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Michael B. Laskoff: The War on Evidence-Based Medicine - 60,000 Needless Casualties

2009-11-21T21:54:49Z

This week saw what happens when an ugly little thing like empirical evidence collides with what might best be called faith-based health consumerism, which dictates that more is always better. The Federal Preventative Service Task Force, a non-partisan, non-political group founded during the Reagan administration was accused of encouraging healthcare rationing because it made a non-binding recommendation, based on empirical evidence, a/k/a science: women should start having mammograms later and less frequently.

Announcing this finding generated some very predictable results. Large organizations that had fought for the rights of women to obtain mammograms were very confused and expressed knee-jerk opposition. Equally, the American College of Radiology felt deeply threatened: mammograms generate a lot of revenue for their membership. And of course, political opponents to healthcare reform used this as 'proof' of rationing (something already practiced by insurance companies).

What is shocking, however, are the implications of statements made by many but concisely expressed by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson. She said, "One life out of 1,904 to be saved, but the choice is not going to be yours. It's going to be someone else that has never met you that does not know family history... This is not the American way of looking at our health care coverage."

Senator, I beg you, think about the implications of your statement. First, we should not ignore the findings that current practice needlessly kills one woman out of 1,904. Had we known that two decades ago, current practice would already be considered unethical and probably illegal. Fortunately, we now have evidence that allows us to make better decisions for the common good.

Second, these numbers are not rounding errors. The US Census Bureau estimates that there will about 116.5 million American women over the age of 19 in 2010. Do a little math, and you realize that we're talking about 61,000 preventable deaths. That's almost 20x the number of US soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. (Even if I'm off by a factor of two or three, the numbers are still in the tens of thousands.)

Three, we should not let these women die so that our crumbling healthcare system can spend vast sums of money on testing that will not make the great majority of women healthier. (Sure, it's easy to put a 'face' to the exception who lives because of more frequent testing, but then we should also give a 'face' to the woman who died as the result of the excess.) Advocating useless spending is hardly the talk of a fiscal conservative who would like to be governor of the great state of Texas.

And finally, we should not hide behind, "American way of looking at health care coverage..." Unless you've been under a rock, you already know that we spend at twice the rate of other industrialized nations but are sicker and die younger. That's not a 'way' that deserves respect.

Senator Hutchinson, I do not believe that you want to encourage the needless deaths thousands of women. I think that you simply want to win the next election. But every time you encourage people to selectively ignore solid, empirical evidence, you do real harm to the public that you are supposed to serve.

Democrats Are United -- For Now

2009-11-21T20:31:15Z

At least for the moment, Democrats are united behind Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

All 60 members of the party's caucus have publicly pledged to back him in key vote on the Senate floor Saturday night -- this one to allow debate to proceed on Reid's health care reform bill.

But that unity may not last.

"That was the easy part. Now it's only going to get tougher from here on out," Reid spokesman Jim Manley told HuffPost.

Back-to-back announcements on the Senate floor on Saturday from the two remaining holdouts -- Louisiana's Mary Landrieu, followed by Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln -- put Reid over the top, giving him the 60 votes he needs to overcome the expected Republican filibuster.

The official vote will be called at 8:00 Saturday evening. The Senate will then move to several weeks of floor debate and amendments, followed by another crucial vote to end a second expected filibuster and move to a final tally.

A handful of Democrats are still threatening to filibuster the final bill if certain changes aren't made. Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, is insisting on the removal of a public health insurance option that would compete with private insurers, many of which are based in his home state of Connecticut.

Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Landrieu and Lincoln are also withholding their final support, and trying to extract concessions.

"My vote today to move forward," Landrieu said on the floor, "should in no way be construed" as an indication that she'll back the final bill. "Much work needs to be done," she said.

Lincoln, who could face a primary challenge over her health care stand, similarly said she'd work to amend the bill and expressed her concerns with protecting private insurers from being required to compete with a public plan.

"Rather than create an entirely new government-run health care plan to compete with private insurers. I support health insurance reform that focuses on changing the rules of our existing employer-based private health insurance system," Lincoln said. "I believe we should change the current rules that permit insurance companies to bully their customers and cherry pick healthy patients, so we can force them to compete with each other. This initial procedural vote simply allows us to open debate on health care reform, nothing more or less. My decision to support this vote is not my last nor is it my only chance to shape health insurance reform."

If the Senate does pass a bill, House and Senate conferees will then meet to hash out the considerable differences between their packages. Each chamber must then approve the compromise before it heads to the president's desk for his signature.

Reid Slams Broder: A Retiree Who 'Writes A Column Once In A While'

2009-11-21T19:26:42Z

Speaking from the Senate floor on Saturday, Majority Leader Harry Reid had some harsh words for Washington Post columnist David Broder.

Reid was responding to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's citing of Broder's latest column to attack the Democratic health care reform bill.

"In tomorrow's Washington Post," McConnell began, "David Broder, their distinguished senior columnist, certainly not a political conservative, expresses his reservation as a citizen about the steps that we could be about to take."

Reid responded gravely: "Now, Madam President, to focus on a man who has been retired for many years and writes a column once in a while is not where we should be."

He added emphatically: "where we should be, is recognizing that America deserves a debate on health care reform."

Chris Frates writes for Politico that "Republicans quickly circulated past quotes where Reid had kinder words about the columnist, like in 2004 when Reid called the 'long-time syndicated columnist ... nonpartisan and fair.'"

Broder's argument in this latest column -- that the bill is fiscally irresponsible -- was so unfounded that even his Washington Post colleague Ezra Klein felt obliged to point out some of the things Broder had overlooked.

Watch the video below. Reid's comments start around 8:45.

Kevin Ross: Does This Black Republican Understand Sarah Palin's Appeal? You Betcha!

2009-11-21T19:14:04Z

This was the post that started it:

"Many of you know I'm a Republican. Before I give you my thoughts, however, I'm curious to know what you guys REALLY think of former Alaska Governor and GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin?"

Who could have imagined that this question would elicit such an avalanche of insightful, hilarious, disturbing, and outrageous comments from many of my African American Facebook friends?

I certainly couldn't. But I completely understand why the controversial political vixen is "Going Rogue"... all the way to the bank.

Having been on Facebook now for almost two years, I have NEVER had 55 comments on anything I posted. The closest was when I asked my over 1,900 friends to use one word to describe me. That garnered about 31 replies. Even cajoling folks to recall how we met only snagged 29 willing participants. Take for example this comment:

"I thinks she's a "back asswards," intellectually "dithering," bobblehead whose absolutely dangerous in her willful and purposeful stupidity and ignorance."

So for the moose-hunting darling of the GOP to have this many folks bag, dis, clown and essentially give no dap to a "Richard Nixon in lipstick" tells me there is something extra special about this MILF of five and grandmother to a boy whose daddy is big on armpit hair.

And Sarah Palin is "all sorts of pissed about it." No, not just about the recent Newsweek cover featuring her looking quite fetching in a sexy jogger number that amply shows off her gams. Those liberal media news outlets are all on her doo-doo list -- particularly that porn collage called Playgirl featuring the suddenly ubiquitous and perennial thorn in her side Levi Johnston.

It's that righteous indignation that Palin has down to a science that have some on the political left and moderates on the right regularly experiencing Schadenfreude whenever the 45-year-old is knocked down a peg.

And yet everyone who gets on board the SS Sarah Smile strikes gold. Katie Couric effortlessly makes Palin look mentally numb and voila, her ratings and reputation for being a stellar journalist suddenly reappear. SNL's Tina Fey portrays a spot-on caricature of presidential candidate John McCain's unusual vice-president choice and walks away with an Emmy.

Oprah invites Palin on her show for a gabfest and reinforces, during November sweeps and the announced ending of her syndicated talker no less, why Winfrey's the queen of daytime. Associated Press reporters must really love her. With 11 reporters assigned to fact-check Palin's HarperCollins tome Going Rogue during the midst of company layoffs, I'm sure few are complaining at AP, particularly when the alternative would be job hunting during a sustained economic downturn.

We won't even talk about the book publishing world that is thanking God-Almighty for delivering a tectonic wonder woman capable of moving 1.6 million books with lightening speed off the shelves to salvage what has otherwise been a disastrous year for many New York literary companies.

Yet despite Sarah Palin's success as a wife, a mother, politician, opinion leader and now author, large numbers of black people just are not feeling her. Another comment echoed the sentiments of many:

Sarah Palin perfectly represents the backwards-thinking types in this country who are, more often than not, uneducated and not exposed to people of different cultures. I dislike her, not because she's a Republican, but because she stirs up so much moronic rhetoric. She does nothing to push forward an intelligent discussion. I am not even a Democrat, I'm an Independent. Although my father and several close friends are Republicans, I have serious doubts about the intelligence of anyone who seriously supports Palin.

While my Facebook compadres pale to Palin's 1 million plus supporters, another person who I attended college with years ago went much deeper:

As I watched the opening ceremony of this year's RNC convention as I do every four years, I was taken aback by her nasty and snarky comments. Her divisive behavior continued on the campaign trail. As a Christian, I was struck by her dishonesty and outright unchristian-like behavior. Sarah Palin is part and parcel of the problem that has created this frenzy in the extreme right wing fringe of the Republican party. This is the same group who is now selling t-shirts using scripture to abdicate the assassination of the President of the United States.

Palin is far from stupid, but certainly media hungry and a political scab willing to cut down anyone to further her own agenda. Another LIAR in the political arena, but too slow to cover her own story.

While I wish to never hear from Sarah Palin again, she will never go away as long as she can draw the lines she gets in conservative states like Michigan. She is divisive to the country and the Republican party as a whole. What a can of worms McCain opened when he selected her. He had several excellent choices to pick as a viable female running mate, and now we will have her hanging around our neck for years.

Me, I totally get why Blacks can't stand her. When you see the overwhelmingly white men and women rabid over the barracuda from Wasilla, quite a few look like a mix of trailer park dwellers, KKK recruiters, and backwoods hillbillies. Progressive African Americans are not letting the "yahoos" back into the mix without a verbal beatdown, and thus the sometimes shrill but no less robotic, Pavlovian response whenever Palin's name is even whispered.

But I also understand why middle America, the hockey moms, NASCAR fans, Ann Coulter and small business owners are sprung. They are among those 4 million viewers that Fox News regularly caters to. Sarah Palin is hands down the most attractive Republican candidate since Ronald Reagan stepped on the scene to die-hard, GOP enthusiasts waiting with open arms. And while people joked about how stupid and how much of a light-weight the B-movie actor was, Reagan knew how to work a camera and television screen.

Also a former governor, Reagan (who had enough sense to finish out his term before making a White House run) was a blue-ribbon superstar in that he was able to raise money and get people to buy into his bigger than life persona, all the while maintaining his common man touch. Possessing charisma and charm the likes of which had not been seen before, Ronald Reagan had the "it" factor, something no other Republican leader has had since he exited stage left.

Until Sarah Palin!

Now do I believe she is qualified to be president? Absolutely not. I had already decided that I was casting my vote for then Senator Barack Obama even before Palin came on the scene. After her debut, I was even more convinced that the my party was going down in flames. Palin was a cynical choice, based on having a limited pedigree that perfectly fit all the necessary boxes: good looking, pro-gun, pro-life, pro-military, driven, and a fresh face that would fire up the base without McCain looking like he was being upstaged.

As for a woman being used to trump the historical significance of an African-American ascending to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue once Hillary Clinton was pummeled in the Democratic primary, well, that goes without saying.

On so many levels, however, Sarah Palin has exemplified the same intangible attributes our current president possesses. There is something special about Barack Hussein Obama. Despite over-promising and under-delivering, Obama has the ability to captivate and mesmerize. He has tapped into the country's change zeitgeist, even if the results are mixed at best.

That in itself is no small feat. It requires a tactical, resilient individual who not only understands her brand, but recognizes that it's more potent than lightning in a bottle. At least during her 15 minutes of fame.

This is why so many people unknowingly embolden Sarah Palin every time they relegate her to being a clueless tool for those who ultimately want Obama to fail and fail miserably.

Yet, these are the same citizens baffled as to why demagogue Rush Limbaugh is more popular than ever, while CNN continues to rearrange the Titanic deck chairs when it comes to their dismal ratings and dwindling influence in the hardball political journalism arena.

Is Palin academically challenged? Duh! And here is where any comparisons to President Obama end. As Oprah was very fond of saying, "He's brilliant!" Palin, well... not so much.

That notwithstanding, do Sarah Palin's other assets more than make up for her lacking of intellectual rigor? Can a audacious gal who's easy on the eyes, carries herself a certain way, has her own message of hope and who demonstrates a tenacious work ethic get over in this country (i.e. get paid and be a potential king maker) without running for president in 2012?

Res ipsa loquitur. That's Latin Sarah, for the fact speaks for itself.

David Vines: If It Were Me, I'd Be Embarrassed

2009-11-21T18:50:00Z

It's nice to see that even after the election, conservatives are still playing the "liberal gotcha media" card every time they expose themselves as being shamefully ignorant regarding the issues they care about most.

Last Wednesday, a media firestorm erupted after a seventeen-year-old girl named Jackie was interviewed by MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell while standing in line during Sarah Palin's Michigan book signing. Jackie, wearing a shirt that read, "The US government handed out $700 billion in Wall Street bailouts and all I got was this lousy t-shirt," was caught off-guard when O'Donnell informed her that Sarah Palin was on record as supporting the bailout.

You can see the exchange below:

It didn't take long for Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck to feature this clip on their respective shows and praise Jackie while condemning O'Donnell for her pesky questions backed up by fact-based research. Then, Jackie was given a platform to summarize her side of the story by the blog, Red White & Conservative.

To summarize:

This all started as me, a young 17 year old American going to see a woman I admire and turned into this crazy event hah I'll start at the very beginning.

She had me read my shirt and then proceeded to ask me "Did you know Sarah Palin supported the bailout" to be 100% honest I was like, are you kidding me? She is trying to use my shirt against me. I was so shocked by the craftiness she had that I was truly stumped. I asked her where she got her fact and she read her little note. Then she asked me what I liked about Sarah, and I talked about the Constitution.

In one day I met a role model, and met the liberal media and their crafty schemes. I fell prey to liberal bias, but I'd like to think I did an okay job.

As a fellow high school senior, I feel a strong urge to respond.

This notion that a reporter is being "crafty" and "biased" when they correct factually inaccurate statements is ridiculous. Sure, Jackie might have a point if O'Donnell ran up to her at random and stuck a microphone in her face as she was walking down the street, but that was not the case. This girl was at the book signing of a prominent politician, wore a t-shirt indicating that she had strong political views, agreed to be interviewed, and failed to answer a very simple and straightforward question.

The job of a good reporter is not to ask softball questions or cast everybody they speak to in a positive light. A reporter's job is to collect facts and seek the truth. So, while some may object to O'Donnell's speaking to a seventeen-year-old girl, nobody can accuse her of reporting anything but the facts.

Which brings me to my final point: Jackie is seventeen-years-old, she's not seven.

In her piece for Red White & Conservative, she feels the need to drive home the fact that she's only seventeen four separate times, as if that were some sort of defense.

Now, I understand that much of the electorate is made up of low information voters who don't closely follow politics. That's fine -- it's not ideal, but it's perfectly understandable.

But according to her school profile, Jackie is very politically involved. She is an intern with the Michigan Republican Party and is clearly excited and passionate about what her political "role model," Former-Governor Palin, represents. And yet, when she cannot correctly identify one of Palin's most basic political positions, she plays the victim and blames everybody but herself.

Then, conservative members of the media take the bait and praise her as some sort of Republican hero. They are more than happy to glorify this culture of ignorance and hide behind the veil of "elitism" and "media bias" when anyone approaches them with facts.

All I can say is that if Glenn Beck had heard me express my political views and then assumed that I was a thirteen-year-old, I would not lift the paper bag off my head for quite some time.

Carl Levin: New War Tax For Rich May Be Needed To Fund Afghan War

2009-11-21T18:42:33Z

Higher-income Americans should be taxed to pay for more troops sent to Afghanistan and NATO should provide half of the new soldiers, said Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

An "additional income tax to the upper brackets, folks earning more than $200,000 or $250,000" a year, could fund more troops, Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said in an interview for Bloomberg Television's "Political Capital With Al Hunt," airing this weekend.

Dan Agin: How It Was: The Year After the Crash of 1929

2009-11-21T18:18:02Z

The reality is that since our Great Recession is only a year old, it may be silly to interpret every upward blip as a sign that it's almost finished. The Great Depression lasted ten years, and probably ended only as a result of the economic pump-priming that occurred as we prepared for the Second World War. The Great Depression and the Great Recession are failures of the free market system, and without serious change in the way we do business in America, catastrophic crashes will certainly occur again down the road.

Meanwhile, we need to take the history of the Great Depression seriously. What was the situation, the mood, and the prognosis in 1930, during the year following the Great Crash?

In 1930, the population of the United States was 122 million, and evidently hardly anyone in the country understood the hardships that lay ahead of them. Certainly, American culture and innovation were booming. The year 1930 saw the introduction of Wonder Bread; Mott's applesauce; new airlines like United, TWA, and American; windshield wipers, and pinball machines. Contract bridge and backgammon were a rage. The movie actress Jean Harlow was a sensation in the movie Hell's Angels--produced by Howard Hughes. A primitive computer called a "differential analyzer" was introduced at MIT.

The rich were still rich. A Buick advertisement said it all: "Today the discriminating family finds it absolutely necessary to own two or more motor cars."

That's how it was: the rich were "discriminating" and everyone else was--what?

Early in the year, a minor bull market drove up stock prices of U.S. Steel, General Motors, and General Electric, which led to a wave of optimism among political and business leaders. (Sound familiar?)

But the clouds of misery were gathering. In April, in New York, 400,000 depositors at the Bank of the United States (a private bank with no connection to the government) found the doors locked and their accounts frozen for lack of bank assets. By the end of the year 1,300 banks had failed.

The unemployment figure was 4.5 million and slowly rising. In December, the Republican Hoover Administration appropriated $115 million for construction projects that would put some people back to work--a program that turned out to be as inadequate as throwing a spitball at a rushing rhinoceros. Part of the program was the ridiculous donation of surplus apples to 6,000 unemployed, the apples to be sold for five cents each.

Prognosis? In 1930, every time a supposed "expert" opened his mouth, what came out was a blatant stupidity about the economic situation:

Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury, started off the year with a bang: "I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism... I have every confidence that there will be a revival of activity in the spring, and that during this coming year the country will make steady progress." (The similarities to the statements of the present Secretary of the Treasury are chilling.)

The Secretary of Commerce, Robert Patterson, broadcast the same cheer in March: "With the usual increase in out-of-door work in the Northern states as weather conditions moderate, we are likely to find the country enjoying the accustomed state of prosperity."

In May, President Herbert Hoover blew his bugle of optimism: "I am convinced we have now passed through the worst and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover... There has been no significant bank or industrial failure. That danger, too, is safely behind us." One month later, Hoover announced: "The depression is over."

As Americans, we need to understand that a free-market economy is essentially a free-market casino--with a few big winners and too often many millions of losers. The big winners may be experts about free-market casino gambling, but they are not experts at predicting the fundamental future of the country. The history of the Great Depression tells us there is really no reason to be optimistic at this point. It seems to me we would be better off assuming the worst, understanding that we may be in for a long-haul of bad economic times unless new and drastic measures are put in place.

Parenthetically, there's a political lesson for the current administration. Herbert Hoover was in the White House during the first three years of the Great Depression, and by the time voters came to the polls in 1932, the economic situation was so bad they threw him out in desperation and elected the leader of the opposition party--Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They threw Hoover out despite the pubic paranoia about socialism. In 2012, Barack Obama will have been in the White House four years after the start of the current Great Recession. If there's a long haul of misery ahead, 2012 will be much worse than 2009 or 2010, and it's likely Obama will be a one-term president. He will be thrown out of office despite any public fears about unregulated capitalism. The Republicans in and out of Congress know this, and that's why they're working so hard to keep the Great Recession crippling the country until the next election. If we don't come out of this mess before 2012, the next administration will likely be Republican.

James Zogby: Not Serious, Again

2009-11-21T18:14:48Z

It was 1988, with the first Intifada in full bloom and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the lead up to their November 29th declaration of independence, when I met with a few members of the PLO Executive Committee to discuss their plans. "Is this serious?", I asked. "Absolutely", they assured me. "It will be like our 4th of July".

Given this, I probed further. What will the photo look like?, I asked. What image of the day will be remembered in history? And what will the follow up plans look like to move this "independence day" forward?

These questions were not answered. Nevertheless, announce they did. But, plan they did not. Many states gave full diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine and accorded the title of Embassy to PLO Missions. The Intifada, itself, was reinvigorated. But no more was done, until the US, needing to capitalize on and sustain its new post-Gulf War alliance with key Arab states, convened the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. A reminder of how the weak Palestinian hand still was, came in the humiliating conditions imposed on their participation in this conference. Because Israel would not acknowledge a "Palestinian people", only West Bank and Gaza Palestinians (no Jerusalemites were allowed) were involved and then only as part of a Jordanian delegation.

The period that followed Madrid did show signs of progress. The PLO emerged as the legitimate negotiating partner to peace talks. They were formally recognized as the representatives of the Palestinian people at Oslo and afterwards. But still no state or independence.

And what happened to the November 29th commemoration? In 1989 the Washington office of the PLO sent out an invitation to a reception to celebrate Palestine "Independence Day" on December 2nd!-which in my way of thinking would be like commemorating the Fourth of July on the 7th of July. And in succeeding years, the November 29th date was frequently forgotten and not honored at all.

"Not serious", I concluded.

It was with these events of 1988 in the back of my mind that I greeted the Palestinian Authority's (P.A.) recent announcement that it would unilaterally declare independence and then seek international recognition for their state. While part of me thought that this might be the first truly creative Palestinian initiative in some time, I nevertheless worried that the P.A. might not be serious, willing to sustain this effort and build upon it, using available political assets as leverage.

Clearly something had to give. The P.A. had come to an impasse and a dramatic change in direction was necessary. Negotiations, which had produced nothing but frustration and disappointment, are at a dead end with most Palestinians no longer believing either in the efficacy of the process, the good will of the Israelis or the ability of the United States to act as an honest broker. At the same time, the P.A. is increasingly in danger of losing the last bit of support from its constituency. Its performance, of late, has alternated between erratic and weak, with all too frequent ultimate giving way to embarrassing "climb downs".

Despite its pretentions at leadership, Hamas and the "path" it represents remains fatally flawed. Its pathological, and self-destructive penchant for violence has not only resulted in the deaths of innocents. It has all too frequently done damage to the Palestinian effort and provided an all too willing occupier the opportunity to impose even more brutal hardships on innocent Palestinians.

The US has also failed to inspire confidence. After what appeared to be strong start, a series of US miscues and startling displays of tone deafness to Palestinian needs have prompted Arab anger or despair, causing many to lose hope that this Administration, in fact, represents change.

Something had to give.

A real declaration of independence, coupled with organized displays of mass non-violent popular resistance to the occupation and all its manifestations, followed by appeals to the world community for support, would have created a new dynamic for Palestinians, put Israel on the defensive, helped mobilize world wide public opinion for change, and earned new respect for the lagging P.A. And this popular mobilization and political dynamic would have nicely complemented Salam Fayyed's two year institution and capacity building plan for statehood. It was my hope that this was what was intended.

But then came the realization that this might not be serious at all. To be serious would mean taking the bold risk of seeking real independence, from Israel and the US. It would have meant acting independently, not asking permission from the US or EU or even the UN. It would have meant actually organizing and relying on popular support for strength and legitimacy, and having that popular support earn the recognition of the international community. It would have required vision.

But then I heard a Palestinian leader explain that what was intended in this exercise was not a unilateral declaration of independence, but merely a call to the UN to reaffirm its commitment to the "two state" solution.

I swallowed hard and said, "Not serious, again".

Old Folks To Senate: Vote For Cloture Already

2009-11-21T17:58:33Z

In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), AARP CEO Addison Barry Rand backed the leader's health care bill and urged the chamber to vote yes to end a filibuster and move to a floor debate on Saturday.

"We strongly urge the Senate to vote for cloture this Saturday to begin debate on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act," wrote Rand.

The letter, sent Friday, is AARP's first endorsement of Reid's bill, which is a merged product of measures passed be the finance and health committees.

All 40 Republicans are expected to vote against the motion to proceed to a debate. Fifty-nine members of the Democratic caucus have committed to vote yes. One remains undeclared: Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas.

The cloture vote, which would allow debate on the actual bill to proceed, is scheduled for 8:00 p.m. ET Saturday.

Barbara Ann Radnofsky: Authors Of Texas Marriage Amendment: Who Barks The Loudest?

2009-11-21T17:58:00Z

Right wing pundits are howling over my claim that a 2005 Texas constitutional amendment didn't ban gay marriage; it bans all marriage. The Constitution provides, in very clear language, that Texas "may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage." In our justice system, when language is clear, the courts are not permitted to go behind the clear language to consider intent. It doesn't take an expensive law degree to understand what this clause means.

Bad lawyering caused the approval of Art. 1 Section 32 of our Constitution, which defines marriage in Section A and outlaws marriage in Section B. The clear language in B creates turmoil and breeds litigation. The solution lies in either a new constitutional amendment (our Constitution has hundreds of them) or massive judicial activism to take clear language and reword it. Ironically, the current Attorney General, who was in office in 2005 and asleep at the switch at the time of passage of Art. 1 Section 32, vowed this week to "continue to defend" the amendment. He emphasized that the constitutional amendment was "constitutional." This is a nonsensical approach: continue to defend the clear and constitutional language outlawing marriage.

The authors of the Amendment and their Attorney General protest too much in frustration about the clear language banning all marriages. Everyone in Texas knows that the guilty dog barks the loudest.

Of course, the solution lies in another constitutional amendment rescinding the outlawing of marriage. It is both bad lawyering and bad public policy to ask courts to step beyond their power and re-word an amendment voted on by the people of the State. The Attorney General seeks more than judicial activism, more than judicial legislation from the bench. The Texas Attorney General now puts in to the hands of Texas state court judges the job of rewriting the Texas Constitution.

The Attorney General of Texas has made many other mistakes of constitutional dimension. The website www.BarbaraAnn2010.com will be updated to reflect those mistakes as the campaign progresses. I will file for the office of Attorney General at the end of my announcement tour on Dec 3 2009.

Bill Moyers Plays LBJ Tapes, Draws Similarities With Obama And Afghanistan War

2009-11-21T17:13:26Z

On Friday night, Bill Moyers played clips from the Lyndon B. Johnson tapes on his PBS television show. Moyers drew correlations between the factors facing President Johnson in his decision to send more troops to Vietnam, and President Obama's conundrum with respect to the war in Afghanistan.

From his closing statement:

Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war. But once again we're fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.
Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.

And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he's got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.

View Moyer's introduction to the tapes below, and visit his website to watch the entire program.

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Edward Jay Epstein: Annals of Unsolved Crime: The Oswald Mystery

2009-11-21T16:16:47Z

The endless tangle of questions about bullets, trajectories, wounds, time sequences and inconsistent testimony that has surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and has obsessively fascinated, if not entirely blinded, two generations of self-styled assassination investigators, probably never will be satisfactorily resolved. Each new release of documents from the various bureaucracies involved in the nearly half century old investigation may only deepen the apparent contradictions.

Within this morass of facts. however, there is a central actor, Lee Harvey Oswald. His rifle, which fired the fatal bullet into the president, was found in the sniper's nest at the Texas Book Depository. So was his palm print. He had also bought the ammunition. His cartridge cases were found near the body of a murdered policeman on the route of his flight.

In light of such evidence, the issue that ought to have concerned Americans was not Oswald's technical guilt but whether he was involved with others in the assassination. Oswald was not a "loner" in the conventional sense. Ever since he was handed a pamphlet about the Rosenberg prosecution at the age of 15, he was a joiner, seeking affiliations with groups at home and abroad. When he was only 16, he wrote the Socialist Party, "I am a Marxist and have been studying Socialist Principles for well over five years," and he requested information about joining their "Youth League." He subsequently made membership inquiries to such organizations as the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Labor Party, The Gus Hall-Benjamin Davis Defense Committee, The Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the Communist Party, USA-- correspondence that brought him under surveillance by the FBI.

0swald also joined the Marine Corps. And after a two-year stint as a radar operator, Oswald sought still another affiliation: in October 1959 he became the first Marine to defect to the Soviet Union. In Moscow, he delivered a letter stating: "I affirm that my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." Not only did he publicly renounce his American citizenship, but he told the U.S. consul that he intended to turn over to the Soviet Union military secrets that he had acquired while serving in the Marines, adding that he had data of "special interest" to the Russians. Since he indeed had exposure to military secrets such as the U-2 spy plane, his defection had serious espionage implications. Oswald thus had not only compromised the secret data he had come in contact with in the Marines, but put himself firmly in the hands of another country. He was now completely dependent on Russia for financial support, legal status and protection.

Before disappearing into the Soviet hinterland for a year, Oswald spelled out his operational creed in a long letter to his brother. From Moscow, he wrote presciently of his willingness to commit murder for a political cause: "I want you to understand what I say now, I do not say lightly, or unknowingly, since I've been in the military .... In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American Government --", and then ominously added for emphasis, "Any American." His willingness to act as an assassin was now known to anyone who read this letter, which included not only his Russian hosts but American intelligence, since his letter was intercepted by the CIA and microfilmed.

Oswald returned from the Soviet Union in June 1962, joined by his Russian wife Marina, and settled in Dallas. He then acquired the means for killing. He purchased a rifle with telescopic sights and a revolver from a mail-order house under a false name. He also lectured a small circle of friends on the need for violent action rather than mere words. His particular focus was General Edwin A. Walker, an extreme conservative, who had been active in Dallas organizing anti-Castro guerrillas. For example, he suggested to a German geologist, Volkmar Schmidt that General Walker should be treated like a "murderer at large." He did not stop at fierce words. For weeks, he methodically stalked Walker's movements, photographing his residence from several angles. He then had his wife photograph him, dressed entirely in black, with his revolver strapped on a holster on his hip, his sniper's rifle in his right hand, and two newspapers, The Worker and The Militant, in his left hand. He made three copies of the photograph--one of which he inscribed, dated "5--IV-63" and sent to a Dallas acquaintance, George De Mohrenschildt (who had also seen his rifle). He then left with his rifle wrapped in a raincoat, telling his wife he was off to "target practice," but his target, General Walker, was out of town that night. Five nights later, Oswald returned to Walker's house, and fired a shot at him that missed his head by inches, demonstrating to those that saw the photograph that he had the willingness to kill.

After the failed assassination, another friend, Ruth Paine, drove Oswald and his family to New Orleans, where he became the organizer for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which opposed the efforts of the Kennedy administration to overthrow Castro. Aside from printing leaflets, staging demonstrations, getting arrested and appearing on local radio talk shows in support of Castro that summer, Oswald attempted to befriend leaders of and infiltrate anti-Castro groups that were organizing sabotage raids against Cuba. By this time, he apparently considered himself a sleeper operative, writing in August 1963 to the central committee of the Communist Party USA, and asking, "Whether in your opinion, I can compete with anti-progressive forces above ground, or whether I should always remain in the background, i.e. underground." During this hot summer, while practicing sighting his rifle in his backyard, according to his wife, he told her about his plan to hijack an airliner to Cuba, saying he might earn a position in Castro's government. Then, on September 9th, in a report that appeared on the front page of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Castro, who had been the target of a number of assassination attempts by the CIA, warned that if American leaders continued "aiding plans to eliminate Cuban leaders ... they themselves will not be safe."

The implication of this warning was not lost on Oswald. Telling his wife that they might never meet again, he left New Orleans two weeks later, headed for the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. To convince the Cubans of his bona fides-- and seriousness--he had prepared a dossier on himself, which included a 10 page resume, outlining his revolutionary activities, newspaper clippings about his defection to the Soviet Union, documents he had stolen from a printing company engaged in classified map reproduction for the US Army, his correspondence with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee executives, and, as if to demonstrate his lethal capability , the photographs linking him to the Walker shooting.

Oswald applied for a visa at the Cuban Embassy on the morning of September 27, 1963. He said that he wanted to stop in Havana en route to the Soviet Union. On the application, the consular office who interviewed him noted: "The applicant states that he is a member of the American Communist Party and Secretary in New Orleans of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Despite such recommendations, Oswald was told that he needed a Soviet visa before the Cuban visa could be issued. He argued over this requisite with the Cuban counsel, Eusebio Azque, in front of witnesses, and reportedly made wild claims about services he might perform for the Cuban cause. During the next five days, he traveled back and forth between the Soviet and Cuban embassies attempting to straighten out the difficulty. When he telephoned from the Cuban embassy to arrange an appointment at the Soviet Embassy with an officer called Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov, he set off alarm bells at the CIA, which had been surreptitiously monitoring the phone line. Kostikov was a KGB officer who had been under close surveillance in Mexico by the FBI. By the time the CIA had identified Oswald, and notified the FBI, he had left Mexico.

When he returned to Dallas, Oswald assumed a different identity--"O.H.Lee"--and, separating himself from his family, he moved to a rooming house. He also forbade his wife from divulging his whereabouts.

On October 18th, Oswald's visa was approved by the Cuban Foreign Ministry despite the fact that he had not officially received a Soviet visa, as required. Apparently unaware of this development, he wrote another letter to the Soviet Embassy, referring to his meeting with Kostikov in Mexico, and adding cryptically: "Had I been able to reach the Soviet Embassy in Havana as planned, the embassy there would have had time to complete our business." When FBI counterintelligence intercepted this letter in Washington. it urgently requested its field agent in Dallas to question him.

The FBI agent, James Hosty, unable to locate Oswald, warned his wife she could be sent back to Russia. When his wife told him about the FBI warning he threatened to bomb its Dallas office. By this time, Oswald had a menial $1.50 hour job at the Texas Book Depository, which overlooked the convergence of the three main streets into central Dallas.

On November 22nd, at 12:30 pm, as the President's car passed the book depository, a burst of rifle fire fatally wounded him. Less than two hours later, a Dallas policeman had been shot and killed, and, near the shooting, Oswald was arrested with the murder weapon in his hand. He was charged with killing the policeman and, shortly afterwards, assassinating the President. Then, on November 24th, Oswald was shot to death in Dallas police headquarters by night club owner Jack Ruby.

The Warren Commission concluded--rightly I now believe--that Oswald fired all the shots that killed the President. But conspiracies do not necessarily require multiple rifleman to accomplish their purpose. And what the Warren Commission could not absolutely rule out, as two of its members pointed out to me, was the possibility that Oswald had acted at the behest of others. After all, he had advertised his willingness to undertake a high-profile assassination by circulating photographs connecting himself to the shooting of General Walker. Any party who was monitoring his activities in Dallas, New Orleans or Mexico City could have discerned from them that he was a potential assassin awaiting a mission. With his mind set on such violent actions as hijacking a plane, blowing up the FBI office, or killing "any American," not much would be required to prod him to violence. He had sought liaisons in dangerous quarters and someone could have provided him with an inducement. But with Oswald forever silenced by Ruby, and intelligence services capable of expunging embarrassing data about their contacts with a Presidential assassins from their files, it is doubtful that we will ever know who, if anyone, influenced Oswald to act on November 22, 1963.

U.S. Fears $53 Billion Spent On Reconstruction In Iraq Will Go To Waste

2009-11-21T16:06:12Z

In its largest reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan, the United States government has spent $53 billion for relief and reconstruction in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, building tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges.

But there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq's ability to provide basic services to its people.

Joe The Plumber Comes Out Against Palin Running In 2012

2009-11-21T15:53:41Z

Forever a part of American electoral history, Joe Wurzelbacher--better known as "Joe the Plumber"--is hitting back at the media for its coverage of him over the past year, telling Editor & Publisher the reporting has been "poorly done."

In a wide-ranging interview with E&P, Wurzelbacher also shared his thoughts on Sarah Palin (he hopes she doesn't run for president in 2012), Palin's references to him in her new book, and the charge that he has capitalized off the publicity that has come with being Joe the Plumber.

Craig Crawford: Tyranny of the Silent Filibuster

2009-11-21T15:29:51Z

Why doesn't Harry Reid force an old-fashioned filibuster that could make Republicans look silly? Because he can't.

The Senate Majority Leader must get 60 votes to start the health care debate -- which he aims to try tonight -- and he'll need that many again when it comes time to try and stop the debate for an up-or-down vote.

So why not make Republicans really filibuster, provoking the spectacle of marathon speechmaking? Because it's just not that simple.

Under Senate rules, filibusterers need to do no more than call for endless rounds of quorum calls. The only drama for television would be watching successive roll calls, and that's nothing like the Hollywood scenario we saw with Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

No, as we point out in this video (produced by CQ-Roll Call's Andrew Satter), Reid is doing all that he can do -- collect 60 votes for a super-majority that allows a final vote.

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