Three years ago, when reviewing movies became a chore instead of a joy, and my partner in cinematic hoo-hah said I really should start a blog, I balked a bit at giving up something that I'd been doing for six years and for which I had gained somewhat of a decent reputation. But after being only moderately engrossed by No Country for Old Men, walking out of it scratching my head and thinking "WTF???", and now this, I know I made the right decision:

Well, no one wants to say it but you will be reading this shortly: The Golden Globes and the Academy Awards will be cancelled.

On Monday December 17th, the WGA turned down requests for waivers by the Oscars and the Golden Globes to put those telecasts on air without the Guild’s writers. With the rejection of the waivers for the Academy Awards (ABC), set for Sunday February 24th, and the much faster approaching Golden Globes (NBC), set for January 13th, the WGA has essentially cancelled both awards shows by its actions.

The SAG Awards did receive a waiver and are scheduled for Jan. 27th.

But the other two awards shows will be cancelled and no one or should I say everyone in the industry is avoiding the mention of this 600 pound LaMotta because a) they are holding out the now near impossible hope for a settlement and b) no one wants to interrupt the cash flow from the media promotions of the potential nominees.

That is unless they want to go the route of the People’s Choice Awards which announced it will air its show Jan 8th (CBS) in a 2 hour “magazine” format of prerecorded videos and no audience yet featuring Queen Latifah as the prerecorded “host.”

The Oscars and the Golden Globes will not play that game.

Leslie Unger, spokeswoman for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said, “It’s very difficult for me to envision that we would follow the model.”

But the folks who put on the Oscars and the Globes still feel they will somehow put those shows up despite their failure to receive the requested Guild waiver. It will never happen. Here’s why. No publicist is gonna send their client to run the gauntlet of Writer’s Guild’s strikers who will be on hand to make things extremely impossible for any stars who have the nerve to cross the picket lines into the event. No stars. No Oscars. No Globes.

I feel badly about the position in which Comedy Central has placed Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Apparently not even being the most influential pseudo-news guys in America gives you the clout to fight a corporate boss forcing you to be a scab.

But given the state of movies in this country over the last few years, perhaps this writer's strike is precisely the hairball the industry needs to cough up. It may mean the destruction of the industry, because who's going to write the scripts that the directors (who look like they're going to negotiate after all) direct and in which the actors perform?

Labels: movies, WGA strike

The clock starts ticking at 5 PM on Wednesday, next time (presumably) Hardball is live.

Let's take a stroll down memory lane, shall we? To October 11, 2000's Hardball:

MATTHEWS: Does Al Gore have a truth problem, and is it going to hurt him?

ESTRICH: He's got this little problem, but it's not really about truth. I mean, you have to say about Clinton that when he lied, at least it was worth it to lie.

MATTHEWS: Right. Let me put it this way --

ESTRICH: Gore -- this is like --

MATTHEWS: -- you're not answering the question --

ESTRICH: -- [former Rep.] Dan Rostenkowski [D-IL] --

MATTHEWS: -- I want to try it again. No --

ESTRICH: -- and postage stamps.

MATTHEWS: -- no. If you apply to college, or you apply for a job, and you say, "I discovered Love Canal, I invented the Internet," these little --

ESTRICH: Oh, no.

MATTHEWS: -- problems are serious questions of character and resume inflation.

Now let's look at Willard Mitt Romney:

Mitt Romney acknowledged yesterday that he never saw his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. as he asserted in a nationally televised speech this month, and historical evidence shows that Michigan's Governor George Romney and the civil rights leader never did march together.

Romney said his father had told him he had marched with King and that he had been using the word "saw" in a "figurative sense."

"If you look at the literature, if you look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of in the sense I've described," Romney told reporters in Iowa. "It's a figure of speech and very familiar, and it's very common. And I saw my dad march with Martin Luther King. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort."

But historical evidence, including news accounts at the time, shows that George Romney never marched with King, though he supported King's agenda.

Susan Englander, assistant edi tor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, who is editing the King papers from that era, told the Globe yesterday: "I researched this question, and indeed it is untrue that George Romney marched with Martin Luther King."

She said that when he was governor of Michigan, George Romney issued a proclamation in June 1963 in support of King's march in Detroit, but declined to attend, saying he did not participate in political events on Sundays. A New York Times story from the time confirms Englander's account.

Does it all depend on what the definition of "saw" is?

The last time we heard Chris Matthews say anything substantive about Mitt Romney was December 13, when he talked about Romney's "As long as you believe in a Great White Alpha Male in the Sky, you're an American" speech. As the "My father marched with Martin Luther King" story has developed over the last week, and Romney has devolved into Clintonesque parsing, Matthews has been strangely silent. Given Matthews' harping on statements falsely attributed to Al Gore, is his fawning, nearly homoerotic praise of Romney from August 13, going to keep him from giving Romney the same treatment he gave Al Gore in 2000?

UPDATE: OK, so he expressed some mild exasperation on Friday's show. That still doesn't equate to the relentless hammering he gave Al Gore in 2000.

Labels: Chris Matthews, hack journalism, Mitt Romney

...another snarky Christmas song. Because nothing says Christmas like a Jewish guy doing a darkly comic parody video from 1986 that seems weirdly timely today:

Labels: Christmas, comedy

This question is from our most welcome newbie to the Force, John Cole:

Seriously- the Republican field is just an exercise in absurdity. The leading candidates are a flat-earth religious huckster, a serial liar, and a cross-dresser with an authoritarian streak and mob ties. Is this really the best the GOP has to offer?

You have to ask?

Labels: bloggers

Remember when the Democratic-controlled Congress, which can't seem to end this war or do anything other than pass resolutions declaring Christianity "an important religion", decided that its most important work was defending Gen. David Petraeus against those blue meanies at Moveon.org?

Well, look who's spearheading a drive to send phone cards to soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan so they can call home during the holidays? I'll give you a hint: It isn't Bill O'Reilly. It isn't Jonah Goldberg. It isn't Rush Limbaugh. It isn't the Christian Coalition.

It's Moveon.org, working with USO:

Dear MoveOn member,

This winter, thousands of U.S. servicemen and women are spending the holidays far away from their families, and calling home can cost them a large part of their paycheck. Troops stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the globe actually have to pay for phone calls to the U.S.—and many of them just don't have a lot of money to spare. Imagine being stuck in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Korea and being unable to afford a call to your spouse or kids on Christmas or New Year's Eve.

That's why we're helping the USO to provide thousands of phone cards to troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world to let them call their friends, family and loved ones this holiday season.

These phone cards don't cost a lot—only $15 each, but they are incredibly valuable, providing about 45 minutes of talk-time and holiday wishes for service members.

Can you give $15 to buy a phone card for troops stationed overseas? Click here to chip in:

https://civ.moveon.org/donatec4/holiday_troops.html?id=11827-1466176-BdZUyf&t=2

MoveOn members are committed to seeing our troops come home as quickly as possible, and we'll keep working to make that happen. But right now, supporting the USO is a simple way to make a genuine difference in the lives of brave men and women who've sacrificed a lot for our country.

Can you chip in to buy phone cards for troops stationed overseas this holiday season? Click here to contribute:

https://civ.moveon.org/donatec4/holiday_troops.html?id=11827-1466176-BdZUyf&t=3

Happy holidays from all of us and thanks for all you do.

–Nita, Adam G., Karin, Marika, Noah, Laura, Joan, Wes, Justin, Jennifer, Anna, Eli, Matt, Ilyse, Daniel, Adam R., Carrie, Tanya, and the MoveOn.org Civic Action Team
Thursday, December 20th, 2007

P.S. To learn more about the USO, a non-governmental, non-partisan organization, please visit www.uso.org.

Alternatively, you can also send USO care packages, which let you also enclose a personal message.

Just as pro-life conservatives believe that insurance companies should be allowed to let seventeen-year-olds die in the name of profits, they also believe that supporting the troops and their lives means leaving them in a war zone indefinitely without a clearly-defined mission.

Let's show them who's REALLY got their backs.

Labels: Moveon.org, USO

You know it's coming. But pointing out the damage to very real people that is being done by health insurance companies isn't exploitation, it's underscoring the facts.

I don't expect the family of Nataline Sarkisyan to go stumping for John Edwards, but their plight has served to underscore Edwards' point that you cannot "negotiate" with companies that will allow a seventeen-year-old to die rather than pay for a procedure that could save her life:

John Edwards tonight cited the case of a 17-year-old California girl who died after her insurance company refused coverage on a liver transplant to save her life as a call to action to change the current system of healthcare in America.

Nataline Sarkysian died last night at UCLA Medical Center after complications arose from a bone marrow transplant to treat her leukemia. Her insurance provider, CIGNA Healthcare, first denied the potentially lifesaving transplant, but relented after a loud public protest and outrage. By that time, though, Sarkysian passed away before the procedure could be performed.

"Are you telling me that we're gonna sit at a table and negotiate with those people?" asked a visibly angered Edwards, challenging the health care companies. "We're gonna take their power away and we're not gonna have this kind of problem again."

Edwards also told the audience of about a hundred people at the Score Pavillion in Nevada, Iowa, that it will take a fighter (i.e. him) - and not a negotiator (ii.e. Obama) - to take on large insurance companies like CIGNA.

"Anybody who thinks that we don't have a fight in front of us is living in Never-Never Land," he said.

The Sarkisyans are going to sue CIGNA, as well they should. It's too bad Mark Geragos is their attorney, because my impression of him is that he's more interested in the cameras than in his clients. Because if there were ever a case that was made for John Edwards, it's this one.

UPDATE: Richard Blair weighs in at All Spin Zone.

Labels: health care, John Edwards

Still think that fears of Big Brotherism are just so much dystopian paranoia?

The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

"Bigger. Faster. Better. That's the bottom line," said Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which operates the database from its headquarters in the Appalachian foothills.

The increasing use of biometrics for identification is raising questions about the ability of Americans to avoid unwanted scrutiny. It is drawing criticism from those who worry that people's bodies will become de facto national identification cards. Critics say that such government initiatives should not proceed without proof that the technology really can pick a criminal out of a crowd.

Sometimes I worry that if I ever have to find another job, my writings here will cause a problem. But that fear may be overblown, because if everything about us is in a single database, it will give employers ever-more excuses not to hire us and instead outsource our jobs to low-wage countries, where they don't care about the employees' backgrounds, as long as they're cheap.

Labels: privacy, totalitarianism

I can hear the whisper of the masses rolling eyes, (and Jill screaming,) but I'm afraid that I'm gonna have to say a little something about Jamie Lynne Spears and her unfortunate pregnancy. As repugnant as I find that family's embrace of the trailer park life and their across the board misuse of a huge platform that could be used for some sort of good in the world; as stupid I think she is, and as annoyed as I am about the immediate pile on (well, Huckabee so far,) of the religi-tizing and politicizing of the issue of a young girl deciding to announce to the world that she is having his love child, as opposed to deciding to quietly take care of it, or drop out and have it and adopt it out, or pass it on to a family member, (hopefully not her mom, she seems sort of inept in the parenting department,)there are a few points that Willie Giest and Morning Joe aren't bringing to the table on this; we may have to wait for Oprah, y'know, because she tends to represent the other side of this coin....sometimes....depending on how it spins and where it lands. Heads you're a hero, trailblazer, and tails you're a pathetic victim.

It was my nephew who mentioned it last night as we talked about Christmas on the cell phone. It was a quick turn from him helping Will and Ben set up the Xbox 360 Live, and then a quick mention...had I heard? Of course I had, but 13 year old boys, (as nephew is too,) don't pay much attention, unless its an opening for a cautionary tale of stupidity; that is, unless they have a much younger sister who watches these shows. Suddenly tasked to say the right thing, I tend to do OK, because I believe in treating kids like intelligent beings who have a certain developing moral and ethical core. So, I quickly had to get past the 'stupid trailer-trash' nastiness that goes through my mind whenever certain people fuck up, and get to asking him what he thought. Ah, kids these days....The answers are not far from what you hear on every talk show, except that no one is all that surprised; they are more surprised that she got caught and that she didn't just handle it quietly.


I'm not sure how well this sort of thing goes over these days, in a world where the heroine's sister acts out so badly, and taking into account that, in some part of the culture of their people, it happens and its expected. But in this day and age, its probably worth it to scream the basic fact that these people are incredibly wealthy and they have the luxury to handle this in any way they see fit. That is definitely not true of most young girls in this country. If Jamie Lynn is to be applauded for having a child at 16, and keeping it...even marrying the father, then as much time should be given to the truth about what this situation is outside of the Disney life that these kids are living. Even the Nwe York Times didn't delve further into this than Jamie Lynn's own statement:

''I definitely don't think it's something you should do; it's better to wait,'' she told the magazine. ''But I can't be judgmental because it's a position I put myself in.''

I applaud her realizing that she put herself in this spot, but I cant see how she can just leave that hanging without more than this:

''It was a shock for both of us, so unexpected,'' she said. ''I was in complete and total shock and so was he.''

Oh really? Well, then your tutor didn't do a very good job of explaining what happens when you have unprotected sex, or the condom breaks, or you forget your pill. This was an opportunity missed. So many young girls look up to this kid, and she acts like she had an unexpected visitor from out of town or something.

In a second article, The New York Times covers how this is maybe a good thing because everyone is talking about it; cue Linda Ellerbee for a special program being developed by Nick. But its clear that who is discussing this a New York Times reporter looking on, are older kids who are concerned with their younger sibling's reaction when they find out what Zoe 101 is up to in real life, and the actual younger siblings with a concerned mom present. You see, Zoe is apparently one of the few girl's characters who is empowering to young girls; who has her shit together. As the older girls (and my sister this morning,) are hoping that the younger ones just wont find out, its probably worthwhile to point out that its nearly impossible to stop this news from passing through every school lunchroom in the country. But I'm less worried about girls who are discussing this with their Moms or any sane adult person. Its the ones out there who have to be independent too early, and who are making decisions on the fly with no real base of reality. Its the kids who want someone to pay attention to them and to love them, and who want a dress up doll like Jamie Lynn will no doubt display on the cover of OK and Enquirer. And its every kid who thinks that they are madly in love at 16 years old and who dreams of getting married to that boy. How are they supposed to parse this?


In the real world,so many people, (even blond people,) are not working, and if they are its at some minimum wage job, or jobs, because in most places no one can make ends meet on what you take home from a full time, minimum wage job. If no work can be found, welfare pays only around $350 per month, per kid, and you have to work for that eventually anyway, (like when the baby is 6 weeks old, )so be prepared for the baby to be in daycare beginning quite early. Then, if you can get section 9 housing, you have to pay rent according to what you make, which is a little too high to give you any sort of cushion for anything extra. One kid orders pay per view movies and runs your cable bill up and you're sunk for that month at least, probably much longer...forget the ring tones and all the other trouble that comes up and can totally derail your finances; forget illness, and doctor visits, and transportation, and food...forget it all...$350 per month hardly buys diapers and some food; forget the rest.

Most of the parents I know who are living in what is the inner city here, are trying very hard to watch their kids and stay involved, even though they have to work more than full time and keep house. They also have to trust dwindling government programs and charities to keep the children occupied while they work those long hours. So much falls between the cracks and so much is lost, including some of the children, who make mistakes at a much higher rate than they would if they were raised by at least one parent who has some time. Children definitely act out more and get in more trouble if parents are stretched beyond their ability to cope and if they have to endure long hours at after-school programs. I don't know what the studies say, but I do know what I see all around me, even in a more affluent area where many people work because it takes 2 incomes to make it here.

I suppose you can congratulate any 16 year old boy who wants to marry the mother of his kid, but that is as destined to fail as is the father who is only peripherally involved. It is the rarest of 16 year olds who have the patience or selflessness to take care of a baby, much less raise a child to adulthood. It must be nice to have a financial cushion so that you don't have to go to school, work, and then come home and care for your child; it must be nice.

In reality, having a baby in the best of circumstances is the hardest thing any of us will ever do. They need so much attention and require so much sacrifice. They also give alot of joy. But I cant imagine, having raised one alone but with independent income, what it would be like not to have any financial resources, trying to make ends meet, and to have to work the way I'm seeing people work, if they can even find jobs. Its a wonder that people can find any joy at all in lives that must seem pretty bleak, and its a wonder that more people aren't throwing their babies out the window, with how very difficult it is to care for an infant, even with 2 people helping each other.

I'm sure that the early tribal model of sex separated long houses worked better for raising kids because the whole society pitched in and fulfilled specific purposes, with the babies being cared for by large groups of supportive women, and the men taking the boys as soon as they got a little older. I'm not espousing any societal model, but, it seems like the nuclear family's breakdown has led to this destructive cycle of kids bound to repeat the actions that they've lived through, no matter how much their parents try to protect them. Some of this is because the education system is screwed up, and we need to infuse it with money of the kind that has been pissed away in Iraq, but more of it is the troubling truth that its unclear to kids what they can be, and where they fit in society anymore. If kids dont have a strong sense of self and worth, how can they want to go further than the walls of their own personal barrio? There are no jobs, really. What are kids supposed to aspire to anymore? We cant even offer a secure factory job, much less technical jobs...forget it. Everyone seems to be dreaming of being a star and winning the lotto. There are no more realistic aspirations for the majority of kids coming out of the government system.

So, while Nick scrambles to serve the stockholders, as sponsors jump ship, and while the rest of us talk about how stupid and trashy the Spears family is, lets keep in mind that even if we say its bad, someone out there will think that its OK and even possible because Zoe 101 did it. This is an opportunity to talk to kids about this and to have a real conversation. This is about the structure of our society; Huckabee wants the church to embrace and forgive her? How about a strong statement about how to fight poverty and stem this problem by allowing more wiggle room for parents to be with their LIVE kids, and about actual money pledged to allow the existing kids in this country to have more life experiences that indicate to them that there is a future out there and that they can make choices that effect their lives in many ways. They have a choice and they have control of deciding NOT to take stupid chances that will change the entire course of their lives. The power of making choices with an eye to the long term and the importance of critical decision making, is something that is missing in a society where its easier to redistribute society's wealth when you have a population that is undereducated, poor, and scared. In taking the easy way out, we are exacerbating the problem. Its penny wise, (and not even,) but pound foolish!

This is not about a foolish rich girl doing something stupid. Its about the reverberations that shift our culture more and more towards a helpless model of despair, (i.e. learned helplessness,) on every level of society, and which will impact each part differently, but ultimately effect us all.

cross posted from RIPCoco

Labels: social Darwinism

Remember that old joke (I'm allowed to tell this one under the "It's OK to knock your own team rule) about the Jewish dilemma of free ham?

Well, it looks like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are about to give us the liberal equivalent of that free ham: They're going back to work January 7, with or without writers.

Alan Sepinwall of the Star-Ledger reports:

Can you do fake news without real writers?

Following the lead taken by late night personalities like Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Kimmel -- and possibly David Letterman -- "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart and "Colbert Report" host Stephen Colbert announced late Thursday that they would return to work on their Comedy Central shows in early January, whether or not the Writers Guild of America strike is over by that point.

"We would like to return to work with our writers," Stewart and Colbert said in a joint statement. "If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence."

[snip]

While "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" feature interview segments, both shows devote far more of each episode to written material than their talk show counterparts. Stewart doesn't come up with those punchlines about government and media hypocrisy off the top of his head, and Colbert's "The Word" segment isn't improvised.

Comedy Central declined to reveal exactly how each show will be put together if the strike continues into the new year. (At present, no new talks are planned between the WGA and the entertainment companies.)

Does it count as crossing the picket line if Stewart and Colbert produce their shows, even if they don't hire scab writers to do it? And what does it mean for organized labor when two of the biggest progressive media icons cross the picket line?

UPDATE: Jane Hamsher says that this is Comedy Central's (read: Viacom's) decision, not that of Stewart and Colbert.

Labels: Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, WGA strike

Tent city in suburbs is cost of U.S. home crisis

Between railroad tracks and beneath the roar of departing planes sits "tent city," a terminus for homeless people. It is not, as might be expected, in a blighted city center, but in the once-booming suburbia of Southern California.

The noisy, dusty camp sprang up in July with 20 residents and now numbers 200 people, including several children, growing as this region east of Los Angeles has been hit by the U.S. housing crisis.

The unraveling of the region known as the Inland Empire reads like a 21st century version of "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck's novel about families driven from their lands by the Great Depression.

As more families throw in the towel and head to foreclosure here and across the nation, the social costs of collapse are adding up in the form of higher rates of homelessness, crime and even disease.

While no current residents claim to be victims of foreclosure, all agree that tent city is a symptom of the wider economic downturn. And it's just a matter of time before foreclosed families end up at tent city, local housing experts say.

"They don't hit the streets immediately," said activist Jane Mercer. Most families can find transitional housing in a motel or with friends before turning to charity or the streets. "They only hit tent city when they really bottom out."

Steve, 50, who declined to give his last name, moved to tent city four months ago. He gets social security payments, but cannot work and said rents are too high.
"House prices are going down, but the rentals are sky-high," said Steve. "If it wasn't for here, I wouldn't have a place to go."

'SQUATTING IN VACANT HOUSES'

Nationally, foreclosures are at an all-time high. Filings are up nearly 100 percent from a year ago, according to the data firm RealtyTrac. Officials say that as many as half a million people could lose their homes as adjustable mortgage rates rise over the next two years.

California ranks second in the nation for foreclosure filings -- one per 88 households last quarter. Within California, San Bernardino county in the Inland Empire is worse -- one filing for every 43 households, according to RealtyTrac.
Maryanne Hernandez bought her dream house in San Bernardino in 2003 and now risks losing it after falling four months behind on mortgage payments.

"It's not just us. It's all over," said Hernandez, who lives in a neighborhood where most families are struggling to meet payments and many have lost their homes.
She has noticed an increase in crime since the foreclosures started. Her house was robbed, her kids' bikes were stolen and she worries about what type of message empty houses send.

The pattern is cropping up in communities across the country, like Cleveland, Ohio, where Mark Wiseman, director of the Cuyahoga County Foreclosure Prevention Program, said there are entire blocks of homes in Cleveland where 60 or 70 percent of houses are boarded up.

The housing bust is part of it, but so is the spiralling cost of health care, a dwindling job base as more companies outsource jobs taht pay a living wage, and the crushing debt that this president will be leaving us.

I only hope George W. Bush lives long enough (hopefully in whatever prison into which convicted war criminals convicted are sentenced) to see himself beat out Herbert Hoover in the Worst President Ever stakes.

Labels: George Bush, housing bubble, mortgage crisis

Today is the first day in a week and a half that I've felt almost like a human being. I usually get a very bad cold about once every two years, but that's about it. This one was a bad one, and had me pretty miserable for most of the last twelve days. Of course well-meaning people have been all over me to go to a doctor, get antibiotics (for a viral cold??), get antivirals, maybe it's asthma, maybe it's the flu, whatever.

I know it's not the flu because I haven't had fever since the first day. I do know one thing: "flu-like symptoms" don't put you in the hospital unless you're pretty damned sick, and if you're that damned sick, you're not out the next day "feeling great".

But then, I'm not Rudy Giuliani:

A day after “flu-like symptoms” led him to turn his airplane in mid-air and seek medical attention, Rudolph W. Giuliani smiled and said he felt “great” as he walked out of a hospital here Thursday afternoon. But his campaign provided few details of what had caused the problem that led him to spend more than 14 hours in the hospital.

Mr. Giuliani was admitted to Barnes-Jewish Hospital here on Wednesday night after he fell ill on a campaign swing through Missouri. His aides said that he had felt increasingly ill as the day went on, and that after his plane left for New York he experienced such a severe headache and flu-like symptoms that the plane returned to Missouri.

After spending the night in the hospital, and being given a series of tests, Mr. Giuliani walked out shortly before 3 p.m. “I’m feeling fine, thanks to the hospital,” Mr. Giuliani, clad in a dark suit and a blue necktie but no overcoat, told reporters.

Just what had ailed Mr. Giuliani was unclear. His communications director, Katie Levinson, said he had been given “a clean bill of health” before he left the hospital. “Doctors performed a series of precautionary tests and the results of all the tests were normal,” Ms. Levinson said in a statement.

The campaign declined to elaborate on what his symptoms were or to specify which tests were performed. Hospital officials said the campaign had asked them not to provide any information about Mr. Giuliani’s health and to refer questions to the campaign.

Jake Tapper similarly wonders about how one can be so sick as to be hospitalized one day and just fine the next:

What was wrong? What tests did he get? What was causing such severe pains? Giuliani gave no details.

His campaign will not release any concrete medical information to the press -- raising questions about the former New York mayor's health and the transparency of his campaign.

Giuliani was experiencing headache pain so severe Wednesday night he had his charter plane turn around and go back to St. Louis and was rushed to the emergency room.

His campaign shared no concrete medical information about which tests the mayor undertook and what the exact results were, also refraining from allowing the media to see his medical records or speak to his doctors.

A senior Giuliani campaign official told ABC News, "He's fine. He campaigns very vigorously. He did 77 events in 53 cities this month. He just got sick."

The former mayor was all smiles for the cameras as he left Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis Thursday afternoon after spending the night and the better part of a day in a Missouri hospital.

"I feel great. Take care. Merry Christmas, I'm feeling fine, thanks to the hospital. They did a great job," Giuliani said, refusing to answer any reporters' questions as he left the hospital.

Now this bug that I've been battling had as part of its early stages a constant band of headache around the back of my head, which at its peak had me awakening in the middle of the night with pounding head pain. But I wasn't hospitalized.

I know that Saint Rudy of 9/11 believes that everything about him is his own personal business -- his marital and extramarital affairs, his client list, his business dealings, and now his health. But if he wants to be president, he'd better get used to the fact that the health of the guy who may have to make split-second decisions IS the people's business, not just his own. And if he can't deal with that, then let him withdraw from the race and go back to private life where no one will care about his health.

Labels: Rudy Giuliani, secrecy

Sometimes amidst the sniping and other assorted crap that goes on over at le Grand Orange, there's a diary that both makes you want to scream with rage but at the same time gives you hope for us all.

Yesterday it was this one, which told us of a seventeen-year-old in need of a liver transplant that was denied by by CIGNA. After the company was barraged by phone calls from people who read about Nataline Sarkisyan's plight, the decision was reversed and the transplant was approved.

A happy ending, right? Not quite. Nataline Sarkisyan died a few hours after a paper-pusher's denial of care decision was reversed:

Nataline had been battling leukemia and received a bone marrow transplant from her brother. She developed a complication, however, that caused her liver to fail.

Doctors at UCLA determined she needed a transplant and sent a letter to CIGNA Healthcare on Dec. 11. The Philadelphia-based health insurance company denied payment for the transplant.

On Thursday, about 150 teenagers and nurses protested outside CIGNA's office in Glendale. As the protesters rallied, the company reversed its decision and said it would approve the transplant.

Despite the reversal, CIGNA said in an e-mail statement before she died that there was a lack of medical evidence showing the procedure would work in Nataline's case.

"Our hearts go out to Nataline and her family, as they endure this terrible ordeal," the company said. " ... CIGNA HealthCare has decided to make an exception in this rare and unusual case and we will provide coverage should she proceed with the requested liver transplant."

Officials with CIGNA could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday night.

I'll just bet they couldn't. Nor will they today. Or tomorrow. Or the next day. Or any time ever in the future.

Do you know people who have lost loved ones during the holidays? I do. All too many of them, including one who lost a daughter in her early 20's soon after New Year's. The holiday season is never the same after that. Here is a family that has to live with the knowledge that their daughter is dead because a gumchewer on the other end of the phone at a health insurance company looked at a spreadsheet and decided that a seventeen-year-old didn't deserve a chance at life because to give her that chance might mean that CIGNA CEO H. Edward Hanway might earn less than $10 million a year and so that the company could boast a 22% increase in profits for the third quarter.

Those profits are blood money -- money earned by denying care to desperately ill people like Nataline Sarkisyan and denying coverage to other people with pre-existing conditions.

The very same people who call themselves "pro-life" will go to the mat to have fertilized eggs declared the same as human beings, but they oppose universal health care even if it means a seventeen-year-old dies.

Imagine how many Nataline Sarkisyans there are in the United States. How many families are going into Christmas week fighting for care that they can't get because the CEO has to earn multimillions and Wall Street has to be happy?

If Barack Obama wants to know why you can't let these people sit at the table with you and "negotiate" health care, this is why. Because when they "negotiate", real people die.

Labels: health care

I don't think so:

Labels: John Edwards

Clarence Thomas, the angriest man in America, doesn't much like being a Supreme Court Justice:

Clarence Thomas told an overflow crowd at Chapman University Monday evening that he never wanted to become a Supreme Court justice, or even a judge.

"There's not much that entices about the job," Thomas said, answering questions from the public that provided a rare glimpse of the man behind the office. "There's no money in it, no privacy, no big houses, and from an ego standpoint, it does nothing for me."

Thomas, 59, said the position is satisfying because he feels he's serving the public, and he's honored by it, "but I wouldn't say I like it."

Then maybe it's time to step down and open up a spot for someone who takes the job seriously and doesn't see it as a substitute for the kind of therapy Thomas so desperately needs so he can stop cultivating his Garden of Old Grudges.

(via ThinkProgress)

Labels: Clarence Thomas, WATBs

This essay in American Conservative comes to us via Cernig at Newshoggers, whom I really need to make a point of reading every day. Michael C. Desch makes the point that if you like George W. Bush's doctrine of Endless War, you are going to just LOVE Rudy Giuliani:

The core of senior advisors includes former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, Martin Kramer (Middle East), Stephen Rosen (defense), S. Enders Wimbush (diplomacy), Peter Berkowitz (statecraft, human rights, and freedom), Kim Holmes (foreign policy), and perhaps Daniel Pipes. Giuliani’s chief foreign-policy advisor is retired diplomat and Yale instructor Charles Hill. In the face of controversy about how many neoconservatives were playing prominent roles, Podhoretz bragged to the New York Observer,“Giuliani doesn’t think that this is a liability.”

Podhoretz is the person whose presence has done the most to set in concrete the notion that Team Rudy is all neocon all the time. Famous for arguing that we are in the midst of “World War IV,” Podhoretz is scathing in his criticism of those he suspects of not waging the war with enough vigor. He even charges that many senior military officers show insufficient stomach for the fight, singling out former CENTCOM commander John Abizaid and his successor, Adm. William Fallon. Podhoretz is also an assiduous peddler of the new neocon myth that the antiwar camp stabbed President Bush in the back.

And he doesn’t stop at Iraq: Podhoretz constantly beats the drum for bombing Iran to halt its nascent nuclear program. Air Marshal Podhoretz assured The Telegraph that the air campaign “would take five minutes.” His optimism that attacking Iran would be another cakewalk combines with pessimism about the prospects of multilateral sanctions preventing Iran from getting the bomb. “Yet for all their retrospective remorse over the wholesale slaughter of the Jews back then,” Podhoretz sneers, “the Europeans seem no readier to lift a finger to prevent a second Holocaust than they were the first time around.”

There are areas where Podhoretz is out of synch with the rest of the Giuliani team. One is his steadfast commitment to the Bush administration’s efforts to spread democracy in the Middle East, which he applies equally to American enemies like Iran and Syria and friends like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Other Giuliani advisors are more restrained about democracy promotion. Another point of departure is Podhoretz’s long-standing critique of the Clinton administration for treating terrorism as simply a “crime problem,” a charge somewhat discordant with the mayor’s claim that his successful campaign against crime in New York City justifies electing him global sheriff.

The biggest problem Podhoretz poses for the Giuliani campaign is that he has some particularly far-fetched beliefs that even in these fevered times most Americans do not share. As Ian Buruma noted in a recent review of World War IV, Podhoretz “expresses a weird longing for the state of war, for the clarity it brings, and for the chance to divide one’s fellow citizens, or indeed the whole world, neatly into friends and foes, comrades and traitors, warriors and appeasers, those who are with us and those who are against.”

[snip]

Giuliani’s tendency to conflate all terrorist groups—whether Islamist or not and whether they attack the United States or just allies like Israel—led Fred Kaplan of Slate to dub him the “anti-statesman.” Sending him and his team to the White House might actually ignite World War IV.

Anyone actually considering voting for this authoritarian proto-fascist lunatic ought to read this article before deciding. Because even the most ardent supporter of Israel must admit that having the entire world erupt into global conflagration is NOT "good for Israel."

Labels: Rudy Giuliani

Republicans and other economic free marketers have always adhered to what I call the Fernando Corollary. Fernando was the unctuous pseudo-Latino lounge lizard talk show host played by Billy Crystal on SNL, who always told people "You look mmmmmahvelous" and said that it was better to look good than to feel good. The Republican Fernandos have long understood that for Americans, it is just as good to look rich or to feel rich as to be rich, and that's why they have been able to make political hay out of token gestures like $300 advances on next year's tax refunds and handing middle- and working-class Americans the financial gun with which to shoot themselves.

I wanted a house for a long tiime before we bought one. I wanted a house the way most women want babies. There were a number of reasons for this, few of them financial. I wanted to be able to paint whatever colors I wanted. I wanted us to be able to crank up the stereo without disturbing anyone. But most of all, I wanted to be assumed to be an adult, and not have to beg a landlord, "Please, please, PLEEZ, Mr. Landlord? Can I PLEEZ have a kitty? I promise I'll take care of it" -- in my thirties.

We started looking for a house in 1995, looking at a particular price range. When houses in that price range turned out to need mid-five-figures of work, we decided to wait another year and save some more money so we could go up to the next price point. At that point, when we went to pre-qualify and be pre-approved for a mortgage, we were told by the mortgage company, "You know, you CAN go higher. We can qualify you for X dollars" -- which was $60,000 more than the amount we had figured out we could afford.

We had about as good a rental deal as it's possible to get at that time. Our apartment wasn't very big, but it had an open floor plan with a kitchen that had moe countertop/workspace than I have now. It was on the first floor and we had use of the yard. It was in great condition, the landlord always called in people to fix things that broke, and in eight years he never raised the rent. But he had a heart condition and was fading noticeably at the time we moved out, and had we not bought when we did, we'd be having to move in another year anyway. It also happened to be close to the bottom of the market.

Still, you don't go from paying $650/month for rent to buying a house without figuring out exactly how you're going to do it, especially when you have a reluctant spouse, as I did. There weren't the kind of online financial calculators then that we have now, but I knew my way around an HP-12C calculator, and I was able to figure out exactly how much the mortgage would be and what the "net" after the tax deduction for mortgage interest and property taxes would be. So we knew exactly what our price range was and we were not going to go one penny over that. And when we finally bought, it wasn't a house with a spanking new kitchen and new bathrooms, but what is known as a "POS Cape" where nothing had been updated since 1975, the bathrooms were both original, the basement family room was from the 1970's, and the carpet in the living room was red. But it was on a dead end street, it had "good bones" and plaster walls" and Mr. Brilliant, who is 6' tall, didn't have to duck anywhere.

We were lucky because however inadvertently, we timed the market right. In the late 1980's, we were told by friends to buy, buy, buy -- that real estate only goes up. One friend bought a house at the 1980's peak and ended up selling at a loss one step ahead of being foreclosed. It was nearly two decades before she was able to buy again. I never forget this, largely because when I look in the cabinet where I keep "the good dishes", I see the remains of her boyfriend's grandmother's stemware that I bought at their garage sale so that if he ever wanted it back, he'd know where it was.

Eleven years after buying, the kitchen is still a work in progress, the basement still has the same cheap paneling the previous owners put up in the 1970's, and the downstairs bathroom is still original. We've put on new sidiing and a new roof and new windows after saving enough to pay for them, because we are practical and cautious and not about to put ourselves in a precarious financial positiion by taking equity loans.

I recognize that the housing bubble made the $200,000 house a thing of the past in northern New Jersey (even if only temporarily), but the concept remains: If you can't afford it, you can't afford it. Period. And you wait till you can.

The problem is that Americans have come to believe that they deserve what they want when they want it. I blame Ronald Reagan for most of this, with his bogus supply-side economic doctrine which said that you can cut taxes, increase spending, and still balance the budget. You can have anything you want, and it's all free. Americans bought the bullshit because it takes the notion of deferred gratification and throws it out the window. Reagan's legacy can be seen in some of the houses in my neighborhood: former POS Capes that have been remodeled into McMansions with soaring entry foyers, bridal staircases, and cavernous kitchens with Jenn-Air appliances and granite countertops in which no one cooks. You may have leveraged yourself to the hilt, but dammit, your daughter will be able to come down a nice staircase when she goes to the prom -- assuming you keep your job and can keep paying the mortgage after the rate adjusts.

It's rare that I don't agree 100% with Paul Krugman, but in his op-ed today, he paints those who took out mortgages they couldn't afford as hapless and helpless dupes of a predatory mortgage industry:

Apologists for the mortgage industry claim, as Mr. Greenspan does in his new book, that “the benefits of broadened home ownership” justified the risks of unregulated lending.

But homeownership didn’t broaden. The great bulk of dubious subprime lending took place from 2004 to 2006 — yet homeownership rates are already back down to mid-2003 levels. With millions more foreclosures likely, it’s a good bet that homeownership will be lower at the Bush administration’s end than it was at the start.

Meanwhile, during the bubble years, the mortgage industry lured millions of people into borrowing more than they could afford, and simultaneously duped investors into investing vast sums in risky assets wrongly labeled AAA. Reasonable estimates suggest that more than 10 million American families will end up owing more than their homes are worth, and investors will suffer $400 billion or more in losses.

So where were the regulators as one of the greatest financial disasters since the Great Depression unfolded? They were blinded by ideology.

“Fed shrugged as subprime crisis spread,” was the headline on a New York Times report on the failure of regulators to regulate. This may have been a discreet dig at Mr. Greenspan’s history as a disciple of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of unfettered capitalism known for her novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

In a 1963 essay for Ms. Rand’s newsletter, Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.”

It’s no wonder, then, that he brushed off warnings about deceptive lending practices, including those of Edward M. Gramlich, a member of the Federal Reserve board. In Mr. Greenspan’s world, predatory lending — like attempts to sell consumers poison toys and tainted seafood — just doesn’t happen.

But Mr. Greenspan wasn’t the only top official who put ideology above public protection. Consider the press conference held on June 3, 2003 — just about the time subprime lending was starting to go wild — to announce a new initiative aimed at reducing the regulatory burden on banks. Representatives of four of the five government agencies responsible for financial supervision used tree shears to attack a stack of paper representing bank regulations. The fifth representative, James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision, wielded a chainsaw.

Also in attendance were representatives of financial industry trade associations, which had been lobbying for deregulation. As far as I can tell from press reports, there were no representatives of consumer interests on the scene.

Two months after that event the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the tree-shears-wielding agencies, moved to exempt national banks from state regulations that protect consumers against predatory lending. If, say, New York State wanted to protect its own residents — well, sorry, that wasn’t allowed.

Of course, now that it has all gone bad, people with ties to the financial industry are rethinking their belief in the perfection of free markets. Mr. Greenspan has come out in favor of, yes, a government bailout. “Cash is available,” he says — meaning taxpayer money — “and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.”

I'm all for practices that make it easier to buy a home, for those who otherwise have the means to pay a mortgage. We were the beneficiaries of modifications to the old 20% down/30 year fixed doctrine that allowed us to put down 10% and pay PMI until the house's value rose enough to increase our equity to 20%. That kind of modification is reasonable. But it's hard for me to imagine sitting in a mortgage broker's office while he presents you with proposals for a $400,000 first mortgage and another $100,000 second mortgage to cover a down payment and a new gourmet kitchen when you make $60,000 a year, and not walking away from the table saying "We just can't do it now." It's hard for me to understand looking at a house like mine, priced at close to a half-million dollars, and not thinking "This price can't possibly hold." A 30-year fixed rate mortgage builds equity slowly enough; I can't imagine making payments on a mortgage that builds no equity at all. You don't have to know your way around an HP-12C to ask "What happens after the rate adjusts?"

Making it easier for qualified buyers to purchase a home is an unmitigated good. Singing Ronald Reagan's old song of having whatever you want and it's all free is another story. Industry has proven time and time again that nothing trumps profits. Health insurers are willing to let people die rather than pay for treatment. Auto manufacturers that make bad decisions about the vehicles they choose to manufacture will lay off tens of thousands of employees -- and then give the CEO a seven-figure bonus. Manufacturers of pool filters will allow a child to have her intestines sucked out by their product rather than fix a defect. Regulation is necessary, and we are now seeing the result of deregulating the mortgage industry. Telling a home buyer that the rate will adjust to 8% and then raising it to 12% is fraud and should be treated as such. Not making perfectly clear that the adjusted rate may very well be higher than it is today because rates fluctuate is a bait-and-switch.

Krugman is right that this should be a campaign issue, and he's right that consumers deserve protection from predatory lending practices. But home buyers have an obligation to their own lives and their own futures to educate themselves before signing on the dotted line. Even if home prices drop to what they were in 1996, a six-figure mortgage is one hell of a lot of debt into which to enter without knowing damn well what you're doing.

Labels: housing bubble, mortgage crisis

Nancy Pelosi, quoted in the New York Times:

“What is interesting to me is how the Republicans have stuck with the president...I didn’t foresee that.”

And that, my friends, may very well be the "WTF???" moment of the year.

How on earth could Nancy Pelosi have NOT known that Republicans would stick with this president, when they had been doing just that for six years? When even Arlen Specter and Chuck Hagel, the most outspoken critics in the Republican Party voted for everything George Bush wanted and against everything he didn't, when the time came to take a stand? I realize that Specter and Hagel are in the Senate, not the House, but they are emblematic of the lemmings-off-a-cliff mentality of the Republican Party. Did she really expect that Republicans were just going to stop doing what they've been doing since 1994 and suddenly capitulate to the inevitability of Democratic dominance? If so, then she's more out of thought than any of us thought and it's time for her to step down and let someone else lead; someone willing to see what's right in front of his/her eyes.

Labels: Nancy Pelosi, spinelessness

Can you really blame Iraq for still dreaming of better days, which are being defined more and more as when their strongman Saddam Hussein was in charge of things?

Granted, Saddam, too, had his torture palaces and murdered his countrymen but Iraqis, as with the rest of us, have short and forgiving memories. The tyrant is dead. Long stay George W. Bush!

So, how surprised do we have the right to be when we hear of the discovery of Iraqi insurgent torture chambers near Muqdadiya in Diyala province?

Gee. Wasn’t it Bush who’d said last July, “There is progress in Diyala province, where there is a big push against insurgents” (I guess they learned to push back)? And, gee, isn’t the “troop drawdown” (slashing our brigades from 20 to a much more manageable 19) slated to begin in that very same Diyala Province? Gee, this wouldn’t be the same Muqdadiya in which about 100 insurgents armed to the teeth with RPG’s stormed a police station in March of ’06 and killed about 18 Iraqi cops the very day before Bush told Helen Thomas that he was fully planning on punting an exit strategy all the way to 2009?

Is the discovery of this torture complex and the 26 corpses that were found there what Cheney loves to call “enormous progress” or an unfortunate setback that will put the kibosh on even this all-too-little de-escalation and give us an excuse to stay in Diyala?

Either way, this represents a no-win situation: Either the already-reviled United States renegs on its promise to begin troop exits in Diyala or we look as if we’re walking away without doing a damned thing about the evil that was taking place under our very noses.

Sort of like the mess the British are leaving behind in Basra.

No doubt, however, the Bush administration, those fresh-faced eternal optimists, God luv ’em, will find some way to turn this into something positive, such as another cost-plus, no-bid contract for KBR, Halliburton or Blackwater (that is, if they can spare the manpower being allocated to poisoning the troops, bilking the American taxpayer, raping their own female employees or murdering the indigenous population.).

But if you ask Doug Feith, former gofer for Paul Wolfowitz, how this insurgency could’ve developed, don’t expect many answers. A week and a half ago, Feith said to the American Enterprise Institute, that fine neoconservative bastion for peace and Muslim-Christian brotherhood, that while mistakes were made, de-Baathification wasn’t among them. Feith, with the stubbornness of a dead mule, still insists that we didn’t create a ready-made insurgency when Paul Bremer, the anti Lawrence of Arabia of Iraq, abruptly threw tens of thousands of soldiers into the streets.

Soldiers already whipped and now angrier and desperate for money and payback. Enter al Qaeda largely funded with bin Laden’s bottomless pockets and a sophisticated financial network, aided in no small part by our allies the Saudis, that we still haven’t completely smashed or frozen.

And then, of course, there’s the inevitable repugnant reaction to anyone else, insurgents or otherwise, actually using torture that a verbally- and politically-waterboarded Congress gave Bush the latitude to legally engage in by ratifying the Military Commissions Act last year.

This administration is by now so closely allied with torture and practices that harken back to the Nazis, Soviets and even the bloodiest years in the Tower of London, that any expression of pious revulsion at anyone else using torture may be viewed upon as merely protecting a proprietary interest, as if someone, somewhere in a small dark office of the Justice Department will actually sue the Iraqi insurgency for a violation of intellectual property statutes.

Meanwhile, anonymous Iraqi artists paint graffiti, trying to imagine better days that will be a longer time in coming than they dare imagine.

I think every blogger's dream is to be able to blog full-time, without having to worry about things like a paycheck and health insurance. As the trend moves away from the individual or small group blogger and towards the group blog concept, the "lite" version of that dream is to be asked to participate in a group blog. These group blogs blow the rest of us away in terms of content, but I think we're losing something as distinctive blog voices become absorbed in group blogs, some of which have become businesses in their own right.

It's hard to crank out material day after day without any reward other than readership. I'm lucky in that I at least for now have a good full-time job that's close to home and leaves me a few hours in the day to read up on what's going on and to write. I'd love to write more, but if the price of writing full-time is the gnawing fear that comes with being unemployed, I say, "No, thanks."

But some of the best blog writers out there are still flying solo, or with part-time co-pilots, and the most prominent of those is Digby.

Digby may hobnob with the Big Folks, but Hullabaloo is still a throwback to the days when everyone was a solo flier. And unlike many blogs, even this one, every post at Hullabaloo is a tightly-constructed essay in its own right.

Many of us are tucking twenties into holiday cards this year for the newspaper carrier and the hairdresser and the kids' day care attendants and the trash collectors and the various other people we want to remember. If you read Digby, I hope you'll consider showing your appreciation while you're doing your holiday tips. Because just because some bloggers can do it full time while we spend the day in a cubicle or office doesn't mean we shouldn't support them.

(If Driftglass had a tip jar, I'd link to that too and tell you to show him some love as well. But alas, he doesn't.)

Labels: bloggers

If Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, I will vote for him, but he still strikes me as the college guy who hides in his room during the frat parties lest something happen that might damage his presidential aspirations later on. His refusal to see that for today's Republicans, bipartisanship means "Do it our way or fuck off" is enough of a problem, but the pattern of not wanting to leave a track record of votes indicates an unwillingness to take a stand when it counts:

Sometimes the “present’ votes were in line with instructions from Democratic leaders or because he objected to provisions in bills that he might otherwise support. At other times, Mr. Obama voted present on questions that had overwhelming bipartisan support. In at least a few cases, the issue was politically sensitive.

The record has become an issue on the presidential campaign trail, as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, his chief rival for the Democratic nomination, has seized on the present votes he cast on a series of anti-abortion bills to portray Mr. Obama as a “talker” rather than a “doer.”

Although a present vote is not unusual in Illinois, Mr. Obama’s use of it is being raised as he tries to distinguish himself as a leader who will take on the tough issues, even if it means telling people the “hard truths” they do not want to hear.

Mr. Obama’s aides and some allies dispute the characterization that a present vote is tantamount to ducking an issue. They said Mr. Obama cast 4,000 votes in the Illinois Senate and used the present vote to protest bills that he believed had been drafted unconstitutionally or as part of a broader legislative strategy.

“No politically motivated attacks in the 11th hour of a closely contested campaign can erase a record of leadership and courage,” said Bill Burton, Mr. Obama’s spokesman.

An examination of Illinois records shows at least 36 times when Mr. Obama was either the only state senator to vote present or was part of a group of six or fewer to vote that way.

In more than 50 votes, he seemed to be acting in concert with other Democrats as part of a strategy.

For a juvenile-justice bill, lobbyists and fellow lawmakers say, a political calculus could have been behind Mr. Obama’s present vote. On other measures like the anti-abortion bills, which Republicans proposed, Mr. Obama voted present to help more vulnerable Democrats under pressure to cast “no” votes.

In other cases, Mr. Obama’s present votes stood out among widespread support as he tried to use them to register legal and other objections to parts of the bills.

In Illinois, political experts say voting present is a relatively common way for lawmakers to express disapproval of a measure. It can at times help avoid running the risks of voting no, they add.

“If you are worried about your next election, the present vote gives you political cover,” said Kent D. Redfield, a professor of political studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield. “This is an option that does not exist in every state and reflects Illinois political culture.”

Perhaps. But one would think that a politician who hopes to represent change and straightforwardness would be more willing to take stands on controversial issues. If he thought a bill was unconstitutional, or might be ineffective, why not just vote "No"?

Labels: Barack Obama

Most of you probably know what I'm talking about, but I won't dignify it by linking to anything. But isn't it funny how every time John Edwards starts to gain traction, one of these maggots crawls out from under a rock making claims?

UPDATE: Sorry, wingnuts (and Ann Althouse). You're wrong again. Better luck next time. But you know, you might just consider that perhaps shit doesn't always stick to the wall anymore.

Labels: 2008 election, John Edwards, utter horseshit

Four+ years of enduring Maureen Dowd write columns like this one:

When men want to put down a powerful woman in a sexist way, they will say she’s a hag or a nag or a witch or angry or hysterical.

First, the Republicans tried to paint Hillary as angry, but that didn’t work because she has shown a steady composure and laughed a lot (even if the laughter isn’t always connected to people saying anything funny). She has kept her sense of humor — which has a tart side — mostly under wraps, so she won’t be accused of being witchy.

But some conservative pundits who disagree with a woman on matters of policy jump straight into an attack on the woman’s looks or personal life.

And so the inevitable came to pass this week when Rush Limbaugh began riffing about an unflattering picture of Hillary in New Hampshire that Matt Drudge put up on his Web site with the caption, “The Toll of a Campaign.”

“So the question is this,” the radio personality said. “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?”

Observing that Hillary is stuck with a looks-obsessed culture and that the presidency ages its occupants, including W., Limbaugh observed that “men aging makes them look more authoritative, accomplished, distinguished. Sadly, it’s not that way for women, and they will tell you.”

And Hillary, he noted, “is not going to want to look like she’s getting older, because it will impact poll numbers, it will impact perceptions.” So, he added, “there will have to be steps taken to avoid the appearance of aging.”

He said that voters lean toward attractive men, too, and that since TV, it’s less likely that a bloated “fat-guy” president would get elected — recalling that some were gauging whether Al Gore would run by checking his weight.

Limbaugh finished up with this: “Let me give you a picture, just to think about. ... The campaign is Mitt Romney vs. Hillary Clinton in our quest in this country for visual perfection, hmm?”

Now if I had written this column, I'd use it to expound on the sexism of evaluating even a presidential candidate on the basis of her "fuckability" if she's a woman. Or I'd have taken note of Limbaugh's oddly homoerotic description of Mitt Romney's "visual perfection." I mean, have YOU ever heard a straight guy talk about another man that way?

But because this is Maureen Dowd, instead we get this:

Hillary doesn’t have to worry about her face. She has to worry about her mask. Back in the ’92 race, Clinton pollsters devised strategies to humanize her and make her seem more warm and maternal. Fifteen years later, her campaign is devising strategies to humanize her and make her seem more warm and maternal.

The public still has no idea of what part of her is stage-managed and focus-grouped, and what part is legit. It’s pretty pathetic, at this stage of her career, that she has to wage a major offensive, by helicopter and Web testimonials, to make herself appear warm-blooded.

...which reads as if Maureen Dowd got up to go to the bathroom and when she got back, started to write a different column.

We know that the way our society treats older women is vexing to Dowd, who continues to behave in interviews with men as if she's the cutest girl at the malt shop and can't understand why they treat her like a columnist for one of the most prestigious newspaper in the country instead of like the cheerleader they want to take up to Lookout Point. It's sad, then, that Dowd, whose Hillary-loathing probably outdoes even Limbaugh's, can't even put that away long enough to recognize that the furor over "Teh Photo":



...represents the very ageism that has MoDo, who is a good-looking woman for any age, having difficulty getting a date. Yes, Hillary Clinton is lined. It happens, as any woman over the age of 50 who hasn't immobilized her face with Botox will tell you. And the harsh winter winds of Iowa and New Hampshire aren't exactly aging skin's best friend. But if MoDo could get past her loathing for five minutes, she too might be appalled that the very men (because it IS men, and the wingnut fembots who try to please the boys by being as shallow and dick-obsessed as the men are) who seem to think that a woman president should look like Pam Anderson are the ones who look right past her, no matter how fetchingly she crosses her legs or tugs on her skirt.

Rebecca Traister addresses "Teh Photo" in an article entitled "Campaigning While Female", which really ought to be "Campaigning While Aging", because let's face it -- Uma Thurman running for president wouldn't have Rush Limbaugh complaining about how he doesn't want to have to watch her age in office. This isn't to say that Uma Thurman wouldn't be subject to the same scrutiny; after all, Thurman is thirty-six years old and would be forty-two after four years and pushing fifty after eight.

For some reason, a woman's aging holds up a mirror to men's own aging in a way a fellow man's aging doesn't. I'm always reminded of the clip from the trailer for About Schmidt in which Jack Nicholson says "What is this old woman doing in my house?" -- a clip that so turned me off that I refused to see the movie. But a lined and mature Hillary Clinton is even more terrifying than the hypersexualized vagina dentata that has always seemed to be behind the right's hatred of her. Perhaps it's the reproach that the way the biggest babe magnet in the country looks at her sends to other men; that however much of a dirty dog Bill Clinton may be, and however much Little Head sometimes does the thinking, Cranial Head is still nuts about her. Perhaps it's that an aging woman in the White House, like the aging wife in the house, hits men over the head with a sledgehammer that they aren't kids either. Or perhaps it's as simple as a closet case like Matt Drudge letting out his inner Carson Kressley for a moment -- and the rest of the Hillary Haters taking advantage of Drudge needing to offload some of the pressure of being in the closet.

Regardless of the motivation, it's just another reason why it grieves me so much that the first viable woman candidate is a corporatist warhawk that I can't support. Because it would sure be nice to join a kind of Crone Power movement that says, "We're here, we're old, and if you don't like it, close your fucking eyes."

Labels: Hillary Clinton

The minute the Bush Administration claimed that the CIA destroyed the interrogation tapes without its knowledge and against its will, I knew that they were involved in it up to their eyeballs. And I was right:

At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Some other officials assert that no one at the White House advocated destroying the tapes. Those officials acknowledged, however, that no White House lawyer gave a direct order to preserve the tapes or advised that destroying them would be illegal.

To the extent that no White House attorney directly advocated destroying the tape but didn't explicitly advocate preserving them, this is what during the Reagan years was called "plausible deniability", or loosely translated, "Do what you want....but don't tell me you did it."

And the weirdest thing for those of us who grew up in the 1960's is the notion of taking the CIA's side on anything.

Labels: Bush Administration, torture

Johnny the Tortoise slipped quietly into the lead in Iowa (at least according to one poll):

John Edwards has leapfrogged over his rivals Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and leads the Democratic field in Iowa, according to the latest InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion poll. In the Republican caucus race, Mike Huckabee continues to hold a narrow lead over Mitt Romney.

The race among the three top Democrats is extremely close, with the potential for any of them to finish first – or third.

Edwards leads with 30 percent in a poll of Democratic voters who said they intend to participate in the Jan. 3 presidential caucuses, followed by Clinton with 26 percent and Obama with 24 percent. When the sample was narrowed to the most likely caucus-goers, based on several questions, Obama leads Edwards by less than a percentage point with 27 percent, with Clinton in third place at 24 percent.

Edwards holds a significant advantage, however, among a group who could be key to the first contest of the presidential year: those who say their first choice is someone other than the top three. Under Iowa Democratic Party rules, candidates who poll less than 15 percent in the first vote at each caucus around the state are eliminated, and their supporters get a second chance to vote for another candidate.

Under both screens, Edwards leads as the second choice of these voters, with Clinton trailing Obama.

“If Edwards is the second choice at this stage of those who intend to vote for other Democrats, then it would not be surprising if he produced a bit of a shock in Iowa,” said InsiderAdvantage CEO Matt Towery.

(h/t)

Labels: John Edwards

The land of Tolkein geeks, anyway.

Nothing like having The Golden Compass bomb to make a studio rethink its relationship with Peter Jackson:

After publicly feuding for more than a year, "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema have reached agreement to make J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit," a planned two-film prequel to the blockbuster trilogy.

Jackson, who directed "Rings," will serve as executive producer for two "Hobbit" pictures. They will tell the story of how the young hobbit Bilbo Baggins originally came to possess the nefarious One Ring that Frodo, his adopted heir, needed three films to dispose of.

A director for the films has yet to be named. Production is tentatively set to begin in 2009 with a release planned for 2010, and the sequel following in 2011.

Relations between Jackson and New Line soured after "Rings" despite a collective worldwide box office gross of nearly $3 billion. Jackson shepherded Tolkien's Middle-Earth saga to a combined 17 Academy Awards including best picture for 2003's "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King." The trilogy also includes 2002's "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" and 2001's "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring."

"I'm very pleased that we've been able to put our differences behind us, so that we may begin a new chapter with our old friends at New Line," Jackson said in a statement. "We are delighted to continue our journey through Middle Earth."

And so are we. As long as said director doesn't turn out to be someone like Brett Ratner.

Labels: movies

Hokey as hell -- and hilarious:



Hey, Movie Trailer Guy -- from your mouth, to God's ear.

Iowa....please don't screw this up. We're counting on you.

Labels: John Edwards

New Jersey: America's laughingstock. We have the Turnpike, the tank farms in Elizabeth, the Molly Pitcher Service Area, the Flagship, Lucy the Elephant, the strip club that turned into the Bada Bing on The Sopranos, actual places called "pork stores", and the Bergen Mall, a quaint old 1950's mall that is alas being metamorphosed into yet another of those ersatz "Towne Centers".

But despite the corrupt politicians and Camden and high property taxes and weakening job base and the other things that make life in New Jersey a daily trial, at last we have something in which we can take pride: We are one of the few states to recognize that killing people who kill people to show people that killing people is wrong -- is wrong.

Labels: death penalty, New Jersey

If you want to thank Chris Dodd, even if you're supporting another candidate (as I am), go send him some love (as I did).

Labels: Chris Dodd, Democrats with balls, FISA

And it's only because Darlene Love's pipes are the best evidence we've ever seen that there may be a God after all:



But seriously....does anyone really LIKE Christmas music? To me, the standard recordings of Christmas songs have the icepick-to-forehead inducing effect of hearing Stairway to Heaven for the 47,826th time.

And then, of course, there's this one, which kind of violates the "It's only OK to knock your OWN team" rule, but ah, the heck with it -- it's DARLENE FUCKIN' LOVE:

Labels: Christmas, icepick meet forehead

Don't get all up my ass about being xenophobic. It's no secret that I have major problems with the parade of IT jobs being sent overseas, and I have even more problems with the way call centers are being run. You don't work in IT as long as I have without recognizing the idiosyncracies in speech that are characteristic of India, no matter how many Shilpas identify themselves as Sharon and Sanjeevs identify themselves as Steve. Frankly, I'd rather deal with Shilpa and Sanjeev, because at least then I know with whom I'm speaking. I've worked with people from India, I've had friends from India, and I have no problem understanding people from India.

My beef isn't with people in India who take these jobs. I can't object to someone who just wants to earn a living, and often these call center employees are as exploited as any other worker dependent on a giant multinational corporation. I really try to separate out the individual person at the other end of the phone from the policies to put him there and the companies that make their jobs well-nigh impossible to do properly, but sometimes it's difficult.

My place of employment is a Dell shop. We deal with Dell for all desktop machines. And usually Dell's business customers are routed to American customer service reps. We had a particular line of desktops with heat problems, and as the motherboards went, our tech support guys would call Dell and get new motherboards. One time the call was routed incorrectly, and our guy ended up having to deal with no fewer than three different people reading the same script about the tests that had to be done "in order to identify the problem." He ended up calling again and again until his call was routed to someone in the U.S.

Mr. Brilliant and I have succumbed to the siren song of high-definition television. We don't go out all that much and don't spend much on entertainment, so the prospect of spending $130/month for pay TV doesn't seem as horrifying as it would otherwise, particularly when it gets you almost 300 channels of nothing you'd want to watch. Right now we have about 147 pieces of this lovely Craftsman TV stand strewn all over the living room floor, waiting for one or both of us to find the Rosetta Stone that will decipher the assembly instructions, but if you want to schedule installation of the HD line, you have to get on the phone. So yesterday, with almost no voice in the seventh day of being down with the Winter in New Jersey Crud, I called Dish Network to arrange for the HD receiver and the installation.

The call center rep identified himself as "Maxwell", and I almost immediately realized that I had reached a call center in India. After I had admonished "Maxwell" twice to please speak into the microphone, he started by asking me for my account password. Not my account number, but my account password. There IS no account password, other than the one you use to log into your account online, which apparently was NOT the "password" to which he was referring. When I said I didn't know what he was talking about because there is no account password other than the one used for the online account, he told me to ask my husband for the password.

That's when I let him have it. I told him that assuming a woman didn't know the password because her husband had it was insulting (especially when it's my name on the account), and asked if he was in the U.S. When he said no, I said "If you were in the U.S., you would know how insulting it is to tell a woman to ask her husband for information just because she doesn't know what the hell you're talking about because you're asking for something that doesn't exist." He then asked me AGAIN to ask my husband for the password. I also said I hoped that the call was "being monitored for quality assurance" because the quality assurance on this call was God-awful.

I asked to be transferred to someone in the U.S., and he said he couldn't, that calls were routed to the next available operator. I told him I was hanging up and that I would keep calling till I get someone in the U.S. I tried again and this time I got "Tanesha". I had a pretty good idea that Tanesha wasn't a name that someone in an Indian call center would identify as American, and when I asked if she was in the U.S., she said yes, she was in Philadelphia.

I nearly wept with joy and gratitude. Tanesha didn't ask me about a password. I explained that I had some questions about the best way to set up my HD setup, what the various costs were, the differences between the two receivers that were my options, what the installation rebate was, and what the commitment was. Then she set up the appointment. Not one question about a password. And she was even politically correct by asking if I celebrate Christmas before wishing me a merry one. I thanked her profusely for her assistance abd said I hoped this call was being monitored because I wanted her boss to see what a good job she's doing.

In retrospect, it occurred to me that "Maxwell" was probably asking about my account number, not my password. But once there was that breakdown in communication, the fact that these call centers tend to work by written script in an attempt to avoid some of the issues of national idiosyncracies in the language cited in the article linked above became an insurmountable obstacle to completing the call. It showed me that "Maxwell" wasn't equipped to do more than take orders for installation.

I'm the kind of customer that a company like Dish Network should embrace tightly. We've had the service for eight years, despite the relentless sales pitches for Optimum services (offered by Cablevision, one of the most odious and crappy cable providers in the known universe) and the creepy and obviously unscreened door-to-door salesmen that Verizon is hiring to aggressively push its FIOS TV/phone service. We pay more to buy our phone, internet, and TV à la carte just because we like the way Echostar does business. Echostar CEO Charlie Ergen is the kind of cult hero to the company's customers the way Steve Jobs is for Apple's. I like the company so much that I bought some of the stock for my IRA. And I like the service offered so much that I would rather have a lower stock price than see the company sold to AT&T, which was widely expected earlier this month and still may happen given the company's splitting into two entities -- Echostar retaining the set-top box/satellite businesses and Dish Network Corp. offering the subscription service.

Alas, I expect the subscription service to be sold to AT&T sometime next year anyway given this move, which will create a huge moral dilemma for whatever remains of our eighteen-month commitment at that point. Somehow I can't imagine that an AT&T-owned Dish Network is going to keep channels like Free Speech Television, Worldlink, and Veria. But in the world of premium television, it's pick your poison. And eventually, given the FCC's determination to consolidate the media into ever fewer hands, it won't matter anyway. All you'll hear anywhere is what the government wants you to.

Labels: globalization, outsourcing