Bits & Pieces

This meeting capped off a debate that began with a similar summit nearly one year ago. Since then, every idea has been put on the table. Every argument has been made. Everything there is to say about health care has been said and just about everyone has said it. So now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform health care so that it works, not just for the insurance companies, but for America’s families and businesses.

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[N]o matter which approach you favor, I believe the United States Congress owes the American people a final vote on health care reform. We have debated this issue thoroughly, not just for a year, but for decades. Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of sixty votes. And now it deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that was cast on welfare reform, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, COBRA health coverage for the unemployed, and both Bush tax cuts — all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.

I have therefore asked leaders in both of Houses of Congress to finish their work and schedule a vote in the next few weeks. From now until then, I will do everything in my power to make the case for reform. And I urge every American who wants this reform to make their voice heard as well — every family, every business owner, every patient, every doctor, every nurse.

–President Obama, today, finally speaking with passion about the need for healthcare insurance reform now.

Via NBC news:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Matt Taibbi has a new article in RollingStone outlining the amazing similarity between the way Wall Street made money,during the collapse and through today, and classic grifter cons. As usual, his article well worth a full read.

The bottom line is that banks like Goldman have learned absolutely nothing from the global economic meltdown. In fact, they’re back conniving and playing speculative long shots in force — only this time with the full financial support of the U.S. government. In the process, they’re rapidly re-creating the conditions for another crash, with the same actors once again playing the same crazy games of financial chicken with the same toxic assets as before.

That’s why this bonus business isn’t merely a matter of getting upset about whether or not Lloyd Blankfein buys himself one tropical island or two on his next birthday. The reality is that the post-bailout era in which Goldman thrived has turned out to be a chaotic frenzy of high-stakes con-artistry, with taxpayers and clients bilked out of billions using a dizzying array of old-school hustles that, but for their ponderous complexity, would have fit well in slick grifter movies like The Sting and Matchstick Men. There’s even a term in con-man lingo for what some of the banks are doing right now, with all their cosmetic gestures of scaling back bonuses and giving to charities. In the grifter world, calming down a mark so he doesn’t call the cops is known as the “Cool Off.”

But by now, we know how the Obama administration deals with those who would destroy it: it goes straight for the capillaries.

- Paul Krugman, describing President Obama’s reaction to GOP obstruction and Senate “holds.”

Official White House photo of staff during YouTube interview of the President. (via MacDailyNews)

The interchange on Friday between President Obama and the House GOP Caucus was amazing and important. From the New York Times:

The encounter at a Baltimore hotel was unlike any of Mr. Obama’s presidency, or very many other presidencies, for that matter. Such a sustained and public dialogue with a hostile audience is rare for a president. Instead, Friday’s back and forth resembled the British tradition where the prime minister submits to questions on the floor of the House of Commons — something Senator John McCain had promised to do if elected president.

And here is the full video. Well worth a viewing.

What are the political ramifications?

Here is the state of the union address Obama should deliver:

Andrew Sullivan argues that President Obama must directly take on the paranoid claims of the right and, in doing so, he must fight with every tool at a President’s disposal. And, all of us who supported the President must again to so, even if we are not getting everything we want. Read the entire essay, but here is an excerpt:

The seismic events of the last few days ends, in some respects, the phony war of the first year of Obama’s presidency. As is the case in truly fracturing democracies, the opposition simply does not and cannot accept the fact that it is out of power. The incoherence of the opposition to Obama – that he is both Jimmy Carter and Adolf Hitler, as Stephen Colbert pointed out last night – reveals the irrationality of the hate. It began immediately on the FNC/RNC right. And the ferocity of the campaign against Obama, the sheer dickishness of the GOP and its acolytes, the total oppositionism to everything he has done and indeed anything he might do… suggests that any hope for some kind of cooperation from this rump is impossible.

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This is about more than health reform and we have to see it in that context. This is about a cynical nihilist attempt to break this presidency before it has had a chance to do what we elected it to do by a landslide vote. It is an attempt to destroy a majority’s morale, to break a president’s foreign policy autonomy, to prevent engagement in the Middle East peace process, to stop action on climate change, to restore torture, to increase tensions with the Muslim world, to launch a war on Iran. We cannot delude ourselves that if Obama fails, this is not the alternative. It is.

And we have to re-engage as powerfully as we did in the campaign to fight back against these now emboldened forces of reaction. I think this is true not just for the sake of the country but also for the sake of the GOP. The nihilist obstructionism and rhetoric they have embraced makes constitutional democracy close to impossible. Their total lack of any workable alternatives to dire problems is a form of degeneracy we have to avoid empowering.

So fight, Mr President.

We’re about to get into a big fight with the banks.

– President Obama, finally showing some determination, alluding to his new plans for financial regulation and tax the largest banks to repay TARP.

Call it bait-and-switch. Obama ran on a platform that included stronger financial regulations and changes in the behavior that caused the economic collapse.

What has been the reality? Obama has filled the ranks of financial regulators and his economic advisors with Wall Street insiders. Matt Taibbi explicates:

Read the full details in Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone.  Excerpt:

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history.

I can’t disagree with Frank Rich’s column this morning. Tiger Woods is a terrific personification of an entire decade of people making money  (and going to war) based on a false persona and fantasy.

If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us . . . have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).

For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

–President Obama, in a speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

When Obama addressed the audience at West Point regarding his plans for Afghanistan I was inspired by the sea of up and coming military leadership in the audience.

But then I looked more closely…

It seems that various incidents involving reality TV have recently been causing news. On the first was the entire balloon boy incident, when an aspiring reality TV “actor” sought publicity by faking a purported accidental balloon flight by his son. This triggered a large emergency rescue effort, putting rescuers of a non-existent threatened child in danger and costing money.

Now, an aspiring reality TV show couple successfully crashed a White House official state dinner.  The couple shook President Obama’s hand while the President stood immediately next to the Prime Minister of India. Pictures of the couple at the event are shown on the wife’s Facebook page.  Needless to say, this was a huge failure by the Secret Service, but it is also an outrage that, apparently for the purpose of entertainment, the couple in question intentionally breached Presidential security.

It is important, in this case, that the couple be prosecuted fully.  Further, anyone who knowingly aided the breach should also be charged if possible. Reality TV “personalities” cannot be above the law. Also, it appears that Bravo (aka NBC) may also have been involved.

Mr. and Mrs. Salahi, who are known in the area to have a taste for polo and fine wine, are aspiring reality-show celebrities. For months, the couple have been trailed by camera crews with the cable channel Bravo, as it prepared for a new show, “The Real Housewives of D.C.”

Seemingly distancing itself from the Salahis’ actions, Bravo said Friday that it would not comment about “ongoing investigations.” Earlier, the channel said that while its cameras were filming the Salahis before the dinner, producers were told by the couple that they had been invited to it.

Update: More here, from the New York Times’ television critic:

Bravo has not yet said it would drop the dashing blond Mrs. Salahi; Larry King has already booked her for his show. The Washington social climbers had a plan, even if it was lunatic and dangerous. So did the father who pretended that his son was trapped in a runaway balloon, and in much the same reality-show fevered way, so did Jon and Kate Gosselin when they ripped their marriage apart on camera.

Richard and Mayumi Heene, the parents of Falcon, the so-called Balloon Boy, were not as lucky as the Salahis. They briefly held cable news in their thrall last month, but after the local Colorado sheriff concluded that the 50-mile balloon chase was a fake, Mr. Heene pleaded guilty to a felony charge of falsely influencing the authorities and faces jail time. But even that may turn out to be worth it to the Heenes, amateur storm chasers who appeared twice on ABC’s reality show “Wife Swap.”

Update 2: Now they have cancelled their Larry King appearance and are taking bids for their first TV interview. Shame on whoever pays them a dime.

This was produced and released by the White House. For real.