| Rep. Raul Grijalva on Max Baucus' work on healthcare reform: "I think the product that has come out from his committee and himself, I really believe that it has no legitimacy in this debate. It's an insider product. It's there to protect the industry. It is not there to try to look for that middle ground. He is key in holding up deliberations, has been key in trying to work on a consensus, but everything you see in his legislation had to be approved by the industry before it became part of the plan. So I don't think it's legitimate. I think we're struggling with real issues in some of the other pieces of legislation from the House and even from the Health Committee. And that's where the focus of the attention should be. I consider Senator Baucus's proposal to be essentially an insider trader move to protect an industry and really doesn't have validity at all, both political validity or content validity."
A CBS poll now shows, after Obama's speech, that a majority of Americans favor his handling of healthcare reform. Reasearch 2000 shows a +8 bump in his favorability ratings.
David Paine stews about how the families of 9/11 came up with the idea of a day of national remembrance for today...and how it was politicized by the right. Old habits die hard, I guess.
Kevin Drum's post, "The Lost Decade," confirms what we all knew: for the majority the 00s we saw negligible earnings growth. Unless, of course, you belong to the richest tenth of society; then your income grew by about 35 percent.
The Census Bureau also notes another million lost their insurance last year.
Wow! "In an extraordinary frank meeting with Mr Gorbachev in Moscow in 1989 - never before fully reported - Mrs Thatcher said the destabilisation of Eastern Europe and the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact were also not in the West's interests. She noted the huge changes happening across Eastern Europe, but she insisted that the West would not push for its decommunisation. Nor would it do anything to risk the security of the Soviet Union."
You know...I always suspected 80s-era conservatives liked having the Soviet bloc around...but this bit of frank admission is stunning. Can't engage in old-fashioned Red-baiting without any Reds, can we? Makes you wonder what discussions were going on in the Reagan/Bush cabinets at the time...
Why do we love the Joe Wilson story so much? Because it's the perfect media vehicle, a personal embodiment of a trend, that the GOP image has been hijacked by its cranks. But are the cranks not emblematic of the party right now? Josh Marshall notes that even the party's "moderates" are pretty out there - Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty "may try interposition/nullification" to block health care refrom from coming to his state. "In other words," writes Marshall, "giving the ole college try to insurrectionary doctrines that were discredited going on two hundred years ago..."
Public Policy Polling (pdf): Rob Miller 44, Joe Wilson 43.
An Andrew Sullivan reader on today's GOP: "Juvenile, manipulative, impossibly smarmy, hateful - or at least more than willing to use the weapon of other people's hate - and, above all, relentlessly cynical. To these (mostly) men, politics is not the "art of the possible", not a means for peaceably grappling with the most difficult and complex issues of the day, or for attempting to improve the lives of people you will never meet. It is nothing but a game, one where the object is not just to win but to destroy your enemies with a weird mix of angry slander and junior high insults - and to have a good chuckle while admiring your handiwork."
(Kevin Drum recommends you revisit Franklin Foer's "Swimming with Sharks" for an idea of how they got that way...)
Harold Meyerson: "The story isn't part of the official Wal-Mart creation epic, but it tells us almost all we need to know about the company's approach to the interests of its employees and the laws of the nation. Around the time that the young Sam Walton opened his first stores, John Kennedy redeemed a presidential campaign promise by persuading Congress to extend the minimum wage to retail workers, who had until then not been covered by the law. Congress granted an exclusion, however, to small businesses with annual sales beneath $1 million -- a figure that in 1965 it lowered to $250,000.
"Walton was furious. The mechanization of agriculture had finally reached the backwaters of the Ozark Plateau, where he was opening one store after another. The men and women who had formerly worked on small farms suddenly found themselves redundant, and he could scoop them up for a song, as little as 50 cents an hour. Now the goddamn federal government was telling him he had to pay his workers the $1.15 hourly minimum. Walton's response was to divide up his stores into individual companies whose revenues didn't exceed the $250,000 threshold. Eventually, though, a federal court ruled that this was simply a scheme to avoid paying the minimum wage, and he was ordered to pay his workers the accumulated sums he owed them, plus a double-time penalty thrown in for good measure.
"Wal-Mart cut the checks, but Walton also summoned the employees at a major cluster of his stores to a meeting. 'I'll fire anyone who cashes the check,' he told them." |
