Palin, Fox News, LL Cool J tangle over phantom interview
By Brett Michael Dykes
Copyright by Yahoo! News
March 31, 2010
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100331/ts_ynews/ynews_ts1387
Here's a chapter in the culture wars that no one saw coming: Sarah Palin and Fox News facing off against '80s rap star and actor LL Cool J.
Palin makes her hosting debut Thursday night on Fox, as captain of an interview special in Greta Von Susteren's 10 p.m. slot. The show is called "Real American Stories," and the New York Daily News explains that it chronicles "people who have overcome adversity and more."
Among the success stories Palin plans to highlight are those of country music star Toby Keith, former GE Chairman Jack Welch, and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. LL Cool J (birth name James Todd Smith) was also included in the roster — which prompted some conservative commenters to gloat a bit.
Popular conservative blogger Allahpundit tweaked liberals who accuse Tea Party supporters of racist sympathies, saying they'll be "shocked to find the alleged Grand Dragon of the tea-party movement making chitchat with a hip-hop legend."
The problem is that no such chitchat was produced for the Palin show. LL Cool J, star of "NCIS: Los Angeles," tweeted Tuesday night: "Fox lifted an old interview I gave in 2008 to someone else & are misrepresenting to the public in order to promote Sarah Palins Show. WOW."
When contacted by Yahoo! News for comment, a Fox News spokesperson explained that LL Cool J had been informed in 2008 that the interview was planned as a segment for "Real American Stories"--though of course the network couldn't have known at the time that Palin would be hosting. The Fox spokesperson also provided us with a statement:
"Real American Stories features uplifting tales about overcoming adversity and we believe Mr. Smith's interview fit that criteria. However, as it appears that Mr. Smith does not want to be associated with a program that could serve as an inspiration to others, we are cutting his interview from the special and wish him the best with his fledgling acting career."
Attempts to reach LL Cool J for comment proved unsuccessful. Perhaps he intends a more recent Twitter entry to serve as his rejoinder to the Fox statement: "Nobody can bring you peace but yourself."
Update: Looks like the confusion isn't limited to the hip hop genre. Toby Keith's publicist tells the New York Times that Keith has never done an interview with Palin and she had no idea he was being used in the Palin special. She believes that Fox will be recycling an interview Keith gave Fox in 2009.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Irish Lent
Irish Lent
An Irishman moves into a tiny hamlet in County Kerry, walks into the pub and promptly orders three beers. The bartender raises his eyebrows, but serves the man three beers, which he drinks quietly at a table, alone.
An hour later, the man has finished the three beers and orders three more. This happens yet again. The next evening the man again orders and drinks three beers at a time, several times. Soon the entire town is whispering about the Man Who Orders Three Beers.
Finally, a week later, the bartender broaches the subject on behalf of the town. "I don't mean to pry, but folks around here are wondering why you always order three beers?"
"Tis odd, isn't it?" the man replies. "You see, I have two brothers, and one went to America, and the other to Australia . We promised each other that we would always order an extra two beers whenever we drank as a way of keeping up the family bond."
The bartender and the whole town were pleased with this answer, and soon the Man Who Orders Three Beers became a local celebrity and source of pride to the hamlet, even to the extent that out-of-towners would come to watch him drink.
Then, one day, the man comes in and orders only two beers. The bartender pours them with a heavy heart. This continues for the rest of the evening. He orders only two beers. The word flies around town. Prayers are offered for the soul of one of the brothers.
The next day, the bartender says to the man, "Folks around here, me first of all, want to offer condolences to you for the death of your brother. You know-the two beers and all."
The man ponders this for a moment, then replies, "You'll be happy to hear that my two brothers are alive and well. It's just that I, meself, have decided to give up drinking for Lent."
An Irishman moves into a tiny hamlet in County Kerry, walks into the pub and promptly orders three beers. The bartender raises his eyebrows, but serves the man three beers, which he drinks quietly at a table, alone.
An hour later, the man has finished the three beers and orders three more. This happens yet again. The next evening the man again orders and drinks three beers at a time, several times. Soon the entire town is whispering about the Man Who Orders Three Beers.
Finally, a week later, the bartender broaches the subject on behalf of the town. "I don't mean to pry, but folks around here are wondering why you always order three beers?"
"Tis odd, isn't it?" the man replies. "You see, I have two brothers, and one went to America, and the other to Australia . We promised each other that we would always order an extra two beers whenever we drank as a way of keeping up the family bond."
The bartender and the whole town were pleased with this answer, and soon the Man Who Orders Three Beers became a local celebrity and source of pride to the hamlet, even to the extent that out-of-towners would come to watch him drink.
Then, one day, the man comes in and orders only two beers. The bartender pours them with a heavy heart. This continues for the rest of the evening. He orders only two beers. The word flies around town. Prayers are offered for the soul of one of the brothers.
The next day, the bartender says to the man, "Folks around here, me first of all, want to offer condolences to you for the death of your brother. You know-the two beers and all."
The man ponders this for a moment, then replies, "You'll be happy to hear that my two brothers are alive and well. It's just that I, meself, have decided to give up drinking for Lent."
Saturday, March 27, 2010
An open letter to conservatives
An open letter to conservatives
By Russell King
Copyright by Filtered News
March 22, 2010
http://filterednews.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/an-open-letter-to-conservatives/#com-head
Dear Conservative Americans,
The years have not been kind to you. I grew up in a profoundly Republican home so I can remember when you wore a very different face than the one we see now. You’ve lost me and you’ve lost most of America. Because I believe having responsible choices is important to democracy, I’d like to give you some advice and an invitation.
First, the invitation: Come back to us.
Now the advice. You’re going to have to come up with a platform that isn’t built on a foundation of cowardice: fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from yours; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/commun/fasc-ism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more. But you have work to do even before you take on that task.
Your party — the GOP — and the conservative end of the American political spectrum has become irresponsible and irrational. Worse, it’s tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred. Let me provide some examples – by no means an exhaustive list — of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.
If you’re going to regain your stature as a party of rational, responsible people, you’ll have to start by draining this swamp:
Hypocrisy
You can’t flip out — and threaten impeachment – when Dems use a parliamentary procedure (deem and pass) that you used repeatedly (more than 35 times in just one session and more than 100 times in all!), that’s centuries old and which the courts have supported. Especially when your leaders admit it all.
You can’t vote and scream against the stimulus package and then take credit for the good it’s done in your own district (happily handing out enormous checks representing money that you voted against is especially ugly) — 114 of you (at last count) did just that — and it’s even worse when you secretly beg for more.
You can’t fight against your own ideas just because the Dem president endorses your proposal.
You can’t call for a pay-as-you-go policy, and then vote against your own ideas.
Are they “unlawful enemy combatants” or are they “prisoners of war” at Gitmo? You can’t have it both ways.
You can’t carry on about the evils of government spending when your family has accepted more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts.
You can’t refuse to go to a scheduled meeting, to which you were invited, and then blame the Dems because they didn’t meet with you.
You can’t rail against using teleprompters while using teleprompters. Repeatedly.
You can’t rail against the bank bailouts when you supported them as they were happening.
You can’t be for immigration reform, then against it .
You can’t enjoy socialized medicine while condemning it.
You can’t flip out when the black president puts his feet on the presidential desk when you were silent when the white presidents did the same. Bush. Ford.
You can’t complain that the president hasn’t closed Gitmo yet when you’ve campaigned to keep Gitmo open.
You can’t flip out when the black president bows to foreign dignitaries, as appropriate for their culture, when you were silent when the white presidents did the same. Bush. Nixon. Ike. You didn’t even make a peep when Bush held hands and kissed leaders of a country that’s not on “kissing terms” with the US.
You can’t complain that the undies bomber was read his Miranda rights under Obama when the shoe bomber was read his Miranda rights under Bush and you remained silent. (And, no, Newt — the shoe bomber was not a US citizen either, so there is no difference.)
You can’t attack the Dem president for not personally* publicly condemning a terrorist event for 72 hours when you said nothing about the Rep president waiting 6 days in an eerily similar incident (and, even then, he didn’t issue any condemnation). *The Obama administration did the day of the event.
You can’t throw a hissy fit, sound alarms and cry that Obama freed Gitmo prisoners who later helped plan the Christmas Day undie bombing, when — in fact — only one former Gitmo detainee, released by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, helped to plan the failed attack.
You can’t condemn blaming the Republican president for an attempted terror attack on his watch, then blame the Dem president for an attempted terror attack on his.
You can’t mount a boycott against singers who say they’re ashamed of the president for starting a war, but remain silent when another singer says he’s ashamed of the president and falsely calls him a Maoist who makes him want to throw up and says he ought to be in jail.
You can’t cry that the health care bill is too long, then cry that it’s too short.
You can’t support the individual mandate for health insurance, then call it unconstitutional when Dems propose it and campaign against your own ideas.
You can’t demand television coverage, then whine about it when you get it. Repeatedly.
You can’t praise criminal trials in US courts for terror suspects under a Rep president, then call it “treasonous” under a Dem president.
You can’t propose ideas to create jobs, and then work against them when the Dems put your ideas in a bill.
You can’t be both pro-choice and anti-choice.
You can’t damn someone for failing to pay $900 in taxes when you’ve paid nearly $20,000 in IRS fines.
You can’t condemn criticizing the president when US troops are in harm’s way, then attack the president when US troops are in harm’s way , the only difference being the president’s party affiliation (and, by the way, armed conflict does NOT remove our right and our duty as Americans to speak up).
You can’t be both for cap-and-trade policy and against it.
You can’t vote to block debate on a bill, then bemoan the lack of ‘open debate’.
If you push anti-gay legislation and make anti-gay speeches, you should probably take a pass on having gay sex, regardless of whether it’s 2004 or 2010. This is true, too, if you’re taking GOP money and giving anti-gay rants on CNN. Taking right-wing money and GOP favors to write anti-gay stories for news sites while working as a gay prostitute, doubles down on both the hypocrisy and the prostitution. This is especially true if you claim your anti-gay stand is God’s stand, too.
When you chair the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, you can’t send sexy emails to 16-year-old boys (illegal anyway, but you made it hypocritical as well).
You can’t criticize Dems for not doing something you didn’t do while you held power over the past 16 years, especially when the Dems have done more in one year than you did in 16.
You can’t decry “name calling” when you’ve been the most consistent and outrageous at it. And the most vile.
You can’t spend more than 40 years hating, cutting and trying to kill Medicare, and then pretend to be the defenders of Medicare
You can’t praise the Congressional Budget Office when its analysis produces numbers that fit your political agenda, then claim it’s unreliable when it comes up with numbers that don’t.
You can’t vote for X under a Republican president, then vote against X under a Democratic president. Either you support X or you don’t. And it makes it worse when you change your position merely for the sake obstructionism.
You can’t call a reconciliation out of bounds when you used it repeatedly.
You can’t spend tax-payer money on ads against spending tax-payer money.
You can’t condemn individual health insurance mandates in a Dem bill, when the mandates were your idea.
You can’t demand everyone listen to the generals when they say what fits your agenda, and then ignore them when they don’t.
You can’t whine that it’s unfair when people accuse you of exploiting racism for political gain, when your party’s former leader admits you’ve been doing it for decades.
You can’t portray yourself as fighting terrorists when you openly and passionately support terrorists.
You can’t complain about a lack of bipartisanship when you’ve routinely obstructed for the sake of political gain — threatening to filibuster at least 100 pieces of legislation in one session, far more than any other since the procedural tactic was invented — and admitted it. Some admissions are unintentional, others are made proudly. This is especially true when the bill is the result of decades of compromise between the two parties and is filled with your own ideas.
You can’t question the loyalty of Department of Justice lawyers when you didn’t object when your own Republican president appointed them.
You can’t preach and try to legislate “Family Values” when you: take nude hot tub dips with teenagers (and pay them hush money); cheat on your wife with a secret lover and lie about it to the world; cheat with a staffer’s wife (and pay them off with a new job); pay hookers for sex while wearing a diaper and cheating on your wife; or just enjoying an old fashioned non-kinky cheating on your wife; try to have gay sex in a public toilet; authorize the rape of children in Iraqi prisons to coerce their parents into providing information; seek, look at or have sex with children; replace a guy who cheats on his wife with a guy who cheats on his pregnant wife with his wife’s mother;
Hyperbole
You really need to disassociate with those among you who:
assert that people making a quarter-million dollars a year can barely make ends meet or that $1 million “isn’t a lot of money”;
say that “Comrade” Obama is a “Bolshevik” who is “taking cues from Lenin”;
ignore the many times your buddies use a term that offends you and complain only when a Dem says it;
liken political opponents to murderers, rapists, and “this Muslim guy” that “offed his wife’s head”;
say Obama “wants his plan to fail…so that he can make the case for bank nationalization and vindicate his dream of a socialist economy”;
equate putting the good of the people ahead of your personal fortunes with terrorism;
smear an entire major religion with the actions of a few fanatics;
say that the president wants to “annihilate us”;
compare health care reform with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a Bolshevik plot , the attack on 9/11, or reviving the ghosts of communist dictators;
equate our disease-fighting stem cell research with “what the Nazis did”;
call a bill passed by the majority of both houses of Congress, by members of Congress each elected by a majority in their districts, as “the end of representative government”;
shout “baby killer” at a member of Congress on the floor of the House, especially one who so fought against abortion rights that he nearly killed health care reform (in fact, a little decorum, a little respect for our national institutions and the people and the values they represent, would be refreshing — cut out the shouting, the swearing and the obscenities);
prove your machismo by claiming your going to “crash a party” to which you’re officially invited;
claim that Obama is pushing America’s “submission to Shariah”;
question the patriotism of people upholding cherished American values and the rule of law;
claim the president is making us less safe without a hint of evidence;
call a majority vote the “tyranny of the minority,” even if you meant to call it tyranny of the majority — it’s democracy, not tyranny;
call the president’s support of a criminal trial for a terror suspect “treasonous” (especially when supported the same thing when the president shared your party);
call the Pope the anti-Christ;
assert that the constitutionally mandated census is an attempt to enslave us;
accuse opponents of being backed by Arab slave-drivers or being drunk and suicidal;
equate family planing with eugenics or Nazism;
accuse the president of changing the missile defense program’s logo to match his campaign logo and reflect what you say is his secret Muslim identity;
accuse political opponents of being totalitarians, socialists, communists, fascists, Marxists; terrorist sympathizers, McCarthy-like, Nazis or drug pushers; and
advocate a traitorous act like secession, violent revolution , military coup or civil war (just so we’re clear: sedition is a bad thing).
History
If you’re going to use words like socialism, communism and fascism, you must have at least a basic understanding of what those words mean (hint: they’re NOT synonymous!)
You can’t cut a leading Founding Father out the history books because you’ve decided you don’t like his ideas.
You cant repeatedly assert that the president refuses to say the word “terrorism” or say we’re at war with terror when we have an awful lot of videotape showing him repeatedly assailing terrorism and using those exact words.
If you’re going to invoke the names of historical figures, it does not serve you well to whitewash them. Especially this one.
You can’t just pretend historical events didn’t happen in an effort to make a political opponent look dishonest or to make your side look better. Especially these events. (And, no, repeating it doesn’t make it less of a lie.)
You can’t say things that are simply and demonstrably false: health care reform will not push people out of their private insurance and into a government-run program ; health care reform (which contains a good many of your ideas and very few from the Left) is a long way from “socialist utopia”; is not “reparations”; and does not create “death panels”.
Hatred
You have to condemn those among you who:
call members of Congress n*gger and f*ggot when they disagree with them on policy;
elected leaders who say “I’m a proud racist”;
state that America has been built by white people;
say that poor people are poor because they’re rotten people, call them “parasitic garbage” or say they shouldn’t be allowed to vote;
call women bitches and prostitutes just because you don’t like their politics ( re - pea -ted - ly );
assert that the women who are serving our nation in uniform are hookers;
mock and celebrate the death of a grandmother because you disagree with her son’s politics;
declare that those who disagree with them are shown by that disagreement to be not just “Marxist radicals” but also monsters and a deadly disease killing the nation (this would fit in the hyperbole and history categories, too);
joke about blindness;
advocate euthanizing the wives of your political opponents;
taunt people with incurable, life-threatening diseases — especially if you do it on a syndicated broadcast;
equate gay love with bestiality — involving horses or dogs or turtles or ducks — or polygamy, child molestation, pedophilia;
casually assume that only white males look “like a real American”;
assert presidential power to torture a child by having his testicles crushed in front of his parents to get them to talk, order the massacre of a civilian village and launch a nuclear attack without the consent of Congress;
attack children whose mothers have died;
call people racists without producing a shred of evidence that they said or done something that would even smell like racism — same for invoking racially charged “dog whistle” words (repeatedly);
condemn the one thing that every major religion agrees on;
complain that we no longer employ the tactics we once used to disenfranchise millions of Americans because of their race;
blame the victims of natural disasters and terrorist attacks for their suffering and losses;
celebrate violence , joke about violence, prepare for violence or use violent imagery, “fun” political violence, hints of violence, threats of violence (this one is rather explicit), suggestions of violence or actual violence (and, really, suggesting anal rape with a hot piece of metal is beyond the pale); and
incite insurrection telling people to get their guns ready for a “bloody battle” with the president of the United States.
Oh, and I’m not alone: One of your most respected and decorated leaders agrees with me.
So, dear conservatives, get to work. Drain the swamp of the conspiracy nuts, the bald-faced liars undeterred by demonstrable facts, the overt hypocrisy and the hatred. Then offer us a calm, responsible, grownup agenda based on your values and your vision for America. We may or may not agree with your values and vision, but we’ll certainly welcome you back to the American mainstream with open arms. We need you.
Update: I’ve cross-posted this at TalkingPointsMemo and Street Prophets. Someone has written a DailyKos diary about it and Lizz Winstead, creator of the Daily Show, and formerly on Air America (She did the morning show with Rachel Maddow and Chuck D when Air America started) put link to my TPM post on her fan page. Apparently this piece has gone viral through Facebook, email and other blogs. This is fun, but — man! — you should read what some people who have never met me but disagree with my post are saying about my character!
By Russell King
Copyright by Filtered News
March 22, 2010
http://filterednews.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/an-open-letter-to-conservatives/#com-head
Dear Conservative Americans,
The years have not been kind to you. I grew up in a profoundly Republican home so I can remember when you wore a very different face than the one we see now. You’ve lost me and you’ve lost most of America. Because I believe having responsible choices is important to democracy, I’d like to give you some advice and an invitation.
First, the invitation: Come back to us.
Now the advice. You’re going to have to come up with a platform that isn’t built on a foundation of cowardice: fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from yours; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/commun/fasc-ism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more. But you have work to do even before you take on that task.
Your party — the GOP — and the conservative end of the American political spectrum has become irresponsible and irrational. Worse, it’s tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred. Let me provide some examples – by no means an exhaustive list — of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.
If you’re going to regain your stature as a party of rational, responsible people, you’ll have to start by draining this swamp:
Hypocrisy
You can’t flip out — and threaten impeachment – when Dems use a parliamentary procedure (deem and pass) that you used repeatedly (more than 35 times in just one session and more than 100 times in all!), that’s centuries old and which the courts have supported. Especially when your leaders admit it all.
You can’t vote and scream against the stimulus package and then take credit for the good it’s done in your own district (happily handing out enormous checks representing money that you voted against is especially ugly) — 114 of you (at last count) did just that — and it’s even worse when you secretly beg for more.
You can’t fight against your own ideas just because the Dem president endorses your proposal.
You can’t call for a pay-as-you-go policy, and then vote against your own ideas.
Are they “unlawful enemy combatants” or are they “prisoners of war” at Gitmo? You can’t have it both ways.
You can’t carry on about the evils of government spending when your family has accepted more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts.
You can’t refuse to go to a scheduled meeting, to which you were invited, and then blame the Dems because they didn’t meet with you.
You can’t rail against using teleprompters while using teleprompters. Repeatedly.
You can’t rail against the bank bailouts when you supported them as they were happening.
You can’t be for immigration reform, then against it .
You can’t enjoy socialized medicine while condemning it.
You can’t flip out when the black president puts his feet on the presidential desk when you were silent when the white presidents did the same. Bush. Ford.
You can’t complain that the president hasn’t closed Gitmo yet when you’ve campaigned to keep Gitmo open.
You can’t flip out when the black president bows to foreign dignitaries, as appropriate for their culture, when you were silent when the white presidents did the same. Bush. Nixon. Ike. You didn’t even make a peep when Bush held hands and kissed leaders of a country that’s not on “kissing terms” with the US.
You can’t complain that the undies bomber was read his Miranda rights under Obama when the shoe bomber was read his Miranda rights under Bush and you remained silent. (And, no, Newt — the shoe bomber was not a US citizen either, so there is no difference.)
You can’t attack the Dem president for not personally* publicly condemning a terrorist event for 72 hours when you said nothing about the Rep president waiting 6 days in an eerily similar incident (and, even then, he didn’t issue any condemnation). *The Obama administration did the day of the event.
You can’t throw a hissy fit, sound alarms and cry that Obama freed Gitmo prisoners who later helped plan the Christmas Day undie bombing, when — in fact — only one former Gitmo detainee, released by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, helped to plan the failed attack.
You can’t condemn blaming the Republican president for an attempted terror attack on his watch, then blame the Dem president for an attempted terror attack on his.
You can’t mount a boycott against singers who say they’re ashamed of the president for starting a war, but remain silent when another singer says he’s ashamed of the president and falsely calls him a Maoist who makes him want to throw up and says he ought to be in jail.
You can’t cry that the health care bill is too long, then cry that it’s too short.
You can’t support the individual mandate for health insurance, then call it unconstitutional when Dems propose it and campaign against your own ideas.
You can’t demand television coverage, then whine about it when you get it. Repeatedly.
You can’t praise criminal trials in US courts for terror suspects under a Rep president, then call it “treasonous” under a Dem president.
You can’t propose ideas to create jobs, and then work against them when the Dems put your ideas in a bill.
You can’t be both pro-choice and anti-choice.
You can’t damn someone for failing to pay $900 in taxes when you’ve paid nearly $20,000 in IRS fines.
You can’t condemn criticizing the president when US troops are in harm’s way, then attack the president when US troops are in harm’s way , the only difference being the president’s party affiliation (and, by the way, armed conflict does NOT remove our right and our duty as Americans to speak up).
You can’t be both for cap-and-trade policy and against it.
You can’t vote to block debate on a bill, then bemoan the lack of ‘open debate’.
If you push anti-gay legislation and make anti-gay speeches, you should probably take a pass on having gay sex, regardless of whether it’s 2004 or 2010. This is true, too, if you’re taking GOP money and giving anti-gay rants on CNN. Taking right-wing money and GOP favors to write anti-gay stories for news sites while working as a gay prostitute, doubles down on both the hypocrisy and the prostitution. This is especially true if you claim your anti-gay stand is God’s stand, too.
When you chair the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, you can’t send sexy emails to 16-year-old boys (illegal anyway, but you made it hypocritical as well).
You can’t criticize Dems for not doing something you didn’t do while you held power over the past 16 years, especially when the Dems have done more in one year than you did in 16.
You can’t decry “name calling” when you’ve been the most consistent and outrageous at it. And the most vile.
You can’t spend more than 40 years hating, cutting and trying to kill Medicare, and then pretend to be the defenders of Medicare
You can’t praise the Congressional Budget Office when its analysis produces numbers that fit your political agenda, then claim it’s unreliable when it comes up with numbers that don’t.
You can’t vote for X under a Republican president, then vote against X under a Democratic president. Either you support X or you don’t. And it makes it worse when you change your position merely for the sake obstructionism.
You can’t call a reconciliation out of bounds when you used it repeatedly.
You can’t spend tax-payer money on ads against spending tax-payer money.
You can’t condemn individual health insurance mandates in a Dem bill, when the mandates were your idea.
You can’t demand everyone listen to the generals when they say what fits your agenda, and then ignore them when they don’t.
You can’t whine that it’s unfair when people accuse you of exploiting racism for political gain, when your party’s former leader admits you’ve been doing it for decades.
You can’t portray yourself as fighting terrorists when you openly and passionately support terrorists.
You can’t complain about a lack of bipartisanship when you’ve routinely obstructed for the sake of political gain — threatening to filibuster at least 100 pieces of legislation in one session, far more than any other since the procedural tactic was invented — and admitted it. Some admissions are unintentional, others are made proudly. This is especially true when the bill is the result of decades of compromise between the two parties and is filled with your own ideas.
You can’t question the loyalty of Department of Justice lawyers when you didn’t object when your own Republican president appointed them.
You can’t preach and try to legislate “Family Values” when you: take nude hot tub dips with teenagers (and pay them hush money); cheat on your wife with a secret lover and lie about it to the world; cheat with a staffer’s wife (and pay them off with a new job); pay hookers for sex while wearing a diaper and cheating on your wife; or just enjoying an old fashioned non-kinky cheating on your wife; try to have gay sex in a public toilet; authorize the rape of children in Iraqi prisons to coerce their parents into providing information; seek, look at or have sex with children; replace a guy who cheats on his wife with a guy who cheats on his pregnant wife with his wife’s mother;
Hyperbole
You really need to disassociate with those among you who:
assert that people making a quarter-million dollars a year can barely make ends meet or that $1 million “isn’t a lot of money”;
say that “Comrade” Obama is a “Bolshevik” who is “taking cues from Lenin”;
ignore the many times your buddies use a term that offends you and complain only when a Dem says it;
liken political opponents to murderers, rapists, and “this Muslim guy” that “offed his wife’s head”;
say Obama “wants his plan to fail…so that he can make the case for bank nationalization and vindicate his dream of a socialist economy”;
equate putting the good of the people ahead of your personal fortunes with terrorism;
smear an entire major religion with the actions of a few fanatics;
say that the president wants to “annihilate us”;
compare health care reform with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a Bolshevik plot , the attack on 9/11, or reviving the ghosts of communist dictators;
equate our disease-fighting stem cell research with “what the Nazis did”;
call a bill passed by the majority of both houses of Congress, by members of Congress each elected by a majority in their districts, as “the end of representative government”;
shout “baby killer” at a member of Congress on the floor of the House, especially one who so fought against abortion rights that he nearly killed health care reform (in fact, a little decorum, a little respect for our national institutions and the people and the values they represent, would be refreshing — cut out the shouting, the swearing and the obscenities);
prove your machismo by claiming your going to “crash a party” to which you’re officially invited;
claim that Obama is pushing America’s “submission to Shariah”;
question the patriotism of people upholding cherished American values and the rule of law;
claim the president is making us less safe without a hint of evidence;
call a majority vote the “tyranny of the minority,” even if you meant to call it tyranny of the majority — it’s democracy, not tyranny;
call the president’s support of a criminal trial for a terror suspect “treasonous” (especially when supported the same thing when the president shared your party);
call the Pope the anti-Christ;
assert that the constitutionally mandated census is an attempt to enslave us;
accuse opponents of being backed by Arab slave-drivers or being drunk and suicidal;
equate family planing with eugenics or Nazism;
accuse the president of changing the missile defense program’s logo to match his campaign logo and reflect what you say is his secret Muslim identity;
accuse political opponents of being totalitarians, socialists, communists, fascists, Marxists; terrorist sympathizers, McCarthy-like, Nazis or drug pushers; and
advocate a traitorous act like secession, violent revolution , military coup or civil war (just so we’re clear: sedition is a bad thing).
History
If you’re going to use words like socialism, communism and fascism, you must have at least a basic understanding of what those words mean (hint: they’re NOT synonymous!)
You can’t cut a leading Founding Father out the history books because you’ve decided you don’t like his ideas.
You cant repeatedly assert that the president refuses to say the word “terrorism” or say we’re at war with terror when we have an awful lot of videotape showing him repeatedly assailing terrorism and using those exact words.
If you’re going to invoke the names of historical figures, it does not serve you well to whitewash them. Especially this one.
You can’t just pretend historical events didn’t happen in an effort to make a political opponent look dishonest or to make your side look better. Especially these events. (And, no, repeating it doesn’t make it less of a lie.)
You can’t say things that are simply and demonstrably false: health care reform will not push people out of their private insurance and into a government-run program ; health care reform (which contains a good many of your ideas and very few from the Left) is a long way from “socialist utopia”; is not “reparations”; and does not create “death panels”.
Hatred
You have to condemn those among you who:
call members of Congress n*gger and f*ggot when they disagree with them on policy;
elected leaders who say “I’m a proud racist”;
state that America has been built by white people;
say that poor people are poor because they’re rotten people, call them “parasitic garbage” or say they shouldn’t be allowed to vote;
call women bitches and prostitutes just because you don’t like their politics ( re - pea -ted - ly );
assert that the women who are serving our nation in uniform are hookers;
mock and celebrate the death of a grandmother because you disagree with her son’s politics;
declare that those who disagree with them are shown by that disagreement to be not just “Marxist radicals” but also monsters and a deadly disease killing the nation (this would fit in the hyperbole and history categories, too);
joke about blindness;
advocate euthanizing the wives of your political opponents;
taunt people with incurable, life-threatening diseases — especially if you do it on a syndicated broadcast;
equate gay love with bestiality — involving horses or dogs or turtles or ducks — or polygamy, child molestation, pedophilia;
casually assume that only white males look “like a real American”;
assert presidential power to torture a child by having his testicles crushed in front of his parents to get them to talk, order the massacre of a civilian village and launch a nuclear attack without the consent of Congress;
attack children whose mothers have died;
call people racists without producing a shred of evidence that they said or done something that would even smell like racism — same for invoking racially charged “dog whistle” words (repeatedly);
condemn the one thing that every major religion agrees on;
complain that we no longer employ the tactics we once used to disenfranchise millions of Americans because of their race;
blame the victims of natural disasters and terrorist attacks for their suffering and losses;
celebrate violence , joke about violence, prepare for violence or use violent imagery, “fun” political violence, hints of violence, threats of violence (this one is rather explicit), suggestions of violence or actual violence (and, really, suggesting anal rape with a hot piece of metal is beyond the pale); and
incite insurrection telling people to get their guns ready for a “bloody battle” with the president of the United States.
Oh, and I’m not alone: One of your most respected and decorated leaders agrees with me.
So, dear conservatives, get to work. Drain the swamp of the conspiracy nuts, the bald-faced liars undeterred by demonstrable facts, the overt hypocrisy and the hatred. Then offer us a calm, responsible, grownup agenda based on your values and your vision for America. We may or may not agree with your values and vision, but we’ll certainly welcome you back to the American mainstream with open arms. We need you.
Update: I’ve cross-posted this at TalkingPointsMemo and Street Prophets. Someone has written a DailyKos diary about it and Lizz Winstead, creator of the Daily Show, and formerly on Air America (She did the morning show with Rachel Maddow and Chuck D when Air America started) put link to my TPM post on her fan page. Apparently this piece has gone viral through Facebook, email and other blogs. This is fun, but — man! — you should read what some people who have never met me but disagree with my post are saying about my character!
Housing crisis drives families into overcrowded living conditions - Longstanding problem in Chicago exacerbated by foreclosures, posing safety and oth
Housing crisis drives families into overcrowded living conditions - Longstanding problem in Chicago exacerbated by foreclosures, posing safety and other concerns
By Antonio Olivo
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
March 28, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realestate/ct-met-overcrowded-housing-0328-20100327,0,5362202,full.story
Like many Chicago-area residents who've lost their homes to foreclosure, Alondra Navarette had nowhere to turn when forced to leave her spacious house earlier this year.
The struggling maid could no longer afford her ballooning mortgage payments when house-cleaning jobs dried up. So she moved into the already cramped basement apartment occupied by her daughter and a roommate on Chicago's Northwest Side.
Similar choices by thousands who have lost their homes are renewing concerns about overcrowded housing in the Chicago region, housing advocates and government officials say.
With a record 23,200 foreclosures reported in Chicago last year, in addition to tens of thousands more in the suburbs, families have been avoiding homelessness by crowding in with relatives or friends in a move that affects everything from school classroom sizes and test scores to street parking and public safety.
Nationally, rising foreclosures at the start of the recession in 2008 prompted 2.6 million more people than the year before to double up with relatives, for a total of 49 million "multigenerational households," according to a Pew Research Center study released this month.
More recent numbers won't be available until later this year, but officials say all signs point to a worsening of the problem. In dense urban neighborhoods like Chinatown or Little Village, as well as once-roomy outer suburbs like Waukegan or Addison, housing activists point out homes with three or four families each.
Sitting in a makeshift living room cluttered with boxes and other items beneath low-hanging plumbing pipes, Navarette, 48, showed her desperation by gesturing with her hand as if she were dangling by the neck in a noose.
"I never thought I'd be hanging like this," she said. "We're living on top of each other."
The Chicago area has been grappling with overcrowded homes for decades, the product of a lack of affordable housing and workers moving closer to blue-collar jobs in wealthy suburbs.
The problem gained new attention last month when seven people died in a Cicero fire that engulfed an overcrowded apartment with an illegally converted attic bedroom where five of the victims were found, including a 3-day-old baby. In 2007, a fire inside an illegally converted basement occupied by 10 people on Chicago's Southwest Side killed a 3-year-old boy and a 10-month-old boy.
Though Cook County prosecutors allege the Cicero tragedy was due to an arson planned by the building's owner, the fire nonetheless illustrated the dangers inherent in overcrowding, officials say.
"It's a major concern if there's a fire and the firemen don't know that there's an apartment in the basement, or an apartment in the back, the attic, or that the first floor is separated," said Anthony Bertuca, city attorney for the western suburb of Berwyn.
His town of brick bungalow homes — frequently split into illegal apartments — saw a nearly 300 percent increase in overcrowding to 1,340 such homes during the 1990s, according to U.S. Census data. Though the definition varies, generally a home is considered overcrowded if it has more than 1.5 people per room.
Every month, Berwyn processes between 10 to 15 administrative housing-court cases involving overcrowding, Bertuca said.
But although local government officials are aware the problem may be growing, they argue that there isn't much they can do about it, other than to check for signs of overcrowding and to follow up on neighbors' complaints.
They partly blame the fallout from U.S. housing discrimination lawsuits in the Chicago area during the 1990s. When a fresh wave of new immigrants moved to suburbs such as Cicero, Elgin and Waukegan in those years, officials sought to crack down on overcrowding through aggressive inspections and by limiting the number of residents per dwelling.
The crackdowns prompted complaints from civil rights groups, who argued that such actions unfairly targeted large Latino families.
After the lawsuits were settled, most local governments in the state adopted home occupancy ordinances that, among other living requirements, dictate how much square footage is available to each resident, housing policy groups say.
"But, the problem is, enforcing it is almost impossible," argued Ray Hanania, spokesman for Cicero. Because of privacy laws governing home inspections, "We can't just walk in and catch people living in violation of even those basic dwelling laws."
Cicero officials long suspected overcrowding at the home where the fire killed seven — after neighbors complained that trash bins behind the building regularly overflowed, Hanania said. Neighbors and a sibling of one victim said 10 people lived in the illegal apartment.
During each scheduled town inspection, "Nobody would admit to living in the upstairs apartment," Hanania said. "It would be described by everybody as a carpeted recreation room. We might suspect overcrowding, but proving it is a different thing."
With more job losses and foreclosures expected in the coming months, regional planning groups predict overcrowding will worsen.
"Where are these people going?" said King Harris, a senior executive at the Chicago Metropolis 2020, a regional planning group that for years has warned about the dangers of overcrowding.
Harris blamed the problem on an unwillingness in suburban areas to develop homes affordable to lower-income families. A 2003 state law requiring towns to set aside 10 percent of all new residential development for affordable housing has had no teeth, especially during the housing boom a few years ago, he said.
"As a result, expensive homes were built. People found ways to buy them that really weren't right," Harris said. "Then guess what happened? Now, we have a meltdown."
The problem is also growing in Chicago, which since 2007 has seen nearly 58,000 foreclosures, according to an analysis of Illinois real estate data released this month by National People's Action, a network of community organizations based in Chicago.
In Chinatown, Mei Huan Wu is taunted daily by one of the few decent apartment buildings in the neighborhood affordable to low-income families.
There, she assists seniors inside the 91-unit Chinese American Service League building, which opened in 1997 and has a waiting list of 250 applicants.
When she's done, Wu, 62, walks the bustling streets to her own apartment, a small two-bedroom unit in the rear part of a slumping graystone building that she and her husband share with another family.
Because of the limited space, their bedroom is filled with canned goods and other food. A lack of closets means clothes hanging from every available section in the apartment, which features water-damaged ceilings and a malfunctioning heater held together by fraying duct tape.
"I never imagined America was going to be anything beautiful, but I never imagined it could be something like this," Wu said, through a translator.
Matilde Trujillo dreaded her planned move with her two children this month to the small apartment on Chicago's Northwest Side rented by her brother and his family.
The brick bungalow in Cicero that Trujillo and her husband, Gerardo, bought 10 years ago has gone into foreclosure. The couple began defaulting on their mortgage after their computer repair company failed last year.
Trujillo's husband recently enlisted in the Army in search of economic stability for his family. While he's away at boot camp, she packs for the move and tries to convince their children — Evelyn, 10, and Angel, 12 — that their new shared living arrangement will be temporary.
"We really loved the extra space," Trujillo said.
aolivo@tribune.com
By Antonio Olivo
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
March 28, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realestate/ct-met-overcrowded-housing-0328-20100327,0,5362202,full.story
Like many Chicago-area residents who've lost their homes to foreclosure, Alondra Navarette had nowhere to turn when forced to leave her spacious house earlier this year.
The struggling maid could no longer afford her ballooning mortgage payments when house-cleaning jobs dried up. So she moved into the already cramped basement apartment occupied by her daughter and a roommate on Chicago's Northwest Side.
Similar choices by thousands who have lost their homes are renewing concerns about overcrowded housing in the Chicago region, housing advocates and government officials say.
With a record 23,200 foreclosures reported in Chicago last year, in addition to tens of thousands more in the suburbs, families have been avoiding homelessness by crowding in with relatives or friends in a move that affects everything from school classroom sizes and test scores to street parking and public safety.
Nationally, rising foreclosures at the start of the recession in 2008 prompted 2.6 million more people than the year before to double up with relatives, for a total of 49 million "multigenerational households," according to a Pew Research Center study released this month.
More recent numbers won't be available until later this year, but officials say all signs point to a worsening of the problem. In dense urban neighborhoods like Chinatown or Little Village, as well as once-roomy outer suburbs like Waukegan or Addison, housing activists point out homes with three or four families each.
Sitting in a makeshift living room cluttered with boxes and other items beneath low-hanging plumbing pipes, Navarette, 48, showed her desperation by gesturing with her hand as if she were dangling by the neck in a noose.
"I never thought I'd be hanging like this," she said. "We're living on top of each other."
The Chicago area has been grappling with overcrowded homes for decades, the product of a lack of affordable housing and workers moving closer to blue-collar jobs in wealthy suburbs.
The problem gained new attention last month when seven people died in a Cicero fire that engulfed an overcrowded apartment with an illegally converted attic bedroom where five of the victims were found, including a 3-day-old baby. In 2007, a fire inside an illegally converted basement occupied by 10 people on Chicago's Southwest Side killed a 3-year-old boy and a 10-month-old boy.
Though Cook County prosecutors allege the Cicero tragedy was due to an arson planned by the building's owner, the fire nonetheless illustrated the dangers inherent in overcrowding, officials say.
"It's a major concern if there's a fire and the firemen don't know that there's an apartment in the basement, or an apartment in the back, the attic, or that the first floor is separated," said Anthony Bertuca, city attorney for the western suburb of Berwyn.
His town of brick bungalow homes — frequently split into illegal apartments — saw a nearly 300 percent increase in overcrowding to 1,340 such homes during the 1990s, according to U.S. Census data. Though the definition varies, generally a home is considered overcrowded if it has more than 1.5 people per room.
Every month, Berwyn processes between 10 to 15 administrative housing-court cases involving overcrowding, Bertuca said.
But although local government officials are aware the problem may be growing, they argue that there isn't much they can do about it, other than to check for signs of overcrowding and to follow up on neighbors' complaints.
They partly blame the fallout from U.S. housing discrimination lawsuits in the Chicago area during the 1990s. When a fresh wave of new immigrants moved to suburbs such as Cicero, Elgin and Waukegan in those years, officials sought to crack down on overcrowding through aggressive inspections and by limiting the number of residents per dwelling.
The crackdowns prompted complaints from civil rights groups, who argued that such actions unfairly targeted large Latino families.
After the lawsuits were settled, most local governments in the state adopted home occupancy ordinances that, among other living requirements, dictate how much square footage is available to each resident, housing policy groups say.
"But, the problem is, enforcing it is almost impossible," argued Ray Hanania, spokesman for Cicero. Because of privacy laws governing home inspections, "We can't just walk in and catch people living in violation of even those basic dwelling laws."
Cicero officials long suspected overcrowding at the home where the fire killed seven — after neighbors complained that trash bins behind the building regularly overflowed, Hanania said. Neighbors and a sibling of one victim said 10 people lived in the illegal apartment.
During each scheduled town inspection, "Nobody would admit to living in the upstairs apartment," Hanania said. "It would be described by everybody as a carpeted recreation room. We might suspect overcrowding, but proving it is a different thing."
With more job losses and foreclosures expected in the coming months, regional planning groups predict overcrowding will worsen.
"Where are these people going?" said King Harris, a senior executive at the Chicago Metropolis 2020, a regional planning group that for years has warned about the dangers of overcrowding.
Harris blamed the problem on an unwillingness in suburban areas to develop homes affordable to lower-income families. A 2003 state law requiring towns to set aside 10 percent of all new residential development for affordable housing has had no teeth, especially during the housing boom a few years ago, he said.
"As a result, expensive homes were built. People found ways to buy them that really weren't right," Harris said. "Then guess what happened? Now, we have a meltdown."
The problem is also growing in Chicago, which since 2007 has seen nearly 58,000 foreclosures, according to an analysis of Illinois real estate data released this month by National People's Action, a network of community organizations based in Chicago.
In Chinatown, Mei Huan Wu is taunted daily by one of the few decent apartment buildings in the neighborhood affordable to low-income families.
There, she assists seniors inside the 91-unit Chinese American Service League building, which opened in 1997 and has a waiting list of 250 applicants.
When she's done, Wu, 62, walks the bustling streets to her own apartment, a small two-bedroom unit in the rear part of a slumping graystone building that she and her husband share with another family.
Because of the limited space, their bedroom is filled with canned goods and other food. A lack of closets means clothes hanging from every available section in the apartment, which features water-damaged ceilings and a malfunctioning heater held together by fraying duct tape.
"I never imagined America was going to be anything beautiful, but I never imagined it could be something like this," Wu said, through a translator.
Matilde Trujillo dreaded her planned move with her two children this month to the small apartment on Chicago's Northwest Side rented by her brother and his family.
The brick bungalow in Cicero that Trujillo and her husband, Gerardo, bought 10 years ago has gone into foreclosure. The couple began defaulting on their mortgage after their computer repair company failed last year.
Trujillo's husband recently enlisted in the Army in search of economic stability for his family. While he's away at boot camp, she packs for the move and tries to convince their children — Evelyn, 10, and Angel, 12 — that their new shared living arrangement will be temporary.
"We really loved the extra space," Trujillo said.
aolivo@tribune.com
Why I wrote the 'Stupak amendment' and voted for health-care reform
Why I wrote the 'Stupak amendment' and voted for health-care reform
By Bart Stupak
Copyright by The Washington Post
Saturday, March 27, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/26/AR2010032602921.html
When I saw that Kathleen Parker's March 24 op-ed, "Stupak's original sin," defined me as a "backstabber," it reminded me of a Bible verse. Matthew 7:3 asks, "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"
The true motives of many blogs and organizations claiming to be pro-life have become clear in recent days: to politicize life issues as a means to defeat health care reform. One group even sent an e-mail to supporters saying they are "working feverishly to stop this legislation from going forward."
The pro-life groups rallied behind me -- many without my knowledge or consent -- not necessarily because they shared my goals of ensuring protections for life and passing health-care reform but because they viewed me as their best chance to kill health-care legislation.
Last November, an amendment I introduced succeeded in making sure the House health-care-reform bill contained the current law prohibiting public funding for abortions. I was disappointed that the Senate could not pass my language and only mustered 45 pro-life votes, far short of the 60 votes needed to keep the amendment intact.
Many of my Democratic pro-life colleagues and I worked tirelessly in the days leading up to the final House vote on health-care reform to strengthen the legislation's restrictions on abortion funding. We proposed numerous procedural and legislative options, but ultimately all of our efforts required the 60 votes we could not obtain in the Senate.
Once it was clear that the House leadership would eventually obtain the 216 votes necessary to pass health-care reform, I was left with a choice: Vote against the bill and watch it become law with no further protections for life or reach an agreement that prevents federal funding for abortions.
Therefore, I and other pro-life Democrats struck an agreement with President Obama to issue an executive order that would ensure all Hyde Amendment protections would apply to the health-care reform bill. No, an executive order is not as strong as the statutory language we fought for at the start. We received, however, an "ironclad" commitment from the president that no taxpayer dollars will be used to pay for abortions.
Throughout history, executive orders have carried the full force and effect of law and have served as an important means of implementing public policy. Perhaps the most famous executive order was the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. More recently, in 2007, President George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13435, restricting embryonic stem-cell research. This executive order protected the sanctity of life and was "applauded" and "welcomed" by pro-life advocates. That these same people would now claim that President Obama's executive order maintaining the sanctity of life is not worth the paper it is written on is disingenuous at best.
Some, including Parker, have criticized Obama's executive order as unenforceable in the courts and therefore just a "fig leaf." Yet the language that critics point to is standard language with any executive order, including Bush's ban on embryonic stem-cell research. Again, many of these pro-life groups did not express concern over the Bush language but claim it is unacceptable under Obama.
To further protect against federal funding for abortion, during floor debate on the health-care reform bill I engaged in a colloquy with Rep. Henry Waxman to make clear congressional intent that the provisions in the bill, combined with the executive order, will ensure that outcome. Such colloquies are often referred to in court cases when an attempt is being made to determine Congress's intent. This, too, was no minor concession by those opposed to our efforts, and it is a tremendous victory for those protecting the sanctity of life.
I have said from the start that my goal was to see health-care reform pass while maintaining the long-standing principle of the sanctity of life. The president's executive order upholds this principle and current law that no federal funds be used for abortion. I and other pro-life Democrats are pleased that we were able to hold true to our principles and vote for a bill that is pro-life at every stage of life and that provides 32 million Americans with access to high-quality, affordable health care.
The writer is a Democratic representative from Michigan.
By Bart Stupak
Copyright by The Washington Post
Saturday, March 27, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/26/AR2010032602921.html
When I saw that Kathleen Parker's March 24 op-ed, "Stupak's original sin," defined me as a "backstabber," it reminded me of a Bible verse. Matthew 7:3 asks, "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"
The true motives of many blogs and organizations claiming to be pro-life have become clear in recent days: to politicize life issues as a means to defeat health care reform. One group even sent an e-mail to supporters saying they are "working feverishly to stop this legislation from going forward."
The pro-life groups rallied behind me -- many without my knowledge or consent -- not necessarily because they shared my goals of ensuring protections for life and passing health-care reform but because they viewed me as their best chance to kill health-care legislation.
Last November, an amendment I introduced succeeded in making sure the House health-care-reform bill contained the current law prohibiting public funding for abortions. I was disappointed that the Senate could not pass my language and only mustered 45 pro-life votes, far short of the 60 votes needed to keep the amendment intact.
Many of my Democratic pro-life colleagues and I worked tirelessly in the days leading up to the final House vote on health-care reform to strengthen the legislation's restrictions on abortion funding. We proposed numerous procedural and legislative options, but ultimately all of our efforts required the 60 votes we could not obtain in the Senate.
Once it was clear that the House leadership would eventually obtain the 216 votes necessary to pass health-care reform, I was left with a choice: Vote against the bill and watch it become law with no further protections for life or reach an agreement that prevents federal funding for abortions.
Therefore, I and other pro-life Democrats struck an agreement with President Obama to issue an executive order that would ensure all Hyde Amendment protections would apply to the health-care reform bill. No, an executive order is not as strong as the statutory language we fought for at the start. We received, however, an "ironclad" commitment from the president that no taxpayer dollars will be used to pay for abortions.
Throughout history, executive orders have carried the full force and effect of law and have served as an important means of implementing public policy. Perhaps the most famous executive order was the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. More recently, in 2007, President George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13435, restricting embryonic stem-cell research. This executive order protected the sanctity of life and was "applauded" and "welcomed" by pro-life advocates. That these same people would now claim that President Obama's executive order maintaining the sanctity of life is not worth the paper it is written on is disingenuous at best.
Some, including Parker, have criticized Obama's executive order as unenforceable in the courts and therefore just a "fig leaf." Yet the language that critics point to is standard language with any executive order, including Bush's ban on embryonic stem-cell research. Again, many of these pro-life groups did not express concern over the Bush language but claim it is unacceptable under Obama.
To further protect against federal funding for abortion, during floor debate on the health-care reform bill I engaged in a colloquy with Rep. Henry Waxman to make clear congressional intent that the provisions in the bill, combined with the executive order, will ensure that outcome. Such colloquies are often referred to in court cases when an attempt is being made to determine Congress's intent. This, too, was no minor concession by those opposed to our efforts, and it is a tremendous victory for those protecting the sanctity of life.
I have said from the start that my goal was to see health-care reform pass while maintaining the long-standing principle of the sanctity of life. The president's executive order upholds this principle and current law that no federal funds be used for abortion. I and other pro-life Democrats are pleased that we were able to hold true to our principles and vote for a bill that is pro-life at every stage of life and that provides 32 million Americans with access to high-quality, affordable health care.
The writer is a Democratic representative from Michigan.
A Liberal Dose of Humor: Gene Weingarten can make fun of Democrats AND Republicans
A Liberal Dose of Humor: Gene Weingarten can make fun of Democrats AND Republicans
By Gene Weingarten
Copyright by the Washington Post
Sunday, March 28, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/19/AR2010031902643.html?hpid=topnews
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column suggesting that Republicans are fanatic, Bible-thumping, right-wing paranoiacs. This resulted in a lot of outraged mail from fanatic, Bible-thumping, right-wing paranoiacs. They claimed I am somehow biased against them.
Well, duh. As I've said before, I am so liberal that I should be tried for treason and executed. But my column was based on fact: A poll had revealed that most Republicans believe, for example, that Genesis should be taught in schools as a valid scientific explanation for the origin of life, and that President Obama might want the terrorists to win. In the column, I claimed to have found a secret second half of the poll, which I made up, lampooning these idiotic notions through exaggeration.
One letter-writer dared me to do the same sort of hit job on Democrats. I responded, smugly, that I'd be delighted to do that just as soon as Democrats demonstrate a similar nutty paranoia. So the guy sent me a link to a 2007 national poll revealing that more than half of all registered Dems believe that George W. Bush might have known of the 9/11 attacks in advance, and let it happen anyway.
Dang.
Ahem. As it happens, I have just come into exclusive possession of questions and answers from an unpublished, shocking and completely spurious poll of Democrats. Here are the highlights:
If the Supreme Court's decision had gone the other way and George W. Bush had not become president in 2000, how would things be different today?
Thirty-two percent said, "There would be no greed and hunger, and nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too, and all the people would be living life in peace."
Forty-seven percent said, "Cars would run on sunshine."
Under what circumstances might you condone the use of a handgun?
Twenty-nine percent said "for self-defense by a uniformed police officer, but only if he or she has already been shot at least twice."
Thirty-one percent said "as a source of metal for plowshares."
What bad things that have happened in the last year can fairly be blamed on Barack Obama?
Sixty-two percent said "that Mr. Obama continues to smoke cigarettes, endangering his health and therefore jeopardizing his ability to continue to lead America with wisdom, character and a bold vision for a better tomorrow."
Is anything inherently morally offensive?
Twenty-six percent said: "No. A rigorous examination of our cultural taboos serves only to teach us what has the power to shock. A person can choose to be offended, but a thing cannot itself be offensive, not even pornographic videos featuring women, pancake syrup and billy goats."
Twelve percent said the only thing that they believe is offensive is "noticing that certain groups of people might possibly behave in certain ways that seem to be stereotypical of their group."
Thirty-one percent said "mentioning God in public."
Is there any crime so heinous that it cannot be forgiven, or any criminal so awful he cannot be rehabilitated through compassion, respect and understanding?
Forty-six percent said "violators of ordinances prohibiting secondhand smoke."
Twenty-two percent said "people who shoot abortion doctors."
Eleven percent said "farmers who mistreat chickens."
What has America done in the past that utterly negates any good the country has done or will do? Ever?
Twenty-seven percent said "persecution of black people and Native Americans."
Eleven percent said "propping up evil dictators."
Forty-one percent said "country music."
Rachel Manteuffel contributed to this column. E-mail Gene at weingarten@washpost.com.
By Gene Weingarten
Copyright by the Washington Post
Sunday, March 28, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/19/AR2010031902643.html?hpid=topnews
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column suggesting that Republicans are fanatic, Bible-thumping, right-wing paranoiacs. This resulted in a lot of outraged mail from fanatic, Bible-thumping, right-wing paranoiacs. They claimed I am somehow biased against them.
Well, duh. As I've said before, I am so liberal that I should be tried for treason and executed. But my column was based on fact: A poll had revealed that most Republicans believe, for example, that Genesis should be taught in schools as a valid scientific explanation for the origin of life, and that President Obama might want the terrorists to win. In the column, I claimed to have found a secret second half of the poll, which I made up, lampooning these idiotic notions through exaggeration.
One letter-writer dared me to do the same sort of hit job on Democrats. I responded, smugly, that I'd be delighted to do that just as soon as Democrats demonstrate a similar nutty paranoia. So the guy sent me a link to a 2007 national poll revealing that more than half of all registered Dems believe that George W. Bush might have known of the 9/11 attacks in advance, and let it happen anyway.
Dang.
Ahem. As it happens, I have just come into exclusive possession of questions and answers from an unpublished, shocking and completely spurious poll of Democrats. Here are the highlights:
If the Supreme Court's decision had gone the other way and George W. Bush had not become president in 2000, how would things be different today?
Thirty-two percent said, "There would be no greed and hunger, and nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too, and all the people would be living life in peace."
Forty-seven percent said, "Cars would run on sunshine."
Under what circumstances might you condone the use of a handgun?
Twenty-nine percent said "for self-defense by a uniformed police officer, but only if he or she has already been shot at least twice."
Thirty-one percent said "as a source of metal for plowshares."
What bad things that have happened in the last year can fairly be blamed on Barack Obama?
Sixty-two percent said "that Mr. Obama continues to smoke cigarettes, endangering his health and therefore jeopardizing his ability to continue to lead America with wisdom, character and a bold vision for a better tomorrow."
Is anything inherently morally offensive?
Twenty-six percent said: "No. A rigorous examination of our cultural taboos serves only to teach us what has the power to shock. A person can choose to be offended, but a thing cannot itself be offensive, not even pornographic videos featuring women, pancake syrup and billy goats."
Twelve percent said the only thing that they believe is offensive is "noticing that certain groups of people might possibly behave in certain ways that seem to be stereotypical of their group."
Thirty-one percent said "mentioning God in public."
Is there any crime so heinous that it cannot be forgiven, or any criminal so awful he cannot be rehabilitated through compassion, respect and understanding?
Forty-six percent said "violators of ordinances prohibiting secondhand smoke."
Twenty-two percent said "people who shoot abortion doctors."
Eleven percent said "farmers who mistreat chickens."
What has America done in the past that utterly negates any good the country has done or will do? Ever?
Twenty-seven percent said "persecution of black people and Native Americans."
Eleven percent said "propping up evil dictators."
Forty-one percent said "country music."
Rachel Manteuffel contributed to this column. E-mail Gene at weingarten@washpost.com.
The Color of Money: 4 scenarios in the new health-care law
The Color of Money: 4 scenarios in the new health-care law
By Michelle Singletary
Copyright by The Washington Post
Sunday, March 28, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/26/AR2010032605598.html?hpid=topnews
With the most significant changes to the nation's health-care policy in decades having finally come to fruition, the question I have, as I'm sure so many others do as well, is how the new law will affect me.
It's unlikely that most people will read through the 906 pages of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. But if you are inclined to do so, you can find a link to the text at http://thomas.loc.gov. Search for HR 3590.
If you're not eager to slog through the hair-pulling legislative language, where can you go to get a review of what this reform means for you, whether you have coverage or not?
I searched for a number of online tools that allow people to plug in their information and get back a personalized summary of how the new legislation affects their lives. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit focusing on major health-care issues, has an interactive calculator that can help determine if you are eligible for subsidies to buy coverage through an exchange because you don't have insurance through an employer or through Medicare or Medicaid. At http://www.kff.org, you can also get a summary of the major provisions of the new law.
One of the easiest interactive tools to determine how the law will affect you can be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/healthcaretool. It is built to include the law that passed Sunday, plus the reconciliation fixes that the Senate approved Thursday. All you have to do is answer four simple questions. The tool takes into account current coverage, household size, marital status and adjusted gross income (AGI), which is a number used to determine your federal income tax.
Using the online tool, let me take you through a few scenarios (all salary figures represent AGI).
Situation No. 1: You are married and have insurance through your employer. There are five people in your household. Your annual household income is $70,000.
Starting in 2014, if you pay more than 9.5 percent of your income in health insurance premiums, you will have the option of receiving tax credits to help cover the cost of those premiums in the new exchanges. You will also get assistance with health-care deductibles and co-payments. According to your income and family size, the tax credits will ensure you do not spend more than $5,635 to $6,650 on premiums. Your maximum out-of-pocket costs for deductibles and co-payments would be capped at 30 percent of the total cost.
To make sure that health care is affordable, tax credits will assist people with incomes up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level (up to $43,000 for individuals, or $88,000 for a family of four). The credit is phased out for higher-income families.
Situation No. 2: You're single and unemployed. You have coverage because of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, commonly referred to as COBRA. Under COBRA, people can continue to get coverage at their former employer's group rates. But they have to pay the full premium, including the share that the employer used to pay, plus a 2 percent administrative fee.
For now, you're stuck with COBRA. However, once the exchange and subsidies are set up in 2014, they will effectively replace COBRA. So if you leave or lose your job after this provision kicks in, you'll be able to buy coverage on the exchange with the help of government subsidies. Additionally, there will be a ban on denying coverage for preexisting conditions.
Situation No. 3: You are 22 and earn about $11,000 a year in part-time income. You graduated from college in 2009 but still can't find a full-time job. You don't make enough to afford health-care coverage.
In September, you can go back on your parents' plan.
The law requires that people get some minimum coverage starting in 2014. Penalties for not having coverage begin in 2014 at $95 per uninsured dependent and rise by 2016 to $695 a person (up to a maximum of $2,085 per family or 2.5 percent of household income, whichever is higher).
Situation No. 4: You have coverage through your employer. You have a family of four and a household income of $300,000.
There will be no change to your insurance coverage.
But your Medicare payroll tax rates will increase starting in 2013 from 1.45 percent to 2.35 percent on earnings of more than $200,000 for individual taxpayers and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly. There will also be a 3.8 percent tax on investment income for high-income taxpayers.
These are just some scenarios. Like it or not, health-care reform is here.
Readers can write to Michelle Singletary at The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071.
Comments and questions are welcome, but because of the volume of mail, personal responses are not always possible. Please note that comments or questions may be used in a future column, with the writer's name, unless a specific request to do otherwise is indicated.
By Michelle Singletary
Copyright by The Washington Post
Sunday, March 28, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/26/AR2010032605598.html?hpid=topnews
With the most significant changes to the nation's health-care policy in decades having finally come to fruition, the question I have, as I'm sure so many others do as well, is how the new law will affect me.
It's unlikely that most people will read through the 906 pages of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. But if you are inclined to do so, you can find a link to the text at http://thomas.loc.gov. Search for HR 3590.
If you're not eager to slog through the hair-pulling legislative language, where can you go to get a review of what this reform means for you, whether you have coverage or not?
I searched for a number of online tools that allow people to plug in their information and get back a personalized summary of how the new legislation affects their lives. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit focusing on major health-care issues, has an interactive calculator that can help determine if you are eligible for subsidies to buy coverage through an exchange because you don't have insurance through an employer or through Medicare or Medicaid. At http://www.kff.org, you can also get a summary of the major provisions of the new law.
One of the easiest interactive tools to determine how the law will affect you can be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/healthcaretool. It is built to include the law that passed Sunday, plus the reconciliation fixes that the Senate approved Thursday. All you have to do is answer four simple questions. The tool takes into account current coverage, household size, marital status and adjusted gross income (AGI), which is a number used to determine your federal income tax.
Using the online tool, let me take you through a few scenarios (all salary figures represent AGI).
Situation No. 1: You are married and have insurance through your employer. There are five people in your household. Your annual household income is $70,000.
Starting in 2014, if you pay more than 9.5 percent of your income in health insurance premiums, you will have the option of receiving tax credits to help cover the cost of those premiums in the new exchanges. You will also get assistance with health-care deductibles and co-payments. According to your income and family size, the tax credits will ensure you do not spend more than $5,635 to $6,650 on premiums. Your maximum out-of-pocket costs for deductibles and co-payments would be capped at 30 percent of the total cost.
To make sure that health care is affordable, tax credits will assist people with incomes up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level (up to $43,000 for individuals, or $88,000 for a family of four). The credit is phased out for higher-income families.
Situation No. 2: You're single and unemployed. You have coverage because of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, commonly referred to as COBRA. Under COBRA, people can continue to get coverage at their former employer's group rates. But they have to pay the full premium, including the share that the employer used to pay, plus a 2 percent administrative fee.
For now, you're stuck with COBRA. However, once the exchange and subsidies are set up in 2014, they will effectively replace COBRA. So if you leave or lose your job after this provision kicks in, you'll be able to buy coverage on the exchange with the help of government subsidies. Additionally, there will be a ban on denying coverage for preexisting conditions.
Situation No. 3: You are 22 and earn about $11,000 a year in part-time income. You graduated from college in 2009 but still can't find a full-time job. You don't make enough to afford health-care coverage.
In September, you can go back on your parents' plan.
The law requires that people get some minimum coverage starting in 2014. Penalties for not having coverage begin in 2014 at $95 per uninsured dependent and rise by 2016 to $695 a person (up to a maximum of $2,085 per family or 2.5 percent of household income, whichever is higher).
Situation No. 4: You have coverage through your employer. You have a family of four and a household income of $300,000.
There will be no change to your insurance coverage.
But your Medicare payroll tax rates will increase starting in 2013 from 1.45 percent to 2.35 percent on earnings of more than $200,000 for individual taxpayers and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly. There will also be a 3.8 percent tax on investment income for high-income taxpayers.
These are just some scenarios. Like it or not, health-care reform is here.
Readers can write to Michelle Singletary at The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071.
Comments and questions are welcome, but because of the volume of mail, personal responses are not always possible. Please note that comments or questions may be used in a future column, with the writer's name, unless a specific request to do otherwise is indicated.
UK hedge funds gain from bets on sterling
UK hedge funds gain from bets on sterling
By Sam Jones, Hedge Fund Correspondent
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: March 26 2010 23:00 | Last updated: March 26 2010 23:00
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/94e1a24c-3917-11df-8970-00144feabdc0.html
Some of the UK’s biggest hedge funds have made hundreds of millions of pounds by betting on a decline in the value of sterling this year in trades that suggest rising expectations of further falls over the next few months.
Flagship funds of Man Group, Winton Capital and BlueCrest have profited from big positions speculating on the drop in sterling, which has come under pressure over worries over the UK national debt, electoral uncertainty and the sluggish state of the economy.
The three hedge funds – which are the first, third and fourth largest in Europe respectively and manage close to $50bn (€37bn) between them – do not take an active view on sterling’s fundamental worth. They use computer models to identify trends and follow them in trades that typically last several months.
The funds’ large positions point to a rising weight of trades against the currency by other parties.
According to a person familiar with the situation, for AHL, Man’s $21bn flagship fund, betting on a fall in sterling has already been its second most profitable trade of the year.
Sterling has now fallen about 8.6 per cent against the dollar since the beginning of the year and 12 per cent from its 2009 high against the US currency in August.
In the past week, the pound has declined against the dollar to $1.48.
Although currency markets remained sanguine after the Budget, official data on Friday showing business investment had suffered the biggest annual drop on record in the fourth quarter unnerved investors.
Man, Winton and BlueCrest, whose founder Mike Platt is leaving the UK for Switzerland, declined to comment on their positions.
Other, more discretionary hedge funds have also piled into shorting the pound, capitalising on growing uncertainty over the outcome of May’s expected general election.
In its February newsletter, Brevan Howard, Europe’s largest hedge fund, said that politics remained high on market participants’ agenda.
“A narrowing of the Conservative poll lead was accompanied by some renewed weakness in sterling, as the prospect of no clear majority in government raised questions about the fiscal consolidation path,” the hedge fund wrote to clients.
By Sam Jones, Hedge Fund Correspondent
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: March 26 2010 23:00 | Last updated: March 26 2010 23:00
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/94e1a24c-3917-11df-8970-00144feabdc0.html
Some of the UK’s biggest hedge funds have made hundreds of millions of pounds by betting on a decline in the value of sterling this year in trades that suggest rising expectations of further falls over the next few months.
Flagship funds of Man Group, Winton Capital and BlueCrest have profited from big positions speculating on the drop in sterling, which has come under pressure over worries over the UK national debt, electoral uncertainty and the sluggish state of the economy.
The three hedge funds – which are the first, third and fourth largest in Europe respectively and manage close to $50bn (€37bn) between them – do not take an active view on sterling’s fundamental worth. They use computer models to identify trends and follow them in trades that typically last several months.
The funds’ large positions point to a rising weight of trades against the currency by other parties.
According to a person familiar with the situation, for AHL, Man’s $21bn flagship fund, betting on a fall in sterling has already been its second most profitable trade of the year.
Sterling has now fallen about 8.6 per cent against the dollar since the beginning of the year and 12 per cent from its 2009 high against the US currency in August.
In the past week, the pound has declined against the dollar to $1.48.
Although currency markets remained sanguine after the Budget, official data on Friday showing business investment had suffered the biggest annual drop on record in the fourth quarter unnerved investors.
Man, Winton and BlueCrest, whose founder Mike Platt is leaving the UK for Switzerland, declined to comment on their positions.
Other, more discretionary hedge funds have also piled into shorting the pound, capitalising on growing uncertainty over the outcome of May’s expected general election.
In its February newsletter, Brevan Howard, Europe’s largest hedge fund, said that politics remained high on market participants’ agenda.
“A narrowing of the Conservative poll lead was accompanied by some renewed weakness in sterling, as the prospect of no clear majority in government raised questions about the fiscal consolidation path,” the hedge fund wrote to clients.
Facebook privacy policy shift fires critics
Facebook privacy policy shift fires critics
By David Gelles in San Francisco
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: March 26 2010 23:17 | Last updated: March 26 2010 23:17
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/685aef6e-3929-11df-8970-00144feabdc0.html
Facebook on Friday announced another round of changes to its privacy policy, including amendments that could allow the site to share user information automatically with third-party websites.
Certain websites could soon be “pre-approved” by Facebook, so that if a user is logged into Facebook and then visits the third-party website, it would receive information including the “names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting” of a user and his or her friends.
The sites might be able to retain that information “to the extent permitted under their terms of service or privacy policies”.
Facebook said it would introduce the feature with a small group of partners and offer new controls for users to opt out.
However, the company could face resistance by users and advocates who see such a move as another invasion of privacy.
The reaction from advocacy groups in Washington was prompt.
“They’re pushing the envelope, which they continue to do,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said.
“The problem is that Facebook is choosing what data fall into the ‘everyone’ category and then how to use it. That sounds like an awful lot of control.”
EPIC filed a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission last year after Facebook changed policies that automatically made more user information publicly available.
Mr Rotenberg said on Friday EPIC was considering filing another complaint or amending the existing one.
In January David Vladeck, head of the FTC’s bureau of consumer protection, said the complaint raised “issues of particular interest for us at this time.
“As the amount of personal information shared on social networking sites grows, and the number of third-party companies and advertising networks with access to such information grows, it is important that consumers understand how their data are being shared and what privacy rules apply.”
Facebook most recently updated its privacy policy in December.
That set of revisions included changes that encouraged users to make more personal data public to the entire internet.
The changes met resistance from users and advocates.
Friday’s changes, along with those in December, are part of a strategy to make Facebook more ubiquitous around the web.
By making more of the information from its 400m users publicly available, Facebook is positioning itself to be a searchable index of identities, preferences and trends.
By allowing users to log into other sites using their Facebook identity, the company is seeking to be something of a passport for users as they travel around the web.
Facebook acknowledges that it has little control over how third parties use the personal data it provides.
“We do not own or run the applications and websites you interact with through Facebook Platform,” it said in a document posted last year.
“While we try to enforce standards to protect your information, we cannot guarantee they will follow our rules.”
By David Gelles in San Francisco
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: March 26 2010 23:17 | Last updated: March 26 2010 23:17
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/685aef6e-3929-11df-8970-00144feabdc0.html
Facebook on Friday announced another round of changes to its privacy policy, including amendments that could allow the site to share user information automatically with third-party websites.
Certain websites could soon be “pre-approved” by Facebook, so that if a user is logged into Facebook and then visits the third-party website, it would receive information including the “names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting” of a user and his or her friends.
The sites might be able to retain that information “to the extent permitted under their terms of service or privacy policies”.
Facebook said it would introduce the feature with a small group of partners and offer new controls for users to opt out.
However, the company could face resistance by users and advocates who see such a move as another invasion of privacy.
The reaction from advocacy groups in Washington was prompt.
“They’re pushing the envelope, which they continue to do,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said.
“The problem is that Facebook is choosing what data fall into the ‘everyone’ category and then how to use it. That sounds like an awful lot of control.”
EPIC filed a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission last year after Facebook changed policies that automatically made more user information publicly available.
Mr Rotenberg said on Friday EPIC was considering filing another complaint or amending the existing one.
In January David Vladeck, head of the FTC’s bureau of consumer protection, said the complaint raised “issues of particular interest for us at this time.
“As the amount of personal information shared on social networking sites grows, and the number of third-party companies and advertising networks with access to such information grows, it is important that consumers understand how their data are being shared and what privacy rules apply.”
Facebook most recently updated its privacy policy in December.
That set of revisions included changes that encouraged users to make more personal data public to the entire internet.
The changes met resistance from users and advocates.
Friday’s changes, along with those in December, are part of a strategy to make Facebook more ubiquitous around the web.
By making more of the information from its 400m users publicly available, Facebook is positioning itself to be a searchable index of identities, preferences and trends.
By allowing users to log into other sites using their Facebook identity, the company is seeking to be something of a passport for users as they travel around the web.
Facebook acknowledges that it has little control over how third parties use the personal data it provides.
“We do not own or run the applications and websites you interact with through Facebook Platform,” it said in a document posted last year.
“While we try to enforce standards to protect your information, we cannot guarantee they will follow our rules.”
Supply fears start to hit Treasuries
Supply fears start to hit Treasuries
By Michael Mackenzie in New York and David Oakley in London
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: March 26 2010 19:18 | Last updated: March 26 2010 19:18
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c51fbbce-3908-11df-8970-00144feabdc0.html
The bond vigilantes are finally flexing their muscles. A long period of stability for the US government bond market showed signs of cracking this week as a lack of investor appetite for new debt sent the benchmark 10-year yield to its highest level since last June.
For more than a year, analysts have been warning that record sized debt sales by the US Treasury were at odds with a 10-year yield sitting comfortably below 4 per cent. This week, the yield on 10-year notes jumped from 3.65 per cent to a peak of 3.92 per cent on Thursday. On Friday it was 3.87 per cent.
Falling inflation, rising unemployment, the housing market slump, the Federal Reserve’s policies of a near zero overnight borrowing rate and its purchase of up to $1,700bn in bonds have all helped keep Treasury yields near historic lows.
But this week the mood shifted as yields for $118bn of new US debt were much higher than forecast, sparking overall selling of Treasuries. Sentiment also deteriorated in the UK bond market after the government’s budget ahead of a general election expected in May failed to resolve doubts over future spending and debt reduction.
The term “bond vigilantes” was coined in the 1980s when bond investors pushed up long-term yields to force central banks into taking action to curb inflation. This time, bond investors are less worried about inflation: they are fretting about huge fiscal deficits and the looming bond supply needed to finance them.
“Everyone thought we would see rising rates due to higher inflation, but it appears the bond vigilantes are demanding a higher real rate due to concerns about Treasury issuance,” says George Goncalves, head of fixed income strategy at Nomura Securities.
Worries about the debt loads of developed economies have come into focus this year amid the crisis threatening Greece and other members of the eurozone periphery.
The fact that German Bunds have outperformed both Treasuries and gilts in recent months highlights this increasing worry over public debt. Germany’s budget deficit is much lower than the US and UK and inflation there is also expected to remain low.
“The spotlight on Greece only helped to reveal that the US’s kitchen – with Federal and state budget balances – was itself full of cockroaches,” says William O’Donnell, strategist at RBS Securities.
It hasn’t helped that the US announced a big overhaul of its healthcare system this month, adding to worries about the scale of US spending.
Moreover, the Fed completes its bond buying programme next week, leaving the market to absorb the supply of new debt on its own. Next week’s March employment report, which economists say could see 150,000 jobs created, also looms as a test for bond market sentiment.
“The environment for debt auctions has turned negative,” says Rick Klingman, managing director at BNP Paribas. “Long-term rates are rising and it is no coincidence that this has occurred after the passage of healthcare reform and the end of Fed buy-backs.”
Also rattling US investors this week was a report by the Congressional Budget Office that falling payroll taxes due to high unemployment, means that the social security programme will pay out more in benefits than it receives for this fiscal year. “A sustained rise in yields is upon us and bond funds will start to incur losses,” says Jim Caron, global head of interest rate strategy at Morgan Stanley. He expects 10-year yields to reach 4.50 per cent in the second quarter, as investors pull their money from bond funds. March looms as the first month for negative returns for investors in Treasuries this year.
For now, other key markets such as equities and the dollar have not been affected by the rise in yields, but that may change if the 10-year rises decisively above 4 per cent and big auctions next month are also poorly received. “This appears as a credit shot across the Treasury market bow and concerns over the US fiscal spending could well move to the dollar and equities,” says Mr Goncalves.
A sign of the strains across US fixed income markets was this week’s historic rupture between the 10-year Treasury yield and its close derivative, the interest rate swap.
For the first time since swaps emerged in the mid-1980s, the 10-year swap rate traded below that of the “risk free” 10-year Treasury yield. Analysts say this reflects how government debt issuance has altered the dynamics between “risk-free” yields and swaps, which reflect borrowing costs for non-sovereign borrowers.
In the UK, swap rates have been below those of 10-year gilt yields since January. The yield on 10-year gilts was at 4.03 per cent on Friday, up from a low of 3.91 per cent earlier this week. The peak yield so far this year was 4.27 per cent in February. In Europe, however, swap rates are 20 basis points higher than 10-year yields.
“If we get clarity on what the UK will do on deficit reduction once the election is behind us, then the market and gilt yields could stabilise,” says Mike Amey, UK portfolio manager for Pimco.
Since the UK budget on Wednesday, the negative spread, or inversion, has widened with swap rates trading nearly 20 basis points below gilts for 10-year maturities compared with a negative spread of 10bps just before the government statement on public finances.
In other words, huge issuance is already creating unexpected distortions and stresses in the market. It is far from clear that we have seen the last of them, given the amounts that still need to be raised.
By Michael Mackenzie in New York and David Oakley in London
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: March 26 2010 19:18 | Last updated: March 26 2010 19:18
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c51fbbce-3908-11df-8970-00144feabdc0.html
The bond vigilantes are finally flexing their muscles. A long period of stability for the US government bond market showed signs of cracking this week as a lack of investor appetite for new debt sent the benchmark 10-year yield to its highest level since last June.
For more than a year, analysts have been warning that record sized debt sales by the US Treasury were at odds with a 10-year yield sitting comfortably below 4 per cent. This week, the yield on 10-year notes jumped from 3.65 per cent to a peak of 3.92 per cent on Thursday. On Friday it was 3.87 per cent.
Falling inflation, rising unemployment, the housing market slump, the Federal Reserve’s policies of a near zero overnight borrowing rate and its purchase of up to $1,700bn in bonds have all helped keep Treasury yields near historic lows.
But this week the mood shifted as yields for $118bn of new US debt were much higher than forecast, sparking overall selling of Treasuries. Sentiment also deteriorated in the UK bond market after the government’s budget ahead of a general election expected in May failed to resolve doubts over future spending and debt reduction.
The term “bond vigilantes” was coined in the 1980s when bond investors pushed up long-term yields to force central banks into taking action to curb inflation. This time, bond investors are less worried about inflation: they are fretting about huge fiscal deficits and the looming bond supply needed to finance them.
“Everyone thought we would see rising rates due to higher inflation, but it appears the bond vigilantes are demanding a higher real rate due to concerns about Treasury issuance,” says George Goncalves, head of fixed income strategy at Nomura Securities.
Worries about the debt loads of developed economies have come into focus this year amid the crisis threatening Greece and other members of the eurozone periphery.
The fact that German Bunds have outperformed both Treasuries and gilts in recent months highlights this increasing worry over public debt. Germany’s budget deficit is much lower than the US and UK and inflation there is also expected to remain low.
“The spotlight on Greece only helped to reveal that the US’s kitchen – with Federal and state budget balances – was itself full of cockroaches,” says William O’Donnell, strategist at RBS Securities.
It hasn’t helped that the US announced a big overhaul of its healthcare system this month, adding to worries about the scale of US spending.
Moreover, the Fed completes its bond buying programme next week, leaving the market to absorb the supply of new debt on its own. Next week’s March employment report, which economists say could see 150,000 jobs created, also looms as a test for bond market sentiment.
“The environment for debt auctions has turned negative,” says Rick Klingman, managing director at BNP Paribas. “Long-term rates are rising and it is no coincidence that this has occurred after the passage of healthcare reform and the end of Fed buy-backs.”
Also rattling US investors this week was a report by the Congressional Budget Office that falling payroll taxes due to high unemployment, means that the social security programme will pay out more in benefits than it receives for this fiscal year. “A sustained rise in yields is upon us and bond funds will start to incur losses,” says Jim Caron, global head of interest rate strategy at Morgan Stanley. He expects 10-year yields to reach 4.50 per cent in the second quarter, as investors pull their money from bond funds. March looms as the first month for negative returns for investors in Treasuries this year.
For now, other key markets such as equities and the dollar have not been affected by the rise in yields, but that may change if the 10-year rises decisively above 4 per cent and big auctions next month are also poorly received. “This appears as a credit shot across the Treasury market bow and concerns over the US fiscal spending could well move to the dollar and equities,” says Mr Goncalves.
A sign of the strains across US fixed income markets was this week’s historic rupture between the 10-year Treasury yield and its close derivative, the interest rate swap.
For the first time since swaps emerged in the mid-1980s, the 10-year swap rate traded below that of the “risk free” 10-year Treasury yield. Analysts say this reflects how government debt issuance has altered the dynamics between “risk-free” yields and swaps, which reflect borrowing costs for non-sovereign borrowers.
In the UK, swap rates have been below those of 10-year gilt yields since January. The yield on 10-year gilts was at 4.03 per cent on Friday, up from a low of 3.91 per cent earlier this week. The peak yield so far this year was 4.27 per cent in February. In Europe, however, swap rates are 20 basis points higher than 10-year yields.
“If we get clarity on what the UK will do on deficit reduction once the election is behind us, then the market and gilt yields could stabilise,” says Mike Amey, UK portfolio manager for Pimco.
Since the UK budget on Wednesday, the negative spread, or inversion, has widened with swap rates trading nearly 20 basis points below gilts for 10-year maturities compared with a negative spread of 10bps just before the government statement on public finances.
In other words, huge issuance is already creating unexpected distortions and stresses in the market. It is far from clear that we have seen the last of them, given the amounts that still need to be raised.
Can ‘No’ Revive the Republicans?
Can ‘No’ Revive the Republicans?
By TOBIN HARSHAW
Copyright by The New York Times
March 26, 2010, 6:46 PM
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/can-no-revive-the-republicans/?scp=1&sq=Can%20‘No’%20Revive%20the%20Republicans?%20&st=cse
Well, Karl Rove isn’t one to let a downpour dampen his parade. “Democrats are celebrating victory,” the Republican strategist wrote in The Wall Street Journal after President Obama signed the health care reform package. “The public outcry against what they’ve done doesn’t seem to bother them. They take it as validation that they are succeeding at transforming America. But we’ve seen this movie before and it won’t end happily for Democrats.”
Rove’s version of “hope and change”? “Republicans have a powerful rallying cry in ‘repeal, replace and reform.’ ” Well, I can’t say that it sings, but there may be more public support than you’d expect: “The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, conducted on the first two nights after the president signed the bill, shows that 55% favor repealing the legislation. Forty-two percent (42%) oppose repeal. Those figures include 46% who Strongly Favor repeal and 35% who Strongly Oppose it.” Yes, I know that many liberals think Scott Rasmussen as a G.O.P. shill, but they may want to look at this CBS News survey that found “nearly two in three Americans want Republicans in Congress to continue to challenge parts of the health care reform bill.”
Some conservatives think intransigence is a political winner. One who disagreed, David Frum, got fired.
Rove’s got a bevy of supporters on the right side of the blogosphere. “Republicans aren’t going to get 67 votes needed to override an Obama veto that would greet repeal attempts, but it’s no longer inconceivable that the Senate could flip, leaving the remaining Democrats (especially those up for re-election in 2012) quaking,” writes Jennifer Rubin at Commentary. “Certainly there will be other issues — repeal of the Bush tax cuts in 2011, unemployment, and national security. But if you have a large base of active support on one key issue – which the other side obsessively emphasizes — it’s hard to resist making that issue the central focus of the campaign.”
And it looks like plenty of Republican officials like the playbook. Here’s John McCain, the man many on the right considered an insufficiently conservative presidential candidate, in a radio interview on Monday: “There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year. They have poisoned the well in what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.”
And let’s hear from his party’s leader in the chamber, Mitch McConnell: “Senate Republicans will now do everything in our power to replace the massive tax hikes, Medicare cuts and mandates with the reforms our constituents have been calling for throughout this debate.”
Strong words, but not strong enough for Erick Erickson of RedState (and now CNN)” “What word is missing?” he asks of McConnell’s statement. “How about the word ‘repeal.’ So fearful of being labeled the ‘Party of No,’ the Senate Republicans cannot bring themselves to give a full throated defense of the proposition that this monstrosity should be repealed. They will instead go with nibbling at the edges.”
All this raises a question that goes well beyond the health care debate: can the Republicans make any progress, in Congress or at the polls in November, with that ‘Party of No’ label?
Darrell Delamaide of MarketWatch is skeptical:
The excessive rhetoric of House Minority Leader John Boehner, who called the bill “Armageddon,” will leave Republicans looking silly as the law’s various provisions are quietly implemented, and affordable health care becomes as natural to people as Social Security and Medicare have become.
The midterm elections will not be a referendum on health-care reform. That was the election in 2008, when the majority voted in favor of reform and finally got what it sought through our tortured legislative process. But midterm elections will be a referendum on Obama’s performance, and the outcome depends on how skillfully the administration and the congressional majority now use the game-changing momentum of the health-care vote over the weekend.
John Quiggin at Crooked Timber thinks this debate marked an epochal change for the G.O.P.:
The Republicans have become the Party of No in another sense. Having been the party of initiative since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, they are back to their more accustomed role as the party of reaction. The change can probably be dated back to the 2004 election, when Bush failed to privatize Social Security or maybe even in 2003 when electoral pressure pushed him into introducing the Prescription Drug Subsidy (a pork laden monster as you’d expect from Bush, but still an expansion of the welfare state).
The shift is certainly evident when you compare Obama’s first year in office with Clinton’s. Clinton was introducing policies demanded by the Republicans and their response (the Contract with America) was that he wasn’t doing nearly enough. Now, the Republicans have nothing of their own to offer, except more tax cuts (and, I guess, more torture).
The most surprising critic of this approach, however, was the former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum. “It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster,” he lamented at his site FrumForum. “Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But: (1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November — by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs. (2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.”
In this pessimism, Frum was part of a sizeable minority of conservatives. But in the rest of the column, he crossed a Rubicon of sorts. “At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration,” Frum explains. “No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo — just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.”
The result of this blind ambition?
We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.
There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or — more exactly — with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother? I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters — but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead …
So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.
Frum’s cri de coeur got rave reviews, albeit not from the intended audience.
Here’s Bill Barol at Huffington Post: “Last night was more than a legislative moment. It was also, and the implications of this will be deeper and broader than any legislation, a political one. (God help me, this is a part of the argument David Frum made yesterday.) Had the administration been turned back on health care it would have been crippled, probably irreversibly, in its ability to do big things in the areas that still need big things done: Energy, jobs and immigration, to pick just three.”
“Frum seemed to be picking up on exactly what I, and others, have been arguing: the midterm elections in 2010 are likely above all else to be a function of the state of the economy, which, as Frum notes, may actually be looking better by November,” adds
Joshua Tucker at Salon. “They will also … be a function of President Obama’s approval ratings, which have held relatively steady at around 50 percent for months, despite all the supposed angst in the country since then over health care reform.”
Jonathan Chait at the New Republic thinks Frum is spot on: “The Republican strategy of total opposition instead forced the Democrats into an all-or-nothing choice of passing a comprehensive bill or collapsing into catastrophic defeat. (Republicans tried desperately to convince them that letting the bill die was their best political strategy, but Democrats wisely rejected this awful advice.) Let me be clear: I’m glad they did it. I’m willing to accept higher Democratic losses in exchange for a health care bill that really solves the pathologies of the health care market. The Republican strategy was an audacious gamble, and it could have worked, but it came up empty. Thank goodness.”
Joe Gandelman at the Moderate Voice thinks Frum shows a good grasp of Republican history: “Political parties have kept power by only appealing to true believers, but coalition building which requires some consensus and compromise has proven to be the enduring and politically endearing course, (go back and read how Ronald Reagan upset many conservatives: Reagan is categorized as a ‘moderate’ by one historian due to his willingness to work with the opposition and compromise to achieve his broader goals).”
“Folks, if you want to know why bipartisanship failed, don’t look to Democrats,” writes Justin Gardner at Donklephant, naming the names that Frum left out. “Look to Boehner. Look to Palin. Look to Rush. Look to Hannity. Look to McConnell. Look to Beck. Look to Fox News. Look to the Tea Party.” He continues:
Democrats came to the table ready to deal. What they weren’t ready to do is develop a health care bill that was based almost solely on Republican economic philosophies. Still, they askewd a public option, even when their base was crying foul and demanding it. But Republicans made the political calculation that defeating the legislation was more important.
Fair enough, but Frum thinks that this bill represents the biggest legislative defeat for Republicans since the 60s. Because, even with all of this talk of repeal, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to sell the idea of jacking prices back up on prescription drugs, reinstituting the pre-existing conditions clause and a whole host of other things that this current legislation addresses.
As for the response from conservatives, well, let’s let Frum’s wife, the writer Danielle Crittenden, give us a window into their lives (via Huffington Post):
For days I’ve been sitting here in the bunker beside him (and our three dogs), watching the whizzbangs land all around. What is distressing is not the predictable hate mail he has been receiving — and thanks to the internet, he’s been receiving it in hundredfold; we’ve both seen that before. What is distressing (to me, anyway) are the dishonest slurs on his character and integrity by people who know him, and in some cases have known him for many years — truly ugly suggestions that David is motivated by cynicism or sycophancy, or both …
We have both been part of the conservative movement for, as mentioned, the better part of half of our lives. And I can categorically state I’ve never seen such a hostile environment towards free thought and debate — once the hallmarks of Reaganism, the politics with which we grew up — prevail in our movement as it does today. The thuggish demagoguery of the Limbaughs and Becks is a trait we once derided in the old socialist Left. Well boys, take a look in the mirror. It is us now.
Frum’s own update was rather more terse: “I have been a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute since 2003. At lunch today, AEI President Arthur Brooks and I came to a termination of that relationship.”
Politico’s Mike Allen was able to get Frum’s fuller account:
David Frum told us last night that he believes his axing from his $100,000-a-year “resident scholar” gig at the conservative American Enterprise Institute was related to DONOR PRESSURE following his viral blog post arguing Republicans had suffered a devastating, generational “Waterloo” in their loss to President Obama on health reform. “There’s a lot about the story I don’t really understand,” Frum said from his iPhone. “But the core of the story is the kind of economic pressure that intellectual conservatives are under. AEI represents the best of the conservative world. [AEI President] Arthur Brooks is a brilliant man, and his books are fantastic. But the elite isn’t leading anymore. It’s trapped. Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained. I think Arthur took no pleasure in this. I think he was embarrassed. I think he would have avoided it if he possibly could, but he couldn’t.
“The idea that AEI donors sit down to talk with AEI’s president about who should and shouldn’t be on the staff, or what the staff should write, is fantasy,” insists Charles Murray, a scholar at the institution, writing at the Corner. “David has never seen the slightest sign of anything like that at AEI. He can’t have. He made it up. AEI has a culture, the scholars are fiercely proud of that culture, and at its heart is total intellectual freedom. As for the reality of that intellectual freedom, I think it’s fair to say I know what I’m talking about. I’ve pushed it to the limit.”
Others, however, feel that Frum’s comments have the ring of truth to them. “I was fired by a right wing think tank called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush’s policies, especially his support for Medicare Part D,” writes the former Reagan White House adviser Bruce Bartlett, at Capital Gains and Games. “In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC. Now the same thing has happened to David Frum, who has been fired by the American Enterprise Institute … Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI ’scholars’ on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.”
Bartlett thinks this story is much bigger than the careers of two Republican free-thinkers:
I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn’t already.
Sadly, there is no place for David and me to go. The donor community is only interested in financing organizations that parrot the party line, such as the one recently established by McCain economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin … this is a black day for what passes for a conservative movement, scholarship, and the once-respected AEI.
If Bartlett is right, it gives a whole new meaning to Frum’s admonition that “a win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.”
(Note: Frum had more comments on Bartlett’s and Murray’s posts Friday evening.)
By TOBIN HARSHAW
Copyright by The New York Times
March 26, 2010, 6:46 PM
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/can-no-revive-the-republicans/?scp=1&sq=Can%20‘No’%20Revive%20the%20Republicans?%20&st=cse
Well, Karl Rove isn’t one to let a downpour dampen his parade. “Democrats are celebrating victory,” the Republican strategist wrote in The Wall Street Journal after President Obama signed the health care reform package. “The public outcry against what they’ve done doesn’t seem to bother them. They take it as validation that they are succeeding at transforming America. But we’ve seen this movie before and it won’t end happily for Democrats.”
Rove’s version of “hope and change”? “Republicans have a powerful rallying cry in ‘repeal, replace and reform.’ ” Well, I can’t say that it sings, but there may be more public support than you’d expect: “The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, conducted on the first two nights after the president signed the bill, shows that 55% favor repealing the legislation. Forty-two percent (42%) oppose repeal. Those figures include 46% who Strongly Favor repeal and 35% who Strongly Oppose it.” Yes, I know that many liberals think Scott Rasmussen as a G.O.P. shill, but they may want to look at this CBS News survey that found “nearly two in three Americans want Republicans in Congress to continue to challenge parts of the health care reform bill.”
Some conservatives think intransigence is a political winner. One who disagreed, David Frum, got fired.
Rove’s got a bevy of supporters on the right side of the blogosphere. “Republicans aren’t going to get 67 votes needed to override an Obama veto that would greet repeal attempts, but it’s no longer inconceivable that the Senate could flip, leaving the remaining Democrats (especially those up for re-election in 2012) quaking,” writes Jennifer Rubin at Commentary. “Certainly there will be other issues — repeal of the Bush tax cuts in 2011, unemployment, and national security. But if you have a large base of active support on one key issue – which the other side obsessively emphasizes — it’s hard to resist making that issue the central focus of the campaign.”
And it looks like plenty of Republican officials like the playbook. Here’s John McCain, the man many on the right considered an insufficiently conservative presidential candidate, in a radio interview on Monday: “There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year. They have poisoned the well in what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.”
And let’s hear from his party’s leader in the chamber, Mitch McConnell: “Senate Republicans will now do everything in our power to replace the massive tax hikes, Medicare cuts and mandates with the reforms our constituents have been calling for throughout this debate.”
Strong words, but not strong enough for Erick Erickson of RedState (and now CNN)” “What word is missing?” he asks of McConnell’s statement. “How about the word ‘repeal.’ So fearful of being labeled the ‘Party of No,’ the Senate Republicans cannot bring themselves to give a full throated defense of the proposition that this monstrosity should be repealed. They will instead go with nibbling at the edges.”
All this raises a question that goes well beyond the health care debate: can the Republicans make any progress, in Congress or at the polls in November, with that ‘Party of No’ label?
Darrell Delamaide of MarketWatch is skeptical:
The excessive rhetoric of House Minority Leader John Boehner, who called the bill “Armageddon,” will leave Republicans looking silly as the law’s various provisions are quietly implemented, and affordable health care becomes as natural to people as Social Security and Medicare have become.
The midterm elections will not be a referendum on health-care reform. That was the election in 2008, when the majority voted in favor of reform and finally got what it sought through our tortured legislative process. But midterm elections will be a referendum on Obama’s performance, and the outcome depends on how skillfully the administration and the congressional majority now use the game-changing momentum of the health-care vote over the weekend.
John Quiggin at Crooked Timber thinks this debate marked an epochal change for the G.O.P.:
The Republicans have become the Party of No in another sense. Having been the party of initiative since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, they are back to their more accustomed role as the party of reaction. The change can probably be dated back to the 2004 election, when Bush failed to privatize Social Security or maybe even in 2003 when electoral pressure pushed him into introducing the Prescription Drug Subsidy (a pork laden monster as you’d expect from Bush, but still an expansion of the welfare state).
The shift is certainly evident when you compare Obama’s first year in office with Clinton’s. Clinton was introducing policies demanded by the Republicans and their response (the Contract with America) was that he wasn’t doing nearly enough. Now, the Republicans have nothing of their own to offer, except more tax cuts (and, I guess, more torture).
The most surprising critic of this approach, however, was the former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum. “It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster,” he lamented at his site FrumForum. “Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But: (1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November — by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs. (2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.”
In this pessimism, Frum was part of a sizeable minority of conservatives. But in the rest of the column, he crossed a Rubicon of sorts. “At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration,” Frum explains. “No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo — just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.”
The result of this blind ambition?
We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.
There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or — more exactly — with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother? I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters — but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead …
So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.
Frum’s cri de coeur got rave reviews, albeit not from the intended audience.
Here’s Bill Barol at Huffington Post: “Last night was more than a legislative moment. It was also, and the implications of this will be deeper and broader than any legislation, a political one. (God help me, this is a part of the argument David Frum made yesterday.) Had the administration been turned back on health care it would have been crippled, probably irreversibly, in its ability to do big things in the areas that still need big things done: Energy, jobs and immigration, to pick just three.”
“Frum seemed to be picking up on exactly what I, and others, have been arguing: the midterm elections in 2010 are likely above all else to be a function of the state of the economy, which, as Frum notes, may actually be looking better by November,” adds
Joshua Tucker at Salon. “They will also … be a function of President Obama’s approval ratings, which have held relatively steady at around 50 percent for months, despite all the supposed angst in the country since then over health care reform.”
Jonathan Chait at the New Republic thinks Frum is spot on: “The Republican strategy of total opposition instead forced the Democrats into an all-or-nothing choice of passing a comprehensive bill or collapsing into catastrophic defeat. (Republicans tried desperately to convince them that letting the bill die was their best political strategy, but Democrats wisely rejected this awful advice.) Let me be clear: I’m glad they did it. I’m willing to accept higher Democratic losses in exchange for a health care bill that really solves the pathologies of the health care market. The Republican strategy was an audacious gamble, and it could have worked, but it came up empty. Thank goodness.”
Joe Gandelman at the Moderate Voice thinks Frum shows a good grasp of Republican history: “Political parties have kept power by only appealing to true believers, but coalition building which requires some consensus and compromise has proven to be the enduring and politically endearing course, (go back and read how Ronald Reagan upset many conservatives: Reagan is categorized as a ‘moderate’ by one historian due to his willingness to work with the opposition and compromise to achieve his broader goals).”
“Folks, if you want to know why bipartisanship failed, don’t look to Democrats,” writes Justin Gardner at Donklephant, naming the names that Frum left out. “Look to Boehner. Look to Palin. Look to Rush. Look to Hannity. Look to McConnell. Look to Beck. Look to Fox News. Look to the Tea Party.” He continues:
Democrats came to the table ready to deal. What they weren’t ready to do is develop a health care bill that was based almost solely on Republican economic philosophies. Still, they askewd a public option, even when their base was crying foul and demanding it. But Republicans made the political calculation that defeating the legislation was more important.
Fair enough, but Frum thinks that this bill represents the biggest legislative defeat for Republicans since the 60s. Because, even with all of this talk of repeal, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to sell the idea of jacking prices back up on prescription drugs, reinstituting the pre-existing conditions clause and a whole host of other things that this current legislation addresses.
As for the response from conservatives, well, let’s let Frum’s wife, the writer Danielle Crittenden, give us a window into their lives (via Huffington Post):
For days I’ve been sitting here in the bunker beside him (and our three dogs), watching the whizzbangs land all around. What is distressing is not the predictable hate mail he has been receiving — and thanks to the internet, he’s been receiving it in hundredfold; we’ve both seen that before. What is distressing (to me, anyway) are the dishonest slurs on his character and integrity by people who know him, and in some cases have known him for many years — truly ugly suggestions that David is motivated by cynicism or sycophancy, or both …
We have both been part of the conservative movement for, as mentioned, the better part of half of our lives. And I can categorically state I’ve never seen such a hostile environment towards free thought and debate — once the hallmarks of Reaganism, the politics with which we grew up — prevail in our movement as it does today. The thuggish demagoguery of the Limbaughs and Becks is a trait we once derided in the old socialist Left. Well boys, take a look in the mirror. It is us now.
Frum’s own update was rather more terse: “I have been a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute since 2003. At lunch today, AEI President Arthur Brooks and I came to a termination of that relationship.”
Politico’s Mike Allen was able to get Frum’s fuller account:
David Frum told us last night that he believes his axing from his $100,000-a-year “resident scholar” gig at the conservative American Enterprise Institute was related to DONOR PRESSURE following his viral blog post arguing Republicans had suffered a devastating, generational “Waterloo” in their loss to President Obama on health reform. “There’s a lot about the story I don’t really understand,” Frum said from his iPhone. “But the core of the story is the kind of economic pressure that intellectual conservatives are under. AEI represents the best of the conservative world. [AEI President] Arthur Brooks is a brilliant man, and his books are fantastic. But the elite isn’t leading anymore. It’s trapped. Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained. I think Arthur took no pleasure in this. I think he was embarrassed. I think he would have avoided it if he possibly could, but he couldn’t.
“The idea that AEI donors sit down to talk with AEI’s president about who should and shouldn’t be on the staff, or what the staff should write, is fantasy,” insists Charles Murray, a scholar at the institution, writing at the Corner. “David has never seen the slightest sign of anything like that at AEI. He can’t have. He made it up. AEI has a culture, the scholars are fiercely proud of that culture, and at its heart is total intellectual freedom. As for the reality of that intellectual freedom, I think it’s fair to say I know what I’m talking about. I’ve pushed it to the limit.”
Others, however, feel that Frum’s comments have the ring of truth to them. “I was fired by a right wing think tank called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush’s policies, especially his support for Medicare Part D,” writes the former Reagan White House adviser Bruce Bartlett, at Capital Gains and Games. “In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC. Now the same thing has happened to David Frum, who has been fired by the American Enterprise Institute … Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI ’scholars’ on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.”
Bartlett thinks this story is much bigger than the careers of two Republican free-thinkers:
I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn’t already.
Sadly, there is no place for David and me to go. The donor community is only interested in financing organizations that parrot the party line, such as the one recently established by McCain economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin … this is a black day for what passes for a conservative movement, scholarship, and the once-respected AEI.
If Bartlett is right, it gives a whole new meaning to Frum’s admonition that “a win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.”
(Note: Frum had more comments on Bartlett’s and Murray’s posts Friday evening.)
Doctors Offer Thoughts on Cutting Health Care Costs
Doctors Offer Thoughts on Cutting Health Care Costs
By LESLEY ALDERMAN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 20, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/health/27patient.html?hpw
IN persuading Congressional Democrats to pass the health care overhaul, President Obama addressed one of the most pressing issues facing the country: providing broader access to medical insurance for as many as 32 million Americans who do not now have it.
For many of the rest of us, the benefits could still be substantial once the law takes full effect in 2014. People with pre-existing medical conditions could no longer be denied insurance. All lifetime and annual limits on coverage would be eliminated. And new policies would be required to meet higher benefit standards.
But the new law does not tackle head-on the staggering cost of health care in the United States, which eats up $2.3 trillion a year, about 16.2 percent of our gross domestic product, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
That raises the ultimate Patient Money question: How can the country reduce health care costs while not compromising quality?
During the health care debate, government officials, insurers, drug companies and medical associations all weighed in with their opinions. But what about the people who receive so much of our out-of-pocket health care payments: the doctors on the medical front lines? What do they think the country — in other words, you and me — should do to help moderate costs?
I turned to some of the doctors I’ve interviewed over the last year and asked them to prescribe remedies for high medical costs. Here is what they said. (The remarks have been edited and condensed.)
Insure Catastrophes Only
“The idea of paying a certain monthly fee for insurance that allows you to have most of your routine care covered doesn’t make sense. When you buy auto insurance, you don’t insure yourself for every dent and nick — you insure yourself for serious accidents. This is the way the health insurance system should work. Our current insurance model does not encourage patients to take care of themselves. It doesn’t reward patients for being healthy, it rewards them for being sick. This isn’t good for patients or insurers.”
Jacques Moritz, M.D., director of gynecology, St Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, New York
Change Malpractice Law
“Some doctors often order tests to confirm a suspected diagnosis — even when the suspected diagnosis is likely correct with a high degree of certainty — out of concerns regarding the potential for malpractice suits in our current litigious climate. This is a cost of medical care that could be fixed if serious efforts at tort reform were undertaken.”
James A. Reiffel, M.D., professor of clinical medicine and director, electrocardiography laboratory, Columbia University Medical Center, New York
NOTE: The new law contains a provision to award five-year grants to selected states to develop alternatives to current tort litigation.
Counsel Nutrition
“In the cardiology arena, adoption of a Mediterranean style diet has been shown to reduce the likelihood of a second heart attack by more than 70 percent — a benefit far in excess of any drug or procedure. Unfortunately, most doctors do not have the training to provide effective nutritional counseling. How much does the health care system — and more importantly, the patient — lose every time a medical encounter does not include attention to nutrition?”
Stephen R. Devries, M.D., preventive cardiologist, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago
Rely on Evidence...
“I believe that if you do the right thing for the patient, it will ultimately be the right thing for the health care system. That means spending adequate time gathering information and using actual research data to guide judicious ordering of tests and prescribing of treatment. For instance, if an asymptomatic, otherwise healthy, patient comes to me wanting a whole-body CT scan to make sure they do not have something bad hiding inside of them, I would decline and educate him or her that there is no data to show that this test has any significant benefit to offset the potential radiation or other harm and the major medical societies do not recommend this test.”
Lisa Bernstein, M.D., internist and associate professor in the department of medicine, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta
NOTE: The new law provides for the creation this year of a nonprofit corporation, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which would conduct research comparing the clinical effectiveness of medical treatments. The institute’s findings could not be construed as mandates, though, or used to deny coverage.
... But Allow for Expertise
“Government policy often results in a race to the average and mediocre, to the customary and usual, while ignoring the exceptional and extraordinary. And it is this group of patients — the unusual, the outlier, the complex, the group that has failed evidence-based care — that represents the costliest group in any illness category. Such is the case in migraine, where a very small percentage of patients represent 75 percent of the overall costs. These are the patients who must be hospitalized, who attend the emergency department on a regular basis, who develop secondary illness, undergo needless procedures and surgery, and become dependent on narcotics in their desperate search for pain relief. The pursuit of savings by government agencies often misses the point that good care at almost any price is less costly than bad care at almost any savings.”
Joel R. Saper, M.D., founder and director, Michigan Head Pain & Neurological Institute, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Use ‘Integrative Medicine’
“Plenty of studies now show that integrative medicine works very well. By that I mean the practice of medicine that reaffirms the importance of the relationship between practitioner and patient, and has a broader scope that includes therapies from conventional bioscientific medicine, as well as newer complementary approaches like acupuncture and chiropractic. For example, a study conducted at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York found that when women participated in a hypnosis session before breast surgery, they required less pain medication and experienced less nausea and emotional upset than the control group. Patients in the hypnosis group also cost the hospital $772 less overall. That’s an example of how a simple technique can help patients and reduce costs.”
Woodson Merrell, M.D., chairman, department of integrative medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center, New York
Pay to Treat Child Obesity
“We struggle constantly to get reimbursement for services at my clinic. This is terribly short-sighted. Society could spend one thousand dollars now for comprehensive medical care for an obese child, or it could spend one hundred thousand dollars later for that patient’s coronary artery bypass surgery. Every insurance company figures it’s not their problem: an obese kid will likely be with a different carrier by the time he or she starts to experience costly health complications.”
David Ludwig, M.D., director, Optimal Weight for Life Program, Children’s Hospital, Boston
Stop Overtreating
“There are some people who would benefit from more medical care, but there are many more who are getting too much. Excessive intervention is particularly rampant at the two extremes of health: those who are dying, for whom our aggressive care can be inhumane, and those who are well, in whom we feel increasingly compelled to look hard for things to be wrong. There are strong commercial interests in tapping this latter group as a new source of revenue. Screening scans, for instance, find more small cancers and early heart disease. Contracted definitions of what’s normal label more people as having disease, such as hypertension and diabetes. And everyday experiences become entirely new diseases: difficulty sleeping becomes a sleep disorder, impaired sex drive becomes sexual dysfunction.”
H. Gilbert Welch, M.D., professor of medicine, Dartmouth Institute of Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Lebanon, N.H.
Restore the Humanity
“What’s in jeopardy in medicine — for a host of reasons — is the human connection between doctor and patient. There are doctors in training now who do not want to do a physical exam; they just want the lab tests and the echo-cardiogram on a heart patient, for example. But the laying on of hands is a powerful tool in establishing trust and in healing. Doctors, patients and insurers alike should work together to recreate the familiarity, the warmth, the trust and the friendly alliances that used to define patient-caregiver relationships. If the health care profession would rediscover the power of the human relationship, we could bring about the kinds of lifestyle changes that would reduce disease big-time.”
Edward Hallowell, M.D., a child and adult psychiatrist practicing in New York City and Sudbury, Mass., author of “Married to Distraction” (Ballantine Books, 2010)
By LESLEY ALDERMAN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 20, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/health/27patient.html?hpw
IN persuading Congressional Democrats to pass the health care overhaul, President Obama addressed one of the most pressing issues facing the country: providing broader access to medical insurance for as many as 32 million Americans who do not now have it.
For many of the rest of us, the benefits could still be substantial once the law takes full effect in 2014. People with pre-existing medical conditions could no longer be denied insurance. All lifetime and annual limits on coverage would be eliminated. And new policies would be required to meet higher benefit standards.
But the new law does not tackle head-on the staggering cost of health care in the United States, which eats up $2.3 trillion a year, about 16.2 percent of our gross domestic product, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
That raises the ultimate Patient Money question: How can the country reduce health care costs while not compromising quality?
During the health care debate, government officials, insurers, drug companies and medical associations all weighed in with their opinions. But what about the people who receive so much of our out-of-pocket health care payments: the doctors on the medical front lines? What do they think the country — in other words, you and me — should do to help moderate costs?
I turned to some of the doctors I’ve interviewed over the last year and asked them to prescribe remedies for high medical costs. Here is what they said. (The remarks have been edited and condensed.)
Insure Catastrophes Only
“The idea of paying a certain monthly fee for insurance that allows you to have most of your routine care covered doesn’t make sense. When you buy auto insurance, you don’t insure yourself for every dent and nick — you insure yourself for serious accidents. This is the way the health insurance system should work. Our current insurance model does not encourage patients to take care of themselves. It doesn’t reward patients for being healthy, it rewards them for being sick. This isn’t good for patients or insurers.”
Jacques Moritz, M.D., director of gynecology, St Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, New York
Change Malpractice Law
“Some doctors often order tests to confirm a suspected diagnosis — even when the suspected diagnosis is likely correct with a high degree of certainty — out of concerns regarding the potential for malpractice suits in our current litigious climate. This is a cost of medical care that could be fixed if serious efforts at tort reform were undertaken.”
James A. Reiffel, M.D., professor of clinical medicine and director, electrocardiography laboratory, Columbia University Medical Center, New York
NOTE: The new law contains a provision to award five-year grants to selected states to develop alternatives to current tort litigation.
Counsel Nutrition
“In the cardiology arena, adoption of a Mediterranean style diet has been shown to reduce the likelihood of a second heart attack by more than 70 percent — a benefit far in excess of any drug or procedure. Unfortunately, most doctors do not have the training to provide effective nutritional counseling. How much does the health care system — and more importantly, the patient — lose every time a medical encounter does not include attention to nutrition?”
Stephen R. Devries, M.D., preventive cardiologist, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago
Rely on Evidence...
“I believe that if you do the right thing for the patient, it will ultimately be the right thing for the health care system. That means spending adequate time gathering information and using actual research data to guide judicious ordering of tests and prescribing of treatment. For instance, if an asymptomatic, otherwise healthy, patient comes to me wanting a whole-body CT scan to make sure they do not have something bad hiding inside of them, I would decline and educate him or her that there is no data to show that this test has any significant benefit to offset the potential radiation or other harm and the major medical societies do not recommend this test.”
Lisa Bernstein, M.D., internist and associate professor in the department of medicine, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta
NOTE: The new law provides for the creation this year of a nonprofit corporation, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which would conduct research comparing the clinical effectiveness of medical treatments. The institute’s findings could not be construed as mandates, though, or used to deny coverage.
... But Allow for Expertise
“Government policy often results in a race to the average and mediocre, to the customary and usual, while ignoring the exceptional and extraordinary. And it is this group of patients — the unusual, the outlier, the complex, the group that has failed evidence-based care — that represents the costliest group in any illness category. Such is the case in migraine, where a very small percentage of patients represent 75 percent of the overall costs. These are the patients who must be hospitalized, who attend the emergency department on a regular basis, who develop secondary illness, undergo needless procedures and surgery, and become dependent on narcotics in their desperate search for pain relief. The pursuit of savings by government agencies often misses the point that good care at almost any price is less costly than bad care at almost any savings.”
Joel R. Saper, M.D., founder and director, Michigan Head Pain & Neurological Institute, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Use ‘Integrative Medicine’
“Plenty of studies now show that integrative medicine works very well. By that I mean the practice of medicine that reaffirms the importance of the relationship between practitioner and patient, and has a broader scope that includes therapies from conventional bioscientific medicine, as well as newer complementary approaches like acupuncture and chiropractic. For example, a study conducted at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York found that when women participated in a hypnosis session before breast surgery, they required less pain medication and experienced less nausea and emotional upset than the control group. Patients in the hypnosis group also cost the hospital $772 less overall. That’s an example of how a simple technique can help patients and reduce costs.”
Woodson Merrell, M.D., chairman, department of integrative medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center, New York
Pay to Treat Child Obesity
“We struggle constantly to get reimbursement for services at my clinic. This is terribly short-sighted. Society could spend one thousand dollars now for comprehensive medical care for an obese child, or it could spend one hundred thousand dollars later for that patient’s coronary artery bypass surgery. Every insurance company figures it’s not their problem: an obese kid will likely be with a different carrier by the time he or she starts to experience costly health complications.”
David Ludwig, M.D., director, Optimal Weight for Life Program, Children’s Hospital, Boston
Stop Overtreating
“There are some people who would benefit from more medical care, but there are many more who are getting too much. Excessive intervention is particularly rampant at the two extremes of health: those who are dying, for whom our aggressive care can be inhumane, and those who are well, in whom we feel increasingly compelled to look hard for things to be wrong. There are strong commercial interests in tapping this latter group as a new source of revenue. Screening scans, for instance, find more small cancers and early heart disease. Contracted definitions of what’s normal label more people as having disease, such as hypertension and diabetes. And everyday experiences become entirely new diseases: difficulty sleeping becomes a sleep disorder, impaired sex drive becomes sexual dysfunction.”
H. Gilbert Welch, M.D., professor of medicine, Dartmouth Institute of Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Lebanon, N.H.
Restore the Humanity
“What’s in jeopardy in medicine — for a host of reasons — is the human connection between doctor and patient. There are doctors in training now who do not want to do a physical exam; they just want the lab tests and the echo-cardiogram on a heart patient, for example. But the laying on of hands is a powerful tool in establishing trust and in healing. Doctors, patients and insurers alike should work together to recreate the familiarity, the warmth, the trust and the friendly alliances that used to define patient-caregiver relationships. If the health care profession would rediscover the power of the human relationship, we could bring about the kinds of lifestyle changes that would reduce disease big-time.”
Edward Hallowell, M.D., a child and adult psychiatrist practicing in New York City and Sudbury, Mass., author of “Married to Distraction” (Ballantine Books, 2010)
2nd Strike Begins at British Airways
2nd Strike Begins at British Airways
By NICOLA CLARK
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/business/global/28air.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1269709998-eDFVXLgFJI9JhuZrWuipJg
British Airways cabin crews began their second walkout in a week on Saturday to protest cost-cutting plans that include a wage freeze and changes to in-flight staffing levels.
As of mid-afternoon Saturday in London, 93 British Airways flights departing from Heathrow Airport near London had been canceled, according to the airline’s Web site, roughly one-third of the total. Thirty-eight arrivals were listed as canceled.
Flights in and out of Gatwick Airport and London City Airport were unaffected.
The walkout follows a three-day strike from March 20 through March 22. That walkout was called by Unite, the union representing the airline’s 13,500 cabin crew members, after the two sides had been unable to return to the bargaining table last week.
British Airways has said that it plans to fly more than 75 percent of the 240,000 passengers with tickets during the strike, which was expected to last until Tuesday. An additional 43,000 passengers have been either rebooked on other carriers or opted to fly on other dates, according to the airline.
In a statement, British Airways said 70 percent of its intercontinental flights from Heathrow would operate Saturday, up from 60 percent in the first strike period. Fifty-five percent of domestic and European flights from Britain’s largest airport would go on as scheduled, up from 30 percent during the previous walkout.
“The numbers of cabin crew reporting at Heathrow are currently at the levels we need to operate our published schedule,” the airline said.
Negotiations between Unite and British Airways management broke down in the days before the strike last weekend and have not resumed, despite repeated efforts by Brendan Barber, the leader of the Trades Union Congress, an umbrella group for Britain’s unions, to broker a dialogue.
Tensions increased this week after Willie Walsh, the chief executive of British Airways, informed striking employees that the airline was permanently revoking their free travel benefits and that their pay would be reduced for the duration of the work action.
In a letter on Thursday to striking cabin crew members, Unite’s joint leaders, Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley, called Mr. Walsh’s move “unacceptable antiunion bullying” and insisted that any resolution include the restoration of the free flights.
Unite has warned that it could call for more strikes after the Easter holiday period if a settlement is not reached by the end of next week. Pauline Doyle, a Unite spokeswoman, said union leaders would have to decide by April 8 on any further work action. British law requires a minimum of seven days’ notice for a walkout.
By NICOLA CLARK
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/business/global/28air.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1269709998-eDFVXLgFJI9JhuZrWuipJg
British Airways cabin crews began their second walkout in a week on Saturday to protest cost-cutting plans that include a wage freeze and changes to in-flight staffing levels.
As of mid-afternoon Saturday in London, 93 British Airways flights departing from Heathrow Airport near London had been canceled, according to the airline’s Web site, roughly one-third of the total. Thirty-eight arrivals were listed as canceled.
Flights in and out of Gatwick Airport and London City Airport were unaffected.
The walkout follows a three-day strike from March 20 through March 22. That walkout was called by Unite, the union representing the airline’s 13,500 cabin crew members, after the two sides had been unable to return to the bargaining table last week.
British Airways has said that it plans to fly more than 75 percent of the 240,000 passengers with tickets during the strike, which was expected to last until Tuesday. An additional 43,000 passengers have been either rebooked on other carriers or opted to fly on other dates, according to the airline.
In a statement, British Airways said 70 percent of its intercontinental flights from Heathrow would operate Saturday, up from 60 percent in the first strike period. Fifty-five percent of domestic and European flights from Britain’s largest airport would go on as scheduled, up from 30 percent during the previous walkout.
“The numbers of cabin crew reporting at Heathrow are currently at the levels we need to operate our published schedule,” the airline said.
Negotiations between Unite and British Airways management broke down in the days before the strike last weekend and have not resumed, despite repeated efforts by Brendan Barber, the leader of the Trades Union Congress, an umbrella group for Britain’s unions, to broker a dialogue.
Tensions increased this week after Willie Walsh, the chief executive of British Airways, informed striking employees that the airline was permanently revoking their free travel benefits and that their pay would be reduced for the duration of the work action.
In a letter on Thursday to striking cabin crew members, Unite’s joint leaders, Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley, called Mr. Walsh’s move “unacceptable antiunion bullying” and insisted that any resolution include the restoration of the free flights.
Unite has warned that it could call for more strikes after the Easter holiday period if a settlement is not reached by the end of next week. Pauline Doyle, a Unite spokeswoman, said union leaders would have to decide by April 8 on any further work action. British law requires a minimum of seven days’ notice for a walkout.
Doctrine Preoccupied Benedict as Archbishop
Doctrine Preoccupied Benedict as Archbishop
By KATRIN BENNHOLD and NICHOLAS KULISH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/world/europe/28church.html?hp
MUNICH — When Pope Benedict XVI was archbishop of Munich and Freising, he was broadly described as a theologian more concerned with doctrinal debates than personnel matters. That, say his defenders, helps explain why he did not keep close tabs on a pedophile priest sent to his archdiocese in 1980 and allowed to work in a parish.
Yet in 1979, the year before Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, approved the Rev. Peter Hullermann’s move to Munich, the cardinal blocked the assignment to the local university of a prominent theology professor recommended by the university senate. And in 1981, he punished a priest for holding a Mass at a peace demonstration, leading the man to ultimately leave the priesthood.
Pope Benedict’s four-and-a-half-year tenure as archbishop is among the least-examined periods of his life, but his time presiding over 1,713 priests and 2.2 million Catholics was in many ways a dress rehearsal for his present job tending to the Roman Catholic Church’s more than one billion members worldwide.
As archbishop, Benedict expended more energy pursuing theological dissidents than sexual predators. Already in the early 1980s, one could catch a glimpse of a future pope preoccupied with combating any movement away from church tradition. Vatican experts say there is little evidence that Benedict spent much time investigating more than 200 cases of “problem priests” in the diocese, with issues including alcohol abuse, adultery and, now under the microscope, pedophilia.
“His natural habitat was the faculty lounge, and he hadn’t even been a faculty chair,” said John L. Allen Jr. of The National Catholic Reporter. “He would be the first to concede he was much more interested in the life of the mind than the nuts and bolts of administrative work.”
Andreas Englisch, a leading German Vatican expert and the author of several books on Benedict, said that Cardinal Ratzinger “was never interested in bureaucratic stuff,” and noted that when he was first asked to be archbishop of Munich, he considered turning down the post because he didn’t want to work as “a manager.” In his autobiography, Benedict described taking the post as “an infinitely difficult decision.”
His management decisions are now the central focus of the widening scandal in the church in Germany. His supporters say that although he approved Father Hullermann’s move to his archdiocese, they assume that he may not have paid attention to a memo informing him that the priest, who had sexually abused boys in his previous posting, was almost immediately allowed to resume parish duties.
“He certainly would not have realized anything; he was in a different sphere,” said Hannes Burger, 72, who covered the church, including Benedict’s time as archbishop, for the Munich-based daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.
“He held beautiful sermons and wrote beautifully, but the details he left to his staff,” said Mr. Burger, who interviewed the future pope several times before he went to Rome. “He was a professorial bishop, with Rome as his goal.”
Three decades ago it was common practice in the church to ignore or cover up incidents of molestation, or, in severe cases, to transfer priests to faraway parishes. Even outside the church, both victims and law enforcement authorities were less likely to take decisive steps to expose and combat abuse.
But Benedict’s track record in handling such cases under his direct control has assumed new relevance because he presides over a church troubled by scandal. He has to weigh whether and how severely to punish bishops who failed to act to deal with abuses in their domains.
In fact, in his efforts to combat child abuse in 2010, Benedict faces a dilemma over how to handle the same kind of institutional secrecy that was practiced by his own archdiocese in 1980. The future pope himself chose “co-workers of the truth,” as the motto for his time as archbishop.
The case is alarming, wrote the German newspaper Die Zeit this week, not “because Ratzinger was guilty of an exceptional offense.”
“It is the other way around: It is significant because the archbishop acted as probably most other dignitaries in those years. In 1980 Joseph Ratzinger was part of the problem that preoccupies him today.”
Benedict was a stern disciplinarian on the issue that propelled him up the church hierarchy. An early enthusiast for reform in the Catholic Church in the early 1960s, he soon changed his mind and joined the ranks of those trying to put the brakes on the liberalizing forces unleashed by the counterculture movement.
His time in Munich was marked by confrontations with the local clergy, theologians and priests who worked there at the time say.
Cardinal Ratzinger ruffled feathers almost upon arrival in Munich by ordering priests to return to celebrating First Communion and first confession in the same year, rather than having the first confession a year later, a practice that had become established over the previous decade, and which its advocates considered more appropriate for young children.
One priest, the Rev. Wilfried Sussbauer, said he wrote to the archbishop at the time questioning the change, and said Cardinal Ratzinger “wrote me an extremely biting letter” in response.
After receiving the letter, Father Sussbauer and other priests asked for an audience with their archbishop in 1977. They did not get one. But the visiting sister of President Jimmy Carter did. When the priests found out, they called Cardinal Ratzinger’s office. “We asked, ‘Who is more important, your own priests or the sister of the American president?’ ” Father Sussbauer, 77, recalled. “Then suddenly we got an appointment.”
Cardinal Ratzinger was already something of a clerical diplomat, traveling as the official representative of Pope John Paul I to Ecuador in 1978. And with two conclaves to select a new pope in 1978, it seemed at times as if the archbishop already had one foot in the Vatican.
“His predecessor as archbishop was simply more aware of the practical problems of pastoral work,” said Wolfgang Seibel, a Jesuit priest and editor of the Munich-based magazine Stimmen der Zeit from 1966 to 1998. “He didn’t have enough time to leave his mark.”
How closely he would have watched personnel decisions, especially with an administrative chief, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, who had been in his post since 1968, is an open question. But the transfer of Father Hullermann from Essen would not have been a routine matter, experts said.
Mr. Englisch, the Vatican expert, said that transferring a problem priest was “such a difficult decision” that it would necessarily have required his input.
“I think the guy who handled it would have gone to his archbishop and said, ‘This case of transferring a priest is not common, and we should really have an eye on him,’ ” Mr. Englisch said.
Referring to Benedict, he added, “I don’t think that he really knew the details; I don’t think he was really interested in the details.”
“As they say in the legal profession, you either knew or you should have known,” said the Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, who once worked at the Vatican Embassy in Washington and became an early and well-known whistle-blower on sexual abuse in the church. “The archbishop is the unquestioned authority in that diocese. The buck stops there.”
Rachel Donadio and Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.
By KATRIN BENNHOLD and NICHOLAS KULISH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/world/europe/28church.html?hp
MUNICH — When Pope Benedict XVI was archbishop of Munich and Freising, he was broadly described as a theologian more concerned with doctrinal debates than personnel matters. That, say his defenders, helps explain why he did not keep close tabs on a pedophile priest sent to his archdiocese in 1980 and allowed to work in a parish.
Yet in 1979, the year before Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, approved the Rev. Peter Hullermann’s move to Munich, the cardinal blocked the assignment to the local university of a prominent theology professor recommended by the university senate. And in 1981, he punished a priest for holding a Mass at a peace demonstration, leading the man to ultimately leave the priesthood.
Pope Benedict’s four-and-a-half-year tenure as archbishop is among the least-examined periods of his life, but his time presiding over 1,713 priests and 2.2 million Catholics was in many ways a dress rehearsal for his present job tending to the Roman Catholic Church’s more than one billion members worldwide.
As archbishop, Benedict expended more energy pursuing theological dissidents than sexual predators. Already in the early 1980s, one could catch a glimpse of a future pope preoccupied with combating any movement away from church tradition. Vatican experts say there is little evidence that Benedict spent much time investigating more than 200 cases of “problem priests” in the diocese, with issues including alcohol abuse, adultery and, now under the microscope, pedophilia.
“His natural habitat was the faculty lounge, and he hadn’t even been a faculty chair,” said John L. Allen Jr. of The National Catholic Reporter. “He would be the first to concede he was much more interested in the life of the mind than the nuts and bolts of administrative work.”
Andreas Englisch, a leading German Vatican expert and the author of several books on Benedict, said that Cardinal Ratzinger “was never interested in bureaucratic stuff,” and noted that when he was first asked to be archbishop of Munich, he considered turning down the post because he didn’t want to work as “a manager.” In his autobiography, Benedict described taking the post as “an infinitely difficult decision.”
His management decisions are now the central focus of the widening scandal in the church in Germany. His supporters say that although he approved Father Hullermann’s move to his archdiocese, they assume that he may not have paid attention to a memo informing him that the priest, who had sexually abused boys in his previous posting, was almost immediately allowed to resume parish duties.
“He certainly would not have realized anything; he was in a different sphere,” said Hannes Burger, 72, who covered the church, including Benedict’s time as archbishop, for the Munich-based daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.
“He held beautiful sermons and wrote beautifully, but the details he left to his staff,” said Mr. Burger, who interviewed the future pope several times before he went to Rome. “He was a professorial bishop, with Rome as his goal.”
Three decades ago it was common practice in the church to ignore or cover up incidents of molestation, or, in severe cases, to transfer priests to faraway parishes. Even outside the church, both victims and law enforcement authorities were less likely to take decisive steps to expose and combat abuse.
But Benedict’s track record in handling such cases under his direct control has assumed new relevance because he presides over a church troubled by scandal. He has to weigh whether and how severely to punish bishops who failed to act to deal with abuses in their domains.
In fact, in his efforts to combat child abuse in 2010, Benedict faces a dilemma over how to handle the same kind of institutional secrecy that was practiced by his own archdiocese in 1980. The future pope himself chose “co-workers of the truth,” as the motto for his time as archbishop.
The case is alarming, wrote the German newspaper Die Zeit this week, not “because Ratzinger was guilty of an exceptional offense.”
“It is the other way around: It is significant because the archbishop acted as probably most other dignitaries in those years. In 1980 Joseph Ratzinger was part of the problem that preoccupies him today.”
Benedict was a stern disciplinarian on the issue that propelled him up the church hierarchy. An early enthusiast for reform in the Catholic Church in the early 1960s, he soon changed his mind and joined the ranks of those trying to put the brakes on the liberalizing forces unleashed by the counterculture movement.
His time in Munich was marked by confrontations with the local clergy, theologians and priests who worked there at the time say.
Cardinal Ratzinger ruffled feathers almost upon arrival in Munich by ordering priests to return to celebrating First Communion and first confession in the same year, rather than having the first confession a year later, a practice that had become established over the previous decade, and which its advocates considered more appropriate for young children.
One priest, the Rev. Wilfried Sussbauer, said he wrote to the archbishop at the time questioning the change, and said Cardinal Ratzinger “wrote me an extremely biting letter” in response.
After receiving the letter, Father Sussbauer and other priests asked for an audience with their archbishop in 1977. They did not get one. But the visiting sister of President Jimmy Carter did. When the priests found out, they called Cardinal Ratzinger’s office. “We asked, ‘Who is more important, your own priests or the sister of the American president?’ ” Father Sussbauer, 77, recalled. “Then suddenly we got an appointment.”
Cardinal Ratzinger was already something of a clerical diplomat, traveling as the official representative of Pope John Paul I to Ecuador in 1978. And with two conclaves to select a new pope in 1978, it seemed at times as if the archbishop already had one foot in the Vatican.
“His predecessor as archbishop was simply more aware of the practical problems of pastoral work,” said Wolfgang Seibel, a Jesuit priest and editor of the Munich-based magazine Stimmen der Zeit from 1966 to 1998. “He didn’t have enough time to leave his mark.”
How closely he would have watched personnel decisions, especially with an administrative chief, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, who had been in his post since 1968, is an open question. But the transfer of Father Hullermann from Essen would not have been a routine matter, experts said.
Mr. Englisch, the Vatican expert, said that transferring a problem priest was “such a difficult decision” that it would necessarily have required his input.
“I think the guy who handled it would have gone to his archbishop and said, ‘This case of transferring a priest is not common, and we should really have an eye on him,’ ” Mr. Englisch said.
Referring to Benedict, he added, “I don’t think that he really knew the details; I don’t think he was really interested in the details.”
“As they say in the legal profession, you either knew or you should have known,” said the Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, who once worked at the Vatican Embassy in Washington and became an early and well-known whistle-blower on sexual abuse in the church. “The archbishop is the unquestioned authority in that diocese. The buck stops there.”
Rachel Donadio and Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.
Whose Country Is It?
Whose Country Is It?
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/opinion/27blow.html?th&emc=th
The far-right extremists have gone into conniptions.
The bullying, threats, and acts of violence following the passage of health care reform have been shocking, but they’re only the most recent manifestations of an increasing sense of desperation.
It’s an extension of a now-familiar theme: some version of “take our country back.” The problem is that the country romanticized by the far right hasn’t existed for some time, and its ability to deny that fact grows more dim every day. President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront the future. And it scares them.
Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.
Hence their anger and frustration, which is playing out in ways large and small. There is the current spattering of threats and violence, but there also is the run on guns and the explosive growth of nefarious antigovernment and anti-immigrant groups. In fact, according to a report entitled “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism” recently released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “nativist extremist” groups that confront and harass suspected immigrants have increased nearly 80 percent since President Obama took office, and antigovernment “patriot” groups more than tripled over that period.
Politically, this frustration is epitomized by the Tea Party movement. It may have some legitimate concerns (taxation, the role of government, etc.), but its message is lost in the madness. And now the anemic Republican establishment, covetous of the Tea Party’s passion, is moving to absorb it, not admonish it. Instead of jettisoning the radical language, rabid bigotry and rising violence, the Republicans justify it. (They don’t want to refute it as much as funnel it.)
There may be a short-term benefit in this strategy, but it’s a long-term loser.
A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday took a look at the Tea Party members and found them to be just as anachronistic to the direction of the country’s demographics as the Republican Party. For instance, they were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and “less educated ... than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.” This at a time when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.
You may want “your country back,” but you can’t have it. That sound you hear is the relentless, irrepressible march of change. Welcome to America: The Remix.
I invite you to visit my blog, By the Numbers. Please also join me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/opinion/27blow.html?th&emc=th
The far-right extremists have gone into conniptions.
The bullying, threats, and acts of violence following the passage of health care reform have been shocking, but they’re only the most recent manifestations of an increasing sense of desperation.
It’s an extension of a now-familiar theme: some version of “take our country back.” The problem is that the country romanticized by the far right hasn’t existed for some time, and its ability to deny that fact grows more dim every day. President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront the future. And it scares them.
Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.
Hence their anger and frustration, which is playing out in ways large and small. There is the current spattering of threats and violence, but there also is the run on guns and the explosive growth of nefarious antigovernment and anti-immigrant groups. In fact, according to a report entitled “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism” recently released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “nativist extremist” groups that confront and harass suspected immigrants have increased nearly 80 percent since President Obama took office, and antigovernment “patriot” groups more than tripled over that period.
Politically, this frustration is epitomized by the Tea Party movement. It may have some legitimate concerns (taxation, the role of government, etc.), but its message is lost in the madness. And now the anemic Republican establishment, covetous of the Tea Party’s passion, is moving to absorb it, not admonish it. Instead of jettisoning the radical language, rabid bigotry and rising violence, the Republicans justify it. (They don’t want to refute it as much as funnel it.)
There may be a short-term benefit in this strategy, but it’s a long-term loser.
A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday took a look at the Tea Party members and found them to be just as anachronistic to the direction of the country’s demographics as the Republican Party. For instance, they were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and “less educated ... than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.” This at a time when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.
You may want “your country back,” but you can’t have it. That sound you hear is the relentless, irrepressible march of change. Welcome to America: The Remix.
I invite you to visit my blog, By the Numbers. Please also join me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.
F.D.A. Says Millions Got Unapproved Heart Pills
F.D.A. Says Millions Got Unapproved Heart Pills
By NATASHA SINGER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/business/27nitro.html?th&emc=th
Doctors in the United States wrote more than four million prescriptions last year for nitroglycerin tablets, heart drugs placed under the tongue to reduce the chest pain angina or to stop a heart attack.
But the majority of the drugs sold had not been approved for sale, nor had their safety and effectiveness been vetted, by the Food and Drug Administration.
And many doctors, who discovered only last week that pharmacies were giving their patients unproved heart tablets, now say they have no way of knowing whether patients have suffered unnecessarily as a result.
“If it’s not approved and no one has tested it, we can’t be sure that it’s safe and effective,” said Dr. Harry M. Lever, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic. If patients with angina took substandard or ineffective nitroglycerin tablets, Dr. Lever said, their pain might not subside and the problem could potentially progress to a heart attack.
The F.D.A., which in recent years has been cracking down on a decades-old backlog of unapproved drugs, sent warning letters last week to two drug makers ordering them to stop marketing unapproved nitroglycerin tablets. But the drugs are still being sold at pharmacies while the order takes effect.
The drug makers said they would comply with the order, but said that their tablets were safe.
The F.D.A. said that it had not examined the quality of the products it was ordering off the market but that it had recorded problems with other unapproved nitroglycerin products in the past. The agency advised people who take unapproved nitroglycerin to continue taking their tablets but to consult their doctors about replacement prescriptions.
Cardiologists regularly prescribe nitroglycerin to relieve chest pain associated with coronary artery disease. Placed under the tongue, the drug quickly dissolves into the blood, where it dilates the coronary artery, slightly decreasing blood pressure and reducing heart exertion.
When taken during an initial episode of chest pain, nitroglycerin can prevent a heart attack in 3 to 4 percent of patients, said Dr. Steven E. Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic.
The problem of the unapproved tablets stems from a longstanding ambiguity about the rules for drugs whose use predates the establishment of the F.D.A. in 1938. Only one brand of nitroglycerin pills is federally approved: Nitrostat, made by Pfizer, on the market since 2000.
Many makers of various drugs, not only nitroglycerin tablets, have long contended that their medications did not require F.D.A. review because they were grandfathered as pre-1938 drugs. But the agency is now disputing that interpretation of its rules. It took action on nitroglycerin tablets after looking into the matter and being struck by the large volume of prescriptions being filled with unapproved versions.
“These drugs are historical remnants,” said Michael Levy, a division director in the F.D.A.’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “Pharmacies likely mistake them for generic drugs or for drugs likely to be grandfathered, neither of which is the case.”
Of the nearly 4.4 million prescriptions for under-the-tongue nitroglycerin tablets last year in this country, about 80 percent were filled with unapproved drugs, according to data from the research firm IMS Health.
Leading cardiologists said they were shocked to learn that for years their patients might have been taking crucial heart drugs whose safety and potency had not been vetted by the F.D.A.
“I was taken aback,” said Dr. Ralph G. Brindis, the president of the American College of Cardiology, a professional association representing nearly 26,000 cardiologists in the United States.
Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, a professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, said it would not have occurred to him that licensed pharmacies might be filling prescriptions with unapproved drugs. “Nobody ever teaches you that in medical school,” he said.
On March 16, the agency sent warning letters to two leading suppliers of the unapproved tablets, Konec Inc. of Tucson and Glenmark Generics Inc. of Mahwah, N.J., giving them 90 days to stop making the drugs and 180 days to stop shipping them.
In response to a query from a reporter, a spokesman for Glenmark Pharmaceuticals in Mumbai, India, the parent company of Glenmark Generics, sent a statement saying that the company intended to comply with the agency’s directive to stop making the unapproved drugs.
It added that the F.D.A. warning letter had not asked for a recall — an immediate action in which a company removes products for sale from the market.
The president of Konec, Enrique Durazo, said his company regularly conducted its own lab tests to ensure that its nitroglycerin pills had the equivalent potency and stability to the approved brand-name drug.
But the company has not conducted the kind of human tests, called bioequivalence studies, required for F.D.A. approval of generic drugs, he said. Konec now plans to conduct such tests and seek approval as a generic.
Pfizer, which according to IMS Health sold about 900,000 prescriptions of Nitrostat last year, says it had stepped up production of the drug and expected to be able to meet the entire market demand in the United States.
At CVS, the cash price for a pack of 100 tablets of 0.4-milligram Nitrostat is $21.99; the same amount of the Glenmark product costs $19.99.
With the F.D.A. giving Konec and Glenmark six months to continue marketing their unapproved nitroglycerin tablets, some major pharmacy companies said they planned to continue selling them.
“We still have the product available,” said Robert Elfinger, a spokesman for Walgreens, which sells the Glenmark nitroglycerin. “This is not a recall.”
A spokesman for CVS, which has been selling the Glenmark drug since early 2009, said that the company would make any changes in dispensing that the F.D.A. might require.
Nitroglycerin drugs are not to be confused with the explosive ingredient in dynamite. But even in drug form, nitroglycerin is an unstable chemical, which is why doctors say they cannot be sure how potent the unapproved versions might be.
Moreover, because patients have varied responses, some cardiologists say they now have no way of knowing whether they have been treating their patients with an inferior product.
Dr. Lever, of the Cleveland Clinic, for example, recalls a heart surgery patient telling him that something was wrong with her new tablets. They did not relieve chest pain, he recalled, and they did not cause side effects she had previously experienced.
She then gave the pills, a bottle of Glenmark tablets, to Dr. Lever.
Glenmark did not respond to a query from a reporter seeking comment about the matter.
Dr. Lever, who has kept the bottle in his desk ever since, recalled the episode after learning of the F.D.A.’s action last week.
“Every day, when I’m writing a prescription,” he said, “I’m thinking, ‘Is the patient going to get the right stuff?’ ”
By NATASHA SINGER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/business/27nitro.html?th&emc=th
Doctors in the United States wrote more than four million prescriptions last year for nitroglycerin tablets, heart drugs placed under the tongue to reduce the chest pain angina or to stop a heart attack.
But the majority of the drugs sold had not been approved for sale, nor had their safety and effectiveness been vetted, by the Food and Drug Administration.
And many doctors, who discovered only last week that pharmacies were giving their patients unproved heart tablets, now say they have no way of knowing whether patients have suffered unnecessarily as a result.
“If it’s not approved and no one has tested it, we can’t be sure that it’s safe and effective,” said Dr. Harry M. Lever, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic. If patients with angina took substandard or ineffective nitroglycerin tablets, Dr. Lever said, their pain might not subside and the problem could potentially progress to a heart attack.
The F.D.A., which in recent years has been cracking down on a decades-old backlog of unapproved drugs, sent warning letters last week to two drug makers ordering them to stop marketing unapproved nitroglycerin tablets. But the drugs are still being sold at pharmacies while the order takes effect.
The drug makers said they would comply with the order, but said that their tablets were safe.
The F.D.A. said that it had not examined the quality of the products it was ordering off the market but that it had recorded problems with other unapproved nitroglycerin products in the past. The agency advised people who take unapproved nitroglycerin to continue taking their tablets but to consult their doctors about replacement prescriptions.
Cardiologists regularly prescribe nitroglycerin to relieve chest pain associated with coronary artery disease. Placed under the tongue, the drug quickly dissolves into the blood, where it dilates the coronary artery, slightly decreasing blood pressure and reducing heart exertion.
When taken during an initial episode of chest pain, nitroglycerin can prevent a heart attack in 3 to 4 percent of patients, said Dr. Steven E. Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic.
The problem of the unapproved tablets stems from a longstanding ambiguity about the rules for drugs whose use predates the establishment of the F.D.A. in 1938. Only one brand of nitroglycerin pills is federally approved: Nitrostat, made by Pfizer, on the market since 2000.
Many makers of various drugs, not only nitroglycerin tablets, have long contended that their medications did not require F.D.A. review because they were grandfathered as pre-1938 drugs. But the agency is now disputing that interpretation of its rules. It took action on nitroglycerin tablets after looking into the matter and being struck by the large volume of prescriptions being filled with unapproved versions.
“These drugs are historical remnants,” said Michael Levy, a division director in the F.D.A.’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “Pharmacies likely mistake them for generic drugs or for drugs likely to be grandfathered, neither of which is the case.”
Of the nearly 4.4 million prescriptions for under-the-tongue nitroglycerin tablets last year in this country, about 80 percent were filled with unapproved drugs, according to data from the research firm IMS Health.
Leading cardiologists said they were shocked to learn that for years their patients might have been taking crucial heart drugs whose safety and potency had not been vetted by the F.D.A.
“I was taken aback,” said Dr. Ralph G. Brindis, the president of the American College of Cardiology, a professional association representing nearly 26,000 cardiologists in the United States.
Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, a professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, said it would not have occurred to him that licensed pharmacies might be filling prescriptions with unapproved drugs. “Nobody ever teaches you that in medical school,” he said.
On March 16, the agency sent warning letters to two leading suppliers of the unapproved tablets, Konec Inc. of Tucson and Glenmark Generics Inc. of Mahwah, N.J., giving them 90 days to stop making the drugs and 180 days to stop shipping them.
In response to a query from a reporter, a spokesman for Glenmark Pharmaceuticals in Mumbai, India, the parent company of Glenmark Generics, sent a statement saying that the company intended to comply with the agency’s directive to stop making the unapproved drugs.
It added that the F.D.A. warning letter had not asked for a recall — an immediate action in which a company removes products for sale from the market.
The president of Konec, Enrique Durazo, said his company regularly conducted its own lab tests to ensure that its nitroglycerin pills had the equivalent potency and stability to the approved brand-name drug.
But the company has not conducted the kind of human tests, called bioequivalence studies, required for F.D.A. approval of generic drugs, he said. Konec now plans to conduct such tests and seek approval as a generic.
Pfizer, which according to IMS Health sold about 900,000 prescriptions of Nitrostat last year, says it had stepped up production of the drug and expected to be able to meet the entire market demand in the United States.
At CVS, the cash price for a pack of 100 tablets of 0.4-milligram Nitrostat is $21.99; the same amount of the Glenmark product costs $19.99.
With the F.D.A. giving Konec and Glenmark six months to continue marketing their unapproved nitroglycerin tablets, some major pharmacy companies said they planned to continue selling them.
“We still have the product available,” said Robert Elfinger, a spokesman for Walgreens, which sells the Glenmark nitroglycerin. “This is not a recall.”
A spokesman for CVS, which has been selling the Glenmark drug since early 2009, said that the company would make any changes in dispensing that the F.D.A. might require.
Nitroglycerin drugs are not to be confused with the explosive ingredient in dynamite. But even in drug form, nitroglycerin is an unstable chemical, which is why doctors say they cannot be sure how potent the unapproved versions might be.
Moreover, because patients have varied responses, some cardiologists say they now have no way of knowing whether they have been treating their patients with an inferior product.
Dr. Lever, of the Cleveland Clinic, for example, recalls a heart surgery patient telling him that something was wrong with her new tablets. They did not relieve chest pain, he recalled, and they did not cause side effects she had previously experienced.
She then gave the pills, a bottle of Glenmark tablets, to Dr. Lever.
Glenmark did not respond to a query from a reporter seeking comment about the matter.
Dr. Lever, who has kept the bottle in his desk ever since, recalled the episode after learning of the F.D.A.’s action last week.
“Every day, when I’m writing a prescription,” he said, “I’m thinking, ‘Is the patient going to get the right stuff?’ ”
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