Global health leaders call on Senate to pass $50
billion bill

post from BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash on 18 June 2008 04:33:28 PM. © BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
by Amy Weiss

The Global AIDS Alliance held a conference call with journalists Wednesday afternoon, where global health experts, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, urged lawmakers to pass a bill reauthorizing the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) by giving $50 billion towards HIV/AIDS (as well as malaria and tuberculosis) before President Bush attends the G8 Summit in Japan in July.

The bill (officially called the Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008) passed in the House of Representatives in April. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved it but it has since been stalled for two months.

Senators on both sides of the aisle as well as the White House and the presidential candidates support the bill but it has not yet been scheduled for a vote. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), with the support of six other Republican senators, maintains a hold, objecting to the bill's absence of a specific earmark for funds toward treatment versus prevention of disease.

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There is no longer any doubt as to whether the
current administration has committed war crimes

post from Firedoglake on 18 June 2008 04:31:04 PM. © Firedoglake

Those words are quoted from Major General Antonio Taguba, USA (Ret.) in a preface he wrote to a report put out by Physicians for Human Rights entitled "Broken Laws, Broken Lives." General Taguba knows from which he speaks, he is the general entrusted[...]

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BoingBoing vs. the DLC: Loosely coupled happiness

post from TPMCafe on 18 June 2008 04:25:00 PM. © TPMCafe

I feel like grandma here, wanting to say of Henry and Tim's positions "You're both right", which is tricky since they disagree so directly.

Let me quote Henry: "People can opt out of status races where they are likely to lose, and opt in to status races that they are likely to win. Given a near infinity of possible status hierarchies, they can choose the ones that they do well in. But this argument presupposes that these different possible status hierarchies are disconnected from each other."

Henry is right that they are not disconnected, but I'd argue that they used to be tightly coupled (I think Tim's observation that "until recently, the national media provided something like a uniform yardstick for status" is spot on) but now they are increasingly loosely coupled.

To take two examples from Henry: the rise of BoingBoing, and the netroots leverage versus the DLC. Attention is a commodity market, and BB's success in that market is not a zero-sum game, meaning their newly carved out social status is largely new value for society, both in terms of their actual content, but also because they increase the diversity of what's available. (Full disclosure: other things being equal, I think diversity is in and of itself a primary good.)

Netroots vs. DLC, however, is another matter, because that is close to a zero-sum game. There is only one Democratic party, and what the netroots wins, the DLC loses, in terms of control of that one party. In this case, the status hierarchy is much more absolute.

So let me draw out a question implicit in Henry's use of the Brunching Shuttlecock Geek Hierarchy: note that, even in a chart of who looks down on whom, many of the arrows run both ways. A sample case: Erotic Fanfic Writers think they are above the Fanfic Writers Who Put Themselves In the Story, and F.W.W.P.T.I.T.S think they are above Erotic Fanfic Writers.

That kind of two-way arrow seems to me to be possible vis-a-vis BoingBoing (one can imagine BB readers think of Fark readers as puerile frat boys, and Fark readers think BB readers are hemp-wearing poseurs), but two-way arrows don't seem to me to be possible vis-a-vis the Democratic party. If (as seems possible) the DLC ends up in January of 2009 as a minor player in Democratic politics, there is no amount of self-assurance that can make up for the objective loss of power over a scarce resource.

So I think that Henry and Tim could argue forever, because each will be able to find places in the current milieu where outcomes are more or less zero-sum, and more tightly or loosely coupled to other people's perceptions.

What I'm more interested in is "Which situations can be changed by proliferating forms of status, and what which situations leave us stuck with zero-sum games?" My assumption is answering that question "None, and all" or "All, and none", are both wrong answers, but I don't know what a more sophisticated answer looks like.

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Hoyer: I've lost all control.

post from Daily Kos on 18 June 2008 04:24:55 PM. © Daily Kos

Or at least, that's what he wants you to believe, bizarrely enough.

CQ Politics:

A potential revolt by a group of Democrats pressed party leaders into compromising on a rewrite of electronic surveillance rules that could come to a House vote by week's end, a top Democrat said Wednesday.

Asked why Democrats don’t put aside the surveillance legislation until a new president is elected in November, Hoyer said he would prefer to do so, but can’t because so many House Democrats are prepared to vote for the Senate bill that he and other top House Democrats oppose.

“Clearly enough Democrats have indicated in the House they would vote for the Senate bill if it came to the floor. The alternatives are either the Senate bill or a bill significantly better” reached through negotiations with the Senate and the White House, he said.

“Many Democrats have indicated to me they are willing to wait as long as an alternative is in sight. If not, they are prepared to vote for the Senate bill,” Hoyer said.

Question: Why would "so many House Democrats" be clamoring for the Senate bill, when the last time the Senate bill was in the House, they voted to send it back, amended, without immunity in it?

Question: How will "enough Democrats" vote for the Senate bill if it isn't on the floor? That bill only gets to the floor two ways: 1) Steny Hoyer brings it there, or; 2) a majority of the House signs a discharge petition to bring it there.

There is a third way, of course, and that's for the Republicans to attempt a motion to recommit some other bill with instructions to tack on the text of the Senate FISA bill. But I haven't seen a germane bill on the near horizon on the schedule for them to try this with.

No Democrats have signed the discharge petition -- ironically filed by disgraced, two-timing daddy Vito Fossella, who probably wishes he still had the privacy he's trying to strip from you -- so how is that Senate bill going to get to the floor?

Question: If it does get to the floor via discharge petition, will we be entitled to ask whether or not Steny Hoyer the "leader" of this majority?

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Obama's National Security Working Group

post from Taylor Marsh on 18 June 2008 04:15:37 PM. © Taylor Marsh

BY TAYLOR MARSHSenator Obama has announced his senior working group on foreign policy. Samantha Power is missing, as is Richard Holbrooke. No Bill Richardson either, while Madeleine Albright is first on the list. Sam Nunn is on it too, so it’s[...]

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The Oil Problem -- Editorial Cartoon by Andrew
Wahl

post from BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash on 18 June 2008 04:10:53 PM. © BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash

Bookmark/Search this post with: buzzflash | delicious | digg digg | technorati Technorati Tags: Andrew Wahl oil drilling offshore drilling ANWAR gas prices Bush McCain

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McCains secrecy over Navy records raises
questions

post from Crooks and Liars on 18 June 2008 04:10:22 PM. © Crooks and Liars

Let me first start off by making absolutely clear that this is not intended in any way to be a “swift boat”-style attack on John McCain and his service. Despite what you may think of him as a Senator or Presidential candidate, there is no denying the fact that he served his country in [...]

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-questions/

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The Ones that Got Away

Genghis gets into John McCain's tax plan. Besides the fact that the Tax Policy Center called his plan "very regressive," there's that other little detail: McCain was against the Bush tax cuts before he was for them.

Waldengirl asks why Kucinich's articles of impeachment against Bush have been derided by bloggers because it's "not the right time." She writes: "If we are expecting Obama and the Congressional Democrats to have the courage to take on the big issues confronting our society, we must let them know that we will hold our leaders accountable for their actions, or lack thereof."

Big Blue returns to profiling Obama's potential cabinet members. Today: a few picks for Secretary of Labor.

San Fernando Curt speculates on how Bush--and by extension McCain-- will play the tentative Middle East peace talks. "With some semblance of peace on its borders, Israel and the United States could marshal their forces for an all-out attack on... well... you know."

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ENVIROFASCISTS!!! AAAAAIIEEEAAAGHHH!!!!

OMG, these Republican morans never learn.Some of you with memories longer than a fruit fly's may recall that, oh, last week (and, for that matter, every week since September 11, 2001), every right-wing neocon legislator screamshow host Supreme Court[...]

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No Country For Old Men

This is an actual campaign commercial for Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX). It is set to the tune of Big Bad John (yes, really) and there is some stretching of grammar (and logic, but that’s to be expected) to keep up the rhyme scheme. I was very curious[...]

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