tse Tung hanging in our White House."

Say again? Oh yeah -- the Obama administration is riddled with radical Marxist revolutionaries. Right. Tell that to progressives right now. Moron.

Anyway, Beck apparently draws the line when it comes to the possibility, heaven forfend, Obama might be regarded as a hero:

Beck: I'm a big visual guy. And if you look at the way Barack Obama was imaged -- he was, as a savior. He was, as a -- you look at it now, anybody notice -- you watch the newspaper, and you watch the photos of him coming out of the White House, almost always, they'll have a shot of him with the seal of the President -- you notice that? And it almost looks like a halo. They'll take a shot from the side, and he's standing there, and it looks like a Russian icon!

He's talking about the photos of the president that have been shot for some time now whenever there's a press appearance at the White House. And it didn't start with Obama:

Indeed, if we're suddenly all worried about presidents being made out to be heroes, you have to wonder where Beck was when W. strutted out to his "Mission Accomplished" photo-op:

Now that's what I call an action hero.

Fortunately, Obama has spared us any codpiece appearances.

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Chris Matthews and his panel name Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, the birthers and their ilk and white tribalism as the plague of 2009. The right wingers will of course take this as proof that Matthews is part of that 'librul' media and complain about the tingle up his leg while forgetting about Mitten's chin and Grandpa Fred's Aqua Velva.

MATTHEWS: Welcome back. And more of our look back at this year. Next category, we're calling it a "Plague on All Our Houses." First, swine flu – now, that was a big, big deal this year. The birthers, another kind of plague, the people who pushed the idea that Barack Obama was not born in America. Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and their ilk -– the nutty talk went off the rails this past summer. Here is Beck:

GLENN BECK: This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture. I don't know what it is.

BECK: This guy is, I believe, a racist.

MATTHEWS: And our last plague, those reality TV wannabes. The balloon family and those White House gate crashers. Howard, another rich list. By the way, Glenn Beck, white people. What's that supposed to mean?

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, it's hard not to name him the "Plague of the Year." And not for ideological reasons. Because I think the name calling, the shameless name calling, and stirring up of the worst in our society is something that should be condemned. It was a year ago, almost a year ago, that we were all out there on the mall, when Barack Obama was sworn in as President, one of the great moments in American history, no matter what your politics are, no matter who you are, where you come from, and to sort of drag all that through the mud I think is a plague.

MATTHEWS: Yes, bring back tribalism.

FINEMAN: Yeah, exactly.

KATTY KAY: I would say the birthers, and I think because it's insidious...

MATTHEWS: Same deal, by the way.

KAY: I think it’s a similar deal, and with the birthers, it's getting at this idea that Americans somehow don't like anything that's foreign, that anything that's foreign is suspicious. And there's no evidence of this. And the way that people like Sarah Palin have said this is an issue without actually coming out straight and saying I think he wasn't born in America. There’s a very mean-spiritedness about the birthers, I find, worrying about...

MATTHEWS: I think it’s tribalism, white tribalism.

NORAH O’DONNELL: It is, and it's an effort to delegitimize the President in some way, to offer an ad hominem attack in many ways...

KAY: Without even straight-up attacking.

O’DONNELL: ...suggesting he’s not credible, he’s not American. And it’s sort of a way to – it’s racist in many ways to do it.

MATTHEWS: John, you've got a book coming out, a big one, coming out very early this year, right at the new year time. And you’re going to be on here to talk about it. Was this something that was simmering, this sort of tribalistic resentment of Barack Obama being what he is?

JOHN HEILEMANN: Yeah, it’s funny, you know, people forget that this happened at the end of general election in 2008 where John McCain and Sarah Palin were out at their rallies and you started to see, when she started to talk about how he was palling around with terrorists, you started to see the early incipient kind of signs of what became the birther movement, where you’d have people standing up calling him a socialist, calling him a communist...

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

HEILEMANN: ...calling him an Arab. You know, that stuff was out there, and you only saw it at the very, very end. And by that point, Obama was so far ahead that people kind of ignored it. But it was there and they activated it.

MATTHEWS: And did you hear that Palin was saying that later on, more recently, she wished they’d done more of that Reverend Wright stuff, more of that ethnic stuff, that racial stuff? She wanted to push that.

HEILEMANN: She was very unhappy about going after Reverend Wright.

MATTHEWS: To John McCain’s lasting credit he refused to play the racial card, which is always easy to play in this country, as we’ve seen.

Sting - If I Ever Lose My Faith In You

Some would say I was a lost man in a lost world
You could say I lost my faith in the people on TV
You could say I'd lost my belief in our politicians
They all seemed like game show hosts to me

If I ever lose my faith in you
There'd be nothing left for me to do

This has been a really dispiriting time for many of us...and the likening of politicians and the bobbleheads to game show hosts is an apt one. Trying to sell us on merchandise by wildly over-inflating its value, even though in reality, it's not something we really wanted in the first place. But they keep telling us how great it is and how lucky we are for having won it. And boy, the White House really is going to play the game show host thing this morning, with adviser David Axelrod on three different shows. He'll be on with Howard Dean on Meet the Press (they've also has made the inspired booking of DailyKos' Markos Moulitsas and Joe Scarborough for the round table), which should make for some interesting fireworks. State of the Union will host some divergent views: NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, McCain Musketeer Lindsay Graham and Andy Stern of the SEIU. And once again, if it's Sunday, it's time for John McCain. Palin's favorite candidate will be on Fox News Sunday, no doubt to clutch pearls over the lack of comity due to that upstart Al Franken, ignoring his own similar unkindness. Consistency and integrity, thy name is never Republican.

ABC's "This Week" - White House senior adviser David Axelrod; Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, Mary Landrieu, D-La., Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Axelrod; Howard Dean, former national Democratic Party chairman.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Katty Kay, Howard Fineman, John Heilemann, Norah O'Donnell. Topics: Annual Holiday Highlights Show! Greatest Hits and Worst Moves of 2009! The Chutzpah Prize, Cad of the Year, and Who Surprised Us On the Upside?

CNN's "State of the Union" - Axelrod; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R-Calif.; Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - The former scientific brain of Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold, offers a new approach to solving global warming. Plus, Vali Nasr, advisor to the Obama administration, discusses a new way to fight Islamic terrorism - with capitalism.

CNN's "Amanpour" - Sir Harold Evans and Tina Brown

"Fox News Sunday" - Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.

So, what's catching your eye this morning?

That beautiful, sunny, smiling face belongs to Jessica Bucher, a twelve year old middle school student in Northern California.

At a time when most parents are worried about their twelve year old's grades, or first forays with the opposite sex, or cell phone usage, Jessica's parents have a much more urgent goal: keeping Jessica alive and pain-free.

Jessica Bucher was diagnosed with a rare disease that is almost always fatal: juvenile onset Sandhoff Disease. Thankfully, Jessica has responded well to an experimental umbillical cord stem cell treatment, but not without saddling her parents with astronomic health care bills. Those bills are now threatening their home to foreclosure. It's every parent's Faustian nightmare: save your child and lose your home or save your home and watch your child die. Jessica's classmates have opted to run regular fundraisers to help offset these medical costs because we as a country offer no such safety net to the Buchers.

Likewise, Brian Holben of Chester, Virginia, has a similar dilemma and thankfully, a community willing to step in where the government won't:

Improve Your Game, a Richmond-based youth fitness and conditioning organization, will raise money for the Holben family with the first IYG Kid’s Fitness Challenge, which will be held Dec. 12 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the Sports Center of Richmond.

Brian Holben, who lives in Chester with his wife, Sheila, and their three sons, Zachary, Tanner and Nash, was diagnosed with a brain tumor during the summer. Two of the family’s sons play on baseball teams sponsored by IYG, which also offers fitness training for kids, said Charlene Frostick, who owns IYG with her husband, Joe.

Brian Holben is responding well to treatment, but his recovery will be a long process and medical bills, which are not all covered by the family’s insurance, will continue to mount, she said.

The stories grow exponentially. PleaseCutTheCrap, from whom I read about Jessica and Brian, also mentions an uninsured Kansas teen who needs a heart transplant. Or the attorney I spoke to last month, afraid to go to the doctors to confirm the diabetes diagnosis he suspects, because he's sure he'll be dropped from his insurance, like one of his colleagues. At this point, he admits he's controlling it with diet and careful monitoring of his glucose levels, but for how long will that work?

This is America. The "shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere", but we can't offer our citizens something that every single other industrialized nation does: health care. And why? Because Holy Joe would rather Jessica and Brian and the others die than give any little bit to the Democratic Party.

And even more obscenely, the White House and the Senate leadership are okay with that, willing to capitulate to the resident tantrum thrower for the sake of passing a bill, no matter how it actually affects Americans.

What can Holy Joe say to the Buchers? How can Harry Reid and Rahm Emanuel face the Holbens? How can they justify mandates to that attorney when the insurance companies get all the benefits and little restrictions?

Joe Lieberman thinks nothing of damning Jessica Bucher and her parents to the hell of that existence of choosing between pain now or pain later. Worse, the Democratic leadership in both the White House and the Senate is letting him get away with it.

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December 13, 2009 ABC Oprah's White House Christmas

Via ThinkProgress. The question of the day is, is Orrin Hatch a liar - or simply demented? And if he's demented, should he stay in the Senate? (Obviously, if he's a mere partisan liar, he fits right in.)

Last night, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) delivered an hour-long speech on the Senate floor condemning the Democratic health care reform bill and accusing Democrats of displaying “the arrogance of power” in trying to pass health reform before the holiday recess. Hatch predicted that if Republicans had 60 votes and control of all three branches of government, they would “get this country under control”:

This will become one more example of the arrogance of power being exerted since the Democrats secured a 60-vote majority in the United States Senate and took over the House and the White House. I dream some day of having the Republicans have 60 votes. I’ll tell you one thing, I think we would finally have the total responsibility to get this country under control and I believe we would. But we never come close to that. There are essentially no checks and balances found in Washington today just an arrogance of power with one party ramming through unpopular and devastating proposals on after the other.

Senator Hatch, are you smoking crack? The Republican Party not only had control of the country, y'all got it in exactly the sad state it's in today. Remember the tax cuts for the wealthy that ballooned the deficit? Remember Medicare Part B, which did the same for Medicare?

Remember the weapons of mass destruction, the reason we "had" to invade Iraq?

Under Republican control, we had deregulation, stagnant wages and massive increases in the number of Americans without health insurance.

Maybe it's time you walk over to that medical clinic they have in the Capitol building and ask them to evaluate your memory. Because seriously, either you're losing it ... or you're just another shameless Republican liar.

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David Gergen and Anderson Cooper actually had the nerve to compare the White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers not appearing before Congress to Harriet Miers and Karl Rove ignoring Congressional subpoenas. It's bad enough that the press has spent as much time as they have on this overblown story, but to compare the White House not wanting to give Republicans another scalp in the form of Desiree Rogers--who Gergen admits was not the one responsible for the President's safety--to Karl Rove and Harriet Miers refusing to testify in the U.S. Attorney scandal is utterly ridiculous.

If the press had spent half the time they did on the party crashers story asking why Rove and Miers didn't show up to testify, or on the U.S. Attorney scandal at all, maybe the public would be more aware of how Republicans have been stealing elections, how they used the Department of Justice as a political arm of the Republican Party, and how they filled the D.O.J. with partisan hacks like Monica Goodling.

Transcript via CNN.

COOPER: Let's dig deeper with senior political analyst and former presidential adviser David Gergen. David testified before Congress during the Whitewater investigation, when he was a member of President Clinton's staff.

So, the White House is saying, all right, separation of powers, that's why she can't testify. Do you buy that?

DAVID GERGEN: Not really.

COOPER: That is usually used for extremely serious things, not a social secretary.

GERGEN: Yes, not really, Anderson. But let me say a couple of things, preliminarily. I think people ought to get off her back, personally, on a couple of counts. First of all, the one thing this White House has done well is, they have had a ton of people come through that White House, children and various people from poor neighborhoods. And she's been right at the center of that.

Continue reading »

From The Daily Show:

Aasif Mandvi, Jason Jones and Edward R. Brokaw-Amanpour weigh in on a couple that crashed a state dinner at the White House.

It's like deja vu all over again. Despite the fact that we know the causes of deficits are more important than the actual deficits, despite the fact that most top economists are calling for more economic stimulus and jobs programs, the New York Times has raised the anti-deficit banner in much the same way they did the "weapons of mass destruction" rationale for invading Iraq. (And look how well that all turned out!) This, of course, from the same paper who looked away while Bush trashed the economy.

And now our anti-deficit president's going to do another symbolic tour - in Allentown, of all places. Too, too ironic!

WASHINGTON — As Democrats renew their push to create jobs, they are at odds over the timing, cost and scope of additional measures, with the White House’s concern about high budget deficits pitted against the eagerness of many in Congress to spur hiring before next year’s elections.

After months in which his focus has been on a health care overhaul and foreign policy issues, President Obama will pivot later this week to the economy, convening a White House forum on Thursday to discuss ideas for job creation and then traveling to Allentown, Pa., for his first stop on a “Main Street Tour.”

Congressional Democrats return from a holiday break intent on packaging new proposals for tax incentives and construction projects to promote employment, with the House, where every member is up for re-election next year, on a much faster track than the Senate or the White House.

While the political rationale for additional government action is clear, it is an open question whether it would have any substantial economic effect. Still, the impetus for the activity will be underscored on Friday when the government releases figures for job losses and the unemployment rate for November.

With joblessness, which stood at 10.2 percent in October, likely to remain high through 2010 even as the economy recovers, the stage is set for what could be a yearlong tussle between deficit reduction and government incentives for job creation, and between the politics of Wall Street and Main Street.

An "open question" on whether it would have "any substantial economic effect"? Gee, you'd think a New York Times reporter would read Paul Krugman at least once in a while.

From Paul Hinrichs at The Aristocrats:

Hey! - Let's all stick corncobs up our butts and march around the White House, stiff-legged, butt stuck way up in the air, white as can be, with signs that say "9/13 - yo' mama!" and "Where is Reagan's Death Certificate?" We'll call ourselves the "cornholers" and we're gonna take back America from the Russians who crossed the Bering Straits while Palin was out signing books.

Open thread below... And happy birthday to our Video Cafe maven, Heather!

Ornery Bastard: Hundreds, if not thousands of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the Obama administration to curb K Street's influence in Washington.

The Satirical Political Report: White House party crashers were Dick and Liz Cheney in disguise

Brad DeLong: Dubai: Why, yes, our collateral in underwater. Why do you ask?

American Street: Despair Not!

Bernard Avishai: The real meaning of 'The Freeze'

Dennis Perrin: Children of the Grave

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November 25, 2009 CNN

A couple of aspiring reality-TV stars from Northern Virginia appear to have crashed the White House’s state dinner Tuesday night, penetrating layers of security with no invitation to mingle with the likes of Vice President Biden and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Tareq and Michaele Salahi — polo-playing socialites known for a bitter family feud over a Fauquier County winery and their possible roles in the forthcoming “The Real Housewives of Washington” — were seen arriving at the White House and later posted on Facebook photos of themselves with VIPs at the elite gathering.

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Watching President Obama make the traditional Thanksgiving Day turkey pardon today, I couldn't help thinking ... what if?

What if the wingnuts' wildest fantasies come true, and they ride back into the White House on the wave of right-wing populism now sweeping them? What would this day look like then?

And then I realized, of course, that we already had the answer.

So I made a little mashup fantasy of the view from Planet Wingnuttia. Enjoy. And Happy Thanksgiving.

ShortsandPants: Quote of the Day. Blue Gal explains how these lying hypocrites can make such outlandish claims with a straight face.

Invictus: Purge at the White House on torture and detainee policies?

Capital Eye: Watchdog groups detail political contributions in ways never before documented

Kevin Drum: The New Obstruction

Facing South: Health Bill Hypocrisy? *Republicans* led the push for Louisiana funding that wound up in the Senate bill

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Yoo still here?....'Beat Reporters'...Another reason TIME sux...More sources of B.S. gone...Nationalist narcissism...Murdoch & Microsoft....Pathological-Liar...The news about the internet...A new horizon for the news...Comedy Gold...Were these accidents?...NYT's notion of "pragmatism"...Feckless media...STFU... Modern Media...Less talk, more war...CNN will keep his seat warm...More Fox/wingnut bullsh*t...Inside the Dean Dome