The idea of reimporting cheap prescription drugs from Canada, where drugs cost a fraction of what the identical medicine costs here, has been dormant for many months, if not years. Then, yesterday, Schweitzer stormed into the china shop and shattered some dishes.
Two questions arise. First, why had the issue gone dormant? Short Answer: The Obama Administration cut a deal with the Pharmaceutical Industry, early in the healthcare reform game, in which Obama pledged to kill any efforts to reimport drugs from Canada in return for the Drug Industry running TV Ads and other media--$80 million worth--in support of Obama's healthcare plan.
That's a shady deal by any measurement, unless the ultimate Obama plan finds some way to drastically reduce or subsidize prescription prices. Thus far the plan does not appear to do so.
The second question is what the White House and/or Secretary Sebelius is going to tell Schweitzer. Has Schweitzer gotten too cute? Has he poked the tiger one time too many? Will Obama somehow retaliate or freeze-out our Governor? Or, has Schweitzer put them in an impossible position and thus revived a very important issue, and put it on course for some sort of resolution? Perhaps even a concession from the drug industry that is something more than a promise to run stupid and ineffective campaign ads for a stupid and ineffective corporate giveaway which the White House is trying to sell us?
This is a major poke in the eye of the Obama team and is sure to get some national attention (as Schweitzer always seems to do.) But hey, the Obama Administration deserves it.
Do you ever go to sports games and here fans boo their favorite teams and wonder what is wrong with people? Personally I can't stand 'boo birds'. Of course, real life is different than a sport. When it comes to every day real life, careers and the after effects of certain decisions, I would consider booing bankers.
A Bankers convention recently went down in Chicago but was met with protesters. Basically, banks are only concerned with making as much money as possible. The fat cats sitting at the top have no problem giving themselves some of the relief money granted by the Obama Administration. A couple of things that Obama has worked towards improving deal with the lending industry. Obama has encouraged a loan modification to homeowners facing possible foreclosure. He even invested $75 Billion in perks for lenders who can avoid foreclosure. Well, recent reports have come out saying that it is STILL better for lenders to eat a foreclosure than go through a loan modification. The entire scene is SLOPPY.
I don't know, but to me that is just a travesty. This is something the Obama Administration has to change quickly. With the rise is unemployment lenders have to put their clients best interests first. People need all the help they can get.
The 35th G8 Summit has drawn to a close in the city of L'Aquila in the Abruzzo region of Italy. This annual meeting of world leaders is intended to address important issues that impact the international community. This year, climate and renewable energy were among the primary subjects. Many of them are monetary in nature. I'm sure Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (who chaired the event) approached President Barack Obama, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to ask them about a payday loan and cash advance. Specifically, whether he can use them to throw parties for 18-year-old models who aren't his wife. It's easy to imagine, anyway... but short-term loan products should be used responsibly.
But that's not what the people care about
Was Obama looking at that girl? Was Obama checking out that girl? She does have a name, you know. Mayara Tavares is the name of the 16-year-old Brazilian delegate to the G8 Summit. She is a community activist who has worked on UNICEF projects regarding the rights and welfare of children in Brazil's slums. Tavares sounds like an intelligent, driven young woman with a promising future ahead of her.
Ryan Witt, a St. Louis political correspondent for The Examiner reports that the "scandalous" photo has been making the rounds in the media. He suggests that those who claim to clearly know whether or not President Obama was glancing at the hindquarters of the passing Tavares don't know anything at all. Without being in Mr. Obama's mind, it's impossible to know. Yet we all know that it's easy to stumble into moments that appear to be very inappropriate in still photography. John McCain knows this quite well.
Yes. Yes he does.
Yes, this was an incidental moment following a presidential debate. John McCain wasn't ogling Barack Obama. But doesn't it appear, for that fraction of a second, that McCain is giving into some animal impulse and charging the hindquarters of Obama? Like a honey bee to a fragrant blossom. It was a funny moment.
Media: the butt of all decency
Is it any surprise that America's media has spent more time focusing on Obama looking at a girl than what actually happened at the G8 conference? From early indications, Obama didn't take the lead when it came to the environmental portion of the program. Environmental protection and the establishment of strong green energy sources are key issues that the Obama administration must tackle. But what the American news media gives us is the lowest common denominator and leaves it up to us to assume the worst. Witt reminds us that even if this was a mini-incident (if Obama was looking on purpose), it does not compare to Mark Sanford's E-mails.
What if he WAS looking?
On the one hand, Obama would likely have some explaining to do to his wife and children. I wouldn't justify it as him simply being a man, but I would say that there is biological hard-wiring there. Men and women notice attractive people. It doesn't mean that one side is presenting and the other can think of nothing else but insemination. Clearly, that's not what Mayara Tavares was doing, and President Obama hasn't been driven to betray his family and abandon his duties (et tu, Mark Sanford) by 16-year-old hindquarters. But from an evolutionary standpoint, human beings notice attractiveness. It's unavoidable, but it doesn't have to govern our behavior. We can choose.
Try this from Match.com
Todd Katz writes about our sexual predisposition
According to Robert Deaner, Ph.D., a co-author of the study, humans, like our simian cousins, are probably hard-wired to act this way. "In both human and rhesus monkey societies, individuals vary in their influence and reproductive potential," he says. "So for both humans and rhesus monkeys, natural selection would have favored individuals that valued information accordingly." In other words, evolutionarily speaking, it pays to pay attention to who's most powerful and who's most eager to mate.
Natural selection at work
If that's not enough for you (and there have been plenty of studies supporting this information), try this. From the book "The Psychology of Sexual Orientation, Behavior, and Identity" by Louis Diamant and Richard McAnulty:
The behavioral elements of mounting, thrusting, hindquarters presentation, and intromission seen to be integrated into definite patterns during infancy in monkeys and apes. (p. 151)
Both males and females are more likely to mount an individual that presents the hindquarters or exhibits other species-specific solicitations than one that does not. (p. 150)
So there you have it. We still don't know if Obama was looking, but the ABCNews video below makes it seem as if he was just paying attention to his footing, in my opinion. But as all men know, he could have been doing both. Men can multi-task that way. But can they apply for a payday loan or cash advance at the same time? Yes! Yes they can, because the application process is quick and simple. The world's environment problems, unfortunately, are not.
There has been a lot of talk this week about the surprising move by Walmart to publically support President Obama’s health care reform plan, supposedly positioning themselves as a
leader in the fight to bring health care to all Americans. As we mentioned in a post on our blog
yesterday, this might be easier to swallow if Walmart had any history of leading by example. Instead, they usually do just the opposite.
Given
Walmart’s long record of trying to build a positive
reputation on ineffective work-arounds to health care coverage
for employee, the recent revelations about sacrificing quality for cheap perescription drugs, and their deceptive PR campaign that severely overstated their workers’ health
care coverage, it’s not hard to understand our skepticism. [get the details in the extended entry]
"Labor unions are a big part of the solution" to the nation's economic crisis, said President Barack Obama to the leaders of the AFL-CIO earlier this week.
Obama addressed the issue of unions as part of his continued support of the Employee Free Choice Act in a meeting with the nation's top labor leaders on Tuesday this week.
Obama's central points: labor unions will help rebuild the American middle class and will always have a seat at the table.
More words from Obama below:
"I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem. To me, and to my administration, labor unions are a big part of the solution. We need to level the playing field for workers and the unions that represent their interests - because we cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement....And as we confront this crisis and work to provide health care to every American, rebuild our nation's infrastructure, move toward a clean energy economy, and pass the Employee Free Choice Act, I want you to know that you will always have a seat at the table."
Yesterday, vice-president Joe Biden echoed Obama's remarks and added context. For instance, Biden said, worker productivity has increased almost 20 percent from 2000 to 2007, but wages fell by $2,000.
"If our basic bargain had been intact, if paychecks rose with productivity growth, as they did from World War II to the early '70s, families would have gained $10,000 over that period, instead of losing $2,000," Biden said. "This is all going to be difficult, and one of the most difficult things will be to reinstitute that basic bargain. I think the way to do that is the Employee Free Choice Act."
"If you've got workers who have a decent pay and benefits, they also are customers for your business," Biden said.
He also said the legal playing field on which employees and management contend must be level.
"I have a simple, basic belief," he said. "If a union is what you want, a union you're entitled to have."
To put this into context, the last time Bush broke 80% was January of 2002. Only one American soldier had been killed "smoking evildoers" out of their caves in Afghanistan; a position so un-controversial comedian David Cross points out "Nader would have bombed Afghanistan."
The again, it's probably easy to get out of touch with regular folks if you're the 26th richest member of one of the world's most exclusive and powerful clubs.
Besides an orgasm? Just a thought. With all of the current hoopla surrounding the immediacy of the stimulus package, little thought has been given to what comes next.
Like the mass transit funding. While it would be nice to get some money into the current bill, there is going to be a need for another round of legislation that sets out some long term goals, with drawn out funding mechanisms.
Not every liberal or progressive pipe dream is going to be, or should be, stuffed into the current stimulus package. It just isn't going to be practicable to do so. What needs to happen is that major programs like mass transit, energy independence, healthcare reform, etc. all need to be addressed in programatic ways, with the view towards creating legacies. And it should be #1 priority after the stimulus package is wrapped up.
But the stimulus package should be focused on short term goals: shoring up the economy by preserving and creating jobs. Nothing more, and nothing less. Anything else just gets in the way of what really needs to get done. And creates fodder for the anti-Obamans down the road.
And the funding for family planning was just the tip of the iceberg. Sure, it could be rationalized. I listened to Rep. Wexler go through a convoluted explanation, that sort of made sense if you could follow it. But why go through those contortions? If a provision of the bill doesn't get directly to jobs, then it should go into some other piece of comprehensive reform legislation, and get its full day in the sun. I'm sick and tired of listening to Boehner get a boner talking about funding contraceptives in the stimulus package.
Everybody wants to ramrod their pet project into this stimulus bill because it offers an opportunity for dems--who have been thumb-capped for so long--to finally get the long awaited orgasm that sweeping the elections and getting some needed stimulus is providing. But the stimulus is just that: prelude to an orgasm. One that when over will leave one feeling gratified, but wanting of more. One can smoke a cigarette or take a nap once it has passed. Or one can get up and get to work on the real necessities of this country.
So that's when the new long-term relationship between the people and their country needs to begin. And it needs to be carefully thought out and prepared for. And it needs to be visionar, sustainable and with longevity for all.
Paul Krugman, in an open letter to incoming president Obama in the Rolling Stone,"What Obama Must Do" outlined what I think is one of the most well presented progressive paths forward in the post-Bush era.
Dear Mr. President:
Like FDR three-quarters of a century ago, you're taking charge at a moment when all the old certainties have vanished, all the conventional wisdom been proved wrong. We're not living in a world you or anyone else expected to see. Many presidents have to deal with crises, but very few have been forced to deal from Day One with a crisis on the scale America now faces.
So, what should you do?
Krugman goes on to illustrate in detail the challenges facing our country: economic, health care; labor and the middle class; and truth & reconciliation. He also lays out a progressive framework for Obama to look at. But most importantly, he presents his arguments in a fashion that allows lawmakers, policy wonks, bloggers and the general citizenry to pick up on the intricacies of his thoughts and inform their daily understanding of where this country needs to go.
Check out the new video by AFSCME as part of their Make America Happen campaign (www.afscme.org/makeamericahappen). The video reminds us that we have overcome financial crisis before, and we can do it again. It compared FDR's solutions to the Great Depression with Obama's plans to tackle our current economic crisis.
As AFSCME President Gerald McEntee pointed out in his Huffington Post piece yesterday,
"President-elect Barack Obama's call for bold action and civic engagement in response to our present crisis echoes FDR's inspiring call to pull the nation out of the Great Depression and forge the New Deal. The video shows how our nation triumphed over economic crisis once before and can do so again by reinvesting in public service, providing health care for all Americans and growing the middle class."
With a severe economic recession, an unemployment rate that reached 7.2 percent in December and continues to grow, and with more Americans falling into poverty, Americans are demanding action. Please sign our petition and make your voice heard.
The Make America Happen Campaign is dedicated to helping President-elect Obama revitalize our economy, provide health care for all, and strengthen the middle class. Our best days are still ahead of us.
(...and those of you from Montana? Apply! I think things would go much better if we ran the d*mn country, don't you think? - promoted by Jay Stevens)
Politico has a good story about Montana-boy done-good Jim Messina.
Want a staff job in Barack Obama's White House?
Pretend to be from Montana.
That's the advice from North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, whose former chief of staff Jim Messina is the director of personnel for the Obama transition team.
"Everyone should claim to be from Montana when talking to Jim. First and foremost, he's a Montanan," Dorgan said.
I grew up hunting and fishing on our family's ranch, like so many Montanans, the land is a big part of my heritage. I support Barack Obama largely because of his positions on land use and rural issues.
I stumbled across this article on ESPN about Montana Sportsmen for Obama and thought it was worth sharing.
Sportsmen say land use, not guns, reason to support Obama
Simply put, "Senator Obama shares our values more than Senator McCain," committee member Shane Colton said....
"He (Barack Obama) grew up in an urban setting," said Dan Vermillion, another MWFPC commissioner, who with his two brothers runs a fishing and travel charter company out of Livingston, Mont. "But his views on public lands, wildlife habitat and the protection of wildlife species are totally in line with mine, and to me, that's more important than whether he hunts and fishes."
(AP) A new poll shows that Democrat Barack Obama could be edging ahead of Republican John McCain in Montana.
Obama is at 44 percent and John McCain is at 40 percent in the Montana State University-Billings poll released Thursday. The poll reverses others from earlier in the fall that showed McCain with a lead in the state.
If this poll holds through election day, Gov. Schweitzer will be proven right again. He predicted Montana would go for Obama.
(Thanks to Bob for this excellent analysis of the presidential candidates' health care plans... - promoted by Jay Stevens)
Health care reform is admittedly a complex issue, but it is not so esoteric as to preclude learning the facts and arriving at one's own considered opinions. I attended a talk at St. Pat's, Missoula, on Tuesday night by Dr. Anne Murphy on this very issue. It was very informative. I wrote this without consulting Dr. Murphy, and my apologies to Dr. Murphy for mistakes and misstatements.
As stated by Dr. Murphy (and I paraphrase):
Whether a right, privilege or obligation, quality, accessible and affordable healthcare is a utility, not a luxury. It is essential to opportunity.
So while I've been a longtime skeptic of Obama's chances to win Montana come November, I wanted to look a bit deeper into the R2K numbers from Daily Kos on the race. That poll showed McCain winning the state by 13.
In fact, it even showed McCain winning the youth vote in Montana by 5.
So I went to some national polling to look at how the white youth vote is going elsewhere to try to get a handle on whether it would make sense for Montana youth to be going McCain (the under 30 vote in Montana is probably about 90% white, a bit more diverse than the state as a whole, but not much).
So I checked out Rock the Vote's latest polling. They have white youth going Obama 48-36. Democracy Corps has slightly older numbers that show white youth going Obama by the wider margin of 46-45.
Both of the polling firms in question are Democratic firms, but they are very respected Democratic firms. How to account for such disparity? While subsamples have higher margins of error, so that could be part of it.
But keeping in mind that the Montana youth vote is 90% white, is it likely that youth in Montana are really going more for McCain than white youth nationally? I'd doubt it. Especially since Montana's white population tends to be more big-D Democratic than whites nationally (I think this is typical of homogenous white states).
Now that homogeneity could also mean that we're seeing a racial effect here. This isn't a Bradley effect, mind you, it's people being openly racialized in their voting.
All that said, I think this subsample throws some questions on the 13 point margin.
Bottom line in my book:
I don't think Obama is really down 13 in Montana.
I also still think McCain ultimately wins Montana.
Take all of this with a grain of salt because subsamples are just that -- subsamples.
(Ah, voter registration! Forget for a moment about which party has the advantage -- isn't it cool so many new voters are turning out for this election? - promoted by Jay Stevens)
There's a good piece in the GAZ today about voter registration and what each Party is doing. Election officials are saying there are 36,000 new folks on the rolls, primarily from Democratic efforts.
"We're getting about 100 a day from the Obama campaign," said Barb Cox, Yellowstone County's election clerk. "We might get 50 to 100 a week from the Republican Party."
Other urban counties across the state are seeing similar streams of newly registered voters. Charlotte Mills, Gallatin County clerk and recorder in Bozeman, said her office has had days of 100 registrations but also waves of new registrations tied mostly to Democratic political functions at Montana State University.
But don't worry...the Big Brains over at the State GOP have the situation under control (or at least the spin):
But low volume isn't a concern for the Republicans, said Jake Eaton, spokesman for the Montana GOP. Democrats have traditionally relied on man-on-the-street registrations that haven't necessarily yielded positive results at the polls, Eaton said. Republicans are much more calculated in who they sign up.
I guess they're changing their tune from earlier this month when the Chairman of the MT GOP told New West:
Iverson claims about half of the thousands of new voters for his party.
(Fantastic! "SouthtotheLeft" is using Palin's speech as an incentive to do volunteer work for Obama and promises to use Left in the West to record the journey! I applaud S2L and all the other folks who have pitched in their time and money, not just for Obama, but for all of the candidates who promise to bring about some desperately needed sanity to our society.
A quick reminder -- this is community blog, and you're all encouraged to post here. Share your experiences and thoughts with us all... - promoted by Jay Stevens)
I couldn't bring myself to watch Sarah Palin's speech last night. I have had enough hate in my life, thank you very much. But after reading the blog comments, especially over at Mudflats and FiveThirtyEight, some of her comments left me scratching my head.
Wait, let me rephrase that - some of her comments left smoke coming out of my ears. How dare she target community organisers. My mother's a teacher. She's a community organiser. I don't think someone who won her mayorial post with 890 or so votes has any platform upon which to cast stones.
So, I decided to volunteer seriously for the campaign today. I've previously been involved with Democrats Abroad here in Vancouver, but I want to get my hands dirty. So I am going to travel by bus, eat with strangers, stay in strangers houses across the West to campaign for Barack Obama.
I thought it would be hard getting started. I've had some experience before volunteering for a campaign when I became involved with Ned Lamont's failed Connecticut senatorial bid. And to get on that campaign, you practically had to beg borrow and steal. So I wasn't prepared for when I called the Helena, Montana Obama office and was greeted with the following conversation:
"Hello, I'm calling about volunteer opportuni..."
"Absolutely. We'd love to have you. Come today. Come tomorrow. Come yesterday."
So, I'm coming. I'm going to use this blog to tell you about my adventures and my experience. So for now, I am in Vancouver, BC as I have some meetings next week. But if all goes well, I will be on my way by next week. There's no time to waste.
Although Governor Schweitzer's name has been overshadowed as a potential running mate in recent weeks by the likes of Biden, Kaine, and Sebelius--in politics you never know.
For Obama a gun-loving populist from the West who knows energy policy like the back of his had and never met a powerful, corporate special interest he did not want to take down might be a darn good pick.
(Nice write-up of yet another DCer trying to make "sense" of Montana. - promoted by Jay Stevens)
Unlike in Washington D.C....
Well, The Denver Post put out an interesting analysis of the general campaign's battle for western states. The Post's Karen Crummy, had a pretty "crummy" write up about the state of Montana's electoral and political campaigns in her article today, "Montana: Under the gun on many conservative issues", part of a five article series.
Let's start with "Political Identity Crisis" for $200. I thought that maybe we could continue the theme of exploring our perceptions of just where, on the political spectrum, do we believe our state, our democrats, and ourselves lie, what with all the talk of leftists, progressives, centrists, and Montana dems "walking, talking and acting like republicans." And of course, how the national press sees how the battleground state of Montana is shaping up, what with Obama seemingly blowing in the wind on the issues as of late.
Nothing like challenging our own notions of political identity and loyalty, which seem to have generated so much chatter here at LitW lately. ;-)
Crummy starts off with the assertion that Montana is a one trick pony:
"In Montana, where "opening day" refers to the beginning of hunting season rather than baseball, a candidate's political survival usually hinges on one issue: guns.
A candidate's position on gun rights is the Montana entrance exam. Answer correctly and you can move on to discuss other issues. Give the wrong answer and most voters don't want to hear what else you have to say."
Amidst the obligatory "fair and balanced" sprinkling of quotes from Erick Iverson, Jim Lopach and Brian Schweitzer she gets around to the meat of her story, and that is that Montana is cycling back to voting for democratic candidates, and takes a stab at trying to define why we might do so in the presidential campaign...
(JC addresses a question that's been bouncing around in my head the last few days, after moves by Obama to tack to the "center." He opines we can't really do anything about it...but I'm not so sure. I'll have some thoughts this weekend... - promoted by Jay Stevens)
"Warning: this is one of those brutally frank posts that may well piss you off. Sorry about that"
Given the tenor of several recent diaries here at LitW, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the issue of accountability during a general election. Having run by Lux's article, and another, "The Obama Problem" at HuffPo by Jason Rosenbaum, I thought I'd throw some of their ideas out to see what people here think. And we haven't had a real barn-burner comment love-fest in what, 2-3 days since Wulfgar's "Tepid" diary hit the front page?
So instead of attacking the poster or commenters (me, Jay, Anna, or Mark, or Wulfgar...), let's go at the issue straight up. It's become obvious to progressives and the left that Obama has been moving to the right, and is now campaigning with many centrist positions. And we "Obamabots" have been accused of being delusional because we can't see what is truly happening in the general election.
Rest assured, objective readers, that many Obama supporters the world over can see what is happening, and offer our critiques of his moves, as opposed to resorting to ad hominem "accountability" threats. I had this intuitive notion that holding a general candidate accountable for things like press releases and campaign PR babble was just pissing in the wind. Accountability needs to be reserved for the realm of actions, not postures. Once the election is over, and the candidate has won, then the whole world changes (I'm not talkin' 'bout Obama's "change" agenda here). Reality sets in, the glamor and bubble of electoral politics is burst, and it is time for everybody to get to work--whatever that may be, and make the best out of the next 4 years.
