I'm totally against the Afghanistan war, as C&Lers know, and it was lost as soon as Bush and Cheney decided to attack Iraq. Any chance to stabilize that region was lost immediately thereafter. The world had rallied around Afghanistan in such a way that that country could have been reconstructed and repaired by now.

So President Obama finds himself in a bad situation caused by conservative beliefs and now there really is only one strategy left: When do we leave? That being said, Fred Thompson, in a hatchet-job fashion, says the Afghan war is lost too, because Obama just isn't into it. Wow, aren't Republicans into fighting endless wars for profits?

Fred Thompson must know that Bush abandoned Afghanistan and forged his move to attack and remove the Taliban as nothing more than a chess move to attack Iraq.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson today intensified his party's criticism of President Obama's long deliberation over policy in Afghanistan, announcing that Obama's delay signals that "the war has been lost" and that nothing the president now does will "make any difference."

"It really doesn't matter how President Obama divides the Afghan baby, how he splits the difference between McChrystal and Biden. Because the war has been lost," Thompson said on his radio show today. "I say this because of one sad and simple fact. The president does not have the will and determination to do what's necessary to win it. His heart's not in it, and never has been. The Taliban knows it. Al Qaeda knows it. Our allies know it. And the American people know it.

Americans turned against these two wars a long time ago and public opinion will only keep declining. Vermin like Thompson only look for opportunities to cut up the president as often as possible. And they are using this conflict like the blade. They are a sad movement.

Thompson has the nerve to suggest that a sitting President doesn't care what happens in a war that is taking place now. These conservatives have no shame and that's why conservatism is a sham.
Remember the Faux outrage over Harry Reid?

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol said that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) remark that the Iraq war is lost is “much more disgraceful” than Sen. Trent Lott’s (R-MS) 2002 claim that the country would be much better off if it had maintained racist segregation policies.

“What Harry Reid said is much more disgraceful than anything Trent Lott said, and I do think Democrats should ask Harry Reid to step down,” Kristol said.

Nice to see Obama taking them on like this. I just wish he talked like this more often:

WASHINGTON — President Obama mounted a frontal assault on the insurance industry on Saturday, accusing it of airing “deceptive and dishonest ads” to derail his health care legislation and threatening to strip the industry of its longstanding exemption from federal anti-trust laws.

In unusually harsh terms, Mr. Obama cast insurance companies as obstacles to change interested only in preserving their own “profits and bonuses” and willing to “bend the truth or break it” to stop his drive to remake the nation’s health care system. The president used his weekly radio and Internet address to push back against industry assertions that legislation will drive up premiums.

The transcript is much more blunt:

A new report for the Business Roundtable – a non-partisan group that represents the CEOs of major companies – found that without significant reform, health care costs for these employers and their employees will well more than double again over the next decade. The cost per person for health insurance will rise by almost $18,000. That’s a huge amount of money. That’s going to mean lower salaries and higher unemployment, lower profits and higher rolls of uninsured. It is no exaggeration to say, that unless we act, these costs will devastate the US economy.

This is the unsustainable path we’re on, and it’s the path the insurers want to keep us on. In fact, the insurance industry is rolling out the big guns and breaking open their massive war chest – to marshal their forces for one last fight to save the status quo. They’re filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads. They’re flooding Capitol Hill with lobbyists and campaign contributions. And they’re funding studies designed to mislead the American people.

Of course, like clockwork, we’ve seen folks on cable television who know better, waving these industry-funded studies in the air. We’ve seen industry insiders – and their apologists – citing these studies as proof of claims that just aren’t true. They’ll claim that premiums will go up under reform; but they know that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that reforms will lower premiums in a new insurance exchange while offering consumer protections that will limit out-of-pocket costs and prevent discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. They’ll claim that you’ll have to pay more out of pocket; but they know that this is based on a study that willfully ignores whole sections of the bill, including tax credits and cost savings that will greatly benefit middle class families. Even the authors of one of these studies have now admitted publicly that the insurance companies actually asked them to do an incomplete job.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (86)

PLAYS: (256)

October 14, 2009 C-SPAN
On the floor of the House Congresswoman Kaptur borrows from Charles Dickens to explain the situation we now find ourselves in. "The Banks Privatize Their Profits And Socialize Their Losses!"

h/t TheWrap.com

At the Toronto Film Festival, filmmaker Michael Moore excoriated newspapers for seeking profits and for "slitting their own throats".

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (80)

PLAYS: (160)

Oh joy. More wonderful news from the world of Max Baucus satistying the insurance companies with some payola for their campaign contributions. Is this what's going to be passed off for "reform"?

From Business Week:

This is good news for UnitedHealth, which benefits when patients pick up more of the tab. In late spring, the Finance Committee was assuming a 76% reimbursement rate on average, meaning consumers would be responsible for paying the remaining 24% of their medical bills, in addition to their insurance premiums. Stevens and his UnitedHealth colleagues urged a more industry-friendly ratio. Subsequently the committee reduced the reimbursement figure to 65%, suggesting a 35% contribution by consumers—more in line with what the big insurer wants. The final figures are still being debated.

Stevens says UnitedHealth and its corporate clients want to steer Congress toward benefit levels and cost sharing that can help control overall health spending: "We are providing another resource of actual modeling and advice on how proposals in the committees are structured and some potential unintended consequences of going down certain routes."

Perhaps more than any other insurer, UnitedHealth is poised to profit from health reform. Its decade-long series of acquisitions has made the company a coast-to-coast Leviathan enmeshed in the lives of 70 million Americans.

As Wendell Potter notes in the interview, this is "the last trick up their sleeves to try to control health care costs for themselves" and that they used to spend about 95 cents of every dollar on medical claims. They pay no where near that now and this would make their reimbursement rates even lower.

If this is what comes out of the Senate and called reform, doing nothing would truly be better than this.

You can read the entire article from Business Week here: The Health Insurers Have Already Won.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1009)

PLAYS: (4114)

Rachel Maddow talks to whistleblower Wendell Potter about the health care industry's rising profits while more and more Americans lose their health care insurance.

MADDOW: Are you by any chance a health insurance company executive? No? Me neither. And you and I, therefore, even though I know nothing else about you, you and I have one thing in common for sure. We are both in the wrong line of work.

SEC filings show that between the year 2000 and the year 2007, profit of the country‘s 10 largest health insurance companies rose 428 percent. In 2000, they had $2.4 billion in profit. By 2007, it was $12.9 billion.

Now, of course, this is America, we are capital C “Capitalists,” nobody begrudges anyone a ginormous profit, particularly if they‘re serving an important national need, like providing health insurance to the American people.

So, while the 10 biggest health insurance companies were seeing their profits rise over 400 percent between 2000 and 2007, how were they doing at serving that important national need? How were they doing at the whole providing health insurance to the American people thing? Eww! Apparently, while they quadrupled their profits between 2000 and 2007, the number of Americans without health insurance grew by 19 percent.

That seems bad. But not for everyone - also by 2007, the CEOs of the 10 largest health insurance companies were taking home an average compensation of $11.9 million each every year, while the number of Americans without health insurance for whom a burst appendix can mean bankruptcy has gone through the roof.

It was the insurance industry that bankrolled efforts to kill the last effort of health care reform in Bill Clinton‘s first term. And now, the industry says they‘re OK with reform of a sort. They just want to make sure that they don‘t get any competition from a non-profit government-run insurance plan that patients could opt into if they didn‘t like what the private sector was dishing out. You know, if I was a health insurance company executive, I‘m sure I would want that, too.

Joining us now is a former health insurance executive-turned-whistle blower, his name is Wendell Potter, and he was the head of public relations for CIGNA, one of the nation‘s largest insurers. He‘s now a senior fellow on health care at the Center for Media and Democracy.

Continue reading »

Do you ever get the feeling that the class war is over, and their side won? Money for these guys - but massive conniptions over paying for national health care?

Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.

Staff in London were briefed last week on the banking and securities company's prospects and told they could look forward to bumper bonuses.

Figures next month detailing the firm's second-quarter earnings are expected to show a further jump in profits. Warren Buffett, who bought $5bn of the company's shares in January, has already made a $1bn gain on his investment.

I wrote some nice words about Kathleen Sibelius the last few days because she was able to articulate the phony arguments against a vibrant public option, but it looks like the administration is pulling her back.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Sebelius said that President Barack Obama does not want to drive health insurers out of business, but make them more competitive by offering working families and small businesses the option of a public plan without the high overhead costs of marketing, administration and profits. "I think there is a lot of understanding that the private market has really failed to provide affordable coverage to Americans," Sebelius said. The industry has had "a lot of opportunities" to get rid of coverage restrictions and other unpopular policies, Sebelius said, and really "hasn't served Americans very well."

However, Sebelius stressed that Obama is open to compromise on the shape of the public plan, which doesn't have to be run by the government. She spoke positively of a compromise idea that envisions consumer-owned nonprofit cooperatives, like rural electricity or agriculture co-ops. They would get started with seed money from taxpayers but then compete without government control. The plan by Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., may end up in a health overhaul bill to be unveiled by the Senate Finance Committee this week.

---
But White House senior adviser David Axelrod said Obama is not likely to budge on his demand for a public insurance option. Axelrod said Obama isn't wedded to the public plan being either entirely funded or run by the government and is open to "variations on the theme."

Sibelius also said on NPR that the single payer plan is off the table. We knew that already, but for her to articulate it this way is awful. The fact that she says members of Congress didn't understand the health care debate just shows how either how frakkin' stupid they all are or how corrupt. They knew what they were doing when they torpedoed Clinton's plan and it was led by the Jim Cooper's in Clinton's Congress.

I'm still doing my fundraiser as we speak, but I'm also going to focus on putting pressure on all the crummy Democrats like Blanche Lincoln so that the ball is not dropped. Sure, I need to still raise funds, but I think this Blue America action is very important at this time.

We are raising money fast for our Campaign For Health Care Choice, and we plan to push on with your help. It's so saddening that with Americans voting out the teabagging republicans in astounding numbers---President Obama is allowing the debate to get away from him. We don't need the teabaggers votes or input since they already destroyed the global financial markets and everything else in their path. Their allegiance is not to the American people, but to the corporate donors that occupy the Health Care Industrial Complex.

Scarecrow writes:

So let's see. On Monday, in a highly publicized speech, the President tells the AMA that he wants a public option that "keeps the insurance companies honest." The leading expert on the public option, Prof. Jacob Hacker (and many others -- e.g., here, here, and here), explain why Conrad's co-op proposal is not a substitute for the public plan because it doesn't achieve the President's objectives.

But AP reports that Obama's HHS Secretary, who had already tried to give away the store, says Obama is now willing to abandon the position he took the day before? And she says the industry will blink? Are these people serious?

Yes it would seem they are very serious. That's why we are turning up the heat.
And we are always screwed by the media on everything policy wise. Whenever a republican talking point comes on the scene, they swallow it whole. Ezra Klein outTweets David Gregory because Mr. Meet the Press instantly adopted their talking points. Why would he so easily accept a falsehood? He doesn't have to worry about health care insurance I'm sure.
You can see their republican ties when as Digby writes: Cokie's Law Is Still On The Books.

Ozzy and Sharon, this is really one for the jerk files. Why now? Why ever?

Rolling Stone:

Osbourne’s suit seeks a 50 percent stake in the “Black Sabbath” trademark. Furthermore, the filing claims Osbourne is entitled to a portion of the profits Iommi has generated through use of the band name, and suggests it was Osbourne’s “signature lead vocals” that helped propel the band’s “extraordinary success.” The suit also points out that Sabbath’s popularity took a nosedive during Ozzy’s absence during 1980 and 1996, when former Rainbow vocalist Ronnie James Dio took over behind the mike stand.

Actually, Sabbath's popularity tanked after the release of their sixth album Sabotage, and considerably more through their next two dreadful excursions with Ozzy still at the mic, Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die. Their commercial and artistic stature was reinstated when Ronnie James Dio took over for 1980's Heaven and Hell and 1981's Mob Rules, both more successful outings with regards to quality and quantity than their predecessors. Ronnie James Dio could sue on the very same grounds, but we all know how ridiculous that would sound.

Furthermore, Tony Iommi spent most of the 1980s trying to record with different lineups under names that weren't Black Sabbath, only to have the record company insist that it be called that if he wanted his album to see the light of day.

Anyway, who knows if this will make it to court and how it will play out if it does, but Max's Court of Metal rules in favor of the defendant. Dismissed!