Archive for October, 2009

House Democrats this morning unveiled their health care bill, although the public comments were light on substance and heavy on the same rhetoric they’ve used all along.

Hey. Want the substance? Here you go. It’s the entire bill, a huge download to be sure (nearly 2,000 pages), but dive in!

Initial impression is that the “moderate public option” is only different from the others insofar as the government actually negotiates what it pays for services instead of simply imposing the rates it wants to pay. It’s still a government-run health insurance system.

More commentary as additional details emerge.

Dan Calabrese

Growth is good. It certainly doesn’t mean every economic problem is solved, but growth is good, and the government reported today that the gross domestic product grew 3.6 percent in the third quarter.

Long ways to go.

That’s the first time the economy has grown since the third quarter of 2008 – a fact that will confuse people who read the nonsense in the Associated Press about the recession starting in December 2007.

There’s a necessary reality check when you consider the difference between the growth rate and the actual value of the GDP itself.

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Brett Noel

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Large version for newspaper publication.

Grayscale version for newspaper publication.

Dan Calabrese

On the right (or is it the left?) we have a RINO. Olympia Snowe, scourge of “true conservatives” and leading candidate to be frogmarched out of the Republican Party for backing the Obama stimulus and, most recently, the Baucus health care bill.

You hate her. But you need her.

On the left (or is it the right?) we have a DINO. Actually, Joe Lieberman isn’t even that, really, since he is technically not a Democrat in name. But even though the Democrats did frogmarch him out of their party as punishment for backing the Iraq War, Lieberman sprung to life as an independent and caucuses with the Democrats regardless.

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Lawrence J. Haas

A week from today, Washington will awaken to election results across America that reflect the state of our politics in 2009. Meanwhile, thousands of miles from here, radical forces will undoubtedly mark the anniversary of an event that symbolized our politics in a more troubled time – the Iran hostage crisis.

It was on Nov. 4, 1979 that several hundred students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran,

A cautionary tale.

capturing and holding 52 diplomats and staff for 444 days in a crisis that disheartened the nation, destroyed Jimmy Carter’s presidency and helped set the stage for the ascendance of Ronald Reagan.

It was, more than anything, an event that reflected the national drift and disarray, the military weakness and moral confusion, in the America of that time. The hostage crisis and other big events of the late 1970s are worth another look, for they offer a cautionary tale for a nation that faces challenges today that seem eerily similar.  Read the rest of this entry »

Andy Hefty

No, I am not talking about its most recent laureate who was nominated after being president for a mere two weeks.  I already wrote about that, as did many of my North Star National colleagues.  According to Military.com, the latest nomination for next year’s prize goes to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.  An excerpt:

Someone report this to the Nobel Committee!

MRFF’s founder Mikey Weinstein] established the MRFF in 2006 after first going to court over instances of proselytizing at his alma mater, the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, where his sons were cadets. Since then the foundation has been on the front lines of the fight against what Weinstein calls a “fundamentalist Christian, military-parachurch-corporate proselytizing complex.”

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Dan Calabrese

Conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Ledeen got raked over the coals pretty good last week when they momentarily fell for a story about a supposed college thesis Barack Obama wrote.

This non-existent thesis supposedly made reference to the “so-called Founding Fathers” and lamented that the Constitution did not provide for redistribution of wealth.

That thesis does not exist, and Ledeen and Limbaugh were forced to recant rather quickly. (The North Star National linked to Ledeen’s column the day it ran. When the Huffington Post came out with a piece revealing the story to be fake, we removed the link to Ledeen’s column and linked to the HuffPo piece.)

But Obama did indeed make a statement much like that attributed to him in the fake thesis. He did so in a 2001 interview on WBEZ radio in Chicago. Here is that interview:

Jamie Weinstein

While covering J-Street’s first annual national conference over the last three days, I think I recognized one of 1,000-plus attendees from television, but I couldn’t be quite sure. Proudly wearing a Code Pink t-shirt, the woman was handing out quartercards advertising a December 31 march to “break the illegal Gaza siege.”

Meet your friends.

If I am right in my recollection, I remember watching her being removed by Capitol Hill police officers with her Code Pink compatriots for protesting some congressional hearing I was watching on C-Span.  She may not have been welcome on Capitol Hill, but she sure seemed in her element at J-Street.

After three days among J-Streeters, I think I have come to some important conclusions about the nature of the organization, its followers and its future.

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Dan Calabrese

It’s tempting to believe that a severe crisis – a near-death experience, if you will – is enough to jolt even the most deeply deluded people out of their fantasies. To get a grasp on reality and begin operating accordingly.

It’s tempting, but it’s wrong, because people are who they are, and in most cases almost nothing can bring about anything but the most fleeting change in how a person thinks and acts.

Delusion. (Courtesy: babblingdweeb)

Communities can be the same way, at least in the case of metropolitan Detroit, where the union entitlement mentality appears to have robustly survived the near-and-still-possible death of the domestic auto industry.

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Mark Watson

Ima Player has played the Yes You Can national lottery since it was initiated six months ago. As with state lotteries, the national lottery was approved by Americans because the proceeds would go to educate the children and provide health insurance for victimized citizens and their undocumented non-citizen counterparts.

Careful with those balls.

Before Sunday’s 11 a.m. drawing, the 66-year-old great grandmother of 16 estimates she spends $100 of her $1,100 Social Security payments each month on lottery tickets, but usually only won about $60.

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