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Video: Senate Passes Health-Care Reform Bill, 60-39
Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet on December 24, 2009 at 7:00 AM.

Some day, I hope to pen a report on a congressional vote that does not begin with the words, "On a straight party-line vote..." Alas, today will not be the day (although, for a moment, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., appeared to have joined his Republican colleagues in voting against the bill).

At around 7:00 a.m., the Senate passed its version of health-care reform legislation, a feat many months in the making. So exhausted was Reid, who has been working vitually around the clock over the last seven days, that he initially voted "no" on his legislation when his name was called by the clerk, but he instantly righted -- or shall we say, lefted -- himself to vote "yes."

MORE TO COME - VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP

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Gay GOP Group Co-Sponsors Conservative Political Conference, But Not Allowed to Speak at It
Posted by Matt Corley, Think Progress on December 24, 2009 at 3:00 AM.

Earlier this month, conservative gay rights group GOProud announced that it would be a co-sponsor of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). But the group’s inclusion as a co-sponsor has led to a backlash from the anti-gay right, some of whom are threatening to boycott CPAC if GOProud’s sponsorship isn’t removed. CPAC director Lisa De Pasquale told Hot Air last week that she was “satisfied” that GOProud “do not represent a ‘radical leftist agenda’ and thus “should not be rejected as a CPAC cosponsor.” But David Keene, the head of CPAC’s main organizing group, tried to calm the potential boycott by using a different tactic. In an e-mail to a right-wing radio host, Keene promised that GOProud would not have a speaking spot and that gay rights issues would not be “open to debate”:

In his e-mail response, Keene admitted GOProud “has signed on as a CPAC co-sponsor, but will have no speakers and we told them that, in fact, since opposition to gay marriage, etc are consensus positions (if not unanimous) among conservatives, these topics are not open to debate.” [...]

“I know that there are those who are as opposed to the sinner as the sin, but our view is that CPAC is inclusive and welcomes all of those who agree with us on most issues. I don’t know the GOProud people personally, but we find it difficult to exclude groups because of disagreements on one or two issues no matter how important many of us believe those issues to be … other examples: we have pro-life and pro-abortion co-sponsors, advocates of restrictive and more open immigration, supporters and opponents of the war in Afghanistan and supporters and opponents of some of the restrictions adopted in the war on terror since 9/11,” he continued.

“Some of these issues draw significant support on both sides of the question from the broad movement and these we often debate at CPAC … trade policy, immigration are example … while others like abortion are consensus positions and while we accept those who differ from the consensus, we see no reason for further debate. Gay issues fall within this category,” he said.

Polls Are In: People Really Do Hate Joe Lieberman
Posted by BarbinMD, Daily Kos on December 23, 2009 at 7:00 PM.

The Award for Nonexcellance in Climate Journalism Goes To ...
Posted by Dr. Joseph Romm, Climate Progress on December 23, 2009 at 4:48 PM.

Okay, I think it’s pretty obvious to regular Climate Progress readers who the winner is.  Indeed, I was originally going to ask readers to vote on the winner from the top 10 list below — but it’d be like asking readers to vote for which major sports figure fell from grace farthest this year.  As always, though, I welcome your thoughts on the “winners” and any omissions.

I do a lot of media criticism, so I thought I would end the year with an award for the major media outlet and/or reporter who has moved furthest from journalistic excellence.  Next year I might name the award after this year’s winner, but for now, it’ll be named after Citizen Kane’s “Declaration of Principles,” which publisher Charles Foster Kane idealistically enunciated early on in the film classic, but later on “Without reading it, Kane tears it up, throws it into the wastebasket at his side.”  And no, I’m not including any of the “new media” in the list because none of them has even one-tenth the impact of any of the major media outlets on this list nor do most of them claim to be journalists.

And yes the entire media deserves a dishonorable mention for its generally poor coverage of climate science, politics, and economics this year:

• The clean energy revolution will not be televised, Part 2: Kathleen Hall Jamieson lambastes MSM for under-reporting climate bill
• U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm
• CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story — never mention climate change

Skipping the musical number I had prepared for the awards ceremony, let’s dive straight into the top ten list:

10.  Nicholas Dawidoff, the author of the NYT magazine cover profile on Freeman Dyson — not just because the piece was deeply flawed (the media does bad profiles all the time) but because the author apparently didn’t care:

• Media stunner: When asked “Does it matter, from a journalistic point of view, whether [Freeman Dyson is] right or whether he’s wrong?” his NYT profiler replies “Oh, absolutely not.”

9.  Fox News — just because they are dreadful on every subject doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be on this list:

• Fox News on EPA endangerment finding: “Some skeptics say regulating carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, may be a difficult task, especially since people emit carbon dioxide with every breath”
• Glenn Beck proves he’s a brainless frog, warning (?) “Barack Obama has galvanized the country…. He’s forced us to think!”
• Fox News blurts out its agenda: “Now that Jones has resigned, we need to follow through…. First, stop cap-and-trade, which could send these groups trillions,” and then put “the whole corrupt ‘green jobs’ concept outside the bounds of the political mainstream.”

8.  NYT’s John Tierney — the main reason he isn’t higher is that I’m not certain many people take him very seriously and his output level in print is on the low side (the second bullet below is actually from 12/26/08):

• John Tierney makes up stuff — does the New York Times employ several know/do-nothing fact checkers
• John Tierney IS the country’s worst science writer, not Gregg Easterbrook

7.  David Broder — uninterested in the gravest problem of our time (except, that is, when he writes nonsense about it), and more interested in quick decisions, than right ones:

• David Broder is the sultan of the status quo, stenographer of those centrists who are fatally uninformed about global warming
• Status-quo-media stunner: David Broder urges Obama to make a decision on Afghanistan right now, “whether or not it is right.”

6.  Rush Limbaugh — a buffoon, yes, but his remarks in this case are far beyond the pale even for his brand of extremism:

• Limbaugh to NY Times environment reporter Revkin: “Why don’t you just go kill yourself?”
• Limbaugh rejects an apology for Revkin

5.  Newsweek — they win a special award for the single worst story of the year, and make the top 5 here because it turns out they’ve been selling access to the subjects of that story:

• Newsweek gets duped by Big Oil — for real — in worst Big Media story of the year
• Media stunner: Newsweek partners with oil lobby to raise ad cash, host energy and climate events with lawmakers — while publishing the uber-greenwashing story, “Big Oil Goes Green for Real”

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In (Very Reluctant) "Defense" of the Insurance Mandate
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 23, 2009 at 3:00 PM.

I have no interest in defending the mandate that individuals buy an insurance policy. I think it's self-evident that coercing people to shell out their hard-earned cash to Big Insurance is a distinctly sucky thing.

So I won't.

I do, however, want people to take a deep breath, and at least have a serious discussion of the policy without all the hand-wringing and hyperbole that have been flying around of late.

I used to labor under the naive delusion that liberals tended to be rationalists -- sometimes too nerdy in their reliance on factual arguments -- and conservatives were the ones who appealed to our basest emotions, our fears. Thankfully, the health-care debate's set me straight on this.

Over at FireDogLake, they have a petition to kill the Senate bill. It has one of those list of ten reasons for doing so. The first:

Forces you to pay up to 8% of your income to private insurance corporations - whether you want to or not

When I read that, I had to think hard about what it is they were talking about -- there's certainly nothing in any bill I've read that says you have to pay 8 percent of your income to the insurance companies whether you want to or not.

It turns out to be some Death-Panel quality spin. What are they actually talking about? The Senate bill requires everyone to have insurance, or pay a penalty. But, if the cost of getting insured exceeded 8 percent of your income, then the fine would be waived.

The maximum penalty is 2 percent of adjusted income, which is probably around 1.4 percent or so of the average person's gross pay. That money would not go to "private insurance corporations," but would in fact defray the costs of the uninsured on our public health system.

Or consider the following from David Sirota's column in USA Today:

Worst of all, it doesn't actually extend "new coverage" to 30 million more Americans. Through the "individual mandate," it simply makes people criminals if they don't buy expensive insurance from the private corporations that helped create the health care crisis in the first place.

Again, I'm not defending the mandate so much as calling David out for pushing the idea that people who didn't buy insurance would be "criminals" -- that kind of rhetoric could appear in Townhall or The National Review or some wing-nut blog.  Obama's Gestapo will put you in a FEMA camp if you don't carry health insurance!

The big problem as I see it is that lot of people are discussing this policy in isolation, free of context. And I think the most important bit of context is this: we're not discussing a mandate alone -- it comes with subsidies that make coverage much, much more affordable for working people. Consider some numbers for the Senate bill -- again, much weaker than the House's -- that my colleague Daniela Perdomo brought to my attention the other day:

(click for larger version)

So we're mandating that people carry coverage while decreasing the costs of that coverage by up to 90 percent for the working poor, and 20 percent for a family making $85K.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we can't forbid insurers from denying coverage based on previous conditions -- something that absolutely everyone (except for the insurers themselves) believes is necessary without mandating that people carry insurance. If we did, no healthy person would have a policy -- why would you pay premiums if you could just buy a policy once you become ill?

Another piece of context that I think is missing is this:  right now, if your family's covered through an employer and you pay taxes, you are already paying approximately $1,000 dollars each and every year for the uninsured.

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3 Reasons Why Progressives Are So Frustrated
Posted by Chris Bowers, Open Left on December 23, 2009 at 2:32 PM.

If I may be so bold, I believe I can sum up, in three main points why progressives are so frustrated right now:

1. They are on the short-end of a left-progressive vs. Third Way ideological divide with the leadership of the American center-left coalition;
2. In attempts to not be on the short-end of #1, and persuade the coalition rank and file to join them, they face a massive organizational deficit against the coalition leadership;
3. Finally, if progressives look to split with the coalition in response to #1 and #2, more often than not they just end up getting squashed for it.
    

Full explanation on the flip side. 

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Commander Changes Tune, Says He Won't Court-Martial, Jail Pregnant Soldiers
Posted by Amanda Terkel, Think Progress on December 23, 2009 at 12:47 PM.

This week, news outlets reported on a controversial new policy that threatens women soldiers on active duty who become pregnant — and the men who impregnate them — with jailtime. Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo issued the new rule, which took effect on Nov. 4, “because he said he was losing too many women with critical skills” and needed the threat of jail and a court martial as an “extra deterrent.”

Since the news of the directive came out, Cucolo has faced strong criticism from women’s rights advocates. The National Organization for Women (NOW) called it “ridiculous.” Four women Democratic U.S. senators — Barbara Boxer (CA), Barbara Mikulski (MD), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), and Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) — wrote a letter to Cucolo urging him to rescind the policy, saying they could “think of no greater deterrent to women contemplating a military career than the image of a pregnant woman being severely punished simply for conceiving a child.”

Yesterday, Cucolo clarified the directive, saying he has no plans to court-martial pregnant women:

While violation of any of the rules in “General Order Number 1″ could lead to court-martial, Cucolo said he never intended such a drastic punishment for pregnancy.

“I believe that I can handle violations of this aspect with lesser degrees of punishment,” Cucolo told reporters. “I have not ever considered court-martial for this. I do not ever see myself putting a soldier in jail for this.”

The general said he alone would decide on each case based on the individual circumstances.

So far, there have been “eight cases of women getting pregnant while deployed under his command. Four were given letters of reprimand that were put in their local files, which means they would not end up in their permanent files and they would not be a factor in being considered for promotions. The four other women found out they were pregnant soon after they deployed; because they were not impregnated while deployed, no disciplinary action was taken.”

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A Senate Health Care Bill By Christmas?
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, The Media Consortium on December 23, 2009 at 11:29 AM.

Early Monday morning, the senate voted 60-40 along straight party lines to defeat the initial attempt to filibuster the health care reform bill. Yesterday, it passed the second of three procedural votes, bringing the Senate one step closer to a final vote on the health care reform bill. Majority Speaker Harry Reid (D-NV) is on schedule to vote on the bill before Christmas.

In the last-minute negotiations leading up to these votes, Reid made stiff concessions to conservative Democrats, eliminating the public option and the expanded Medicare buy-in to placate Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT). Sen. Ben Nelson (R-NE) got tougher restrictions on abortion funding, though not as tough as those spelled out in the Stupak amendment to the House bill.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a socialist who caucuses with the Democrats, has apparently given up his threat to filibuster a bill with no public option. Instead, he's taking his turn as "the 60 vote," reports Katrina Vanden Huevel in The Nation. Sanders is using his leverage to push for waivers which would allow states to develop their own health insurance systems, possibly including single payer. Canada's celebrated Medicare program began in a single province and eventually went national.

In AlterNet, Zaid Jilani argues that President Barack Obama failed his progressive base by all but abandoning the public option. As Jilani points out, Obama is even trying to rewrite his own record on the issue. Now he says he didn't campaign on a public option. Jilani reminds us that the Obama-Biden campaign platform promised that "any American will have the opportunity to enroll in [a] new public plan.” Obama was promising a sweeping public option. Even the House bill would only make a tiny fraction of the population eligible for the public option.

It's not surprising that the health care bills before us favor vested interests in the health insurance sector. Health care companies spent $635 million on lobbying over the past two years, and 166 former congressional aides who used to work on health care legislation have registered as lobbyists, reports Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!.

Rachel Larris reports in RH Reality Check that many pro-choice groups will not back the final bill if it contains Sen. Nelson's abortion funding restrictions. Elsewhere on the Hill, the 190-member House Pro-Choice Caucus is huddling with attorneys and insurance companies to plan their next move.

The Senate bill seems destined to pass. Then the negotiations to merge the House and Senate bills will begin. The House bill has a public option and draconian abortion funding restrictions. The Senate bill has no public options and slightly milder restrictions on abortion. Realistically, the conservative Democrats have most of the leverage at this point. If even one joins the filibuster, the final bill will die. Sen. Nelson has already threatened to filibuster the conference report if substantial changes are made to the bill in conference.

At the end of the day, health care reform seems likely to eliminate discrimination based on preexisting conditions, offer subsidies for the purchase of private insurance, and set up some insurance exchanges that might bring down costs some day. These are real gains, but have been won at the cost of subsidizing the insurance companies who caused the problem the first place and leaving women's rights by the wayside.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter.

Palin's 'Lie of the Year' Was Not a Misunderstanding
Posted by Matt Gertz, Media Matters for America on December 23, 2009 at 8:43 AM.

Video: New Ad Takes Obama to Task for Ditching Public Option
Posted by AlterNet Staff, AlterNet on December 23, 2009 at 7:13 AM.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is running this ad in Washington, D.C., and in Wisconsin, home of Sen. Russ Feingold. The purpose of the Wisconsin buy is to exert pressure on Feingold to push for improvements in the final health-care bill.

VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP

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What Does College Football Have to Do With Abortion? Tons, According to Anti-Choice Wingnuts
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, RH Reality Check on December 23, 2009 at 6:31 AM.

The University of Notre Dame has a long history of worshipping the sport of football, complete with jokes about their "Touchdown Jesus."  As the university that still can claim the most famous football coach in college football history, Notre Dame (ND) still takes the sport very seriously decades after the fact.  They’re the only college football team with its own television contract, to have its home games televised exclusively by NBC.  The only problem with all of this is that the Fighting Irish haven’t really been that great a team in a long time.  And that’s why it was such a wise decision for them to hire Cincinnati football coach Brian Kelly, who turned his unremarkable team into a formidable power, and is believed, with good reason, to be able to do even more with the recruiting abilities of Notre Dame.

This new hire is a big deal in college sports.  No wonder the anti-choicers decided they had to have a part of it; Touchdown Jesus forbids that anything important happen that’s not "All About Them."  Hijacking health care reform isn’t enough, it turns out.  Now the Fetus People have to take on college football.

The hook is that Notre Dame is a Catholic university and Kelly is pro-choice.  Apparently, this is suddenly a contradiction, though the sports world has mainly expressed confusion over why this is an issue.  Hard to blame sports writers who ask the obvious question, which is, “What does abortion have to do with football?”

To ask the question is to miss the point, as anyone who has dealt with the Fetus People can attest.  They haven’t met many issues they can’t make about abortion.  It’s an all-purpose stand-in for everything that right wing reactionaries wish to attack---witness, for instance, Chuck Norris implying that giving people more access to general health care is the same thing as aborting the Baby Jesus.  If mammograms and blood pressure medication are the same thing as abortion, then surely hiring a pro-choice football coach is abortion.

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Disney's "The Princess and the Frog" Actually Contains a Powerful Message About Post-Katrina New Orleans
Posted by Melissa Harris-Lacewell, TheNation.com on December 23, 2009 at 5:15 AM.

Disney's The Princess and the Frog opened last week. It showcased Disney's first African American princess, prompted significant merchandise sales, and provoked racial and feminist criticism.

As the mother of a 7-year-old daughter, I knew I'd have to see the film. I went to the theater prepared to deconstruct troubling racial images, which Disney has a history of producing, and distorted notions of womanhood, which Disney makes its fortune creating. But I was mostly delighted by the music, characters, and plot. I found neither race nor gender the driving concerns of this animated film.

I read The Princess and the Frog as a forceful and insightful allegory about the restoration of New Orleans.

Like many children's stories, this one is a morality tale. Parents read to our kids not only to encourage their literacy, but also to impart lessons about our shared cultural and social values: kindness, honesty, courage, thrift, hard work, normative heterosexual relationships that result in lifelong, happy, state-sanctioned marriage. The basics.

This particular morality tale conveys lessons about the city where it is set: New Orleans.

The Princess is Tiana. She grows up in a shotgun house, in a tight-knit, black community, the child of laboring parents. Together they dream of owning a restaurant. Tiana works night and day toward this goal.

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How Obama Pushed Hard For a Public Option, Then Bailed When It Mattered Most
Posted by Zaid Jilani, Think Progress on December 22, 2009 at 4:45 PM.

In recent days, there has been an uproar in the progressive community over the Senate’s decision to drop the public option from its health care bill in order to reach the crucial 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. Given that many liberals backed a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system, the public option was seen as a political compromise.

“I didn’t campaign on the public option,” President Obama told the Washington Post. But he touted the public option on his campaign website and spoke frequently in support of it during the first year of his presidency, citing its essential value in holding the private insurance industry accountable and providing competition:

– In the 2008 Obama-Biden health care plan on the campaign’s website, candidate Obama promised that “any American will have the opportunity to enroll in [a] new public plan.” [2008]

– During a speech at the American Medical Association, President Obama told thousands of doctors that one of the plans included in the new health insurance exchanges “needs to be a public option that will give people a broader range of choices and inject competition into the health care market.” [6/15/09]

– While speaking to the nation during his weekly address, the President said that “any plan” he signs “must include…a public option.” [7/17/09]

– During a conference call with progressive bloggers, the President said he continues “to believe that a robust public option would be the best way to go.” [7/20/09]

– Obama told NBC’s David Gregory that a public option “should be a part of this [health care bill],” while rebuking claims that the plan was “dead.” [9/20/09]

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We Have a Winner! Sarah Palin's "Death Panel" Fallacy Named "Lie of the Year"
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 22, 2009 at 3:30 PM.

THE POOR WOMAN CAN'T HELP HERSELF.... Just yesterday, Politifact's independent fact-checking feature announced its "Lie of the Year." It was a fairly obvious choice, but nevertheless well deserved -- the ignoble award went to former half-term Gov. Sarah Palin (R).

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care," Palin wrote over the summer, in her award-winning missive.

It was one of the stupidest things ever written by anyone on any subject. It also cemented Palin's reputation as a crazy person with an acute allergy to the truth.

Just one day after her deranged "death panel" nonsense was named the "Lie of the Year," Palin decided to raise the specter of her insane accusation all over again.

"NOW w/the Prez "threatening" &Congress "rushing" is when we MUST pay more attention than ever 2what this HealthCare Takeover is all about," Palin wrote in one tweet. "[M]erged bill may b unrecognizable from what assumed was a done deal:R death panels back in?"

To translate this into English, the former half-term governor believes President Obama is "threatening" someone -- she wasn't clear on who -- while lawmakers are "rushing." Given that the health care reform debate lasted nearly as long as Palin's entire tenure as governor, it's hard to believe the process really has been "rushed."

Nevertheless, she believes it's important that "we" carefully scrutinize what the "takeover is all about." Who, exactly, is taking over what is, alas, still unclear.

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Thanks to Dems' Pussyfooting, Health Industry Stocks Shoot Skyward
Posted by Byard Duncan, AlterNet on December 22, 2009 at 2:15 PM.

Americans should now officially view the health care industry (and Democrats pandering to it) the same way someone who was just robbed looks at his neighbor’s brand new fur coat and sports car. The evidence has been there since day one, but rarely has it seemed so ostentatious, so nakedly boastful. Via HuffPo:

• Coventry Health Care, Inc. is up 31.6 percent;

• CIGNA Corp. is up 29.1 percent;

• Aetna Inc. is up 27.1 percent;

• WellPoint, Inc. is up 26.6 percent;

• UnitedHealth Group Inc. is up 20.5 percent;

• And Humana Inc. is up 13.6 percent.

These numbers represent the period between Oct. 27 (the day Joe Lieberman initially said he would filibuster any Senate health care measure that included a public option) and last Friday. Notice any trends?

During this same period, the Dow has only gone up 2.3 percent; and the NASDAQ has only crept up a measly 1.4 percent. This seems to rule out even the tiniest possibility that the health industry bump is microcosmic of broader economic robustness. Rather, it’s more like vulture capitalism at its most despicable.

Matt Taibbi had a good take on the larger political implications of Senate health care failures earlier in the week:

…This individual mandate that's going to force people to become customers of private health insurance companies, the Democrats are going to end up owning that policy and it's going to be extremely unpopular and it's going to be theirs for a generation. It's going to be an albatross around the neck of this party.

…

The Democrats are in exactly the same position that the Republicans were in once the Iraq War turned bad. All the Republicans have to do now is sit back and watch the Democrats make a disaster out of this health care effort. And they're going to gain political capital whether they're in the right or not. And I think it's a very- it's a terrible thing for the party.

And on how Obama got it wrong:

I mean, that's what George Bush did when he wanted to get something unpopular passed or something that was iffy. I mean, he just took, you know, if there were any recalcitrant members, he just took him in the back room and beat him with a rubber hose until they changed their minds. I mean, he could've taken Joe Lieberman back there and said, look, if Connecticut ever wants a dime of highway money again, you're going to have to play ball on this thing. That's what the president does. I mean, the president has an enormous amount of power. The leaders, the majority leaders have an enormous amount of power. And if they want to pass something, they can do it. And especially when there's a tremendous public mandate to get something like this passed. I just- the idea that they couldn't do this was- is a fallacy.

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