Sudden spike in hits from a Google search on "overton window." Why?

Washington City Paper Loose Lips

I don't know if anyone pays attention to the generic ballot for Congress, but things are looking up lately for Republicans. The aggregate on Pollster.com shows a generic Republican polling only two points behind a generic Democrat; at several polling outfits, notably Rasmussen Reports, Republicans are ahead substantially in the generic ballot. Coupled with the losses Democrats suffered in the New Jersey and Virginia governors' races this month, you could argue that 2010 is shaping up to be a bad year for the Democratic Party.

Oh crap. Yet more women's health "guidelines" from our corporate culture aimed at reducing costs.

Now, you should only get a Pap Smear every few years and not start till you’re in your 20s.

Under the headline “Negative Effects of Fewer Pap Smears Unknown,” the article reads:

Dr. Donnica Moore, president of Sapphire Women’s Health Group and an obstetrician-gynecologist by training, worried that the new guidelines might keep women who’ve had a normal Pap smear, or no symptoms, away from the doctor.

Massive 2005 takedown of The Moustache of Understanding.

Rally to support 'Medicare for All' planned for Journal Square in Jersey City

Supporters of a national single-payer healthcare system, also known as Medicare for All, will hold a rally in Jersey City's Journal Square at noon Saturday.

While Medicare covers everyone 65 and over, a single-payer system would extend Medicare coverage to everyone.

As Cory Doctorow says:

Here's a 20-minute, must-see lecture on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement -- the secret copyright treaty currently being negotiated, which stands to fatally wound all user-generated content sites from mailing lists to YouTube; which stands to criminalize kids for noncommercial file-sharing; which stands to put your internet connection in jeopardy if anyone in your house is accused of infringement, and much, much more.

What's not to like?

Burlington Free Press

Sanders, an advocate for a more radical, single-payer solution to the nation’s health care problems, said he will offer an amendment calling for a single-payer system even though he knows it has no chance of passage. A single-payer system is one in which the government is the sole source of financing for health care services.

“It will lose,” he said in an interview. “What I am trying to do, and we have language in the bill to provide the option to states to go forward so they can consider a single-payer system. ... As long as you get the waivers that are necessary to go forward, that’s all I want.”

Somebody post or comment on this, please!

In a column which oddly, or not, doesn't mention the President by title or by name, Krugman concludes:

The gist of the [TARP inspector general's AIG bailout] report is that government officials made no serious attempt to extract concessions from bankers, even though these bankers received huge benefits from the rescue. ...

For the A.I.G. rescue was part of a pattern: Throughout the financial crisis key officials — most notably Timothy Geithner, who was president of the New York Fed in 2008 and is now Treasury secretary — have shied away from doing anything that might rattle Wall Street. ....

Ryan Griffin in HuffPo, yeah yeah:

A bloc of African American House Democrats, angry and worried that not enough is being done about high unemployment by the administration, forced the postponement of a much-anticipated vote Thursday on comprehensive financial regulation reform.

And "progressives" couldn't do the same thing on health care why, exactly?

I sent an email to Eric Massa some time back, thanking him for voting against HR 3962, and specified that I didn't need a reply, as I'm not one of his constituents. I got a 'form letter' response anyway, and thought I would share it.

Dear [hipparchia]:

Because you have previously been in touch about health issues, I am writing to let you know why I voted "no" on the 2009 major health care reform bill (H.R. 3962). Being accountable to you for my actions, perhaps you will forgive a detailed response.

Okay, comment of yesterday I'm a bit behind, by i on the ball patriot at Naked Capitalism in response to tan Edward Harrison post (internal block quote markers are mine):

Edward Harrison said:

Barack Obama has now come clean about his thinking on why his administration has decided to focus first on reducing the deficit and next on jobs. He fears a double-dip recession will occur if foreigners lose confidence in the U.S. dollar, causing interest rates to spike.

(x-posted at ePluribus media)

Via The Hill, John Conyers hammers Obama's weak stance in the healthcare battle in a radio interview:

"I'm getting tired of saving Obama's can in the White House," Conyers said on the liberal Bill Press radio show. "He only won by five votes in the House, and this bill wasn't even anything to write home about."

"The only way he could have got it through was that progressives held their nose," Conyers added.

The veteran Michigan Democrat had teamed with Rep. Dennis Kucinich
(D-Ohio) to push single-payer options in the health reform bill, a
battle which Conyers said was far from over.

And on Rahm Emmanuel? Via the NY Times:

Dig it: the Stupak amendment and the Palin witch-burning are the same fucking thing.

At Baseline Scenario, James Kwak concludes:

For the CRA to be the problem, the causal factor would have to be availability of credit in low-income communities. But from what I’ve read, it seems like today’s problem is no longer redlining — plenty of lenders were willing to lend to the poor. It’s predatory lending — they found that for various reasons it was easier to steer poor people into unnecessarily high-cost loans. Now, I’m no fan of policies to encourage homeownership in general. I think we have too many of them. But the CRA is primarily a policy to discourage discrimination, and that is something we unfortunately still need.

Michael Jackson "Work and Soul" (part 1 of 4); the whole series gives excellent perspective. My takeaway (and there are many others):

That's how bad it is.

No indeed:

With unemployment among blacks at more than 15 percent, the N.A.A.C.P. will join several other groups on Tuesday to call on President Obama to do more to create jobs. ...

In speaking out on jobs, N.A.A.C.P. leaders say they are not trying to pick a fight with the first African-American president. Rather, they say, they are pressing Mr. Obama in an area where they believe he wants to be pressured.

“It’s time [NOW????] for us to really stoke this issue up,” said Hilary O. Shelton, the N.A.A.C.P.’s senior vice president for advocacy and policy. “We’re not so much trying to convince him to do something he doesn’t want to do, but urging him to move forward on an issue we have agreement on.”

Well, you go on believing that.

Videos: This past weekend Medicare for All supporters gathered in St. Louis to discuss our movement

Videos from the national strategy conference for Healthcare-Now!, a sponsoring group of the Mobilization for Health Care for All. Plenty of discussion on strategies to shift the national health care debate toward single-payer universal health care, such as Medicare for All!

Ian Welsh:

Last year myself and Stirling both noted that what would be done by banks if they were bailed out is to horde their money, not lend it out cheap, and save it to buy up competitors, make leveraged plays and so on. That is EXACTLY what has happened. Exactly.

During a downturn, if you have money, you don’t want to lend it out for low gains when you can buy up competitors, cheap. You don’t want to lend it out cheap, when you can make leveraged plays off the bottom of a stock and commodity market which is bound to go up because trillions are being poured into it by central banks. You want to take that money, and buy things while they are cheap, not lend it out for 4 or 5% returns, when you can make many many times that.

Why, exactly, governments expect banks who have better ways to make money to act like retail banks who don’t have any other way to make money but lend out at prime +3 or 4 percent is beyond me. They think they’ll do it out of gratitude for being bailed out, or some sort of sense of civic duty? Most politicians may be stupid, venal and corrupt—but it’s that very greed and venality which means they should understand that banks will do no such thing.

Banks will do it only if they are forced to do it. Remove retail banking from investment banking, insurance and brokerage services, and disallow any risky games on the markets for retail banks. Remove all special facilities from non retail banks because Goldman Sachs should not be doing highly leveraged plays with free money from the Federal Reserve. And reinstitute serious leverage limits, not just for retail banks but for everyone.

As for retail banks, if they don’t lend to the public at rates approved of by the Federal Reserve and Congress, they too should lose their access to special facilities. Banks are given the valuable right to borrow money for almost nothing, and to, in effect, print money by lending out money they don’t have. Those are privileges which are given to them in the expectation that they will use them to benefit the economy. If they refuse to do so, they should lose the privileges.

None of this is rocket science. Those of us who predicted both the crisis and what the bungling of the crisis would cause, however, are precisely the people who are not listened to by those in power. Obama is having his jobs summit, and forget nobodies like me, he isn’t even inviting somebodies like Stiglitz and Krugman.

That's because predicting a crisis correctly disqualifies you for Serious work in Versailles. But, seriously, why would it be any different?

CJR quoting Bloomberg:

[WARREN] “I made a decision at the beginning that the experts wrecked this economy and the public has a right to know what’s going on,” she said. “It’s our economy on the line and the experts can’t be trusted. I want everyone to be part of the solution to how we want to change our economic world. If it’s risky or makes me look stupid to someone, so be it.”

Crazy talk!

Reuters:

[Carin] Froehlich is among the growing number of people across America fighting for the right to dry their laundry outside against a rising tide of housing associations who oppose the practice despite its energy-saving green appeal.

Although there are no formal laws in this southeast Pennsylvania town against drying laundry outside, a town official called Froehlich to ask her to stop drying clothes in the sun. And she received two anonymous notes from neighbors saying they did not want to see her underwear flapping about.

"They said it made the place look like trailer trash," she said, in her yard across the street from a row of neat, suburban houses. "They said they didn't want to look at my 'unmentionables.'"

Edward Harrison:

[T]here is an element of bad faith dealing here. The banks were given TARP funds and other, extensive types of support so they could support the economy via lending. Raising rates to beat the impact of new rules was predictable (the long lead time for implementation of the rules was no accident) but the brazenness of the banks is still remarkable.

Remind you of anything?

Too bad for the insurance industry that phrase was coined by The Residents, because the evidence shows if they adopted it, it could be truth in advertising (via sphere via Angry Bear):

It's federal law: All seriously injured emergency and trauma patients must be given equal lifesaving care, whether or not they can pay for it. But that's not happening, according to a new report. The study, conducted by Children's Hospital Boston research fellow Dr. Heather Rosen and colleagues from three other hospitals, found that uninsured trauma victims ages 18 to 30 are dying at an annual rate 89 percent higher than insured victims with identically severe injuries.