President Obama earlier today announced his proposed "Volcker Rule," which would limit the reckless risk-taking of big banks by barring them from "from owning, investing, or sponsoring hedge fund or private equity funds and from engaging in proprietary trading."
Barack Obama has purchased a half-hour of primetime television on CBS and NBC, sources confirm.
The Obama campaign is producing a nationwide pitch to voters that will air on at least two broadcast networks. The ad will run Wednesday, Oct. 29, at 8 p.m. -- less than a week before the general election.
The direct purchase of such a large block of national airtime right before an election used to be more commonplace before campaigns began to focus their endgame strategies exclusively on battleground states. Such a move is not without precedent in modern presidential politics, however -- Ross Perot did a similar purchase in 1992.
The special is a smart move for the Obama campaign, said Larry Sabato, a political analyst and director of the Center of Politics at the University of Virginia.
"Obama's theme is not just change but unity, so he's appealing to the whole nation rather than a handful of tossup states," Sabato said. "He wants to win the popular vote by a good margin, which will enable him to govern."
And he's got the cash for it.
Few who take any real time to view the modern political landscape and the quality of public information these days would fail to lament it's sad sorry state.
Even after the passage of the McCain/Fiengold Campaign Finance Bill the problem seems worse than ever, more soft-money is flowing and the ability to get un-spun legitimate facts about our candidates and the choices we face becomes more and more difficult.
At the rate we're going it won't be long before Senator John Kerry will be accused of being a pot-head draft dodger, while President George Bush will be hailed as a battle-tested medal carrying war hero who bravely charged into a hail of bullets to save a drowning Vietnamese boy using nothing more than his teeth.
Or we might soon be hearing claims of how Bush has secretly been working in cohoots with the Bin Laden family to ensure that the events of 9/11 would not be impeded by the U.S. Government in exchange for al Qaeda guaranteeing that Bush, as an incumbent President during a War, would be certain to win a second term unlike his father.
Politicians spend a significant portion of the time that they're supposedly working for us raising funds and smoozing donors for their next campaign. Maybe instead of jet-setting from one fundraiser to the next - they might actually be able to sit down and read some of the legislation they're supposed to be voting on?
The "Blue Curtain" suggestion wouldn't eliminate political donations. There would still be paid political advertising by candidates (when the free time is exhausted, or through non-broadcast outlets such as cable), but wouldn't it be nice to put just a little dent in the swirling cesspoll of legalized bribery that currently passes for our political process?
During the furious debate over Health Care which has raged all year - two different arguments have been presented. Those opposed from the right have argued that Health Reform will "Kill Grandma" or lead to Rationing - although all actually evidence and every version of the pending legislation shows the opposite - while those opposed from the left have been arguing that it won't bring down costs and expenses without a public option to compete with private insurance companies.
The reason this impasse has continued is because both arguments are missing the most crucial and essential truth:
Health Reform Will Save Lives.
We need to be prepared to point a cold icy finger at all those who oppose reform and say - "You're Killing Americans"
The rabid cries about "Death Panels" within either the reimbursement for end of life counseling or Rationing via the Medicare Advisory Panel as put forth by the likes of Sarah Palin are bogus.
Despite her blather the CBO says...
Advisory Board proposals "shall not include any recommendation to ration health care ... or otherwise restrict benefits." From Section 3403 of the Senate health care bill,
They're LYING about Death Panels, but the truth is that Health Reform isn't simply an issue of "who pays for it" - it really is a Life or Death issue.
It's not really more complicated than that. Between all the wrangling and sausage making, the bottom line point is that over 40 Million Americans do not have Health Insurance, and that according to the Harvard University Study about 1/10 of 1% of those people - or 45,000 per year - DIE as a result of insufficient or late care.
"The uninsured have a higher risk of death when compared to the privately insured, even after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors, and baseline health," said lead author Andrew Wilper, M.D., who currently teaches at the University of Washington School of Medicine. "We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease — but only if patients can get into our offices and afford their medications."
The study, which analyzed data from national surveys carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), assessed death rates after taking into account education, income, and many other factors, including smoking, drinking, and obesity. It estimated that lack of health insurance causes 44,789 excess deaths annually.
So far only Rep. Alan Grayson has been willing to throw down this guantlet when he said the Republican Health Care Plan was for people without insurance to Die Quickly.
There are plenty of charts and graphs one can throw at this which show that on average the quality of American Health Care ranks somewhere around that of Uzbekistan, while our costs are literally through the roof - taking up over 15% of our national GDP.
We've all heard the stories about long wait times - well I can tell you from direct experience that the when you're uninsured in the U.S. the wait times are pretty damn long too. For example my wife had to wait 18 months after falling down a flight of stairs before getting an MRI of her back. Once they did it they found that the reason for her debilitating pain was that a piece of bone was now pressing against spinal cord threatening to sever it.
A fact which they didn't even bother to tell us until 2 months after the MRI, now 20 months after the accident. And this was a Harbor UCLA Medical Center In Los Angeles, imagine what it's like for people in Kansas.
So the Tea Baggers want to walk around with pictures of the Holocaust and Obama as Hitler?
We need to respond with the fact that We're already having a Holocaust in this Country!
45,000 people a year. That's more than twice the number of Murders that occurs every year in this country. If we saw our friends, family and fellow Americans dying in the streets at that rate, what would be willing to spend to stop it? What did we spend after we lost 4,000 people at 9-11? If health care is delayed until the next congress, that's 90,000 dead. If it's delayed until the next President that's 180,000 dead - nearly as many as are estimated to have just died in the Haiti earthquake.
Anyone who suggested that we should curtail or limit aid to the Haiti because of the cost - while Lives are on the Line - should be shamed right off the planet.
We should have the same attitude about those without Health Care or who are likely to have their claims denied. We should have the same sense of urgency the same sense of dire need because the situation is exactly the same.
But we aren't sending the Marines to aid of American's without Health Care. We aren't sending them food, water, shelter or Doctors without Borders in emergency inflatable Hospitals. We're leaving all those people to DIE alone, out in the cold without a chance at Life.
If they have those pictures we should have pictures of Eric De La Cruz who died after his application to gain access to a "Government Run" health system - aka Medicare - was denied.
Eventually a judge approved Eric's application to Medicare - but because of the delay in the meantime, he DIED.
Or this girl Nataline Saryysian whose Liver transplant was denied by Cigna.
GLENDALE, Calif. - The family of a 17-year-old girl who died hours after her health insurer reversed a decision and said it would pay for a liver transplant plans to sue the company, their attorney said Friday.Nataline Sarkisyan died Thursday at about 6 p.m. at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center. She had been in a vegetative state for weeks, said her mother, Hilda.
Attorney Mark Geragos said he plans to ask the district attorney to press murder or manslaughter charges against Cigna HealthCare in the case. The insurer "maliciously killed her" because it did not want to bear the expense of her transplant and aftercare, Geragos said.
There's you're RATIONING Right there. When i said that "Death Panels" are Real and their called the "Insurance Industry" on Sarah Palin's Facebook Page - She Banned Me.
They don't want to know the truth.
After Nataline died her mother Hilda with support from the California Nurses Association went to Cigna headquarters to confront them on their treatment of her.. where they Laughed and Flipped her the Bird.
Surrounded by supporters, Hilda Sarkisyan marched into Cigna Corp.’s Philadelphia headquarters on a chilly fall day, 10 months after the company refused to pay for a liver transplant for her daughter.
"You guys killed my daughter," the diminutive San Fernando Valley real estate agent declared at the lobby security desk. "I want an apology."
What she got was something quite different.
Cigna employees, looking down into the atrium lobby from a balcony above, began heckling her, she said, with one of them giving her "the finger."
Sarkisyan walked out, stunned and hurt.
"They showed me their true colors," she said. "Shame on them."
This is who these people are, this is who we're fighting with. Greedy Heartless Bastards. it should be a surprise though, as was shown in SiCKO profits and Money is all the Health insurance Industry Cares about.
We need to fix our eye on the prize - and that's Saving Lives. We may honestly disagree about the need for a Public Option Right Now or the pain of paying an Excise Tax, but what we can't lose sight of is all the lives dangling in the balance.
If they have to ram the Senate Bill through Congress (which right now I'd prefer) or use Reconciliation in the Senate to push through bill more like the House's (except we'd have to depend on the Senate Parliamentarian to determine what stays in and what goes) after the defeat of Martha Coakley for Ted Kennedy's seat last night - They NEED TO GET THIS DONE.
Sooner rather than later.
For all the other Eric De La Cruz's and Nataline Sarkisian's out there. For my wife whose looking not very optimistically at the prospect of spinal surgery.
This needs to happen. We can play musical chairs with the money later, but our first priority has to be protecting and preserving the quality of life for Americans.
Otherwise what are are we fighting for - who picks up the check?
Vyan
The television show 24 has become a foreign policy guide for the right wing. Numerous conservative pundits have cited 24 as a sanction for harsh interrogation practices. In September, Laura Ingraham stated, "The average American out there loves the show 24. ... In my mind that’s close to a national referendum that it’s OK to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get."
Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan recently told the 24 producers that he was concerned that the show’s promotion of illegal torture "was having a damaging effect on young troops."
Interrogators didn’t have guidance from the military on what to do because we were told that the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply any more. So our training was obsolete, and we were encouraged to be creative. We turned to television and movies to look for ways of interrogating. I can say that I saw that with myself, also. I would adopt the posture of the television or movie interrogator, thinking that establishing that simple power arrangement, establishing absolute power over the detainee, would force him to break. ...
[We adopted mock] executions and mock electrocution, stress positions, isolation, hypothermia. Threatening to execute family members or rape detainees’ wives and things like that.
“I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”
Another thirty minutes passed. Then, as Hickman and [Army Specialist Christopher] Penvose both recall, Camp Delta suddenly “lit up”—stadium-style flood lights were turned on, and the camp became the scene of frenzied activity, filling with personnel in and out of uniform. Hickman headed to the clinic, which appeared to be the center of activity, to learn the reason for the commotion. He asked a distraught medical corpsman what had happened. She said three dead prisoners had been delivered to the clinic. Hickman recalled her saying that they had died because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised. {Specialist Tony] Davila told me he spoke to Navy guards who said the men had died as the result of having rags stuffed down their throats.
On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr. Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.
The investigators conducted interviews with guards, medics, prisoners, and officers. As the Seton Hall researchers note, however, nothing in the NCIS report suggests that the investigators secured or reviewed the duty roster, the prisoner-transfer book, the pass-on book, the records of phone and radio communications, or footage from the camera that continuously monitored activity in the hallways, all of which could have helped them authoritatively re-construct the events of that evening.
When I asked Talal Al-Zahrani what he thought had happened to his son, he was direct. “They snatched my seventeen-year-old son for a bounty payment,” he said. “They took him to Guantánamo and held him prisoner for five years. They tortured him. Then they killed him and returned him to me in a box, cut up.”
Al-Zahrani was a brigadier general in the Saudi police. He dismissed the Pentagon’s claims, as well as the investigation that supported them. Yasser, he said, was a young man who loved to play soccer and didn’t care for politics. The Pentagon claimed that Yasser’s frontline battle experience came from his having been a cook in a Taliban camp. Al-Zahrani said that this was preposterous: “A cook? Yasser couldn’t even make a sandwich!”
“the gist of Sergeant Hickman’s information could not be confirmed.”
Hood massacre report gutless and shameful
The report is so politically correct that its authors don't even realize the extent of their political correctness -- they're body-and-soul creatures of the PC culture that murdered 12 soldiers and one Army civilian.
Unquestionably, the officers who let Hasan slide, despite his well-known wackiness and hatred of America, bear plenty of blame. But this disgraceful pretense of a report never asks why they didn't stop Hasan's career in its tracks.
The answer is straightforward: Hasan's superiors feared -- correctly -- that any attempt to call attention to his radicalism or to prevent his promotion would backfire on them, destroying their careers, not his.
Hasan was a protected-species minority. Under the PC tyranny of today's armed services, no non-minority officer was going to take him on.
The major, a 39-year-old US-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, was scrutinised by an FBI-led joint terrorism task force because of a series of e-mails between December 2008 and early 2009 with Mr al-Awlaki.
US officials said the content of the e-mail messages did not advocate or threaten violence, and was consistent with Maj Hasan's research for his job as an army psychiatrist, part of which involved post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from US combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Starting in the spring of 2008, key officials from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences held a series of meetings and conversations, in part about Maj. Nidal Hasan, the man accused of killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others last week during a shooting spree at Fort Hood. One of the questions they pondered: Was Hasan psychotic?
"Put it this way," says one official familiar with the conversations that took place. "Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole."
Hasan had been a trouble spot on officials' radar since he started training at Walter Reed, six years earlier. Several officials confirm that supervisors had repeatedly given him poor evaluations and warned him that he was doing substandard work.
Both fellow students and faculty were deeply troubled by Hasan's behavior — which they variously called disconnected, aloof, paranoid, belligerent, and schizoid. The officials say he antagonized some students and faculty by espousing what they perceived to be extremist Islamic views. His supervisors at Walter Reed had even reprimanded him for telling at least one patient that "Islam can save your soul."
America's highest ranking military officer said Tuesday the nation must do more for the mental health of American soldiers, warning statistics show "there are going to be more [troop] suicides this year than last."
Officials say 64 soldiers have committed or are suspected of having committed suicide this year in the Army alone. That puts it on a grim pace to break last year's record of 133.
The issue came to a head last week as Fort Campbell in Kentucky stood down for a three-day suicide prevention event after 11 soldiers there committed suicide this year.
Suicides aren't the only result of stress on military personnel. The Army charged Sgt. John Russell with the murder of five fellow soldiers at a stress clinic in Baghdad's Camp Liberty last month. Russell's commander had referred him to counseling because of concern for his mental health.
Sgt. John M Russel, the U.S. soldier who shot and killed five fellow GIs in a shooting rampage at Camp Liberty, a military base in Baghdad, May 11, 2009 has been formally charged with murder.
The motive for the killing spree is unclear but it is believed Sgt. Russel had been undergoing stress therapy at the Camp Liberty Combat Stress Control Center where the killings occurred. The fragging incident, as the deliberate killing of military allies is called, is becoming increasingly common in Iraq. The Camp Liberty incident is the 6th such fragging incident in the past 4 years.
FORT BRAGG, N.C. (Army News Service, March 25, 2009) -- Sgt. William J. Kreutzer Jr. was sentenced Tuesday to life imprisonment after being found guilty again of murder and attempted murder in the 1995 shooting spree of 19 Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division.
Kreutzer, 38, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996 for the crime which killed one officer and wounded 18 other Soldiers; but in March 2004, a three-judge panel set aside his sentence on appeal.
Hannity: You say (Death Panels) still exist in the Bill?Palin: I do because it's a commission, it's a bureaucracy who will ration care if the Bill goes through. It's modeled, in essence, on a British system that does have people to decide, based on your quality of life, your age, if you deserve health care coverage or not
Senate bill: Advisory Board proposals "shall not include any recommendation to ration health care ... or otherwise restrict benefits." From Section 3403 of the Senate health care bill,
"Independent Medicare Advisory Board":
The legislation also would establish an Independent Payment Advisory Board, which would be required, under certain circumstances, to recommend changes to the Medicare program to limit the rate of growth in that program's spending. Those recommendations would go into effect automatically unless blocked by subsequent legislative action. Such recommendations would be required if the Chief Actuary for the Medicare program projected that the program's spending per beneficiary [in fiscal years 2015-2019] would grow more rapidly than a measure of inflation (the average of the growth rates of the consumer price index for medical services and the overall index for all urban consumers). The provision would place a number of limitations on the actions available to the board, including a prohibition against modifying eligibility or benefits, so its recommendations probably would focus on:
* Reductions in subsidies for non-Medicare benefits offered by MedicareAdvantage plans; and
* Changes to payment rates or methodologies for services furnished in the fee-for-servicesector by providers other than hospitals, physicians, hospices, andsuppliers of durable medical equipment that is offered through competitive bidding.
If you've been paying any attention to the debate on President Obama's healthcare reform on the other side of the Atlantic, you'll know what I mean. Personally, it only came across my radar once American right wingers started mocking the NHS.
Watching these debates is like reading National Geographic. It's just impossible, from a European perspective, to understand what these people are on about. Their political views seem as backwards and removed from the world we live in as a shaman casting magic spells.
The angry opponents of Obama's reforms would do well to actually have a debate, rather than spew out foolish lies. The death panel accusation is not politics. It is just a lie. That's all it is. It has no place in political discourse. It's not even worthy of childhood discourse. It should be considered outside of acceptable debate, like racism or physical violence. That right-wing pundits and insurance companies are free to promote this nonsense is a damning indictment on the entire system. Personally, I'd be fairly indifferent, and wouldn't deign to comment on another country's way of doing things, were it not for the fact that they're now telling lies about the NHS, and that is intolerable.
The Bush administration -- in which Liz Cheney's papa held a fairly high position, you might recall -- prosecuted, after 9-11, 828 people on terrorism charges in civilian courts. At the time of publication of this excellent report from the Center on Law and Security, NYU School of Law last year, trials were still pending against 235 of those folks. That leaves 593 resolved indictments, of which 523 were convicted of some crime, for a conviction rate of 88%.
With regard to military tribunals, the Bush administration inaugurated 20 such cases. So far just three convictions have been won. The highest-profile is the conviction of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver. The Hamdan legal saga, rehearsed here, doesn't exactly suggest that military tribunals provide swifter and surer and tougher justice. In the end, he was convicted all right, but sentenced -- not by a bunch of New York City Democrats, but by a military jury! -- to five and half years.
Then, the tribunal judge, a US Navy captain, gave Hamdan credit for time served, which was five years. So he served six months after conviction. Today he's back in -- guess where? -- Yemen.
Guiliiani: They only talked to him for 30 Hours? My question is why would you ever stop it? In the Military they wouldn't have a time limit to talk to him.
"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case" for prosecution. [...]
WASHINGTON -- The testimony of a key witness at a Senate hearing Wednesday raised serious questions about the truthfulness of former President George W. Bush's own personal defense of the CIA's brutal interrogation program. Former FBI agent Ali Soufan also indicated that the harsh interrogation techniques may actually have hindered the collection of intelligence, causing a high-value prisoner to stop cooperating.
In the first congressional hearing on torture since the release of Bush administration memos that provided the legal justification for torture, Soufan told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the CIA's abusive techniques were "ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaida." According to Soufan, his own nonviolent interrogation of an al-Qaida suspect was quickly yielding valuable, actionable intelligence -- until the CIA intervened.
“[Reid] was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,’ as he said privately.”
Yeah, this is pretty rich.
Here’s a guy who promised to woo African American voters with fried chicken, refused to criticize Glenn Beck for saying that the president was a “white culture”-hating racist, and who just a few days ago dropped the Native American equivalent of “nigger” on national teevee.
And when it was pointed out to him by a fellow Republican that “injun” isn’t kosher, Steele told him to “get a life.”
Steele is an assclown who should stick to what he does best: busting out early ’90s hip hop slang in an effort to sound cool while generally making a mockery of the Republican Party.
The argument that Black people are so pavlovian as to simply vote for Obama's skin tone happens to be just as racist as the accusation that New Hampshire voters were so racist that they simply lied to the pollsters.
Now we have a huge brujah over whether or not a Clinton aide has dropped the "Shuck and Jive" bomb on Obama. People pUH_leeze, that term is so ancient that Black people tossed it out with their platform stacks and bellbottoms. It's so 1977 - it's irrelevant.
But let me tell you - in the opinion of just one black man to the rest of the world - Barack Obama is not the epitome of the "Black Candidate" or "Black Savior" to me simply because - frankly - Barack Obama isn't really all that "Black."
"Yeah, the guy from the L.A. paper
Said he makes guilty whites feel good
They’ll vote for him, and not for me
'Cause he's not from the hood.[4]
"In 2002, Democrats expressed outrage at Senator Lott and called on him to step down as leader. That same standard should be applied to Senator Reid and his embarrassing and racially insensitive statements; statements, I would add, that Senator Reid still has yet to clarify," Cornyn said in a written statement.
"As we await his explanation, Senator Reid should do the right thing, follow the example that he himself set in 2002, and step down as majority leader."
On the roundtable, George Will defended Reid against charges of racism and provoked this spirited exchange with fellow conservative Liz Cheney:
WILL: I don't think there's a scintilla of racism in what Harry Reid said. At long last, Harry Reid has said something that no one can disagree with, and he gets in trouble for it.
CHENEY: George, give me a break. I mean, talking about the color of the president's skin...
WILL: Did he get it wrong?
CHENEY: ... and the candidate's...
WILL: Did he say anything false?
CHENEY: ... it's -- these are clearly racist comments, George.
WILL: Oh, my, no.
Cheney also said the episode highlights a liberal double standard on issues of race. “One of the things that makes the American people frustrated is when they see time and time again liberals excusing racism from other liberals. And I think that, you know, clearly, Senator Reid's comments were outrageous.”
