Prometheus 6

ABC News' Teddy Davis, John Santucci and Gregory Wallace Report: No policy proposal more sharply divided Barack Obama from Hillary Clinton than the former first lady's plan requiring adults to purchase health insurance.

But as the one-time rivals head to Unity, N.H., on Friday, a health adviser to the presumptive Democratic nominee is signaling that Obama's plan could eventually go in Clinton's direction.

The funny thing is, this is true...yet the differences were so small you could actually ignore them for purposes of projecting the outcome of implementing each.

Please, ABC, Tell Us What This Story Is About
Another Obama flip-flop? Or just a plan that insurers will support?
By Trudy Lieberman Tue 1 Jul 2008 01:59 PM

A Dart to ABCNews.com for a muddled mess of a story that may be interesting to Beltway health cognoscenti, but is confusing as the devil to the man (or woman) on the street. The story, entitled “Obama Health Plan Could Go In Clinton’s Direction,” seems to say that Barack Obama now supports an individual mandate for health care. During the primaries, Obama repeatedly said that he would not require people (except children) to have insurance, and blasted Clinton for supporting an individual mandate.

“It’s not hard to understand why faith-based organizations need to discriminate on the basis of religion to maintain their essentially religious character,” Mr. Rosen wrote. “A Jewish organization forced to hire Baptists soon ceases to be Jewish at all.”

The problem is, government funded tasks are not essentially religious. There's also the nonsense that a single Baptist in the midst of a Jewish owned organization causes the organization to no longer be Jewish. Unless they're asserting the equally absurd argument that one Baptist would cause an influx of Baptists that must be hired.

When you're talking about leadership positions in a religious organization, faith and knowledge of doctrine is a legitimate job requirement. There's no need to legally validate discrimination to protect them. And the government isn't paying for leadership positions in churches.

Mr. Rosen also noted that “without the ability to discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring and firing staff, religious organizations lose the right to define their organizational mission enjoyed by secular organizations that receive public funds.” If Planned Parenthood could refuse to hire people disagreeing with its views about abortion, why should churches, mosques and synagogues not have the same right?

Is Planned Parenthood federally funded? Besides, anti-abortion types cannot properly council folks who have decided to have an abortion. Again, we're talking job requirements here.

Add to that the fact that Planned Parenthood is neither church nor state and so the separation of church and state doesn't apply to them any more than anti-discrimination law applies to family businesses with like 20-30 employees.

Obama Sets Off a Debate on Ties Between Religion and Government
By PETER STEINFELS

On Tuesday, Senator Barack Obama did his best to reclaim for Democrats the idea of partnerships between government and grass-roots religious groups — and except for six little words he did a very smooth job.

Profit uber alles.

Accounting Plan Would Allow Use of Foreign Rules
By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON — Federal officials say they are preparing to propose a series of regulatory changes to enhance American competitiveness overseas, attract foreign investment and give American investors a broader selection of foreign stocks.

But critics say the changes appear to be a last-ditch push by appointees of President Bush to dilute securities rules passed after the collapse of Enron and other large companies — measures that were meant to forestall accounting gimmicks and corrupt practices that led to those corporate failures.

Amistad to Publish Photo Book of Obama’s Campaign
By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 6/26/2008 7:40:00 AM

HarperCollins’s Amistad imprint announced today it will publish Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photos on October 28 with a 250,000-copy first printing. The book will cover Barack Obama’s campaign from its beginning through June, and will include more than 150 full color and b&w photographs plus an introductory essay.

Deb Willis, chair and professor of the New York University Tisch School of the Arts Photography and Imaging, will select and edit the photos. Kevin Merida, author of Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas (Doubleday) and a Washington Post writer, will write the introductory essay.

Amistad v-p and editorial director Dawn Davis and Deb Willis negotiated the book deal; literary agent Andrew Blauner negotiated the deal for Merida’s essay.

[M]y sense, though it’s hard to prove, is that the press is feeling a bit ashamed about the way it piled on General Clark. If so, news organizations may think twice before buying into the next fake scandal.

If so, the campaign has just taken a major turn in Mr. Obama’s favor. After all, if this campaign isn’t dominated by faux outrage over fake scandals, it will have to be about things that really did happen, like a failed economic policy and a disastrous war — both of which Mr. McCain promises will continue if he wins.

Rove’s Third Term
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet. Howard Dean didn’t scream. Hillary Clinton didn’t say she was staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated. And Wesley Clark didn’t impugn John McCain’s military service.

Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, titled his tell-all memoir “What Happened.” But a true account of modern American politics should be titled “What Didn’t Happen.” Again and again we’ve had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place.

The latest fake scandal fit the usual pattern as an awkwardly phrased remark, lifted out of context and willfully misinterpreted, exploded across the airwaves.

Ross Douthat

But there remains, I think, a striking opacity to Obama - the deep structures that inform his thinking aren't out in the open for anyone to see, the way they are with McCain, and in certain ways I feel like I know less about Obama the man than I did when he had just started running for President. This has been reflected across his life and political career: I don't agree with the entire Steve Sailer take on Obama, but Sailer is on to something when he writes that the Democratic nominee seems to have "spent his life trying on different personalities," while his core has remained something of a mystery - perhaps even to himself.

And here I am, constantly declaring a lack of surprise.

Grossman Land
By Steven Heller

In his 40-plus year career as a cartoonist, illustrator, sculptor and animator Robert Grossman has created numerous political comic strips for mainstream and alternative magazines. These strips acerbically address issues of the day, most often before they are on the popular culture radar screen.

His earliest strips in the 1960s included “Captain Melanin,” which featured one of the first black superheroes; “Roger Ruthless of the C.I.A.,” which questioned the agency’s work; and the comically veiled Richard M. Nightcrawler, an insect with henchmen named Haldebug and Ehrlichbug. In the 70s, his strip titled “Zoonooz” featured a menagerie of anthropomorphic beasts, including President Gerald Duck.

Obama...only supports letting religious institutions hire and fire based on faith in the non-taxpayer funded portions of their activities, said a senior adviser to the campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity to more freely describe the new policy.

Look, they're going to do that anyway. But you can't be officially condoning things like that. What are you going to do with the lawsuit that asks why, if churches can discriminate in hiring based on strongly held belief, everyone else is denied that right? What are you going to do with the church that fills their taxpayer-funded positions internally from among people hired for the non-taxpayer funded positions?

A regular reader forwarded me a link to Ms. Huffington's complaints about the way Obama is campaigning. It's an expansion on her appearance on Stephanopolis' show this weekend. He finds it a convincing explanation of why his own enthusiasm is waning.

In a Los Angeles Times article detailing Obama's attempts at "shifting toward the center," Matt Bennett of the centrist think tank Third Way says that Obama is a "good politician. He's doing all he can to make sure people know he would govern as a post-partisan moderate."

But isn't being a "good politician" as it's meant here exactly what Obama defined himself as being against? Instead of Third Way think tankers, Obama should listen to this guy:

You know why all this stuff from 2004 is popping up? Because I'm a slave to fashion.

You remember how every 5 minutes in 2004 we got a TERROR ALERT from Homeland Security, and then after Bush was re-elected the TERROR ALERTs seemed to go away? And then Tom Ridge admitted that at least a few of them were politically motivated?

Welcome back.

“The White House said Monday it agreed with an assessment by U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, who warns terrorists could test the next president with an attack.”

The likelihood of this working this time is essentially zero (nobody trusts the party of Katrina and Iraq with their security anymore) but it is a pretty perverse thing for a government to be engaged in.

It really is. Consider the thought of getting folks to trust you then willfully lying to them, consciously constructing a false view of the world, being shameless enough to defend your right to lie to those who trust you, just to get your way...

This is as close to objective evil as I am willing to admit exists.

The South Will Fall Again
By THOMAS F. SCHALLER

Washington

THE interim between the primaries and the parties’ nominating conventions is, according to ancient writ, a fertile period for presidential campaigns to talk about how they plan to expand the political map in the fall. This year is no different. Barack Obama’s strategists are suggesting that the first African-American presidential nominee of a major political party can parlay increased turnout among black voters into a string of victories in the South.

Given that roughly half of all African-Americans live in the 11 former Confederate states, the idea seems intuitive enough. It’s also wrong. Prying Southern electoral votes away from the Republicans is not so simple.

Two pervasive and persistent myths about racial voting in the modern South are behind the notion that Mr. Obama might win in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Mississippi.

Hat tip to...ME! Circa 2004:

In the end, Colin Powell's public career will survive this debacle...General Powell will be able to do the good soldier thing. Black folks will remember he spoke in favor of the idea of affirmative action programs. They'll remember he was The Good Soldier that had to get pulled in line periodically; he followed marching orders precisely but tended to wander out of line when left on his own. Clarke's defense against charges of disloyalty to Bush will be used in Powell's defense against charges of disloyalty to Black folks (charges that are already being made in some circles):

• It's not a lie, it's politics
• When you work for the president and he orders you to emphasize the positive, you do it

And in the end Black folks will accept him back into the fold, because we always do. We're suckers like that. That is the crucial point because I have NO doubt Colin Powell is a Republican and he will always be seen by the party as a possible means to access the Black vote, fools that they are.

Run with McCain and all that falls to hell.

Algorithm determines 'ideal' VP candidates for Obama, McCain
Grant Gross

June 30, 2008 (IDG News Service) It turns out that the ideal vice presidential candidate for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is the same person as the ideal vice presidential candidate for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the presumptive Democratic nominee, according to a sophisticated online survey by Affinnova Inc.

The foreclosure prevention bill is not a cure-all, by any means, but is a way to try to break the cycle. It would allow many troubled borrowers to exchange their unaffordable loans for new mortgages guaranteed by the federal government — as long as the lender agreed to reduce the existing loan balance to 85 percent of the home’s current value. It is questionable whether lenders would be willing to take the loss, and there’s nothing in the law to prod them to do so.

As Foreclosures Escalate

By the time the Senate returns next Monday from its July 4 recess, some 55,000 more homes will have entered foreclosure. And that’s hardly the full picture of the growing calamity. More than three million homeowners are currently at risk of default and millions more are expected to join them in the coming year as home prices drop, the economy falters and delinquencies rise. Yet the Senate went ahead with its vacation last Friday without passing a foreclosure prevention measure.

Obama’s Money Class
By DAVID BROOKS

Barack Obama sells the Democratic Party short. He talks about his fund-raising success as if his donors were part of a spontaneous movement of small-money enthusiasts who cohered around himself. In fact, Democrats have spent years building their donor network. Obama’s fund-raising base is bigger than John Kerry’s, Howard Dean’s and Al Gore’s, but it’s not different.

I guess you could say that. After all, there's only one national populations from which to solicit contributions.

But you could also say bigger is different.

I'm not sure anyone should have to campaign in a different dimension.

"People in Findlay are kind of funny about change," said Republican Mayor Pete Sehnert, a retired police officer who ran for the office on a whim last year. "They always want things the way they were, and any kind of development is always viewed as making things worse, a bad thing."

When people on College Street started hearing rumors about Obama -- who looked different from other politicians and often talked about change -- they easily believed the nasty stories about an outsider.

This person is actually beyond the reach of reason because his understanding of cause-and-effect is flawed.

Dr. James Dobson’s June 24 radio show critiqued Obama’s use of Scripture in justifying his political policies and positions. The next day Obama responded to the evangelical leader’s critique by saying that Dobson was “making stuff up,” which McCullough said was “an indirect way of calling Dobson a liar.”

Obama-Dobson argument a “political blunder” for Obama

Washington DC, Jun 29, 2008 / 06:04 pm (CNA).- Gary McCullough, director of Christian Newswire, has called Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s attack on Focus on the Family president James Dobson a “political blunder” that could have a significant impact on Evangelical swing voters who were otherwise lukewarm towards Obama’s opponent, Sen. John McCain.

Just in case, here it is again. Or watch it on CSPAN tonight.

The 12 participants (who were paid $100 each for their time) comprised six Democrats, two independents who leaned Democratic, two Republicans and two pure independents. None of the 12 supported Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain in the Pennsylvania primary on April 22; seven voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton. One of Hart's principal interests was to learn how those Clinton supporters felt about Obama....

Charles Fasano, a 56-year-old undertaker, identified himself as "a Democrat . . . thinking more about McCain, just because I don't trust Osama -- I mean Obama. It's only one letter difference. His middle name's Hussein. He comes from a Muslim family. It's not right, I can't see it. I just fear for America if he comes in." Later in the discussion Fasano predicted race riots in America if Obama is elected. These were classic examples of sentiments that no poll would ever uncover, but came bubbling up freely in this focus group.

Hearts, Not Minds
Polls Tell Them What Voters Think, But Moderators Say the Focus Group Reveals How Emotion Trumps Analysis
By Robert G. Kaiser
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 30, 2008; C01

What if the 2008 presidential election were decided by voters acting not on their political judgments or analyses of the candidates, but on their emotions? In the view of some experts, this is a trick question -- of course the election will be decided emotionally. Elections always are.

"Campaigns are about emotions and values more than about information," says John Russonello, a partner in a research and communications firm who loves to discover the feelings and visceral reactions that can move voters.

Russonello does this with focus groups, now a ubiquitous tool in American politics and business.

“How do you tell 102 million people who live in the South that they don’t matter?” said Steve Jarding, a Democratic consultant who has worked on several Southern campaigns. This year, he added, the region should be open to a Democratic argument on economics.

But some contend that the building blocks of a Democratic electoral majority lie elsewhere, notably the Southwest. That argument was laid out in 2006 in “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South,” by Thomas F. Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

“The notion that the Democrats have to win in the South is just a fiction,” Dr. Schaller said.

Obama Camp Thinks Democrats Can Rise in South
By ROBIN TONER

WASHINGTON — As they look to the fall election, Democrats face a strategic decision that has bedeviled their party for 40 years: How hard should they fight in the South?

And how does having Senator Barack Obama at the top of the ticket affect that calculation?

Our former president needs our understanding and support. A simple explanation by his doctors of the cause of his recent aberrant behaviors should bring peace of mind to Hillary and her campaign staff. If Mr. Clinton better understood his current limitations, he and his staff could take precautionary steps to avoid embarrassments. A long-overdue explanation would help his adoring public more easily accept his mistakes and readily forgive him. It is not your fault, Mr. Clinton.

Bill Clinton’s Madness:
A Consequence of Heart-Bypass Surgery Brain Damage

We Need to Understand and Show Some Compassion

Rep. Carolyn Kilpatrick was interviewed on CSPAN's Newsmakers program today. Half hour show.

(Due to spotty ISP service last night, this is a bit late)

In our discussions of principles for interpretation of the Constitution, I've noticed the sequence of statements is given weight. It has been argued the most important amendments in the Bill of Rights are the first ones declared. It has been argued that Congress, as the first branch defined in the Constitution, is first among equals. I think that lends weight to my suggestion that the preamble should be given more importance.

Yes, the preamble...the very first sentence in the document.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

We have a "conservative Democrat" from Kentucky, arguing for more conservative judges. And we have a "grass roots Republican" not only echoing his argument, but saying that in the South, "grass roots Republicans" are, in the South, often "conservative Democrats".

This is why "Blue Dog Democrats" are regarded with suspicion in progressive circles. Fact is, the Solid South keeps enough representation in both parties to be able to play either against their specifically local interests.

"Can you name one issue of national importance where Sen. Obama led and ran counter to his party's agenda?"

"Sen. Obama is not going to choose to be wrong as some sort of political statement. I grant McCain bucked his party when its errors were too obvious to ignore. The Democratic Party just hasn't given Sen. Obama that opportunity."

And oh yeah...never support a compromise with Republicans. You can accept a compromise but you can't support one.

"The blockbuster cases, the really big cases, have now brought into very sharp focus how closely divided the court is on the really large and philosophically charged issues before the court," said Charles J. Cooper, a Washington lawyer who was an official in President Ronald Reagan's office of legal counsel.

It has cast "the sharpest possible focus how important the court is going to be, I should think and should hope, in the upcoming election debate," Cooper added.

This was intentional. The Supreme Court decisions this session have been so much salami slicing, opening doors for Conservative activist-selected bad cases.

A Win by McCain Could Push a Split Court to Right
By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 29, 2008; A01

For much of its term, the Supreme Court muted last year's noisy dissents, warmed to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s vision of narrow, incremental decisions and continued a slow but hardly steady move to the right.

But as justices finished their work last week, two overarching truths about the court remained unchanged: It is sharply divided ideologically on some of the most fundamental constitutional questions, and the coming presidential election will determine its future path.

That focus group discussion mentioned in the previous post lasted two and change hours. It's pretty educational, watching a room full of white folks talk. The whole thing is here. It'll be broadcast on C-SPAN tomorrow. And here's an interesting bit of foreshadowing by Washington Journal.