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McCain, Called on His Dishonest Representation of Medicare “Cuts,” Goes Ballistic

(via Progress Ohio)

Dick Durbin actually dared to question the honor of St. John McCain on the Senate floor just now, leading to a volcanic explosion from the Arizona Senator.

Durbin was discussing John McCain’s amendment to commit the Senate health care bill back to the Finance Committee, to return with the elimination of all “Medicare cuts,” as he calls it. These cuts actually involve decreasing fraud, eliminating the total waste of subsidies to private insurance companies for Medicare Advantage, which costs the government more money for the same care, and reducing payments for uncompensated care (there will be less of it with more insured people). Durbin mentioned what top Democrats have mentioned all day, that McCain’s own policy in the 2008 campaign would have cut Medicare $1.3 trillion dollars over 10 years, three times the amount of reductions in this bill.

Boy, John McCain was not happy with that. He interrupted Durbin asking for a question, and when Durbin was finished, whined about the lack of comity in the Senate for not being given the courtesy of responding. He claimed that Durbin was “totally falsifying my position, both in the Presidential campaign and the position we have on this side in this amendment.”

Refuting Durbin’s claim that the Republicans have done nothing to protect patients, McCain cited his work on the patient’s bill of rights, which has been waiting for a final vote in the Senate since 2002, having not received one for four years while Republicans were in power. McCain cited no other policy.

With respect to his enormous flip-flop on Medicare, McCain said, “Yes, I said we could eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in spending,” and specifically cited Sen. Tom Coburn’s Patient Choice Act as the model for his policy. So, some waste cuts, representing $1.3 trillion dollars, are right, when they are forwarded by the guy who told seniors “You are going to die soon” if health care passes. “There is no relation between what I tried to do in this campaign and what’s done in this bill,” said McCain.

McCain went on to say that his record is “very clear” on fighting for patients, and that Democrats are hypocrites because they didn’t support $23 billion in Medicare cuts in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (which passed through reconciliation). As Chris Dodd said, that was because “under that bill, children, working families lost insurance they had, the cuts occurred to proper screenings, women lost access to mammographies, cervical cancer screening was cut, families lost their benefits, there were direct cuts in them.” McCain confuses direct cuts and the provisions in this bill. “You can’t make these things up as you go along,” said Dodd. “Those of us who made warnings about that bill were 100% accurate.”

McCain closed by touting the support of wingnut welfare shops like Citizens Against Government Waste and the PhRMa-funded 60 Plus.

Always fun to watch the eruption of Mount McCain.

Goldman Sachs Is Arming Themselves Against Angry Mobs. Guilty Conscience?

Apparently the Goldman Sachs management is starting to connect the dots? Alice Schroeder from Bloomberg writes:

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.

While we wait, Goldman has wrapped itself in the flag of Warren Buffett, with whom it will jointly donate $500 million, part of an effort to burnish its image -- and gain new Goldman clients. Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein also reversed himself after having previously called Goldman’s greed “God’s work” and apologized earlier this month for having participated in things that were “clearly wrong.”

Has it really come to this? Imagine what emotions must be billowing through the halls of Goldman Sachs to provoke the firm into an apology. Talk that Goldman bankers might have armed themselves in self-defense would sound ludicrous, were it not so apt a metaphor for the way that the most successful people on Wall Street have become a target for public rage.

Common sense tells you a handgun is probably not even all that useful. Suppose an intruder sneaks past the doorman or jumps the security fence at night. By the time you pull the pistol out of your wife’s jewelry safe, find the ammunition, and load your weapon, Fifi the Pomeranian has already been taken hostage and the gun won’t do you any good. As for carrying a loaded pistol when you venture outside, dream on. Concealed gun permits are almost impossible for ordinary citizens to obtain in New York or nearby states.

In other words, a little humility and contrition are probably the better route.

Until a couple of weeks ago, that was obvious to everyone but Goldman, a firm famous for both prescience and arrogance. In a display of both, Blankfein began to raise his personal- security threat level early in the financial crisis. He keeps a summer home near the Hamptons, where unrestricted public access would put him at risk if the angry mobs rose up and marched to the East End of Long Island.

Yves has more.

 http://www.toplessrobot.com/2009/12/iron_man_uses_the_buddy_system.php

 by Susie Madrak http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/boom-times-wall-st-luxury-spending-ri

From the New York Times, we find out just how many Americans now qualify for food assistance:

MARTINSVILLE, Ohio — With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children.

With millions of jobs lost and major industries on the ropes, America’s array of government aid — including unemployment insurance, food stamps and cash welfare — is being tested as never before. This series examines how the safety net is holding up under the worst economic crisis in decades.

It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs.

Virtually all have incomes near or below the federal poverty line, but their eclectic ranks testify to the range of people struggling with basic needs. They include single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor, longtime recipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slender wages leave pantries bare.

But look, not everyone's doing poorly. In fact, the Masters of the Universe are back to their old free-spending ways, thanks to the massive government bailout funded by our tax dollars:

Conspicuous consumption is making a comeback on Wall Street. But no one wants to admit they're doing it.As traders and investment bankers near the finish line of what looks like a boom year for pay, some are spending money like the financial crisis never happened. From $15,000-a-week Caribbean getaways to art auctions to $200,000 platinum wristwatches that automatically adjust for leap years, signs of the good life are returning.

"What we're seeing in the last four to eight weeks is a fairly substantial uptick" in demand for extravagant purchases as Wall Street employees grow more confident that the market's steep rebound so far in 2009 will soon bring them fat bonuses, says David Arnold, senior vice president at Robb Report, a magazine targeted at the super-wealthy.

Isn't that heartwarming? We can be glad that someone's doing well, even if it's at our expense!

- Impeach Bush and Cheney Now! by Chip http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/48058

 by Dave Levinthal

 by Sahil Kapur http://rawstory.com/2009/11/obamas-patriot-act-extensions-major-flip-earlier-stances/

Key components in the USA Patriot Act are set to expire at the end of the year, but President Barack Obama is seeking to extend them, reversing his stark opposition in the past to the same provisions.

"The president's reversal on Patriot Act reform is a major travesty," said Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel for the leading civil rights group ACLU, in an interview with Raw Story. "There have been many, many abuses of power in the last four years."

These three main aspects in question allow the government to acquire private information about civilians through warrantless wiretapping of phone calls and emails, as well as seizure of records from credit reporting companies, banks, internet service providers and libraries. Another component includes the loosening of conditions under which an individual can be accused of providing "material support" to terrorists.

In 2005, then-Senator Obama pledged to filibuster a Bush-sponsored bill that included several of these exact components, calling it "just plain wrong" in a Senate speech.

"Government has decided to go on a fishing expedition through every personal record or private document -- through library books they've read and phone calls they've made," he declared, adding: "We don't have to settle for a Patriot Act that sacrifices our liberties or our safety -- we can have one that secures both."

ABC News reports that "Four years ago, then Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who taught constitutional law, voted down the same provisions along with all Senate Democrats who insisted on changes to the bill that better protected libraries, limited clandestine search warrants, roving wiretaps, and FBI gag orders."

"This was the most opportune time for the surveillance authorities to reverse course," Richardson told Raw Story. "If these programs continue, more abuses of power are absolutely inevitable -- there's no way around it. The level of secrecy granted by Congress is very troubling."

Obama has championed the continuation of all three provisions until at least 2013, a wish that has been granted by the Senate Judiciary Committee and two-thirds fulfilled by the House counterpart. (The House version slaps greater oversight and restrictions on acquiring personal records of non-US citizens.) While he has always been resolutely opposed to former President George W. Bush's vision of the Act, he has defended certain parts of it, and voted in 2006 to re-authorize an altered version.

"Overall, the Obama administration has made marginal improvements but is largely a continuation of the Bush administration with respect to civil liberties," Richardson told Raw Story, referring to the president's rising acquiescence to his predecessor's approach.

The Patriot Act, initially pushed through Congress quickly after 9/11 by the Bush administration as an alleged necessity to combat future attacks, has long been fiercely criticized by the ACLU and other civil libertarians as a gross violation of privacy rights under the Constitution.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald, a former civil rights litigator, recently wrote: "Democrats spent so many years screaming bloody murder over Bush's use of indefinite detention, military commissions, state secrets, renditions, and extreme secrecy -- policies Obama has largely and/or completely adopted as his own."

by Paul Adams

A Dutch project that launched in 2005 has finally borne fruit: cells from a delicious pig have been cultured in the laboratory to grow the first successful filet of in vitro pork, The Times reports.

The prospect of vat-grown meat has been the stuff of science fiction for quite a while, and the subject of serious study for over a decade. A number of groups, including odd bedfellows NASA and PETA, see it as the answer to feeding a hungry world, without all the unpleasant externalities of large-scale meat production. And many vegetarians say they would not have an ethical dilemma eating meat if no animal was killed to produce it.

The team at Holland's Eindhoven University extracted muscle cells from a living pig and incubated them in an appetizing nutrient broth "derived from the blood products of animal foetuses," according to The Times. Future lab meat will be grown in a synthetic medium instead.

An actual lab-grown pork chop is still a ways away, though. Meat suitable for the plate has to be more than a simple petri-dish-grown wad of muscle tissue. Without blood flow, bones, connective tissue, and a modest amount of exercise, the flavor and texture of the muscle will be far from palatable. The culture achieved by the Dutch scientists is reportedly a "soggy form of pork" that its creators have not yet ventured to taste.

For now, though, before the technology for a beautiful synthetic steak has been perfected, lab-grown meat may still be suitable for feeding to other animals, where its impact on environmental and economic issues would still be beneficial. At present, for instance, 25 percent of the world's fish catch is fed back to farmed fish each year, a ratio that's hugely detrimental to the sustainability of the seafood industry.

The lab-grown meat might be edible as a component of sausage as well; and indeed one of the primary funding sources of the Dutch study is Stegeman, a sausage manufacturer owned by Sara Lee.

 by Dave Lindorff  http://pubrecord.org/commentary/6151/barack-obama-manchurian-candidate/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=barack-obama-manchurian-candidate

I once wrote an article about former President George W. Bush saying that he was a perfect Manchurian candidate. That is, if his missing year when he was supposed to have been flying fighter jets with the Texas Air National Guard was actually spent in the former Soviet Union being reprogrammed as a covert KGB agent whose job it was to go back to America, win election to the White House, and proceed to destroy the US, he couldn’t have done a better job than he actually did.

Now I wonder whether President Obama might not be a perfect Manchurian Candidate of the Republican Party, or perhaps of some nefarious foreign entity—perhaps the China or the always-enigmatic Al Qaeda. How else to explain policies that have wreaked such destruction on the Democratic Party in Washington and on the nation at large.

Consider for a moment the history of this new president in whom so many invested so much hope and enthusiasm:

Almost immediately upon taking office President Obama announced that he was appointing Timothy Geithner, part of the Bush/Cheney financial team, to head up his Treasury Department. This is the same Timothy Geithner who, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, engineered the initial give-away of $85 billion to AIG, and the subsequent pass-through of tens of billions of dollars to a handful of the nation’s largest banks and investment banks—surely the largest theft of public assets by private billionaires in the history of mankind.

Obama went on to name a whole gang of Wall Street crooks to run his economic policy, assuring that the recession would be not an opportunity to restore long neglected and undermined New Deal programs, but rather to crush workers and the middle class while shifting staggering sums to the wealthy.

This was followed by a deliberate policy of dropping the ball on health reform, which a vast majority of Americans was clamoring for, and allowing it to be turned into a giant wet kiss for the insurance industry, whose stocks have leapt up with each advance of the massive and massively corrupt health “reform” legislation in Congress. (The ball drop took the form of Obama simply leaving the whole task of “reforming” health care up to the Congress, staying on the sidelines while Congress blew the job.)

Then there is the military. Here Obama kicked things off by insuring that there would be no real change from the Bush/Cheney imperialist scheme by reappointing to the post of secretary of defense the same guy, Robert Gates, who was secretary of defense under President Bush. He put the general formerly in charge of the Iraq War, David Petraeus, in charge of overall Middle East military operations, and took another Bush-era general, Stanley McCrystal, who had run special ops in Iraq, in charge of the Afghanistan War. And since then he has proceeded to ramp up the Afghanistan War from a small-scale operation to a full-fledged war, with no prospect of ending it, and every sign pointing to an ever wider and bigger war in that region, possibly sucking in Pakistan and Iran.

And as for the biggest crisis facing mankind, climate change, this new president, who because of the collapse of the US auto industry had a unique opportunity to compel one of the industries most responsible for the looming global ecological catastrophe to start to fix it by beginning a massive conversion to development and production of electric vehicles and mass transit, instead dropped the ball and just provided a taxpayer bailout with the goal of getting the domestic auto industry back into the business of cranking out gas guzzlers. The president has provided no leadership on climate change at all, effectively sabotaging the global effort to reach a new treaty to limit and cut back on greenhouse gas emissions this December.

Think about this. If the Republicans had created and inserted into the Democratic Party a secret candidate designed to trick Democrats into electing him, so that he could then enact Republican policies of robbing from the poor to enrich the rich, expanding the military budget to a level not seen since World War II, putting the nation deeper into a global war against Islam, sabotaging efforts to combat climate change, and further deregulating the financial sector, could they have come up with anything better than Barack Obama?

If Al Qaeda had wanted to insinuate someone into the White House to further undermine American empire, already on shaky legs during the Bush/Cheney years, by getting the US to further overextend its military, further bankrupt its already creaky economy, and further demoralize its citizens by boosting unemployment and undermining its Constitution, could Bin Laden & Co. have come up with a better Manchurian Candidate than Barack Obama?

If China had wanted a candidate to destroy the American currency, bankrupt the US and its remaining industrial base and leave it helpless and begging to be bought out by Chinese interests (there is now serious talk of China buying General Motors), could the country’s Communist rulers have done better than Barack Obama?

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think for a second that Obama is a secret Republican or a secret Al Qaeda or Chinese operative, though I know that there are right-wing Tea Baggers out there who sincerely believe the latter two scenarios (often at the same time!). I think Obama is simply another slick politician with a giant ego and a shriveled sense of principle and ethics—a man that is, not unlike most of our political class, though with better diction and smile, whose interests include himself, his family, and those who bankroll him, but certainly not you, me and the country as a whole.

But it might help if we started to think of him in these terms, because objectively what we have right now in the White House is a president who is steering the nation towards disaster as surely as if it were his goal in life.

Because he is a Democrat, and because he talked a good line during the campaign last year, progressives are disoriented and don’t know how to respond to his massive betrayal of all things progressive. At this rate, by next fall, we could have a raging full-scale war going on in Afghanistan, Pakistan in a state of chaos, Iran under attack by Israel or perhaps by Israel and the US, health reform a forgotten issue, real unemployment at over 20 percent, the dollar at half the value of the British pound, and negotiations for a global climate treaty in collapse. And progressives still will not be mounting any effective protest or political action.

I’m not sure what the answer is to this crisis. Many people on the left are arguing that it is essential to abandon the Democrats and move to a third party. I think that’s a great idea. The Democratic Party has proved to be absolutely corrupt and beyond salvation–useful only as a sump pump whose purpose is to suck the life out of the progressive movement, such as it is.

But I also can’t help noticing that the vast majority of the middle class seems still content enough to struggle on with the jobs they still have—the 80-85 percent of them who still have jobs—ignoring the plight of those who do not and of the poor. It was an observation made by the late John Kenneth Galbraith that the problem with modern post-industrial democracies is that the vast majority of people do well enough that they no longer care about the suffering of the minority of the population.

As long as the ruling elites are able to keep the majority at least employed and in their homes, they can tighten the screws on the rest with impunity, and that is the situation we are in today. It is hard to see a new progressive party succeeding under such circumstances.

What is undeniable is that we are witnessing the systemic and probably terminal decline of the US as an economic power, and as a military power, and that is certainly a good thing, if not for Americans, then surely for the larger world. What is remarkable is watching President Obama, who was elected by Americans who were hoping he would turn things around, again and again act to hasten that decline.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

 by Zachary Roth
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/11/latest_high-flying_accused_ponzi_schemer_has_ties.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TPMmuckraker+%28TPMmuckraker%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Meet the latest high-living accused Ponzi schemer with close ties to Republican politicians. That would be Tim Durham, the flamboyant Indianapolis-based owner of Fair Finance Co., and ally of Governor Mitch Daniels...

In court papers filed last week by the Feds and examined by TPMmuckraker, Durham was accused of using money from new purchasers of his company's investment certificates to pay off earlier investors, thereby thereby "lulling the earlier victims into believing that their money was being [handled] responsibily." The filing followed an FBI raid last Wednesday on Durham's Indianapolis office.

An investigative report in the Indiana Business Journal last month raised questions about Fair's ability to repay its investors -- most of whom are based in Ohio -- who had purchased $197 million in investment certificates. IBJ reported that Durham had used Fair to fund other business interests, some of them unsuccessful, and that he and related parties owed Fair more than $168 million.

A lawyer for Durham has said his client is cooperating with investigators and believes he has done nothing wrong.

But it's Durham's political connections and flashy lifestyle that really make this story pop.

Durham, 47, who bought Fair from Donald Fair, the son of its founder, in 2002, has been quoted as saying he longs to die as the richest man on earth, and was profiled on the CNBC segment "Rise of the Super Rich." In the court filing, the Feds sough to seize Durham's assets, including a 30,000-square-foot mansion, a home in Los Angeles, and a Bugatti sports car. He also owns a 100-foot yacht, and is a major investor in National Lampoon, which made the movie Animal House, among other raucous hits.

Durham's MySpace page reportedly once showed pictures taken at a 2007 party he hosted at his mansion -- including one that showed two naked women kissing. The page also reported that Penthouse magazine model Martina Warren was there.

Durham raised $160,000, and served as finance chair, for the campaign of Marion County prosecutor Carl Brizzi, who has described Durham as a close friend. So close, indeed, that Brizzi agreed this fall to serve on Fair's board after being asked by Durham. Brizzi says he changed his mind after IBJ's investigative report came out last month.

But Durham also played on bigger stages: He was a significant fundraiser for Daniels, and reportedly also served on the governor's re-election steering committee.

A spokesman for Daniels, a former top Bush White House official who has been talked about as a potential 2012 presidential candidate, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the governor's ties to Durham.