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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

News Nuggets 266


An award-winning image of a whale coming out of its aerial leap -- from the [Manchester] Guardian


For those of you besides themselves over Joe Lieberman's antics, we have several very good consolation nuggets first up.


What Public Option Supporters Won (Jonathan Cohn) from the New Republic

"Disappointed progressives may be wondering whether their efforts were a waste. They most decidedly were not. The campaign for the public option pushed the entire debate to the left--and, to use a military metaphor, it diverted enemy fire away from the rest of the bill."supporters-won


Health Care's Home Stretch (Kevin Drum) from Mother Jones

"With the public option now out of the healthcare bill, is it still worth passing? ..., I think the answer is pretty firmly yes—and that liberals who now want to pick up their toys and hand reform its sixth defeat in the past century need to wake up and smell the decaf. Politics sucks. It always has. But the bill in front of us—messy, incomplete, and replete with bribes to every interest group imaginable—is still well worth passing."


Deal or Die on Health Care (Paul Starr) from the American Prospect

"None of this, however, affects the central provisions of the legislation, which would extend health coverage to an estimated 33 million of the uninsured, raise standards of protection for millions whose coverage is limited, eliminate some of the most hated abuses of the insurance industry, and create a new system of insurance exchanges that would enable people who buy policies individually or through small groups to get new choices and better prices for coverage."


Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill (Nate Silver) at FiveThirtyEight.com

"For any "progressive" who is concerned about the inequality of wealth, income and opportunity in America, this bill would be an absolutely monumental achievement."


Predictions of Western Decline are 'Presumtuous' (Editorial) from the China Daily [of the People's Republic of China in English]

No -- this posting does not relate to the health care legislation.

"Should Chinese take pleasure in the economic pain of the West, while rejoicing at the way their country has weathered the global economic crisis? According to Hong Liang of the state-run China Daily, those who now do so are engaged in a self-defeating delusion."


Is Obama Really A Hawk? (Leslie Gelb) from the Daily Beast

"Conservatives have read too much into Obama’s recent comments on the necessity of war. Leslie H. Gelb on the president’s peaceful—and increasingly promising—foreign policy."


Obama's Christian Realism (David Brooks) from the New York Times

"After Vietnam, most liberals moved on. It became unfashionable to talk about evil. ... Barack Obama never bought into these shifts. In the past few weeks, he has revived the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking and tried to apply it to a different world."


A Policy Bears Fruit (Jackson Diehl) from the Washington Post

"The verdict on Obama's policy of multilateralism, engagement and circumscribed American ambitions is very much still out. Its proponents have said all along that it would take time to show results. And -- partly because of the administration's own missteps -- the critics have failed to notice that at least some of those results are starting to come in."


Reality Check from Oslo (E.J. Dionne) from the Washington Post

"The president reminded us why he had seized the imaginations of so many in the first place. The speech was commonly described as a defense of "just war," and it was -- a rigorous, unblinking argument for why violence and the threat of violence can be necessary on behalf of the right and the good. But even more, the speech revived a school of foreign policy thinking that allied realism with idealism."


Disaster and Denial (Paul Krugmen) from the New York Times

Our ON-THE-MONEY pundit for the day!

"Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question."


Win or Lose, Hillary Clinton Just Goes from Strength to Strength from the [Manchester] Guardian

"Defeat by Barack Obama was supposed to signal a return to the Senate: instead, Hillary Clinton has become a high-profile secretary of state, and is being tipped for the vice-presidency in 2012 and the White House in 2016."


The Republicans' War Within from the Washington post

"There are large parts of the state where the party is irrelevant," said Allan Hoffenblum, a well-known California political analyst who has been a campaign manager for Republicans in the state. "It's not even a statewide party, really." But few stories better reflect the divisions and disarray among state Republicans than the saga of an obscure Southern California assemblyman."


RECESSION NUGGET!!

I didn't know where else to put this short, strange reflection on the impact of these hard economic times.

"Ain't No Shame in Bein' a Ho" from the Atlantic

"No, what my daughter is doing is using her natural born talents. Her beauty. She's using the tools god gave her. Some at my church might call it immoral. I think it good business sense. Especially these days."


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