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The height of American journalism

This whole clusterfuck is exactly what is wrong with American journalism today.  They all work so hard to be pleased with each other, all the while 16% of adult Americans without health care, we are in two wars, there is pro-West revolution in Iran and 48% of Republicans think Obama might not be American.

Dana Milbank is the same guy who went after Nico Pitney for asking Barack Obama the toughest question of the press conference a few weeks ago.  The same Nico Pitney who live blogs the revolution in Iran tirelessly here.  Get a clue, dick.

Racism alive and well in America

Media Matters has a great montauge defrocking the birthers for what they really are, stone cold racists.

Also, Steve Benen has the results of a new KOS survey that points out 58% of all Republicans either believe the president is not a US citizen or they are unsure if he is or not.  Based on the chart below it looks like we are clearly talking about old fashioned Southern racism. Is anyone surprised?

And Republicans want to kill healthcare

Check out this 60 min. segment with Stan Brock, the founder of Remote Area Medical, a charity originally designed to provide health care to the poor tribes in the Amazon Basin.  Out of necessity, 60% of their services are now deployed in the United States.  Perhaps if the Republicans in Congress were without health care like 16% of adult Americans we would start to see some good faith negotiation and progress.

STAN BROCK BRINGS HEALTH CARE TO AMERICANS WITH REMOTE AREA MEDICAL PROGRAM from R2 Studios on Vimeo.

Hat tip Ballon Juice

This is dangerous

Let's look past the obvious; that these attacks are grounded in the fact that Conservatives just can't imagine a White House without a Conservative in it and that some percentage of the Conservative base is racist.

This is dangerously irresponsible and exactly how it started with Dr. Tiller.  He was vilified by Rush and the other Right Wing media outlets to the point of justifying his murder as civic duty to God and country.  They incited hatred in the lowest common denominator of their base to the point that something tragic happened.  Dr. Tiller is dead.

Where is the so called journalist wing of our media?  This isn't just being broadcast on FOX, its being played out on CNN as well.

and the Earth is more than 6,000 years old.

The science behind Global Warming is irrefutable which I suppose explains why it comes as no surprise that the Bush Administration hid 1000s of satellite images that clearly show the tragic environmental impact.  No WMDs, Global Warming is real, you get the picture?

The Obama administration has released those photos which can be viewed here, you be the judge.

  

Environmental impact aside the social and political impact of Global Warming is already changing the face of our world and impacting its citizens, no matter how resistance the religious and uninterested right-wing of American politics is.

The fifth annual Failed States Index—a collaboration between The Fund for Peace, an independent research organization, and Foreign Policy Magazine details the specific impact in their last section, appropriately titled The Last Straw.  It is worth a complete read.

In 2007, the London-based NGO International Alert compiled a list of countries with a high risk of armed conflict due to climate change. They cited no fewer than 46 countries, or one in every four, including some of the world's most gravely unstable countries, such as Somalia, Nigeria, Iran, Colombia, Bolivia, Israel, Indonesia, Bosnia, Algeria, and Peru. Already, climate change might be behind the deep drought that contributed to the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Life imitating parody.

Unfortunatly, this isn't a SNL sketch.  Kudos to Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) for being the only one to speak truth to wingnuts.

The Republicans saving healthcare

Key up the overwhelming fear graphic and scary Star Wars music.

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The House GOP Solutions Group offers the Republican proposal. 

Well it's not exactly a proposal or a plan but "a broad outline" of what the plan might look like if Republicans were allowed the time to formulate a plan. 

Hrm, actually, its a well designed attack on the Democrats with the express purpose of slowing down actual reform.  The Republican proposal is of course, untenable, and pushes the actual cost of health insurance back onto the American people.  Under the Republican plan Americans without insurance (16% of Adult Americans) will be free to buy their own health insurance and for Americans who already have employer based health insurance, the Republicans want to call that income, and tax it.  For either senario Republicans offer $5700 per year towards the cause, while admitting health care costs more than double that.  

The real question is, are Republicans negotiating on health care reform in good faith or is this politics as usual at the expense of the American people?

Just in case....

you were moved by the aforementioned Iranian propoganda.

The Guardian is keeping track.  Iran election: faces of the dead and detained

Since the disputed presidential election on June 12th, the Iranian authorities have detained more than a thousand opposition supporters, journalists and protestors.  There has also been a number of deaths.

And the Iranian government has a hit list on-line (in Persian)

Propaganda from Iran

Fareed Zakaria had a segment this weekend with Dr. Seyed Mohammed Marandi, a pro-Ahmadinejad professor at Tehran University who appeared on the show with the permission of the Iranian government. 

Fareed did a good job in pushing back but it is important to watch the government hard-line and its willingness to deceive in order to realize how improbable reconciliation is between the government of Iran and the people who are resisting it.

MARANDI: I think you also have to keep in mind the fact that some of the measures taken by the security forces have to do with the fact that there has been a lot of interference from outside the country.

Right now you have almost 40 television channels in Persian being broadcast into Iran from the United States and Europe -- basically funded by the American government and European governments, or in some cases owned -- which have played a very negative role over the past few weeks, turning people against one another.

This sort of behavior and this sort of funding coming from the United States and its European allies really does not serve their interests.

ZAKARIA: Professor Marandi, you can't possibly expect us to believe that. Here you have a two-term president of Iran, Rafsanjani, calling for opposition to the regime; a two-term prime minister of Iran, Mr. Mousavi, calling for the creation of an opposition movement; a two-term president, Khatami, calling for a referendum.

You have people under house arrest. You have major clerics in Qom asking that Ahmadinejad's election be boycotted.

Are you telling me all these people are doing this at the bidding of the United States? Surely you must realize that that's kind of a ludicrous claim.

It is worth watching the segment: (can't get CNN to embed this morning to click the link)

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/07/26/gps.interview.inside.iran.cnn

The Last Word on the Birthers..

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Resistance to the Public Option

Taking another look at some of the data I posted from the Ezra Klein piece I wanted to highlight the term "highly concentrated" .   That term is a Justice Department synonym for monopoly. 

Looking at Ezra'sarticle further distills the point that the free market failure of our current health care system is about consolidation, not competition. 

In the past 13 years, there have been more than 400 corporate mergers involving health insurers.

So, can someone give me a reason, aside from protecting the current insurance company monopoly on health care, to resist the public option?

Health Care Must Read

Ezra Kleinhas a great comparison between the 1990s failed Clinton Health care reform attempt and Obama's today.

The necessity:

The Justice Department judges an industry "highly concentrated" if a single company controls more than 42 percent of the market. By that definition, 94 percent of statewide insurance markets are highly concentrated. 

Predictably, health-care premiums shot up more than 90 percent between 2000 and 2007, while the profits of the 10 largest insurers increased 428 percent over the same period.

The risk:

Much as opponents derided the Clinton effort as Clintoncare or Hillarycare, some now speak of Obamacare, and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) recently chortled in a conference call that a defeat on health care would be Obama's "Waterloo." The president, for his part, told PBS's Jim Lehrer last week that some Republicans are engaging in a 1994 redux. "They explicitly went after the Clintons, said: 'We're not going to get this done.' . . . It was a pure political play, a show of strength by the Republicans that helped them regain the House," Obama said. "I think there are folks who think that we should try to dust off that old playbook."

In some ways I think Obama is taking the concept of learning from the Clinton mistakes too literally.  As Ezra points out, the Obama approach is nearly polar opposite to the Clintons during the 90s.  With the overwhelming numbers in Congress and public approval squarely behind him I'd like to see this White House use the stick a little more.  Then again, his style is the type that one never sees coming and so I'm resigned watch and wait.

If you live in a Red district, like I do, call and write your representative.  Let them know it is not ok to play politics while 16% of adult Americans are without health insurance.

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The Soft Power of Barack Obama

Pew's Global Attitude Survey is out and positive perception of America is already back to pre-Bush Administration levels.  The 10+% spike in Lebanon is especially impressive considering Hezbollah just lost what was supposed to be a shoe-in election for them there to a pro-Western, incumbent government.  That election was held directly after the Cairo speech.  Advantage Obama, in just seven months.

I am only one, but I am one.

I was 38 years old when I voted for the first time.  The date was February 5^th 2008, the day I voted for Barack Obama in the Georgia Democratic Primary.  To help understand the personal significance, allow me to give some background.  I was born and raised Italian/Irish in New York City, in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood called Washington Heights during a time when it was called “The Crack Capital of America” by the NY Times.  Out of my Junior High School and High School graduating class, some are dead from drug overdose or drug related violence, a few more have spent their lives in and out of prison and many others are still struggling to recover from the scars and legacy of drug use and abuse.  When I see news clips from the Middle East, the sound of random gun fire sometimes reminds me of summer nights during my childhood growing up in Washington Heights.  Parental guidance was a laughable myth, politicians only pandered Uptown during the closest of elections and a police presence was non-existent as they were content to let the natives police themselves.  To put it short, you had to have some bad fucking luck to be born where I come from.  In my eyes and in the eyes of my community voting was a privilege reserved for downtown people, rich people and more specifically, rich white people(Yes, I know Italian/Irish is considered White, I’ll tackle my race identification and biases another time) and so I never wasted my time or my energy on voting.  

Then I heard Barack Obama talk about hope during his Iowa Caucus Victory Speech.  When he said “Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.”  I instantly thought of all my classmates from Washington Heights, and the stairs crowd from Pinehurst (my Under the Bridge) and the McDs crowd who didn’t make it as I had.  For my entire life I equated success with wealth creation, with hustling.  I had escaped the ghetto of my childhood and never looked back.  After hearing that speech I realized that I learned all the wrong things during my childhood and I’d lived my life in the most shallow and meaningless of ways.  Now I feel that if all I do with my life is to create more wealth and hustle to create more distance between me and where I came from, I have failed.

One thing we know how to do where I come from is smell bullshit and so now that I'm paying attention, every injustice and racist dog whistle and MSM or politico misrepresentation offends me personally and deeply.  Semantics, body language, unspoken words, positioning, pandering, begging and lying are all so easy to see if you’re looking.  And so, I have become utterly inconsolable and very angry but it feels great!  Maybe this blog is the beginning of my figuring out how this new awakening will manifest itself in my life into action and tangible results.  Perhaps I’ll go back to the hood and teach the value of a formal education or of political activism and community support to a group of knuckleheads like myself, if only to provide some of the guidance I never had.  Maybe I’ll just read Hemingway and listen to Miles with them to show them there is a massive world outside the hood.  I don’t know yet.  If Obama has taught me anything its that one person CAN make a difference.  In the meanwhile I, at the very least, hope this outlet will be self-educational and therapeutic.  If I get that, I’ll be happy, anything more would be wonderful.

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Post-Racial?

Yea right. The tea-party movement has got your post racial America right here.

Moral Authority

Think about this for a moment. The MSM, Sectretary of Defense, the US Military and the American people are all outraged by the Taliban video showing captured Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl. But, we no longer have the moral authority to be outraged. Bush, Cheney and Co. squandered that in the name of torture. We have also broken international law. Juan Cole sums up nicely..

In fact, as I was reminded by a former ambassador, the Bush-Cheney-Yoo-Armitage gutting of US conformance with the Geneva Conventions really makes it difficult for Washington credibly to complain about the treatment of any of our captured soldiers. The Taliban could hold the soldier hostage forever if they follow the principle put forward by Sen. Lindsey Graham. They could (God forbid) put him in stress positions naked and threaten to release the pictures to his family, and they would have done nothing that Rumsfeld's Pentagon had not done routinely and on a vast scale.

The intellectual wing of the Republican Party

Birthers, please go to FactCheck.org for a look at an original, raised seal copy of Obama's birth certificate. http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html

FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as "supporting documents" to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.

Why did one straw break the camel's back?

The current government in Iran has already lost their power. They just don't know it yet. Abbas Milani explains why at TNR here.

Before coming to power, Khomeini argued that the most important duty, indeed the raison d'etre of an Islamic government, was to implement fully the tenets of sharia. But once in power and faced with the complexities of modern Iranian society, he subtly changed the very foundation of his theory. He introduced the concept of maslaha--interests of the regime--and declared, much to the consternation of nearly every other ayatollah, that these interests, as determined by him or his successor, would supersede even the fundamentals of Islam. In other words, the state was everything--and sharia was nothing but its legitimizing narrative, a narrative that could be suspended at the will of the leader.

Khomeini's entire platform for legitimacy, for the existence of his government and his unquestionable power as Supreme Leader was based on a sham that he didn't believe in. Up until June 12, 2009 the people of Iran didn't take notice and most didn't even care... ..and then the other shoe dropped. This is a must read from an anonymous Iranian at Salon. "And Still Our Vote Mattered"

That the vote was against Ahmadinejad there can be no doubt. Consider this: Over the 30-year history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, some 30 percent of the population has never voted. These are the true disbelievers, citizens who take pride in having a blank shenasname, or identity booklet. They are the friends and family members who take every opportunity to remind the rest of us, at the dinner table, caught in traffic, sitting in the park, that voting is a mistake, that you ought not participate in a system that is at its core rotten. Except ... Except this time a good half of these nonbelievers came. They came, pulled, pleaded -- coaxed into voting by sons and daughters. They came this year, dramatically reversing what had been a steady decline in participation, lifting turnout to heights not seen since the early days of the Revolution. With the much ballyhooed rural vote already in the bank for the president, the only place left for Ahmadinejad to make up his reported 6 to 8 million new votes was with the apostates. Are we really to believe, as some are now insisting, that these many millions showed up to vote for the incumbent? There's no doubt the vote mattered. Had we not voted, had we not stood in line and suffered this fate together, then we would not have come to the square, we would not be climbing the rooftops every night to sing protests that our votes were so clumsily and needlessly taken away. The fact is that up until four Saturdays ago, Iran's system, with all of its limitations and compromises, was not completely rotten. Our peculiar democracy permitted faith in a residual uncertainty, in the possibility that the guy who can't possibly win, whom they won't let win, still just might. June 12, 2009, ended that uncertainty, brought clarity.

Freedom won't come easy or quick for the Iranian people . Obvious at this point is the Iranian Government's willingness do absolutely anything, including killing women and children to keep their power. What I don't get is the Iranian government seems to be missing the point. The more violence they use, the more martyrs they create, the stronger the resistance becomes. They are force feeding direct power and energy to a non-violent movement growing in the purest spirit of Gandhi and King. The harder the government of Iran thrashes, the more likely the outcome becomes. Insha'Allah.