Senators taking millions from insurance/health care companies

Democratic and Republican senators are taking millions of dollars from insurance and health-care interests and getting lobbied by those donors so they are coming out against a position that 76 percent of Americans agree on, that is a public option.

The history of Obama and the republicans

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is smart, handsome, principled—and no longer a political threat to President Obama in 2012. After going AWOL and admitting to an extramarital affair in Argentina, the now resigned chairman of the Republican Governors Association and oft-mentioned presidential candidate is political toast. But Sanford's pain is Obama's gain.
By my count, Sanford is no less than the 10th horndog whose comeuppance has benefited Obama. This happily married president always seems to get a piece of the action.

Obama first realized the political benefits of sex scandals in 1995 when his congressman on Chicago's South Side, Mel Reynolds, resigned (and went to jail) for having sex with a 16-year-old.

A local state senator, Alice Palmer, left her seat to run for Congress in a special election; Palmer lost to Jesse Jackson Jr. and decided to try to reclaim her seat. But it was too late: Obama challenged her petitions, kept Palmer off the ballot and won election to public office for the first time.

Obama also benefited from the mother of all sex scandals, President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. Had Clinton managed to keep his pants zipped, his vice president, Al Gore, almost certainly would have been elected president in 2000. (A big George W. Bush campaign theme was to "restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office").

If Gore had served two terms, in 2008 the country would have been ready for a different kind of change—the Republicans. No Monica. No Obama.

A footnote to the impeachment drama came when then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had blasted Clinton for Lewinsky, was himself revealed to be in an extramarital affair with a staffer. Just as the House was voting on impeachment, his successor, Bob Livingston, was outed as an adulterer (by Larry Flynt) and forced to resign.

The double whammy undermined the Republican revolution; the new speaker, Denny Hastert, proved a weaker leader than Gingrich and the GOP slowly lost seats. This put control of the House within the reach of Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats in 2006.

Emanuel succeeded that year in retaking the House for many reasons, but the one Republicans pointed to most often was the case of Florida Republican Mark Foley, the GOP representative who tried to seduce underage House pages online. By some accounts, the Foley scandal, which erupted just weeks before the '06 midterms, cost Republicans 12 seats. President Obama now enjoys a comfortable Democratic margin in the House that lets him put a progressive stamp on legislation.

But Obama wouldn't have been elected to the U.S. Senate, much less president, without a few more sex scandals yet. In the 2004 Illinois Democratic Senate primary, Obama badly trailed multimillionaire Blair Hull for months. He and Michelle agreed that if he lost that race, he was out of politics. Then divorce papers revealed that Hull's wife had accused him of physically assaulting her. (Hull said he didn't want to "relitigate" his divorce.)

Obama was already moving in the polls, and he had to fend off other candidates, but after the scandal he surged into the lead and won the primary.

At first the general election pitted Obama against GOP Senate nominee Jack Ryan, a popular banker expected by many to win handily. Until, that is, Ryan's wife, TV actress Jeri Ryan, said her husband pressured her to accompany him to sex clubs and have sex in front of strangers.

Ryan withdrew from the race and Obama cruised to victory against fringe candidate Alan Keyes.

During the 2008 campaign, John Edwards had an affair with Rielle Hunter, a campaign videographer. Edwards dropped out earlier than expected, before Super Tuesday, and his campaign said at the time that money wasn't the reason. Top staffers urged him to quit; according to George Stephanopoulos, they had secretly agreed among themselves to blow up Edwards's campaign rather than let him win the nomination and risk destroying the party's chances in November.

Had Edwards stayed in, he would have siphoned votes from Obama (he took very few from Hillary Clinton) and, in an extremely close race, likely tipped the nomination to Clinton.

Obama won the general election without the help of a sex scandal, but the surprisingly strong Democratic tide (minus the backlash against New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who was caught frequenting prostitutes) was at least partly attributable to disgust with Republican hypocrisy.

There was Sen. David Vitter, whose name was in the little black book of the "D.C. Madam," and Sen. Larry Craig. Craig's arrest for loitering in the men's room of the Minneapolis airport—and his "wide stance" explanation—turned Republicans into laughingstocks.

The embarrassments for the GOP continued: just last week, Nevada Sen. John Ensign, a "family-values" conservative like Vitter, admitted to an affair with a staffer. Vitter has survived politically, and Ensign might, too. But these scandals hardly seem like they will enhance the party's image as it enters into major domestic policy negotiations with Obama.

The Republicans' most promising 2012 nominee would be a smart, fresh face with a reputation for tolerance and a strong connection to the party's conservative base. Despite his problems in South Carolina, which were fueled by his refusal to accept stimulus money, Mark Sanford fits that bill. Or did. Now the party is more likely to go with Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin (or Haley Barbour, a former lobbyist turned Mississippi governor)—or someone easier for the president to beat.

republicans, the party of just NO

A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy says, "There's a certain inevitability to these Cold War analogies. But the president has been right on the money in asserting the need to keep us out of this debate."

Obama has condemned the violence as "unjust" and endorsed the "universal principle" of peaceful protest, an approach informed by a sense that America's troubled place in Iranian history would undermine the demonstrators by coloring their cause as a U.S. interest.

His Cairo speech sought to clear the air -- in Iran's case, by acknowledging the U.S. role in the 1953 coup that toppled the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh.

Translated into Farsi, the speech was delivered to Iranians in real time through a State Department-sponsored text-messaging service.
Obama's advisers say the outreach may have contributed to the defeat in Lebanese elections a few days later of a coalition led by Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed party, that had been predicted to win. In recent days, administration officials have pointed to the Iranian demonstrations as further evidence of Obama's possible influence in the region.

Republicans cannot seem to resist being just the party of NO.

let's get some new Democrats

Whatever may be motivating these Democrats, they don’t seem able to explain their reasons in public.

Thus Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska initially declared that the public option — which, remember, has overwhelming popular support — was a “deal-breaker.” Why? Because he didn’t think private insurers could compete: “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the day.” Um, isn’t the purpose of health care reform to protect American citizens, not insurance companies?

And Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota offers a perfectly circular argument: we can’t have the public option, because if we do, health care reform won’t get the votes of senators like him. “In a 60-vote environment,” he says (implicitly rejecting the idea, embraced by President Obama, of bypassing the filibuster if necessary), “you’ve got to attract some Republicans as well as holding virtually all the Democrats together, and that, they don’t believe, is possible with a pure public option.” Bull!

Yes, the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex and relatively conservative Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating the bipartisan center that used to run America. Give us the health care 72% in the latest poll of the people want and deserve.

Americans want public health option

Two recent news media polls have found public support for a government plan, even if many people are unsure about its implications.

The most recent survey, a New York Times-CBS News poll released Sunday, found that 72 percent supported the idea, including half of those who identified themselves as Republicans.

The polling data backs up our substantive view that to make health care reform work, you need a public option.

republicans wrong AGAIN

President Obama has struck the right tone in his public statements, calling on Iran's government to stop "all violent and unjust actions" and making clear that Washington and the world are watching.

And he is right to avoid becoming more deeply involved in Iran's post-election political crisis, both practically and morally
How many American experts, officials or members of Congress have been to Iran in the past 30 years?

It is Iran's 66 million citizens, not tough rhetoric or token assistance, who will determine how events in the country unfold. Recognizing this, it is not only unproductive but dangerous for the United States to play too visible a role in Iran's domestic disturbances.

The United States encouraged Hungarians in an uprising against their communist leaders in 1956, only to watch as the brave individuals who chose to stand against their regime were killed mercilessly by their own government because they lacked sufficient internal or external support to succeed.

If the American people are not prepared to offer real help to the protesters in Tehran's streets -- up to and including military force to ensure that they win -- it is profoundly immoral to urge Iranians to action from the sidelines.

Those who truly want to see political reform in Iran would do well to stay out of the way. Republicans are on the wrong side of another issue.

the next republican shoe to fall?

Read today: "Let's have a real investigation of the rumors about South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who … has been rumored to be gay for years," Signorile says. "Like Larry Craig, Graham has voted antigay — including for the federal marriage amendment — while people in South Carolina and Washington have discussed what some say is an open secret for a long, long time."

The comments about Graham are not new, but they haven't seen this kind of prominence since Graham's 2002 election to the U.S. Senate. Early in the campaign, state Democratic Party Chair Dick Harpootlian said Graham was "a little too light in the loafers to fill Strom Thurmond's shoes."

He later said he didn't know what "too light in the loafers" meant. Apparently he didn't know what too thick in the head meant either.
The pattern seems to be that you don't come out until befallen in scandal, what with New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey's hiring his honey, Congressman Mark Foley's chasing former pages, and pastor Ted Haggard's paying for "massages" and meth from gay hookers and now republican Senator Ensign.

Considering the state's recent same-sex marriage ban, gay politicians see good reason to stay in the closet, says Truman Smith, president of the South Carolina Log Cabin Republicans.

republicans and racism

Rusty DePass, a South Carolina Republican activist recently "joked" that an escaped zoo gorilla was probably an ancestor of Michelle Obama.

The South Carolina House of Representatives twice tried to pass a resolution expressing regret to the first lady, but they were defeated by the Republican majority.

This tell us volumes about the Republicans who control their party.

words have consequences

In April, a prescient Department of Homeland Security memo predicted that the election of the first African American president and the advent of economic hard times could worsen the threat from "right-wing extremist groups."

In particular, the memo warned of an increase in anti-Semitic activity by extremists who buy into the whole Jewish-banker-secret-cabal paranoid fantasy -- and would blame "the Jews" for engineering the global financial crisis, just as they blame "the Jews" for everything.

The Sean Hannitys, Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the world pretended to be outraged. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele accused the administration of trying "to segment out Americans who dissent from this administration, to segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration, and labeling them as terrorists."

Republicans seem to have decided that telling the truth isn't nearly as important as the high-temperature exercise known as "firing up the base."

The Homeland Security memo made the assessment that "lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent right-wing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States."

There's profit for the pundits, and perhaps personal advantage for some politicians, in calling President Obama a "socialist" and calling Judge Sonia Sotomayor a "racist Latina" and claiming that Democrats want to "take away your guns," but words have consequences.

we are doing something wrong?

read today:
Here are the facts about America's prisons, according to Webb:
The United States, with 5 percent of the world's population, houses nearly 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

As Webb has explained it, "Either we're the most evil people on earth or we're doing something wrong." We incarcerate 756 inmates per 100,000 residents—nearly five times the world average.

Approximately one in every 31 adults in the United States is in prison, in jail or on supervised release. Local, state and federal spending on corrections amounts to about $70 billion per year and has increased 40 percent over the past 20 years.

the Employee Free Choice Act

Most U.S. companies take full advantage of current labor law to try to keep workers from exercising their full rights to organize and collectively bargain under the National Labor Relations Act.

Far from an aberration, such behavior by U.S. companies during union organizing campaigns has become routine, and our nation's labor laws neither protect workers' rights nor provide disincentives for employers to stop disregarding those rights.

In 34 percent of the elections studied, companies fired employees for union activity. In 57 percent of elections, employers threatened to shut down all or part of their facilities, and in 47 percent, employers threatened to cut wages and benefits.
In 63 percent of campaigns, supervisors met with workers one on one and interrogated them about their union activity or whether they or others were supporting the union.

In 54 percent of the elections, supervisors used these one-on-ones to threaten individual workers.

A key aspect of proposed labor law reform, the Employee Free Choice Act, concerns revisions to the rules surrounding arbitration of the first contract. Workers may organize free from the kind of coercion, intimidation and retaliation that so taints the election process in the private sector.