http://weiner.house.gov/news_display.asp...

Weiner just lived up to his name by withdrawing his amendment, which would have substituted single-payer for the House bill favored by Democratic leaders. That coward sickens me right now even more than Obama, Pelosi, Emanuel, Hoyer, and Reid put together.

Haw.

That phrase jumped out at me over at Angry Bear; I'll be interested to see if it propagates.

E-mail from MoveOn.org:

They're double-crossing Obama

Breaking news on health care: The Washington Post is now reporting that insurance giant Blue Cross Blue Shield "is putting the finishing touches on a public message campaign aimed at killing a key plank in Obama's reform platform."

The Huffington Post sums it up as "Insurers Planning on Double-Crossing Obama."

We knew the insurance companies would eventually turn on the president, but this is much sooner than expected.

Remember, there's a right time and place for core values to be sold out... but not so soon!

Times:

[caption] Jerry Levy, [46, who lost his job at a hedge fund last summer], attending a PTA meeting where his experience in the financial industry is a plus with members.

Mr. Levy joined the PTA and immediately noticed that he tends to tackle matters with a bluntness honed in the financial industry, while the women, whether stay-at-home mothers or professionals, he said, communicate more diplomatically.

He has zealously bounded into the PTA, becoming its liaison to the Pelham Board of Education on financial matters. Recently, he announced his candidacy for a seat on the school board, a move applauded by several longtime PTA members.

Yeah, so he can tackle matters with "bluntness" elsewhere.

Anyhow, when was finance ever an industry?

As elegant and ignorant as swans.

High snark from Glenn on Jane Harman's sudden conversion from Serious advocate of extra-legal surveillance to civil-liberties Extremist.

...as serious as it is when a member of Congress is the target of government eavesdropping, can we really afford to investigate this? After all, we have so many very important things to do. It really seems like we need to be looking forward, not backwards. The Bush administration is gone. This all happened in 2005 -- years ago. Is this really a time to be pursuing grudges, to be re-litigating old disputes? What kind of partisan witch hunt is Harman after?

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Detroit Free Press columnist Susan Tompor pulls a reverse Marie Antoinette, for the win:

So let's get this straight, the only bonus most of us now get at the end of the day is a hug from a loved one. And guess what? We feel extremely blessed to get it.

But no hugs for the AIG executives. Let 'em hug their money.

There are no epic take-downs, or anything much that hasn't already been said, but I think "Let 'em hug their money" could have legs. She also brings up a good point about the toothlessness of applying the terms "distasteful" and "inappropriate" to these bonuses:

Hilarity from Aravosis:

Obama: We have to be able to agree to disagree
Great, then where are the racists, Mr. Obama? We don't see you embracing too many of them in the name of learning to agree to disagree. Or does your desire to create a new "atmosphere," and reach out to our enemies, stop when it's your own people, your own children, you'd be betraying? Funny how you only reach across the aisle when it's someone else's family, gay families in particular, getting the shaft.

John -- if I may call you John -- you ask "Where are the racists?" And I think I have the answer for you!

"We gave thousands of dollars..."

Could the stars be aligning for a Google-N.Y. Times merger?

As the New York Times Co. is negotiating with lenders over its debt, speculation has been floating around the blogosphere, pushing the premise that Google Inc. should acquire the beleaguered Gray Lady. The thesis (or, rumor, as some would put it) has been around since the beginning of the year, with SpliceToday on Thursday reintroducing the idea of the unorthodox union of the stalwart of old media with the scion of new media.

Al Gore sits in Google's Board of Directors. I hope Google makes him publisher of the NYT.

Read this article in Vanity Fair and remind me again why Our Betters are better? Vanity Fair:

Even those who have plenty left to spend aren’t spending it. “I ran into a couple I always see at the antiques show,” one Upper East Side woman recounts of her visit to the Armory show on Park Avenue. “They always buy something fairly grand. ‘What have you bought this time?’ I asked. ‘Oh, nothing!’ they said. ‘We’d feel … ashamed.’”

Oh, now they feel shame?   Read more…

Harvard: Not So Smart After All:

Savings on fund management staff: $50 million

Losses on endowment fund: $ 8 billion and counting

Finding out the supposedly smartest college in the nation is run by idiots: Priceless.

That's because all the "creative [cough] class types on Wall Street are hanging out their shingles as consultants, and they need office supplies (or think they do).

The Howler lets WKJM have it with both barrels:

Hasn’t the public suffered enough from the actual Andrew Sullivan? Defending Bush, avoiding Campaign 2000, Josh makes himself a Serious Person. But you can’t build a progressive politics by respecting the need of people like this to shape-shift the recent past.

Josh wants to be a Serious Person. It’s time for Josh to go.

And schadenfreude is far too mild a term for what Tom Watson feels.

Via McClatchy. (Let me say that McClatchy blames McCain's grandstanding in the headline, which let us remember that editors write, but the story makes clear that (a) all the blame is being cast by Dems, big surprise, and (2) it's the House Republicans who are really the cause of the trouble, because they don't buy into the famous "principals." I mean, these are the guys who kept the House open to do some political theatre for drilling even after Pelosi turned off the cameras and the lights, and Pelosi ultimately caved, so why on earth would they give in now? To help Bush? To help McCain? Haw.)

 Read more…

Believe me I’m not surprised. Right now I’m just trying to get out of the way. I was never a fan of the Obama candidacy but, as I travel and listen to people outside the US I realized how crucial this election is. The rest of the world really wants to believe in America. They want to believe the hype, excuse me, I meant the dream. They want to believe in opportunity, equality, justice, freedom … I listen, I smile, and I think, you don’t know shit about America.

The folks up at Stanford ran an http://www.startribune.com/politics/2869... "> AP-Yahoo News poll found that 40 percent of white Americans and one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks.

AP:

The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer.

The warning from Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is contrary to numerous studies that don't find a link between cancer and cell phone use, and a public lack of worry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Herberman is basing his alarm on early unpublished data. He says it takes too long to get answers from science and he believes people should take action now — especially when it comes to children.

In the memo he sent to about 3,000 faculty and staff Wednesday, he says children should use cell phones only for emergencies because their brains are still developing.

Adults should keep the phone away from the head and use the speakerphone or a wireless headset, he says. He even warns against using cell phones in public places like a bus because it exposes others to the phone's electromagnetic fields.

Actually, people shouldn't be using cell phones in confined public spaces like buses out of common courtesy, never mind the medical risk that lambert might be sitting next to you and go for your throat, maddened beyond endurance as you yammer about your trade secrets or sex life or anal leakage issues or whatever. "Hi, I'm on the train!" This means you, Ashley.

A driving force behind the memo was Devra Lee Davis, the director of the university's center for environmental oncology.

"The question is do you want to play Russian roulette with your brain," she said in an interview from her cell phone while using the hands-free speaker phone as recommended. "I don't know that cell phones are dangerous. But I don't know that they are safe."

Obviously, another reason for universal health care. Why?

Insurance Cancellation Questions Could Spread Beyond California

Today’s Health Blog jargon of the day is rescission, the insurance industry’s practice of revoking individual insurance policies because of health-related mistakes or omissions on the application for coverage. ...

... Now it looks like the push-back against rescission may be spreading. Henry Waxman, a Democratic California Congressman, held a hearing on the subject yesterday and said his oversight committee plans to investigate the issue nationally.

 Read more…

Sounds like the Hill is not gruntled with all the Hope and Change:

Some Capitol Hill Democrats have begun to complain privately that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is insular, uncooperative and inattentive to their hopes for a broad Democratic victory in November. ... Obama had done little fundraising for Democratic candidates since signing off on e-mailed fundraising appeals .... Obama has sometimes appeared in members’ districts with no advance notice to lawmakers ... The Obama campaign has not, until very recently, coordinated a daily message with congressional Democrats ... Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — who will chair the Democrats’ convention in August — didn’t know of Obama’s decision to move his final-night acceptance speech from the Pepsi Center to Invesco Field until the campaign announced it on a conference call with reporters [and after Nancy and Harry did do much for Obama, too. Why, the ingratitude! Nice work on the FISA, thing, though. Makes me proud to check the D... ] ...

“They think they know what’s right and everyone else is wrong on everything,” groused one senior Senate Democratic aide. “They are kind of insufferable at this point."

"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition...." -- alive and well.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton dismissed the criticism as not-for-attribution complaints of staffers who aren’t knowledgeable about the campaign’s Hill coordination efforts.

“It’s a favorite parlor game in Washington for low-level staff to take shots at anyone they can, given the opportunity,” Burton said.

Heh. I bet a lot of the sources are happy with that quote.

One Democratic aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, compared the Obama campaign unfavorably to President Bush’s administration.

“At least Bush waited until he was in the White House before they started ignoring everybody,” the aide said.

Ouch! But since the Obama campaign told 18 million Democrat voters to go Fuck themselves in as many "creative" ways they could, why would any of this be surprising?

I'd chalk it up to the usual Politico "Let's you and him fight" methodology, if it didn't chime with other detail. And this isn't from the 527s who got gleischaltung-ed, though it might be from DNC staffers got moved to Chicago.

Look, I think I know what the solution is, though:

This works for me on so, so many levels.

N.Y. AG Prescribes Subpoenas to UnitedHealth Group, Others

The nation's largest health care insurer, four of its subsidiaries and a number of other large insurers are being served subpoenas -- 16 in all -- in a suit to be brought by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo that charges the companies used "rigged data to manipulate the reimbursement rate to their customers who filed claims."

At the center of the scheme, according to the attorney general, is Ingenix, Inc., "the nation's largest provider of health care billing information, which serves as a conduit for rigged data to the largest insurers in the country."

 Read more…

Greetings, Class of June, 2008!

One of the ironist's bitter pleasures during these past several years has been watching the rats jump from Bush's stinking ship at precisely the most expedient times (that is, after some great and irrevocable damage has been wrought upon our nation).

With the shocking news (brace yourselves, folks) that Barack Obama is not at all a New-Politics Progressive Savior, we're seeing some fellow Dems in the throes of buyer's remorse.

Reading this DailyKos thread, I don't know precisely how to feel.

Go read Glenn.