This week, the District of Columbia's city council introduced a bill that would authorize same-sex marriages within its boundaries. According to the Associated Press, the measure "appears unstoppable"—garnering support from most council members, the mayor, and a lack of opposition from the Democratic Congress. Depending how you count, that would make D.C. anywhere from the fifth to the eighth U.S. jurisdiction to legalize gay marriage.
The news is reported by the Associated Press.
It was announced by the Syrian state-run news agency. And confirmed by “Palestinian officials.”
A’jad will meet with Bashar Assad, the object of President Obama’s courtship.
The man whom Hillary last week basically called the military dictator of Iran will also confer with top guns from Hezbollah and Hamas. I’m sure that their topic will be the road to peace.
For more than a month now, I've taken a stubbornly optimistic line on the fate of health care reform -- I've given it slightly better than even odds of passing all along. You've probably noticed that most political reporters have a very different take. They write about health care reform in the past tense, or at best as a very long shot.
If you read this blog, you probably want to know the true state of play in the health care reform debate.
Well, join the club. After yet another a round of phone calls on Friday, I've become convinced that nobody really knows for sure.
Watching the wake for Martha Coakley on television Tuesday night, I saw John Kerry hobbling into the Sheraton Boston ballroom, his crutches supporting the hip replacement he'd had last week.
What a difference between this very serious and cerebral senator and the lightweight who aspired to join him in the upper house of the U.S. Congress.
I allude to two efforts by Kerry to reveal facts that others would prefer to leave undisturbed.
A new Associated Press report says the White House and members of Congress are contemplating a vastly scaled-down health care reform plan:
Chastened by the Democratic Senate loss in Massachusetts, President Barack Obama and congressional allies signaled Wednesday they will try to scale back his sweeping health care overhaul in an effort to at least keep parts of it alive.
“Chemical Ali” was arrested nearly seven years ago, near the beginning of the (second) Iraq war. He is a cousin of Sadsam Hussein who carried out (and maybe even initiated) the tyrant’s most serious crimes. His real name is Ali Hassan al-Majid, by which tag he has already been charged with and judged guilty of three other horrific assaults against the various peoples of Iraq.
One obvious question when Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd announced his retirement last week was what impact it would have on the effort to reform Wall Street. Dodd is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and the bill he wrote last year is the most ambitious regulatory initiative pending in Congress. Anything that changed Dodd’s calculus could have huge implications, which is why I was intrigued by a headline in the following day’s Wall Street Journal proclaiming that, “Dodd's Retirement Muddles Financial Overhaul.”
As first reported by the Associated Press, the White House and labor leaders have reached agreement on the so-called Cadillac tax. And while the deal's impact on the rest of health care reform is not yet clear, the agreement should move negotiations forward while preserving, in some form, an idea the administration and many experts think is essential for successful reform.
The centerpiece of the deal is a temporary exemption for union health plans: Until 2017, the new tax on the most expensive health insurance policies wouldn't apply to policies that were the result of collective bargaining agreements. Labor leaders and supporters have argued that unions would need time to renegotiate their contracts, which often span many years, in order to account for the imposition of the tax.
Other elements of the plan include:
-- Exempting vision and dental benefits from the calculations of plan value
-- Raising the threshold at which the tax kicks in, from $23,000 a year for a family plan to $24,000 a year. (The threshold for individuals goes from $8,500 to $8,900.)
-- Making additional adjustments to the formula based on age and gender
-- Allowing unions to shop for health plans through the new insurance exchanges
The argument for temporarily exempting union plans makes sense, at least in principle. Many unions really did accept generous health benefits, in lieu of wage increases, on the theory it was worth more to their members.
On the other hand, the tax--as originally written--wouldn't have started until 2013 anyway. And exempting union health benefits from the tax, even for a few more years, would mean collecting substantially less revenue.
My Washington decoder ring isn't the most finely tuned. But I think it's good enough to translate the message House leadership was trying to send yesterday: Don't take us for granted.
The message came most loudly, and most clearly, from Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel. For the last few weeks, observers (this one included) have been suggesting that keeping the requisite sixty senators in line will be difficult--and that, as a result, final legislation will look a lot more like the Senate version than its House counterpart.
That would mean, regrettably, covering fewer people and guaranteeing less comprehensive coverage than the House bill would. It'd also mean a lesser requirement on employers, taking less money from the drug and insurance industries, and accepting some sort of tax on the most expensive health benefits.
But Rangel, in an interview with Roll Call, suggested that straying too far from the House bill could also threaten the bill's success, because the original House bill barely passed--and House liberals, in particular, are in no mood to roll over for the Senate.
We’ve got a problem on both sides of the Capitol. A serious problem. ... The difficulty in hashing out an agreement between the two chambers is largely due to there being so many different factions with a stake in the matter ... Normally you’re just dealing with the Senate and they talk about 60 votes and you listen to them and cave in, but this is entirely different ... I’m telling you that never has 218 been so important to me in the House.
It wasn't just Rangel saying this.
Actually, I don't think we are going to hear the phrase "isolated extremist" again, at least not from the president. In fact, the more we hear from him from now on, the more entangled and united the terrorist international is likely to appear. The shock of Detroit has probably been most traumatic for Obama himself. He really did believe that the world of Islam was a civilized order, and he simply can't believe it now. Or can he?
Investors are looking for vehicles to put their money.
OK, I've got at least one.
Yes, invest in tuna. Are there tuna futures like there are pork belly futures? I don't know.
Here's the New York Times headline over an Associated Press story: "Giant Tuna Fetches $177,000 at Japanese Auction." This means that the price of sushi is going up, up, up.
I dimly remembered that Mohammed Atta and at least three of his brothers (a big word in Islam) had been known to security agencies at least a year before 9/11 as "likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States." This quote is from an August 9, 2005 article written by ace- investigator-of-intricate-matters Douglas Jehl for the New York Times.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the couple which together has needed $111 billion to stay afloat and are very far from doing so, did their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday afternoon, just before Christmas eve. I suppose this was to make sure the news contained in them would get the maximum possible attention. This was reported by the Associated Press. But see if it gets printed in your morning newspaper.
Four days before the fall of Kabul in November 2001, Osama bin Laden was still in town. The Al Qaeda leader’s movements before and after September 11 are difficult to trace precisely, but, just prior to the attacks, we know that he appeared in Kandahar and urged his followers to evacuate to safer locations in anticipation of U.S. retaliation. Then, on November 8, he was in Kabul, despite the fact that U.S. forces and their Afghan allies were closing in on the city.
These did not reach the intensity of the 100 hours war in 1969 between Honduras and El Salvador which was also over fought over World Cup soccer matches.
Megan McArdle has a post today in which she takes the media to task for what she deems "Palinoia." She writes:
These are Christopher Hitchens' words (in Slate), and so you are not surprised to find them sharp, even cutting. Doubtless, some of you are provoked. But please don't repair to the self-righteous. Self-righteousness is an awkward response to the truth.
Given the "seven salient facts" about Maj.
Last month, rapper Kanye West interrupted an MTV Video Awards ceremony to protest the selection of Taylor Swift for “Best Female Video.” So widely did the fallout from this episode spread that President Obama soon weighed in against West (“He’s a jackass”). Obama himself would soon become the subject of a similar award-related imbroglio, when he was bizarrely chosen as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
This week, the District of Columbia's city council introduced a bill that would authorize same-sex marriages within its boundaries. According to the Associated Press, the measure "appears unstoppable"—garnering support from most council members, the mayor, and a lack of opposition from the Democratic Congress. Depending how you count, that would make D.C. anywhere from the fifth to the eighth U.S. jurisdiction to legalize gay marriage.
Hillary Clinton has become the president's secretary for women's affairs, and she's done a good job at it--within the severe limits of what realistically can be done to protect females from sexual violence in war zones. On Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council met, with Hillary in the chair, and as the Associated Press put it, "adopted a resolution ...
The Associated Press reported yesterday that thousands of youths welcomed the return to Libya of the only man convicted for participation in the 1988 bombing of Pan American Flight 103.
During her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton's husband Bill promised the electorate that it would get "two for the price of one" if she was elected. She didn't demur, at least not in public.
But she also wasn't elected. She was appointed secretary of state by the winning candidate Barack Obama.
Tuesday's Boston Globe had in it an Associated Press dispatch that speculates about her feeling crowded by the president's frequent flyer international travel, by vice president Joe Biden's foreign assignments and what must be a nightmare for her, the designation of independent and high-powered individuals as special envoys to the most combustible areas in the world. Like Richard Holbrooke to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Truly high-powered. And George Mitchell. OK, not so high-powered. He will enter the history books as a failure, twice over. But that's another story.
As the AP put it, even on her visit to Africa, Hillary "couldn't escape his outsized shadow." By which it meant her husband and his visit with Kim Jung Il in Pyongyang. A university student had asked what Bill thought about some big Chinese loan to the Democratic Republic of Congo (which, by the way, is neither democratic nor a republic.). She was not cool in response: "My husband is not secretary of state, I am." AP says "she snapped." And then went on: "You want me to tell you what me husband thinks? If you want my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channelling my husband." She was a bit irritable, don't you think?
The Associated Press reported Monday that advisors to President-Elect Barack Obama “are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials.” This likely signals a major policy shift in the detention and trial of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay.
