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House Voting Now On The Rule For Health Care
Debate

post from Firedoglake on 07 November 2009 01:24:55 PM. © Firedoglake

The House of Representatives is voting on the rule right now. It's expected to pass. The rule includes two amendments: the Republican substitute health care bill, and the "Stupak Amendment," which would effectively ban private insurers and the public[...]

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re-debate/

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Saturday Morning Diary Rescue

post from MyDD on 07 November 2009 01:22:08 PM. © MyDD

Enjoy. The Tide is Turning in the Fight to Close Guantanamo. (Sharon Kelley) John Garamendi in CA-10: Sworn in and Looking forward to Voting on Health Care Reform. Tuesday's election was about governing, not politics writes John Russonello. UNITE[...]

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Unemployed and underemployed hits 17.5%

post from AMERICAblog News| A great nation deserves the truth on 07 November 2009 01:20:00 PM. © AMERICAblog News| A great nation deserves the truth

It's probably the worst jobs market since the Great Depression. The Obama administration continues to buy into the Geithner/Summers/Wall Street view of the world which puts Wall Street above everyone else at the expense of everyone else. Americans are generous people who grudgingly accepted the bailout to prevent an even worse economic failure but enough is enough. The greed and the acceptance of that greed - regardless of words - by the White House is wearing thin as Americans wait for the upside to the bailout. All pain and no gain can only be tolerated for so long. Meanwhile the 17.5% and their friends and family look at the outrageous bonuses that are being lined up and wonder how it can be possible.

In all, more than one out of every six workers ? 17.5 percent ? were unemployed or underemployed in October. The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent, in December 1982.

This includes the officially unemployed, who have looked for work in the last four weeks. It also includes discouraged workers, who have looked in the past year, as well as millions of part-time workers who want to be working full time.

The official jobless rate ? 10.2 percent in October, up from 9.8 percent in September ? remains lower than the early 1980s peak of 10.8 percent.

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loyed-hits-175.html

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Rep. Barney Frank Present at Marijuana Bust

post from TalkLeft on 07 November 2009 01:16:00 PM. © TalkLeft

Fox News Boston reports Rep. Barney Frank was present at the home of James Ready, his long-time companion, when it was raided for marijuana. Rep. Frank did not live at the house:

According to a police report, police charged Ready with marijuana possession, cultivation and use of drug paraphernalia in August of 2007. Ready admitted to civil possession and paid a fine. The remaining charges were dismissed in 2008. Sources tell FOX25 that when Frank was questioned he told police that he did not live in the house and that he only smoked cigars.

Here's Barney, in his own words, explaining. [More...]

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Weekly Presidential Address - 11/07/2009

post from To Move a Nation on 07 November 2009 01:07:00 PM. © To Move a Nation

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HCR House Debate: The Stupak Amendment

post from Daily Kos on 07 November 2009 01:02:03 PM. © Daily Kos

Where are we on the abortion standoff? Still fighting, from all reports. Politico reports that leadership has twisted arms in the vast majority of the caucus which is pro-choice, and Stupak won't be the poison pill.

Asked whether her allies in the pro-choice movement would support the bill with the language offered yesterday by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered a one-word answer: "Yes."

"I don't believe any of us believe we can hold up what we've been fighting for ... and that's health care," said Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.).

But the lawmakers said they would work hard to whip the Stupak amendment in hopes of keeping it out of the final bill, and several said they weren't ready to declare how they would vote if Stupak's language made it in.

"We're nor conceding that," Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said "pro-choice members are not happy this morning."

We're with you, Diana. Keep whipping and keep fighting against this amendment, and force the handful of anti-choice Dems to make the tough decision over whether they will be willing to blow up the bill. One member says that if their bluff is called, they'll fold:

Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) told the Huffington Post he felt confident that a compromise reached last night -- to allow a vote of Rep. Bart Stupak's (D-Mich.) amendment, which would make it harder for insurers to provide abortion -- would placate lawmakers on the fence, regardless of whether the amendment passed.

"Will that be sufficient?" Honda asked. "I didn't hear anybody say 'Yeah, that would be sufficient. But I think there is a sense that it would (satisfy these folks)."

So we need to help our pro-choice allies in the House call their bluff by helping to defeat the Stupak amendment. All of the Republicans are going to vote for Stupak. That's the company Stupak and his buddies keep.

Slinkerwink has the action list, the members to target and the toll-free numbers to use to call. They're repeated below the fold, just to make the point that you need to call. You can use this great tool from HCAN.

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-Stupak-Amendment

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Great Wide Open Thread

post from Docudharma - Front Page on 07 November 2009 01:00:32 PM. © Docudharma - Front Page

[...]

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The GOP Objects To 40 Democratic Women Inserting
Their Remarks Into The Record.

video details and more

video courtesy of Media Matters

Those uppity females in Congress. Who do they think they are, trying to participate in our democracy on one of the biggest bills in front of Congress?

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), one of the GOP's minions, continues the Joe Wilsonification of Congress to prevent discussion over Stupak's amendment, one that may actually lead to effectively a ban on abortion for low income women:

?The real goal of abortion opponents isn't to maintain the status quo. It's to extend federal prohibitions into private pocketbooks. By restricting coverage offered through the exchange, they hope to make abortion coverage so unattractive that insurers eventually stop offering it in the market for individual and small-group policies.?

And they don't even want us to discuss it. Those white men of the GOP don't want women to insert their remarks into the record.

How dare they? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Party of No:

video details and more

UPDATE: from Think Progress: GOP Gone Wild!

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http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/gop-objects-40-democratic-women-inser

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Too cheap for HDTV A multi-region DVD player lets
you watch Michael Palin for a song and thank gawd he's not Sarah P

A view from Sarah Palin's porch? No, it's a satellite image of Big Diomede and Little Diomede islands in the Bering Strait between the easternmost tip of Asia (Siberian Russia) and the westernmost tip of North America (Alaska).
"I know I'm here for only a very short time, but I hope I'll learn something."
-- Michael Palin, to Sokun, the abbot of the Zen Buddhist temple of Buttsuji in southern Japan, in episode 2 of Full Circle, the "good" Palin's 1995-96 filmed journey counterclockwise around the Pacific Rim

by Ken

Full Circle actually begins in Alaska, on the U.S. island of Little Diomede, in the Bering Strait, opposite the uninhabited Russian island of Big Diomede, the famous closest point between our two countries. On the evidence of the scenes shot on Little Diomede, and then in Nome, and on the still-very-Russian Kodiak Island, I get the distinct impression that Michael Palin knows more about Alaska than the Other Palin (no relation, as he has been at pains to point out).

Having just watched this episode for the first time in many years, I was reminded that a subliminal connection between the Palins has been operative in my brain since the Unfortunate Palin came to my attention.

As a longtime geography buff -- it's one of the things that Howie and I have always had in common, though it's led him to do all sorts of actual traveling and me not so much -- I of course knew the names and geographical significance of the two Diomedes. I never expected to see them, though, or even to come as close to seeing them as I now have in Full Circle. I not only doubt that Princess Sarah has come this close, but doubt that she has the slightest interesting in doing so. It was, I think, her very lack of interest in anything outside the orbit of her sequestered brain, that led her to make such a grotesque hash of the actual physical relationship between Alaska and Russia. She barely knows where Alaska is, and probably can't imagine why anyone would even want to know where, uh, that other place is.

The word I'm circling around is "curiosity," and of course it's one of the defining characteristics of Michael Palin's travels. His curiosity may not be exactly infinite, but it's quite large enough to encompass any people and places his travels take him to. I'm quite sure, for example, that at least as of the time of his visit to Little Diomede and Nome, he knew more about the people who would one day be Governor Palin's constituents than she ever did.

Michael Palin is also the most congenial of traveling companions (it's hard to imagine anyone enjoying the company of Princess Sarah except desexed men who enjoy the fantasy that she might at some point jump their desiccated bones), and one of the funnier. In the second episode of Full Circle, as he makes his labyrinthine way, suitcase in tow, to his meeting with the abbot of the temple of Buttsuji, he notes the effect on his awareness of how much he's traveling with, reflecting, "By the time I climb yet another flight of stairs, I'm ready to renounce all worldly goods, beginning with my suitcase."

Of all Palin's TV journeys, Full Circle is the one that, until now, I had seen most of. Now, however, I've just knocked off his Around the World in 80 Days and Pole to Pole (a trip intended to take him from the North Pole to the South Pole along the 30th-degree east longitude meridian, before a couple of rather large detours, one large and the other massive). After years of coveting, I've now got my very own copy of The Michael Palin Collection, which brings together, in addition to the three titles already mentioned, a pair of Great Railway Journeys, Hemingway Adventure, Sahara, and Himalaya. The more recent New Europe I bought separately.

What set me to coveting the Palin travel set, beyond how much I'd liked the parts I'd seen and how much I hadn't seen, was the existence of this set, at an incredibly modest price -- in the U.K. Back when I started scouting this stuff, most of the Palin travel films weren't even available in the U.S. The problem with buying them from the U.K., of course, is that they're in PAL and have incompatible regional coding.

I see now that the Palin Collection is actually available in the U.S., for something like $225. Back in the day, who knows? I might have paid it. In fact, I paid about $70, and about another $17 for New Europe. What I did was, finally, after years of coveting, to buy one of those increasing number of DVD players that play all TV systems and all regional codes.

You can get them incredibly cheap, but with electronic equipment I'm often almost as afraid to pay too little as too much -- there's an awful lot of crap being sold. In the end, I was pleasantly surprised to find a model as tempting as my new Pioneer DV610AV-S, which even plays SACDs, for $100 including shipping. (Just to be clear, this is a model that's not intended for the U.S. market, and is presumably not warranted by Pioneer. But I trusted that the vendor would back up the merchandise, and in fact it has worked perfectly out of the box.)
Naturally, once I committed to ordering the multi-region DVD player, I had to have something to play on it, which in my mind amounted to an "all systems go" for placing a whopping order with Amazon.co.uk -- starting, of course, with the Michael Palin Collection. But there was a ton of other stuff that either isn't available here or is available there at a fraction of the U.S. price.

Like the complete Inspector Morse mysteries, with a price differential, as I recall, similar to that of the Palin set. And there were the great Le Carré Smiley miniseries, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People. Tinker Tailor was actually the first thing I watched. (I own bootleg VHS dubs of both series in a PAL-to-NTSC conversion so appalling as to be unwatchable -- but I watched them, a bunch of times.) And there were a couple of BBC Dickens minseries, and the original Brideshead Revisited, the British Queer As Folk, and the remake of The Forsyte Saga (I'm still scouting U.S. vs. U.K. editions of the original series), and the complete Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister (which I've got on VHS, but do I watch? and it was so cheap!).

I've already got a shopping basket (in the U.K. it's a "basket" rather than a "cart") brimful of more goodies: seasons 1-3 of the Inspector Lewis mysteries, a tribute to the Two Fat Ladies, the complete Kavanagh Q.C. and Hustle and The Office (which I like much less than the American version, but it's cheap, and maybe it'll grow on me), a set of three BBC Oscar Wilde films (again too cheap to resist), and a preposterously cheap collection of 14 Hitchcock films. Of course the prices keep changing while the stuff is in my basket, but I think of it as like playing the stock market, except with no money at risk. Every time I log in to see my shopping basket, I get an announcement of prices that have changed, usually a matter of 20p or 30p. I've also had price drops of £5 to £7; those were my good days in the market. Not long ago some item -- I think it was one of the many versions of the "complete" Monty Python -- went up £5, and I chucked it right out of the basket -- I still don't know which of the many U.S. and U.K. editions to buy anyway.

I realize that if I were allocating my televisual dollars (or pounds) wisely, I would be saving up for a nice new HD TV. But I'm OK with my present TVs, including the 19-inch Sharp in the kitchen that I bought used in the early '70s from the neighbor of a friend, and was sure I'd overpaid for -- except that the damned thing is still working OK 35 years later, and refuses to stop working.

I don't really have either the asking price or the proper space for the kind of HD set I'd like. I guess I finally decided that the money would be better spent on stuff I actually watch. For what it's worth, my Pioneer DVD player up-converts to however many lines the righteous folk with HD sets enjoy. When funds permit, I'll probably buy another multi-region DVD player for my other "major" TV, so I can watch the PAL DVDs on either.

Meanwhile I continue studying my financial reports. The British complete Rumpole isn't necessarily cheaper than the American, but it reportedly has subtitles, whereas the American edition apparently doesn't -- and for British TV in particular I find they come in increasingly handy. Hmm, a quandary. Maybe I should just get back to Full Circle. Michael was headed for a ferry from Japan to Korea.

A MICHAEL PALIN BONUS: "PINING FOR THE
FJORDS"? YES, IT'S THE DEAD PARROT SKETCH

With the great John Cleese, of course (and brief appearances by Terry Jones and Graham Chapman):

video details and more

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