Well, folks, the Senate health plan is out. It's 2,074 pages long, and is even more crapulent than the House plan, from what I can tell.

Some of the awesome features:

1) Taxing more expensive plans that employers provide. The meme is that these are "Cadillac" plans, as if the people who are covered by these plans have any say WHATSOEVER in how much the programs cost.

2) Cutting even more from Medicare.

3) Offering an "opt-out" option for the states.

4) Forcing people to buy insurance, then penalizing them if they don't do so.

That's it!

Oh, wait. You wanted to know about that whole abortion thingy? Don't worry. The Senate has you covered!

CNN:

More than one-third of all weapons the United States has procured for Afghanistan's government are missing, according to a government report released Thursday.

The U.S. military failed to "maintain complete inventory records for an estimated 87,000 weapons -- or about 36 percent -- of the 242,000 weapons that the United States procured and shipped to Afghanistan from December 2004 through June 2008," a U.S. Government Accountability Office report states.

[...]The military also failed to properly account for an additional 135,000 weapons it obtained for the Afghan forces from 21 other countries.

Wired:

The Treasury Department wants more than $500,000 to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, a fee an attorney on the case suggested Tuesday might be one of the largest bills of its kind.

“I have not seen one that has been larger,” said Noah Wood, a Missouri attorney suing the government to comply with his nearly four-year-old FOIA request.

[...]Still, the government wants Wood to pay $522,886 for the records. The original tab was more than $26,000, but after some revisions in what Wood was seeking, the government upped the ante — even though not all information sought would be forthcoming, according to the bill.

Via Avedon Carol, this little item from Caltics:

Now it looks like they're moving to up the Hooverite ante, and two of California's powerful federal politicians are at the center of the debate. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is joining 6 other Senators to demand that Speaker Nancy Pelosi approve a commission to recommend cuts to Medicare and Social Security - or else they'll refuse to vote to increase the US government's debt ceiling: ...

Steve Benen

'DELAY, DEFINE AND DERAIL'.... Roll Call reports today on what we can expect to see from the Senate GOP caucus as the debate over health care reform enters the final stretch.

Senate Republicans, acknowledging they lack the votes to block a health care reform bill outright, have implemented a comprehensive political strategy to delay, define and derail. [...]

The Republicans have been very candid that their strategy is to sabotage the Obama Presidency so that things get worse for American and Republicans can get back in power.

Anne Applebaum on Roman Polanski:

He did commit a crime, but he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers' fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar.

Richard Cohen on Cap Weinberger:

Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense – which is the way much of official Washington saw him,” Cohen wrote. “Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that’s all right with me.”

Might not be safe for work... But FUCK IT!

DFH by joeyess

Health care reform and domestic violence

K Street preps for healthcare Round 2

“August recess was a missed opportunity. So much discussion was focused on whether or not to create a government-run insurance program. That was a distraction,” said Robert Zirkelbach, the spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP).

We need Dave Johnson to do justice to this article.

*Obligatory Sarah Palin Disclaimer: I did not want the women to be elected VP. She was horridly unqualified(like our current Pres), and proposed truly odious policies. That stance however does not mean I will tolerate blatant sexist trashing of her.

Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret—nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything.

So sayeth Levi Johnston, Sarah Palin's erstwhile future son-in-law. This above anecdote, related by Johnston in this month's Vanity Fair, may or may not be true*.

One of the hilarious things about Shearer's article is how the talking points show up in it, even "he's only been in office for a month/two months/three months"! And the moral? The inside game doesn't work. Listening, "progressives"? HuffPo:

After I started noticing the absence of any public words (let alone actions) on [rebuilding the levees and the wetlands] from the new administration, several commenters here criticized me for, in essence, just running my mouth. "You're a celebrity," they mis-advised me, "go talk directly to the White House about it, like Brad Pitt." I thought I should start my Pitt emulation slowly at first, maybe by wooing Angelina Jolie, but after a couple of weeks, I took the challenge to play the inside game. I haven't written about it until now, because I wanted to see how it would play out before drawing conclusions.

Here's how it played out:

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Jaycee Dugard, missing for 18 years, has been found alive. A 29-year-old woman walked into the Concord Police Department earlier this week. There's a photo of 11-year-old Dugard here, and the El Dorado County SO is planning a press conference this afternoon.

I have been mulling about this post for weeks and simply can't write a good one, so I will just say it in a sloppy way. It is true that Obama, Reid, and the leadersheep is blowing health care reform, but the press has created a toxic environment. The press is inciting violence for crying out loud.

I am glad that Glen Beck is losing his advertisers, kudos to the bloggers behind that. We need to step up these kinds of efforts. We need to start making formal complaints to the FCC. We need to step up pressure on advertisers. We need to start contacting institutional investors and fund managers and ask them if investing in lies and inciting violence is consistent with their fiduciary responsibility.

Krugman:

And then there’s the matter of the banks.

Yeah, who could have predicted that would be a problem? Then again, you had to be watching (09/20/2008) the bailout as it happened (09/28/2008 ) to notice (10/02/2008*) that little "matter," instead of focusing on bright shiny objects like that trashy Sarah Palin.** Priorities! And opportunity costs.

I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing. But I’ve had many conversations with people who voted for Mr. Obama, yet dismiss the stimulus as a total waste of money. When I press them, it turns out that they’re really angry about the bailouts rather than the stimulus — but that’s a distinction lost on most voters. ...

So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted...

Yeah, who could have predicted that?

At home, at 78.

The cause was a malignant brain tumor, according to his wife, Geraldine. It was the latest of a number of cancers and maladies, including spinal meningitis and broken bones, that Mr. Novak had suffered in recent years

. You will of course remember him as the guy who started the Valerie Plame investigation and kicked off one of the great unresolved crises of the Clusterfuck Dick and w the wonderdummy years. And Donald Wildmon is currently hospitalized with meningitis in North Mississippi.

In a world where the Democrats refuse to move to clear up the abuses of the past, time and fate happens to all of us anyway. Good, bad, indifferent, evil, saintly, or simply ordinary, we all face the eventual end of our mortal existence.
Whatever, if anything, lies beyond is sheer speculation, and grounds for a great deal of ill-feeling. But for the moment the cosmos' scales appear to be swinging leftward. More on Novak over the jump:

Oklahoma Congressional Representative John Sullivan, R-(District One).

Rep. John Sullivan: "I see Barack Obama is creating an enemies list of people who oppose this miserable health care plan. I think that's frightening. That's from a guy that can't even show a long-form birth certificate."

Of course that's a cover. But what's it a cover FOR?

Clearly, though, the group was more concerned about the massive health care bill percolating in Congress, energy policy and the growing budget deficit.

Sullivan criticized Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who Sullivan said is "smart but doesn't have any practical energy experience," and he said the health care bill has little chance of passing the House without important changes.

Asked afterward what must be done for the bill to win approval, Sullivan said costs must be reduced and so-called "single-payer" elements that Republicans say would eliminate private insurance must be dropped.

But WAIT -- not only must the parasites not be eliminated, the employers must not be responsible for keeping them healthy and wealthy and well-paid!!!

Nevertheless, Sullivan said some sort of reform is needed. A federal insurance plan for those who can't otherwise afford coverage, he said, should be considered, as well as a way to cover individuals with pre-existing conditions.

"One of the things we have to get away from is the idea that employers are responsible for providing insurance," he said.

She's just going to scare the old folks to death.

Via Big Tent Democrat:

Really bringing the stupid - the new leader of the idiots - Sarah Palin:

As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!

. . . The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

What do the insurance parasites contribute to our health care system?

via Alegre

Ladies and gentlemen, with the help of other blogs, I give you Missouri's Roy Blunt, in his own words.

Is there a bigger tool   Read more…

Melissa McEwan asks a really good question about the cesspool that is the Post:

I'd love to hear the Washington Post explain how they feel confident their reporters are giving balanced coverage to female public figures when they're willing to unabashedly use sexist slurs in public.

The argument about the difference in quality of care provided by nurses and doctors is age-old. You'll find advocates claiming nurse practitioners -- more particularly, Doctors of Nursing Practice and Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioners, who serve as primary healthcare providers -- lack the training and experience to match doctors' competencies. I'll tell you straightway I think that's erroneous. I think it's based on a bigotry driven by fear of competition, greed, and prejudice against women and against "menial" work, as opposed to "proper" work, that goes back to probably the days of Socrates and Aeschylus, if not further.

Famous nurses like Florence Nightingale and Linda Richards encountered claims that their knowledge and methods were inferior to those of doctors, although such views were not universal;

because the plan doesn't enforce payment differences (downwards) on services provided by nurse practitioners. Claiming patients risk losing five freedoms under a national healthcare plan, the copyrighted article in Fortune enumerates what look to me like hazards. Author Shawn Tully claims:

A close reading of the two main bills, one backed by Democrats in the House and the other issued by Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health committee, contradict the President's assurances. To be sure, it isn't easy to comb through their 2,000 pages of tortured legal language. But page by page, the bills reveal a web of restrictions, fines, and mandates that would radically change your health-care coverage.

Those five freedoms? Let's have a quick look at each one, shall we?

KERA-TV catches Kay Bailey Hutchison, who kinda may be running for governor, in a lie about why Texas leads the nation in people with no health insurance. The same line of BS is coming out of John King on CNN according to a commenter on this Burnt Orange Report story.No statistician me, I think I've heard about the illegal immigrants' costly impact on the California budget as well as Texas'. Anybody got any real numbers to prove that this line of scapegoating is, as I think it is, as much a base lie in CA as it is in TX?

Most insured Texans are covered by private insurance, or through government programs like Medicare (for the elderly), Medicaid (for low-income pregnant women and children), the Children’s Health Insurance Program (for children whose families’ incomes exceed Medicaid limits) or a county’s program for poor residents. Slightly more than half of Texas employers offer health care coverage to their employees.

The Texas Department of Insurance has an online brochure, Your Health Care Coverage, which provides general information about health care coverage available in Texas. If you have insurance, your health plan’s policy or benefits booklet has detailed information about covered services, networks and your responsibilities for payment. Certain terms are defined in the “Basic Health Coverage Terms” section.

You should contact your health plan if you have questions about your coverage and out-of-pocket costs.

If you want to speak to someone in person regarding health insurance, call TDI’s Consumer Helpline toll-free at 800/252-3439.

(you know, the REAL problem with health care costs in this country isn't doctors, or even defensive medicine -- the practice of doing extra tests or even stopping work as, say, an ob/gyn because delivering babies makes you a target for lawsuits, while the idea you might do abortions makes you a target for bullets -- it's the INSURANCE COMPANIES.

"

We choose," the Omega watch commercial says, "to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."  Read more…

Really.

When I lived in D.C. before I always maintained some sort of subscription to the Post. Now I wouldn't use it to clean up after my dog. And it sucks because I like newspapers. I like getting them and reading them. You can't cuddle up with your honey and your dog in bed on a Sunday morning with a laptop. Well, you can, but it isn't as nice. However, it only works with newspapers. Which the Washington Post definitely is not. Newspapers don't try to rehabilitate fucking assholes like Randall Terry by completely ignoring, you know, the facts.