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post from Eschaton on 08 February 2007 09:22:00 AM. © Eschaton

It's never too early to start rockin'.

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Frameshop: Donohue Smear of Edwards May Violate
501(c)(3) Laws

post from FRAMESHOP on 08 February 2007 09:16:00 AM. © FRAMESHOP

DONoHUE MAY HAVE BROKEN LAW PROHIBITING INTERVENTION IN POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS According to United States law governing the behavior of 501(c)(3) organizations, it seems highly likely that William Donohue--President of the Catholic League, a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization--may have broken the...

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CNN Repeats Moonie Times Fact-Challenged Smears
of Pelosi

post from Crooks and Liars on 08 February 2007 09:08:27 AM. © Crooks and Liars

I've had it with the traditional media. Had it. They are the laziest of bums. Remember when being a journalist meant actually researching a subject? Not anymore. Now you just keep repeating smears prompulgated by the not-even-trying-to-hide-their-bias Moonie Times with nary a fact-check to stop them from smearing our new Speaker of the House. Was [...]

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VoteVets.org storms Capitol Hill

post from AMERICAblog on 08 February 2007 08:58:00 AM. © AMERICAblog

This is great. Iraq vets were on the Hill this week with a strong message for the pro-escalation members of Congress:

In several news conferences, [Iraq war veteran Jon] Soltz accused McConnell of "aiding the enemy" by allowing the Bush administration to build up troops in Iraq at the expense of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. "We are not fighting the war on terrorism, we are in the middle of a civil war," he said, referring to Iraq. "Meanwhile, the guy who attacked this country on 9/11 is living in a cave in Afghanistan."

Soltz called Cheney a "draft dodger," repeating charges he made last month when he disparaged a "president who frankly knows nothing of war and a vice president who knows even less." He said: "Senators on the fence have a choice. They can stand with veterans like us, or they can stand with the draft dodgers down the road."

Democrats said they will not muzzle the veterans. In many ways, the former soldiers and Marines are expressing sentiments the lawmakers want broadcast, and they help inoculate Democrats against Republican claims that opposing the president's plan undermines the troops.

Not everyone was happy to see the vets. Yep, those GOPers who purport to support the troops were disdainful and dismissive:

Soltz, Van Riper and the others got polite if reserved receptions from Republicans, with one exception. The veterans said they stormed out of a Tuesday meeting with Sen. Larry E. Craig's chief of staff. "He was almost dismissive in his tone," said Joe Kramer, 31, who was in the light infantry in Iraq. "We agreed to disagree. Very loudly."

Dan Whiting, a spokesman for Craig, would say only that the Idaho Republican's chief of staff, Mike Ware, sees things differently.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a decorated Vietnam veteran and likely presidential candidate who supports the addition of troops, dismissed VoteVets.org as a "handful of veterans" not representative of the military.

There are 20,000 members of VoteVets including 1000 who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just a handful? The guys represent soldiers -- and they are giving a voice to the overwhelming majority of Americans who think Bush's war in Iraq is a failure.

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ThinkFast: February 8, 2007

post from Think Progress on 08 February 2007 08:57:00 AM. © Think Progress

NBC newsman Tim Russert testified yesterday that it was “impossible” that he told Libby about Valerie Plame because he did not know about the CIA agent at the time of his conversation with Libby. He added that Libby had called to complain about NBC’s coverage of the Plame affair: “What the hell is going on [...]

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Iraqis avoiding Iraq like the plague

post from Capitol Talk - Front Page on 08 February 2007 08:56:39 AM. © Capitol Talk - Front Page

This is getting more and more sad and pathetic by the second. George Bush's deranged idea of liberating Iraq?: Liberating Iraqis from ~~tyranny~~, ~~Saddam Hussein~~ their own country. The Associated Press is reporting that in the past three years, 2 million Iraqis have fled their home country for neighboring countries. 3,000 Iraqi citizens leave the country every day, with 85,000 of them having fled to Kurdistan, which has been autonomous since 1991.

As snow fell outside, the smell of frying eggplant and onions burned Umm Ali's eyes as she cooked in her kitchen ? which doubles as the family bathroom. There's not much else: one other room for her, her husband and four children. Still, she says, it's better here than at the family's home in Baghdad, 180 miles south, at the center of Iraq's bloodshed.
"Even if we were living in a tent, without a real roof over our heads in this snowy weather, we'd still be happy to be away from that intimidation," said the 41-year-old Shiite.

Read more below the fold.
She went on to say:

"Our joy comes in feeling secure," said Jawad, who took his wife and children from Baghdad's Dora district after a note was left at their house calling the family "Shiite infidels" and warning the children would be "slain like sheep" if the family didn't leave.
"I didn't care about my house," he said. "I just felt my children and I needed to live our lives." He now works as an electrician at a new three-star hotel here.

I'll have more on the magnificent "progress" being made by President Bush in Iraq later on this morning.

[Hat tip AmericaBlog!]

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In Defense of Employer-Based Health Care

post from TPMCafe - The Coffee House feed on 08 February 2007 08:33:24 AM. © TPMCafe - The Coffee House feed

As anyone who knows my writing knows, I'm a big fan of SEIU and Andy Stern's leadership in fighting on behalf of working families. But count me in the skeptics camp as far as this new partnership with Wal-Mart.

The US health care system is obviously screwed up-- costing twice as much per patient as European health care systems, loaded up with useless paperwork, and pervaded by special interests like the pharmaceutical companies that pile on costs that no other country pays.

But the unique problem for the US isn't that much of the financing for health care comes from employers. I'm not even sure what Andy Stern means when he says that the US is "the only industrialized nation on earth that puts the price of healthcare on the cost of our products," since Japan and many European countries pay for health care with heavy mandated health care assessments on payrolls:

For example (see this report):

In France, health care is organized around employer-based sickness funds with employers contributing 12.8% of employee salaries to these funds-- employees contribute 0.75% of their salary as well.
Similarly, Germany's health system is funded with payroll taxes averaging 14.2% of payrolls, with employers and employees each paying half of that amount.
The Japanese health care system is divided up into different health care funds for different size businesses, with larger businesses assessed payroll taxes of 8% (shared partly with employees) to fund 1800 private health care funds.
Sweden funds its health care system partly with an 8.5% payroll tax.
The Netherlands assesses an employer contribution through a 6.25% payroll tax with an employee contribution of 1.7% of income.

Canada and the United Kingdom are relatively unique in that essentially none of the financing for their health care system comes from employers, so it seems that the cost of health care is included in the cost of the products of almost all our competitors in the industrialized world.

What does make the US unique is not that employers play a large role in funding health care, but that we allow so many employers NOT to contribute to help pay for our health care system. That General Motors pays to fund health care out of its revenues is not unique; so does Toyota in Japan. What is unique is that most big retailers in Europe have mandatory requirements to help fund health care for their employees, while Wal-Mart faced no such requirements in the United States.

This inconsistent system does mean that Wal-Mart and other bad employers dump health care costs on the rest of the system, which inevitably does drive up costs for General Motors, but the problem then is not the employer role in health care, but the free-riding by the Wal-Marts of the world.

Now, the new partnership mentions that "businesses, governments and individuals" should all contribute to funding health care, but then that raises the question of how much employers will pay, if any, to help fund the universal health care promised by this new partnership announced by SEIU. And has Wal-Mart committed to fight for new mandatory employer assessments that would be part of a multi-payer health care system?

If the latter is true, that would be a breakthrough, but then that's about creating a fairer, level-playing field for an employer-based health care system, not abandoing it altogether. Right now, government and individuals and many employers are already paying a hell of a lot for health care, so a key missing piece is bad employers like Wal-Mart being required to pay into the system.

So we'll see what comes of this partnership, but color me skeptical until the headline reads, "Wal-Mart agrees that it hasn't been paying its fair share of health care costs."

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For emphasis

post from Capitol Talk - Front Page on 08 February 2007 08:30:00 AM. © Capitol Talk - Front Page

Unlike most Democrats in Washington who are just sitting by idly watching the Republicans wreak havoc as if they (the Dems) were still in the minority - online bloggers, or the "net roots," and organizations such as MoveOn.org are hopping mad over the recent shenanigans of the Republicans in DC (I'll have MUCH more on that later this morning). Checkout this ad airing in several states attacking Republicans, or more specifically Sam Brownback, John Sununu, John Warner, Gordon Smith, George Voinovich, Arlen Specter, Mitch McConnell, Judd Gregg, and Elizabeth Dole over their refusal to allow for debate on the U.S. troop escalation:

video details and more

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Your Liberal Media

I just noticed that the Washington Post online has a Best of the Web feature on their "politics" page that's provided by Real Clear Politics. Now, I like Real Clear Politics. When I'm looking for a right wing web site...[...]

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Cheers and Jeers: Thursday

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...

Nostradamus Strikes Again

Thomas Friedman, the Very Deep Thinker who writes Columns of Great Importance for The New York Times, has set another timetable for our withdrawal from Iraq...and this time he's serious, gosh darn it.

According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Friedman has moved his goalposts no less than fourteen times since 2003. Here's a gem from November, 2004:

"Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won't be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile."

Well thank you, John Wayne. And my favorite two-fer:

"I think we're in the end game there, in the next three to six months, Bob." (January, 2006)

"I think we are in the end game. The next six to nine months are going to tell whether we can produce a decent outcome in Iraq." (March, 2006)

Ah, to be a multi-millionaire with nothing to lose. "Fetch me another martini, Gaston...and don’t skimp on the vermouth!" Well, yesterday he earned the nation's gratitude by throwing down his monogrammed velvet glove again (I'm not providing a link because TimesSelect charges, like, a million dollars for it):

O.K., boys, party's over: we're leaving by Dec. 1. From now on, everyone pays retail for their politics. We will no longer play host to a war where we're everyone's protector and target.

For those of you keeping score at home, that's ten months. This A Very Walton's Christmas timetable---plus a federally-mandated "floor price of $3.50 a gallon for gasoline"---will shock the Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, Turks, Saudis, Iranians, Syrians and the Whole Wide Middle East World into locking arms and singing songs around the campfire. Or not: "If they want tribal instincts to reign, we can leave by Dec. 1 and insulate ourselves from Islam's civil war with a new energy policy." Uh huh.

And what about President Bush's pledge to never impose a timeline for withdrawal, his prediction that the fate of our troops will be decided by future presidents, and his same-sex marriage to the oil barons? I'm sure Mr. Friedman will set some benchmark Friedmans for that in his next column.

Cheers and Jeers starts in There’s Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]