Friday, August 27, 2004
Poverty Up, Uninsured Up.
45 million uninsured. The Administration was smart to release the data weeks early, in quieterAugust.
Some 1.3 million Americans slid into poverty in 2003 despite the economic recovery, and children and blacks were worse off than most, the government said on Thursday in a report certain to fuel Democratic criticism of President Bush.
The percentage of the U.S. population living in poverty rose to 12.5 percent from 12.1 percent in 2002, the Census Bureau said in its annual poverty report, seen by some as the most important score card on the nation's economy and Bush's first term in office. The ranks of the poor rose to 35.9 million, a boost of 1.3 million.
Health care coverage also dropped last year and incomes were essentially stagnant, the Census Bureau said in its annual poverty report, seen by some as the most important score card on the nation's economy and Bush's first term in office. http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6079297
Employers Will Control Costs…how?
Employers believe they can slow the rate of increase of their soaring health-care costs to just under 10% in 2005, but only after shifting even more of the expense to employees, a new nationwide survey said. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109356518789302598,00.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
Krugman: Single payer, yes, but we must be realistic:
Does this mean that the American way is wrong, and that we should switch to a Canadian-style single-payer system? Well, yes. Put it this way: in Canada, respectable business executives are ardent defenders of "socialized medicine." Two years ago the Conference Board of Canada - a who's who of the nation's corporate elite - issued a report urging fellow Canadians to bear in mind not just the "symbolic value" of universal health care, but its "economic contribution to the competitiveness of Canadian businesses."
My health-economist friends say that it's unrealistic to call for a single-payer system here: the interest groups are too powerful, and the antigovernment propaganda of the right has become too well established in public opinion. All that we can hope for right now is a modest step in the right direction, like the one Mr. Kerry is proposing. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/opinion/27krugman.html?hp
What’s Happening, Iraq:
The fighting and attendant chaos- has been terrible. One ominous sign (for the Occupiers and the Allawi government) is how opposition forces have been doing some cooperating amongst themselves.
Volunteers from the Sunni resistance stronghold are teaching Shia militants how to fight. Two young men from Fallujah sat in a house in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, eating a meal of rice and stew prepared by local women. They had come to this sprawling neighbourhood to give the Mahdi Army militia – supporters of radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - the benefit of their experience fighting the United States Marines.
Abu Ghraib Reports:
Rather pathetic to hear James Schlesinger insist that “it was only the night shift!; it was an aberration!" and to insist "it was NOT a failure in policy (just behavior).”
The NY Times did better: the editorial:
or anyone with the time to wade through 400-plus pages and the resources to decode them, the two reports issued this week on the Abu Ghraib prison are an indictment of the way the Bush administration set the stage for Iraqi prisoners to be brutalized by American prison guards, military intelligence officers and private contractors. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/opinion/26thurs1.html
..and from guest op ed. columnist Dahlia Lithwick:
Connect the dots and it's all there: the sadism at Abu Ghraib stemmed from "confusion." Confusion sounds accidental - like maybe it just blew in off the Atlantic - but the report is clear that this confusion resulted from systemic failures at the highest levels…
You can choose to connect these dots, or cast your vote in November based on whether Colonel Mustard was in a Swift boat with a lead pipe. But Abu Ghraib can't be blamed solely on bad apples anymore. It was the direct consequence of an administration ready to bargain away the rule of law. That started with the suspension of basic prisoner protections, because this was a "new kind of war." It led to the creation of a legal sinkhole on Guantánamo Bay. And it reached its zenith when high officials opined that torture isn't torture unless there's some attendant organ failure.
There is a sad, familiar echo behind the Abu Ghraib prosecutions. This is precisely the approach the administration has used throughout the so-called terror trials here at home. Behind virtually every prosecution of an Al Qaeda member since Sept. 11, there has been an overhyped, overcharged foot soldier taking the fall for his invisible superiors http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/opinion/26lithwick.html
Casualties: The number of Americans killed in Iraq during 2004 exceeds the number killed in all of 2003.
Don’t think the major media will highlight it; don’t think it’ll be in Bush’s convention speech.
Shameless Rove (Bush) NYC employees as props. Stop this!
President Bush wants to watch the Republican convention from a New York City firehouse and "bond" with the city's Bravest, officials said yesterday.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is also scouting out firehouses so he can watch it with the heroes of 9/11.
"Both Bush and Schwarzenegger want to bond with city firefighters," said one city official who asked not to be named.
…But…
Those same union leaders hope Bush will take notice of the cutbacks that the FDNY has undertaken since 9/11.
"Any firefighter would welcome a visit from President Bush, but maybe President Bush should stop by one of the firehouses Mayor Bloomberg has shut down," said Peter Gorman, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/story/225960p-194099c.html
Environment: Administration Makes a Change; Admits Global Warming is Real and Caused by Human Activity
Since Kerry has said so little about the awful Bush record, Rove has orchestrated a change, seeking to get this off the debate table.
In a striking shift in the way the Bush administration has portrayed the science of climate change, a new report to Congress focuses on federal research indicating that emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are the only likely explanation for global warming over the last three decades.
In delivering the report to Congress yesterday, an administration official, Dr. James R Mahoney, said it reflected "the best possible scientific information" on climate change. Previously, President Bush and other officials had emphasized uncertainties in understanding the causes and consequences of warming as a reason for rejecting binding restrictions on heat-trapping gases. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/science/26climate.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Yet, Bush had no idea that a change had occurred.
On environmental issues, Mr. Bush appeared unfamiliar with an administration report delivered to Congress on Wednesday that indicated that emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases were the only likely explanation for global warming over the last three decades. Previously, Mr. Bush and other officials had emphasized uncertainties in understanding the causes and consequences of global warming.
The new report was signed by Mr. Bush's secretaries of energy and commerce and his science adviser. Asked why the administration had changed its position on what causes global warming, Mr. Bush replied, "Ah, we did? I don't think so."
More low points here, even for those of us who thought we couldn’t be shocked. On North Korea,
Showing none of the alarm about the North's growing arsenal that he once voiced regularly about Iraq, he opened his palms and shrugged when an interviewer noted that new intelligence reports indicate that the North may now have the fuel to produce six or eight nuclear weapons.
He said that in North Korea's case, and in Iran's, he would not be rushed to set deadlines for the countries to disarm, despite his past declaration that he would not "tolerate'' nuclear capability in either nation. He declined to define what he meant by "tolerate.''
"I don't think you give timelines to dictators,'' Mr. Bush said, speaking of North Korea's president, Kim Jong Il, and Iran's mullahs. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/politics/campaign/27bush.html?hp
Social Security: Greenspan Has a Solution!
Now that the economy is ridden with debt and deficits, Bush ally Alan Greenspan has a solution. Attention Boomers!
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Friday that the country will face "abrupt and painful" choices if Congress does not move quickly to trim the Social Security and Medicare benefits that have been promised to the baby boom generation.
Greenspan acknowledged that any decisions to trim benefits or boost payroll taxes could be difficult politically, but he said those decisions must be made and made quickly to give baby boomers time to adjust.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38164-2004Aug27.html
Media:
1) CNN is trying to outfox Fox. Anchor Miles O’Brien raised the stakes by saying that Kerry’s saving the life of Jim Rassman is a “point of dispute.” What’s next? Perhaps, as Jon Stewart noted to Kerry this week, ‘I’ve learned from that swift boat ad that apparently you’ve never been in Vietnam.’
2) "We fought the most moral war [Iraq] that has ever been fought by any people."
So said one interviewee in the new documentary This Ain’t No Heartland. Austrian filmmaker and photographer Andreas Horvath visited small towns and rural areas in a half-dozen Midwestern states where he discovered widespread ignorance.
The film returns several times to a bar where a group of increasingly tipsy beer drinkers tell racist jokes and fantasize fending off invading armies. The rowdiest of the group gleefully imagines facing down "two billion screaming Chinamen coming at you," with a certainty that America would win. Feeling no pain, he drops his trousers and moons the camera. We also meet the contestants in a demolition derby whose damaged vehicles are souped up with flags and the name Jesus.
Beneath their jocularity, you sense the underlying anxieties of people who are so intimidated by the outside world that they would rather not contemplate it. Their capacity for denial is encouraged by the ravings of a fire-and-brimstone radio preacher who advises that the remedy for "that sinking feeling" is "to stop thinking twice about the truth." The most pernicious threat to well-being, the preacher says, is the notion of dialogue, a word he sneers as though it meant Satan.
The interviews are edited with snippets of a Civil War re-enactment, scary voice-overs, tabloid headlines about "toddler terrorists" and a parade - all making a collage that has its grimly funny moments. Now and then the camera pauses to linger over desolate farmland, ramshackle cottages and a fading red sunset. In the filmmaker's nightmarish view, the heartland is a decaying citadel of ignorance, boorishness and xenophobia, smugly rotting away in the twilight of the American empire. http://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/movies/26hear.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Stifling the Vote: The usual charge brings the usual response
In a new report, the NAACP and People for the American Way cite incidents from Florida to Detroit. NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said efforts at intimidation and suppression, once a tool of Democrats in the Jim Crow South, "have increasingly become the province of the Republican Party" as it seeks to counter the overwhelming advantage Democrats enjoy among black voters.
RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie wrote a letter last month to Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe offering to send bipartisan teams to precincts to ensure fair play, Iverson said. The offer was rejected. Republicans want every eligible vote to count, she said, and "if Democrats are serious about this, they will join us." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33798-2004Aug25.html
Kerry failings / advice
John, MOCK HIM! When Junior says such things as his opposing 527s, i.e. being an advocate of campaign finance reform, say, “What?! You’re claiming to be…?”
Polls: Dead even, nationally, if even a little tilting to Bush. States tightened up. Pennsylvania was safely Kerry, now may not be; Wisconsin and Missouri moving to Bush...for now
Pennsylvania: Kerry 45%, Bush 43% (Issues PA)
Maryland: Kerry 53%, Bush 42% (Survey USA)
Ohio: Bush 49%, Kerry 44% (LA Times)
Missouri: Bush 46%, Kerry 44% (LA Times)
Wisconsin: Bush 48%, Kerry 44% (LA Times)
-R
45 million uninsured. The Administration was smart to release the data weeks early, in quieterAugust.
Some 1.3 million Americans slid into poverty in 2003 despite the economic recovery, and children and blacks were worse off than most, the government said on Thursday in a report certain to fuel Democratic criticism of President Bush.
The percentage of the U.S. population living in poverty rose to 12.5 percent from 12.1 percent in 2002, the Census Bureau said in its annual poverty report, seen by some as the most important score card on the nation's economy and Bush's first term in office. The ranks of the poor rose to 35.9 million, a boost of 1.3 million.
Health care coverage also dropped last year and incomes were essentially stagnant, the Census Bureau said in its annual poverty report, seen by some as the most important score card on the nation's economy and Bush's first term in office. http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6079297
Employers Will Control Costs…how?
Employers believe they can slow the rate of increase of their soaring health-care costs to just under 10% in 2005, but only after shifting even more of the expense to employees, a new nationwide survey said. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109356518789302598,00.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
Krugman: Single payer, yes, but we must be realistic:
Does this mean that the American way is wrong, and that we should switch to a Canadian-style single-payer system? Well, yes. Put it this way: in Canada, respectable business executives are ardent defenders of "socialized medicine." Two years ago the Conference Board of Canada - a who's who of the nation's corporate elite - issued a report urging fellow Canadians to bear in mind not just the "symbolic value" of universal health care, but its "economic contribution to the competitiveness of Canadian businesses."
My health-economist friends say that it's unrealistic to call for a single-payer system here: the interest groups are too powerful, and the antigovernment propaganda of the right has become too well established in public opinion. All that we can hope for right now is a modest step in the right direction, like the one Mr. Kerry is proposing. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/opinion/27krugman.html?hp
What’s Happening, Iraq:
The fighting and attendant chaos- has been terrible. One ominous sign (for the Occupiers and the Allawi government) is how opposition forces have been doing some cooperating amongst themselves.
Volunteers from the Sunni resistance stronghold are teaching Shia militants how to fight. Two young men from Fallujah sat in a house in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, eating a meal of rice and stew prepared by local women. They had come to this sprawling neighbourhood to give the Mahdi Army militia – supporters of radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - the benefit of their experience fighting the United States Marines.
Abu Ghraib Reports:
Rather pathetic to hear James Schlesinger insist that “it was only the night shift!; it was an aberration!" and to insist "it was NOT a failure in policy (just behavior).”
The NY Times did better: the editorial:
or anyone with the time to wade through 400-plus pages and the resources to decode them, the two reports issued this week on the Abu Ghraib prison are an indictment of the way the Bush administration set the stage for Iraqi prisoners to be brutalized by American prison guards, military intelligence officers and private contractors. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/opinion/26thurs1.html
..and from guest op ed. columnist Dahlia Lithwick:
Connect the dots and it's all there: the sadism at Abu Ghraib stemmed from "confusion." Confusion sounds accidental - like maybe it just blew in off the Atlantic - but the report is clear that this confusion resulted from systemic failures at the highest levels…
You can choose to connect these dots, or cast your vote in November based on whether Colonel Mustard was in a Swift boat with a lead pipe. But Abu Ghraib can't be blamed solely on bad apples anymore. It was the direct consequence of an administration ready to bargain away the rule of law. That started with the suspension of basic prisoner protections, because this was a "new kind of war." It led to the creation of a legal sinkhole on Guantánamo Bay. And it reached its zenith when high officials opined that torture isn't torture unless there's some attendant organ failure.
There is a sad, familiar echo behind the Abu Ghraib prosecutions. This is precisely the approach the administration has used throughout the so-called terror trials here at home. Behind virtually every prosecution of an Al Qaeda member since Sept. 11, there has been an overhyped, overcharged foot soldier taking the fall for his invisible superiors http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/opinion/26lithwick.html
Casualties: The number of Americans killed in Iraq during 2004 exceeds the number killed in all of 2003.
Don’t think the major media will highlight it; don’t think it’ll be in Bush’s convention speech.
Shameless Rove (Bush) NYC employees as props. Stop this!
President Bush wants to watch the Republican convention from a New York City firehouse and "bond" with the city's Bravest, officials said yesterday.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is also scouting out firehouses so he can watch it with the heroes of 9/11.
"Both Bush and Schwarzenegger want to bond with city firefighters," said one city official who asked not to be named.
…But…
Those same union leaders hope Bush will take notice of the cutbacks that the FDNY has undertaken since 9/11.
"Any firefighter would welcome a visit from President Bush, but maybe President Bush should stop by one of the firehouses Mayor Bloomberg has shut down," said Peter Gorman, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/story/225960p-194099c.html
Environment: Administration Makes a Change; Admits Global Warming is Real and Caused by Human Activity
Since Kerry has said so little about the awful Bush record, Rove has orchestrated a change, seeking to get this off the debate table.
In a striking shift in the way the Bush administration has portrayed the science of climate change, a new report to Congress focuses on federal research indicating that emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are the only likely explanation for global warming over the last three decades.
In delivering the report to Congress yesterday, an administration official, Dr. James R Mahoney, said it reflected "the best possible scientific information" on climate change. Previously, President Bush and other officials had emphasized uncertainties in understanding the causes and consequences of warming as a reason for rejecting binding restrictions on heat-trapping gases. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/science/26climate.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Yet, Bush had no idea that a change had occurred.
On environmental issues, Mr. Bush appeared unfamiliar with an administration report delivered to Congress on Wednesday that indicated that emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases were the only likely explanation for global warming over the last three decades. Previously, Mr. Bush and other officials had emphasized uncertainties in understanding the causes and consequences of global warming.
The new report was signed by Mr. Bush's secretaries of energy and commerce and his science adviser. Asked why the administration had changed its position on what causes global warming, Mr. Bush replied, "Ah, we did? I don't think so."
More low points here, even for those of us who thought we couldn’t be shocked. On North Korea,
Showing none of the alarm about the North's growing arsenal that he once voiced regularly about Iraq, he opened his palms and shrugged when an interviewer noted that new intelligence reports indicate that the North may now have the fuel to produce six or eight nuclear weapons.
He said that in North Korea's case, and in Iran's, he would not be rushed to set deadlines for the countries to disarm, despite his past declaration that he would not "tolerate'' nuclear capability in either nation. He declined to define what he meant by "tolerate.''
"I don't think you give timelines to dictators,'' Mr. Bush said, speaking of North Korea's president, Kim Jong Il, and Iran's mullahs. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/politics/campaign/27bush.html?hp
Social Security: Greenspan Has a Solution!
Now that the economy is ridden with debt and deficits, Bush ally Alan Greenspan has a solution. Attention Boomers!
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Friday that the country will face "abrupt and painful" choices if Congress does not move quickly to trim the Social Security and Medicare benefits that have been promised to the baby boom generation.
Greenspan acknowledged that any decisions to trim benefits or boost payroll taxes could be difficult politically, but he said those decisions must be made and made quickly to give baby boomers time to adjust.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38164-2004Aug27.html
Media:
1) CNN is trying to outfox Fox. Anchor Miles O’Brien raised the stakes by saying that Kerry’s saving the life of Jim Rassman is a “point of dispute.” What’s next? Perhaps, as Jon Stewart noted to Kerry this week, ‘I’ve learned from that swift boat ad that apparently you’ve never been in Vietnam.’
2) "We fought the most moral war [Iraq] that has ever been fought by any people."
So said one interviewee in the new documentary This Ain’t No Heartland. Austrian filmmaker and photographer Andreas Horvath visited small towns and rural areas in a half-dozen Midwestern states where he discovered widespread ignorance.
The film returns several times to a bar where a group of increasingly tipsy beer drinkers tell racist jokes and fantasize fending off invading armies. The rowdiest of the group gleefully imagines facing down "two billion screaming Chinamen coming at you," with a certainty that America would win. Feeling no pain, he drops his trousers and moons the camera. We also meet the contestants in a demolition derby whose damaged vehicles are souped up with flags and the name Jesus.
Beneath their jocularity, you sense the underlying anxieties of people who are so intimidated by the outside world that they would rather not contemplate it. Their capacity for denial is encouraged by the ravings of a fire-and-brimstone radio preacher who advises that the remedy for "that sinking feeling" is "to stop thinking twice about the truth." The most pernicious threat to well-being, the preacher says, is the notion of dialogue, a word he sneers as though it meant Satan.
The interviews are edited with snippets of a Civil War re-enactment, scary voice-overs, tabloid headlines about "toddler terrorists" and a parade - all making a collage that has its grimly funny moments. Now and then the camera pauses to linger over desolate farmland, ramshackle cottages and a fading red sunset. In the filmmaker's nightmarish view, the heartland is a decaying citadel of ignorance, boorishness and xenophobia, smugly rotting away in the twilight of the American empire. http://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/movies/26hear.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Stifling the Vote: The usual charge brings the usual response
In a new report, the NAACP and People for the American Way cite incidents from Florida to Detroit. NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said efforts at intimidation and suppression, once a tool of Democrats in the Jim Crow South, "have increasingly become the province of the Republican Party" as it seeks to counter the overwhelming advantage Democrats enjoy among black voters.
RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie wrote a letter last month to Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe offering to send bipartisan teams to precincts to ensure fair play, Iverson said. The offer was rejected. Republicans want every eligible vote to count, she said, and "if Democrats are serious about this, they will join us." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33798-2004Aug25.html
Kerry failings / advice
John, MOCK HIM! When Junior says such things as his opposing 527s, i.e. being an advocate of campaign finance reform, say, “What?! You’re claiming to be…?”
Polls: Dead even, nationally, if even a little tilting to Bush. States tightened up. Pennsylvania was safely Kerry, now may not be; Wisconsin and Missouri moving to Bush...for now
Pennsylvania: Kerry 45%, Bush 43% (Issues PA)
Maryland: Kerry 53%, Bush 42% (Survey USA)
Ohio: Bush 49%, Kerry 44% (LA Times)
Missouri: Bush 46%, Kerry 44% (LA Times)
Wisconsin: Bush 48%, Kerry 44% (LA Times)
-R
