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Carper Compromise Plot
Thickens

post from Daily Kos on 21 November 2009 08:58:07 PM. © Daily Kos

Earlier today, Landrieu talked about working with Schumer and Carper on yet another iteration of a public option compromise, along the lines of his state-based triggered co-ops.

Schumer's spokesman flatly denied this, sending this statement:

"Since Leader Reid announced the opt-out public option would be included in the Senate bill, Senator Schumer has not approached anyone about compromises. He is fully behind the level playing field opt-out, which he himself helped advance."

--Schumer spokesman Brian Fallon

Just now, in the press availability following the vote, here's Harry Reid:

Q: Senator Lincoln today made it very clear that she's not going to support any kind of public option. Senator Lieberman has said the same. What do you see as the chances it will be in the final bill.

Reid: First of all, I support a strong public option. I welcome Senator Schumer, Landrieu and Carper, who Senator Landrieu said are working together to find a public option that is acceptable to all Democrats....

Q: Did you just say that you've tasked Senator Schumer, Carper and Landrieu or ...

Reid: No. It's my understanding that Senator Landrieu said today that she's working with Senator Schumer and Carper to come up with an alternative.

Interesting. Either someone is not being entirely truthful, or we have a major miscommunication in leadership. I've asked leadership staff for clarification and will report back when I've heard anything.

Update: Leadership staff declines to comment, but one Senate Democratic aide e-mails "As far as I know it's absolutely true that Senator Schumer has been having these conversations about a public option well before we had this vote tonight."

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Carper-Compromise-Plot-Thickens

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Bernie Sanders: I Want My Leverage!

post from Talking Points Memo on 21 November 2009 08:56:00 PM. © Talking Points Memo

Meanwhile, on the other end of the liberal political spectrum, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) remains adamant in a statement issued this evening that his vote for a health care reform bill isn't guaranteed, though he stops short of saying he must have a[...]

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i_want_my_leverage.php

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Saturday Stuff

post from The Liberal Doomsayer on 21 November 2009 08:54:00 PM. © The Liberal Doomsayer

"A new generation of patriots?" HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!

And "U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!" huh? Read this.

(h/t Dependable Renegade via Eschaton - once more, here's the thing on "Nate," and this is the clip where he appears.)

video details and more

...and by the way, congratulations go out to the Senate Dems who voted to allow debate to begin on health care reform (would have been reprehensible to vote no, not that that's stopped some of them in the past...now, just have the little demagoguery and debate show, go to reconciliation and GET THIS DONE!!)...

...and yes, I realize this is a rather shameless plug for an X-box game, but I like the game and the song is pretty cool too, so here it is.

video details and more

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http://liberaldoomsayer.blogspot.com/2009/11/saturday-stuff_21.html

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Historic health care legislation moves forward
for debate in the Senate.

post from Think Progress on 21 November 2009 08:34:00 PM. © Think Progress

The Senate voted along party lines tonight to avoid a GOP filibuster and move forward with debate on historic health care legislation. The final vote was 60-39, with Ohio Republican George Voinovich not voting. The AP reports that the “spectator galleries were full for the unusual Saturday night showdown, and applause broke out briefly when the vote was announced. In a measure of the significance of the moment, senators sat quietly in their seats, standing only when they were called upon to vote.” Full debate will begin after Thanksgiving.

Senate vote

Immediately after the vote, the White House put out a statement saying, “The President is gratified that the Senate has acted to begin consideration of health insurance reform legislation.” RNC Chairman Michael Steele complained that “a number of moderate Democrats sacrificed their principles to give Harry Reid a victory that brings America dangerously closer to having a government-run health care system.” Igor Volsky has been following tonight’s debate over on the Wonk Room.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/11/21/historic-health-care-legislation-moves-forwar
d-for-debate-in-the-senate/

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'Tea Party: The Documentary Film': No, really,
this trailer is not a creation of The Onion

post from Crooks and Liars on 21 November 2009 08:31:00 PM. © Crooks and Liars

DOWNLOADS: (2)
PLAYS: (125)

Yes, they're perfectly serious.

Here's the cast of characters, including:

NATE: Nate, a young black man from Detroit, Michigan, voted for Barack Obama in 2008 from an upbringing that taught him to mistrust America because of the color of his skin. As a Libertarian with a paradigm shift and a newfound understanding of the nation he loves, he is risking the anger of family and friends by joining the march against a President?s policies that would victimize the very people he loves the most.

Translation: Nate, the only relatively sane-seeming black person we could find for the film, whose key role is to help blunt the image of tea parties as an almost purely all-white phenomenon featuring angry white nationalists who have no compunction about carrying racist signs and calling the president a racist.

JACK: Jack is a father of two young children, a little league baseball coach and a health insurance agent. He risks losing his job under current healthcare reform. He is a Democrat turned Constitutionalist and the younger brother of a Vietnam veteran who is marching for his children and the future of the America he believes in.

Translation: Even though Jack has a fairly obvious motive for opposing health-care reform, he was included because the filmmakers couldn't find a health-insurance lobbyist who could convincingly portray himself as a moderately sympathetic figure.

JENNY BETH: In 2008, she and her husband lost a multi-million dollar business, were forced into bankruptcy and home foreclosure. Nine months later, she is working as a national leader in the grassroots tea party movement, organizing events and taking her message to the steps of the National Mall with the company of millions behind her.

Translation: Beth helps provide a portrait of America's most benighted victims of the Bush administration: Whole-hog ideological conservatives who made lots of money relying on conservative values (i.e., the cutthroat pursuit of profits at the expense of everything else) and who suddenly lost everything when Bush popped the housing bubble. The resulting cognitive dissonance -- "OMFG we lost our entire fortune because "conservative values" like a mania for deregulation and cutting taxes for the wealthy caused a near-collapse of the entire economic system! And now we have to rely on a liberal black man to fix the problem!!!!" -- drove them completely insane, so that now of course they think the solution is to go back and embrace the very policies that destroyed their wealth in the first place.

WILLIAM: William is a patriot renaissance man, a pastor, colonial re-enactor, painter, poet, Vietnam veteran, former Pentagon and Secret Service employee and a man of the march. He can be outrageous and funny or somber and reflective, full of antics and unpredictability. He marched for the Vietnam Memorial during the Reagan Era and this time, his journey back to Washington, DC leads him to the front lines of the march down Pennsylvania Avenue on September 12.

Translation: Plain ol' nuts.

Anyway, after the movie gets its only scheduled theatrical appearance at the FreedomWorks-sponsored D.C. debut, it's straight to DVD.

Oh, we can hardly wait.

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/tea-party-movie-no-really-trailer-no

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Establishment Reality

post from TPMCafe on 21 November 2009 08:18:00 PM. © TPMCafe

For me the most distressing aspect of American politics over the last 30 years is the realization that the Washington Establishment really does rule the country no matter which party holds the White House or Congressional majorities. Progressives suffered through 12 years of Republican presidents after Reagan's election only to realize that the election of Bill Clinton changed nothing. The military budget didn't shrink, deregulation of business oversight continued apace, duopolies mushroomed, alternative energy strategies sat on the shelf. Now we have to suffer through watching Clinton retreads Larry Summers Tim Geithner and Richard Holbrooke lead Obama down the primrose path to disaster while the financial elites and the defense contractors take home record bonuses.

As some of our correspondents have suggested that the split we may be seeing is not between liberals and conservatives, but between insiders and outsiders--the Establishment vs the People.

So yesterday the outsiders won an important, but little noticed victory (it did not even deserve a headline on the NYTimes.com politics page). Representatives Ron Paul and Alan Grayson managed to pass out of the House Financial Services Committee a bill to audit the Federal Reserve, despite the strenuous objections of Barney Frank, Ben Bernanke, Mel Watt (Bank of America's congressman) and the Washington Establishment. As the Huff Post's Ryan Grim reports, it was all classic establishment playbook, but Grayson managed to rally the Dems behind Paul.

The playbook in Washington often goes like this: When a measure that threatens the establishment builds enough momentum that it must be dealt with, it is labeled as "unserious." The Washington Post editorial board, true to the script, called Paul's measure "an unserious answer to a serious question."
And it particularly rankles the center that a pair of "wingnuts" are behind a successful effort to challenge the prevailing order.
Step Two is for a "serious" compromise to be offered. In this case, it was Watt's amendment. But by the time the vote was called Thursday afternoon, committee members had seen through his measure, recognizing that it was not a compromise effort to bring real transparency to the Fed but an attempt to further shut the the doors.
"The Watt amendment will fully obliterate everything 1207" -- Paul's measure -- "is intended to do," said Paul during Thursday's debate.
For anyone remaining confused, the debate was further clarified by the central bank itself: Federal Reserve Vice Chair Don Cohn and General Counsel Scott Alvarez spent much of the day calling committee members, urging them to oppose the Paul-Grayson amendment in favor of Watt's, a member of Congress who asked for confidentiality told HuffPost.
Paul's opponents also placed a letter from former Fed chairmen Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker on the seats of every committee member. Such a move is in violation of House rules and Grayson was able to have the letters removed.

We have to realize there is still a long way before this becomes law. The Senate is the heart of Establishment power. But still, we someday may look back at this day as a day when something slightly unusual happened that began the populist uprising against The Establishment.

The next front in this new coalition against the Insiders is to take on the establishment consensus about Afghanistan as expressed by the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl.

On Afghanistan, in contrast, there is unanimity in the Pentagon and considerable agreement in Congress and among the NATO allies...Almost everyone agrees that accomplishing all those aims will require at least some additional American and NATO troops.

Who appointed bonehead's like Diehl to speak for "almost everyone"? The Wash Po editorial page, which has been remarkably wrong on every foreign policy question in the last 10 years, is just one more Establishment mouthpiece. If more voices on the right like George Will and the Cato Institute start raising their voice against our military adventurism we might actually be able to dig this country out of the massive hole it is in. If you don't believe the world economy is still in a hole Look at The Baltic Dry Index, which tracks world wide bulk dry cargo (Coal, Wheat, Autos, Steel, etc) shipments.

United States - White House - Politics of the United States - Ron Paul - Washington Post

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Heavenly Bodies and Dust Motes

post from Docudharma - Front Page on 21 November 2009 08:15:15 PM. © Docudharma - Front Page

Simulposted from The Wild Wild Left.I was sent pictures by Lady Libertine, the one that inspired her essay, and thought about it a long time. She is right, it is not an easy metaphor; but indeed, a compelling one.I never could, or did write about it.[...]

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-motes

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Such nice people

post from They gave us a republic... - Front Page on 21 November 2009 08:12:39 PM. © They gave us a republic... - Front Page

At Majikthise:

...Eliminationist wags were selling bumper stickers that read "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8" on Cafe Press. Psalm 109:8 reads: "Let his days be few. Let another take is his office." The next verse is, "Let his children be fatherless And his wife a widow." Followed by, "Let his children wander about and beg; And let them seek sustenance far from their ruined homes." How long before one of these is spotted on the bumper of a hapless Republican county chair? I'm taking bets.

At beliefnet:

Psalm 109:8--A Prayer for Obama or Ourselves?
....the "Prayer for Obama," does more than anticipate that he leaves office; it entreats God to destroy the president.
Psalm 109 belongs to a special category of the psalms known as "imprecatory" prayers--it is a lament in the form of petition to destroy one's enemies. It is the personal prayer of an individual, someone who has been dealt an injustice by another--and usually more powerful--person. The words of Psalm 109 are those of deep agony, the longings of a victim for retribution and justice. This psalm is considered one of the most difficult of all the psalms--full of violent images of vengeance and death. Many a biblical critic has struggled with its words--and not a few--including Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant theologians--recommend that it not be used in public worship, much less as a bumper-sticker political slogan....

Such nice people.

From CafePress:

....This morning we made the decision to remove all Psalms 109:8 designs from CafePress.
The public debate started with questioning if the design was simply intended to be criticism of the President or something much worse. The discourse was surprisingly civil online, given the heated nature of the topic. Given that, and the positions of groups like the ACLU and the Anti-Defamation League, we decided to let the dialogue play out publicly before making a final decision.
Last night we posted a poll on our blog, read through the emails we've received and weighed the nature of the calls we've received on the topic. In the process we also learned that many of the original designers of the Psalm 109:8 designs had already decided to remove them on their own.
General consensus has proven that the design does point to a broader interpretation of the Psalm and thus has been deemed inappropriate for sale at CafePress.
We try to create an atmosphere of self-expression. Many of the things we encounter are not black and white, but grey. When the dialogue is civil, we want to let the larger community work things out rather than making an uninformed ruling. The dialogue has played out and common sentiment has reached agreement - this merchandise is not appropriate....

[emphasis added]

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Senate Health Care Debate Cloture Achieved

Listening to the Senate debate the vote on cloture its amazing how much fear mongering and misinformation has been presented by Senate Republicans. One after another they have gotten up and misrepresented not only what is in the bill but how the American[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Docudharma/~3/M-QEmugNOI0/senate-health-care-debat
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Senate Health Care Vote (60-39) and Analysis

The vote is in, and the Reid bill has passed on to debate by a vote of 60 - 39. And we don't even need to write the list, we can name them by memory. Debate will begin following the Thanksgiving break.

I watched the last several hours of discussion, and was struck by the following:

1. The IIE lied. Not stretched the truth, just plain lied. Every time their turn came, it was the "when did you stop beating your wife?" discussion.

2. Robert Menendez (NJ) was masterful. He spoke not in terms of anecdotes, nor morality, but of the specific improvements that implementation of the reform bill would make to his constituents if enacted.

3. These are what the arguments will be as the bill moves to discussion, and later to conference. And it's important to notice who said what, and what they really meant.

For the Republicans, the simple truth is that they had YEARS to make the incremental changes they claim they want. They had YEARS to improve the situation. They were the majority, the knew the deal. And they chose to do nothing. Their argument will be deficit spending, and that can take hold if the Democrats do not volley back with the comparative cost of doing nothing. For this is not just about health care, but also about the ability of our businesses to be competitive in a global marketplace.

For the Democrats, it will be necessary to fight the lies quickly and simply, to explain what this bill means for the specific constituencies of workers with insurance, workers with no insurance, the unemployed uninsured, the elderly on Medicare, etc. etc. etc. While it IS a moral and ethical obligation for a country to provide health care for its citizens, that will not be the argument that will reach the masses.

In the second sentence of the first paragrah, I mentioned that we know who voted in what manner. And we do: those of us who are political junkies. We can name all 100 Senators. (If you personally cannot, please keep it to yourself...I'm betting you can.) However, the majority of Americans can not name THEIR two senators, much less 20 senators. What THEY heard tonight, if they watched, or what THEY will read and see on news clips is the few lines that will resonate with their most base instincts. For the Fox News crowd, this means the idiotic speeches by McConnell and Bennett and Hatch - hard to deny because when you never beat your wife, you cannot have stopped beating her.

Therefore, our words must be structured, on message, clear and to the point. I will try to find the Menendez speech and get it posted tomorrow so you can all see what I mean. THAT is the way to win this thing.

Floor is open...