Evergreene Digest A Journal of Progress for the Rest of Us

Human trafficking, much of it for sexual purposes, is a worldwide phenomenon. It can be found everywhere from Vietnam to the United States. Estimates of its victims run from 4 million to 27 million, which numbers provide a window on how difficult it is to get a handle on the crime. Each year since 2004, the U.S. Attorney General has presented Congress a report on human trafficking, which includes children and adults sold for sexual purposes and other forced labor. In other words, they are slaves. The number of children in this grim trade are estimated at one million, 80% of them girls. But, really, nobody knows for certain.

While many of these slaves are transported over international boundaries - perhaps 800,000 a year - the majority stay in their country of origin, far from family members, captive to the traffickers who make as much as $15 billion a year worldwide. But again, the real numbers are, at best, educated guesswork.

At the Daily Beast, Michelle Goldberg writes about how one victim in India has become a tireless advocate for others as co-founder of Prajwala.

When Sunitha Krishnan arrives at one of the shelters she runs for sex-trafficking victims in the Indian city of Hyderabad, several of the young women who live there throng around her, their high voices excited and quick. Just moments before, they tell her, a brothel madam and three of her goons had shown up at the shelter’s metal gate, screaming threats and abuse. No one seems particularly frightened—in Krishnan’s world, this sort of thing happens a lot. She’s been beaten up by traffickers 14 times in the last 18 years. Mere words don’t rattle her.

Only one girl, who hangs back from the others, looks shaken. She’d been rescued only the night before, and seems both confused and extremely wary. Her wrists are scarred with thick gashes. At first, Krishnan assumes they’re from suicide attempts—almost everyone in the shelter has at one time tried to kill herself—but the girl says she was cut by a customer. The truth, whatever it is, will probably come out later, when Krishnan has had time to win the girl’s trust. Right now, she has to head back to the headquarters of Prajwala, her anti-trafficking organization, because she has a meeting to plan another rescue. ...

Krishnan says her political awakening began when she was gang raped by eight men when she was 16. The worst part of it, she says, wasn’t the rape itself, but the way the surrounding society, including her own family, seemed to blame her for what happened. "Of course, being violated by eight men is not a pleasant experience, but that part of it faded," she says. "But the psychological part of it, the social part of it, continued for many years, that’s when things started becoming more and more clear to me." She realized, she said, "that women who are victims of sexual violence are doubly victimized by the society," and she committed her life to fighting such victimization.

• • • • •

At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:

The Army is sending troops back to Iraq whose injuries prevent them from wearing protective gear, firing a weapon, or even moving quickly enough to take cover to avoid enemy fire.

Jack Murtha seeks to change all this, simply by requiring that the Army adhere to its own standards on readiness, rest, and retraining.

But "Support the Troops" Republicans say no.

Riding the Diary Rescue streetcar tonight are vcmvo2, jlms qkw, jennyjem, dopper0189, Alfonso Nevarez, ybruti, and YatPundit in the motorman's chair of the handicap-accessible 400-series Riverfront car on an almost-spring New Orleans evening.

Diary Rescue is all about promoting good writers, so remember to subscribe to diarists whose work you enjoy reading.

The Rescues:

• coquiero adds to her series called Parenting a Child with Autism with a description of the expense and effort required to find the right bed for her daughter. (ybruti)
• In Mountaintop Removal Redux: Bobby vs. Blankenship, rperks reminds us of the real agenda that fuels "Big Coal's" vicious attacks on the mountains: greed. (vcmvo2)
• davidseth sheds sunlight on the dark and brutal views of a Supreme Court Justice in Quietly Sanctioning Prison Beatings. (jennyjem)
• mark louis analyzes and expounds in Alternative Energy Round-up W/Videos. (jlms qkw)
• FrankCornish reveals the hypocrisy of philanthropy in Charity V. Justice. (Alfonso Nevarez)
• Steven D considers how patent laws helped to turn one corporation into a giant monster in Monsanto Makes a Killing. (jennyjem)
• Spencer Troxell muses about his "clients" at a homeless shelter while he tries to deal with a Bird In the House. (ybruti)
• Examining the work of several high profile "global warming skeptics" DWG finds their work not only unscientific, but also not the work of a true skeptic: More reasons to doubt climate change skeptics. (dopper0189)
• RLMiller describes the planned logging of 80,000 acres in the Tongass National Forest and asks Why does Congress want to raid our best carbon bank? (ybruti)
• Reino brings the CCSSI to your attention, and discusses the downside of National Educational Standards, as well as how you have the opportunity to add your two cents. (jennyjem)
• FinchJ reflects and writes Confessions from a Graduate. (jlms qkw)
• PaulLoeb provides us with a Soul of A Citizen excerpt: The Real Rosa Parks, which debunks the myth of the spontaneous movement, and exalts the virtues of a persistent and well organized struggle. (Alfonso Nevarez)
• And for a little inspired ranting to blow out the pipes, Vietnam Veteran jm214 is a bit pissed about Our Brilliant Military (What's Next?) by A Dumb Viet Vet. (claude)
• Avenging Angel provides some sobering statistics on what is at stake without real health care reform: Employers Rapidly Shifting Health Care Costs to Workers. (dopper0189)
• onemadrn describes a very painful shift in the ER: He was only 24. (vcmvo2)

jotter has High Impact Diaries: March 11, 2010.

sardonyx brings us Top Comments: Lamentations Edition.

Please join the Diary Rescue krewe this evening by suggesting your own rescues in this Open Thread.

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 3/8/2010-3/11/2010. Registered Voters. MoE 2.8% (Last week's results in parentheses):

FAVORABLEUNFAVORABLENET CHANGEPRESIDENT OBAMA54 (53)42 (43)+2PELOSI:35 (36)56 (56)-1REID:26 (27)67 (66)-2McCONNELL:20 (21)63 (63)-1BOEHNER:19 (19)63 (62)-1CONGRESSIONAL DEMS:38 (37)60 (61)+2CONGRESSIONAL GOPS:23 (24)68 (67)-2 DEMOCRATIC PARTY:40 (39)56 (57)+2REPUBLICAN PARTY:29 (30)67 (66)-2

Full crosstabs here. This poll is updated every Friday morning, and you can see trendline graphs here.

Since this is now the second week since the big transition from a universe of all adults to a universe of registered voters, we can finally draw some legitimate comparisons.

Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of volatility to explore. The Democrats (with the exception of the leadership) gain a couple of points in net favorability this week, while the GOPers in question lose a point or two.

That said, some other key indicators don't show much change. The margin for Democrats on the generic ballot variation remains steady at a three-point edge for the Democrats (46-43, up a point for both sides). Meanwhile, the right track-wrong track indicator (critical for the incumbent party) only improved incrementally, from 38/60 to 39/60.

Another key stat, one we have been tracking for a long time, is voter intensity. Those numbers change only a little this week, and in the Republicans' direction. The GOP now has a 51/21 split between those who seem likely to vote versus those who appear unlikely to vote, a net improvement of two points for the Red team (49/21 last week). Meanwhile, the net Democratic voter intensity slacked off by a point (40/32, from 39/30 last week).

After all these months we finally learn the real reason Republicans, to a man, oppose health care reform ... self-esteem:

Discuss.

Spencer Ackerman has a critical post about just how duplicitous Lindsey Graham is in his crusade to stop the 9/11 trials from going forward in federal courts. Graham has been working with Rahm Emanuel on this, promising that if he gets his way on no civilian trials, then he'll get Republicans to drop their opposition to closing Guantanamo.

On Friday, the White House said it was “weeks away” from any decision about whether to scrap a civilian trial for the man known as KSM — which could give Graham what he wants.

There’s just one problem. Graham’s rationale for why KSM needs to be tried in a military commission and not a civilian court has to do with the procedures in the commissions for protecting classified information. But the revisions to the military commissions approved by Congress last year — with significant input from Graham himself — removed any significant difference between how classified information is handled in military and civilian venues. Accordingly, Chris Anders, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said Graham’s position was founded on “one big urban myth” — though whether that will affect Obama’s political calculation over the trial remains to be seen.

Asked to specify Graham’s objection to trying KSM in civilian court, Kevin Bishop, Graham’s chief spokesman, said that the senator is concerned about the potential for releasing classified information in open court. “Military justice and the military framework — a military commission — would allow us to better protect classified information,” Bishop said. Graham made a version of that argument on February 13 in the Republican radio address, referencing a 1995 terrorism trial and asserting, “valuable intelligence was compromised.”

But the military framework for handling classified information is almost exactly the civilian framework for handling it. The Military Commissions Act of 2009, which set procedure for the revised military commissions, explicitly instructs military judges to look to the civilian rules for protecting classified information, known as the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA. Under the Act’s fifth subchapter governing the “construction of provisions” for the “protection of classified information,” the text says that “the judicial construction of the Classified Information Procedures Act (18 U.S.C. App.) shall be authoritative,” except in certain specific cases that Justice Department officials said are legally arcane....

The ACLU’s Anders wondered whether the novelty of military commissions — especially as the legal rules under the commissions have changed three times since the Bush administration created them after 9/11 — might make them more likely avenues for inadvertent disclosure of classified information in a KSM trial. “Who is going to do a better job with applying the substantively difficult law protecting classified information,” Anders said, “federal judges who have regularly applied it in many cases, or military commission judges who have never even tried a complex criminal case, much less the most important international terrorism case in history?”

[Joshua] Dratel [one of a handful of defense attorneys to have taken on terrorism cases in the pre-9/11 civilian courts] agreed, citing a case he argued at Guantanamo Bay in which a judge blurted out that something stated in court “probably” ought to have been classified. ” Any preference for military commissions based on some purported danger of release of classified information in federal courts is like worrying about ships going too far toward the horizon because they’ll fall off the edge of the earth,” he said. “It is simply without any factual foundation, and ignores the 30-year history of federal courts handling classified information in the context of criminal prosecutions.” [emphasis mine]

Graham is purely playing politics on this, the more seemingly genteel side of the same game that Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, and Chuck Grassley are playing with their attacks on the DOJ--undermining Holder and his Justice Department. Making this deal with Graham would be a disaster for the White House on many levels, not the least of which is that Graham isn't a position to fulfill the Guantanamo part of the bargain.

I think I could probably expand this one tweet into an entire book on San Francisco politics.

So, early this morning, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced at Caffe Roma he would indeed be running for California Lt. Governor. There is a popular support for his bid in San Francisco as if he won, the Board of Supervisors would pick who gets to finish out the last year of his term. The smart money is that the Board would go with current SF Democratic Party Chair and former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin.

Hours later, blogger and Examiner columist Sweet Melissa Griffin went to get her afternoon coffee at Caffe Trieste. For those of you who don't know SF, Trieste is 2.5 blocks and a world away from Roma. It is also known as Peskin's office. And there he was, with Janice Hahn -- who has been running for Lt. Gov for months.

Morning coffee at Roma vs afternoon coffee at Trieste pretty much describes the fault-line in North Beach politics.

No word on whether former Gray Davis, Joe Lieberman, & Gavin Newsom consultant Garry South was with Hahn. South went to Hahn after Newsom failed to raise any money in his gubernatorial bid. The news of South joining Newsom's gubernatorial bid was actually broken by a blogger who saw Newsom and South at Starbucks.

After the jump, an Open Letter to Garry South from Calitics & friends, asking him to resign from the Hahn campaign.

Think Progress and the Texas Freedom Network report that the Texas Board of Education has elected to remove references to Thomas Jefferson from the state's social studies curriculum standards.

Think Progress:

The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, “replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.”

TFN:

9:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

9:40 – We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

9:45 – Here’s the amendment Dunbar changed: “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” Here’s Dunbar’s replacement standard, which passed: “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau,  Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.” Not only does Dunbar’s amendment completely change the thrust of the standard. It also appalling drops one of the most influential political philosophers in American history — Thomas Jefferson.

9:51 – Dunbar’s amendment striking Jefferson passed with the votes of the board’s far-right members and board member Geraldine “Tincy” Miller of Dallas.

9:56 – Here is what the Library of Congress says about Jefferson’s influence: “Recognized in Europe as the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson quickly became a focal point or lightning rod for revolutionaries in Europe and the Americas.” The Library of Congress notes, in particular, Jefferson’s influence on revolutionaries in France (including on the Declaration of the Rights of Man), other European nations, South America and Haiti.

If there was ever a WTF moment, this is it. Seriously, what else can you say? The wingers are so far gone, so far off the deep end, so completely crazy...it's almost like the only thing left is...WTF?

It's not exactly breaking news that there is a wage gap between men and women and between whites and people of color.

But a new study from the Insight Center for Community Economic Development reveals a shocking disparity in women's wealth:

Among the most startling revelations in the wealth data is that while single white women in the prime of their working years (ages 36 to 49) have a median wealth of $42,600 (still only 61 percent of their single white male counterparts), the median wealth for single black women is only $5.

Yes. You read that right. Five dollars.

And the numbers aren't much better for black women on the whole, whose median wealth is only $100, or for Hispanic women, whose median wealth is only $120.

The study [pdf] focused on data from the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Board. That means, according to the study's authors, that as bad as these numbers were in 2007, in all likelihood, they're a lot worse now, given the recent economic downturn. In other words, the conclusion that single black women's wealth is about $5 is actually a conservative estimate.

The study offers several explanations. Women of color are more likely to hold jobs with lower pay and fewer benefits. They're also more likely to be raising their families alone, with a full 70 percent of black families headed by single women. And while married or cohabitating women of color do better, with a median net worth of $31,500, that's still substantially less than their white counterparts, whose median net worth is $167,500.

Another explanation is the disproportionate reliance on credit card debt for what the National Council of La Raza calls "survival spending." You know, those luxuries like groceries and other necessities.

And finally, there's this catch:

Last but not least, women of color are more likely to use their own financial resources to help out extended family members. With a history of exclusion from public benefits and economic opportunities afforded to whites, women of color know they are relied on and must rely on others in their families and communities when hard times hit.

So in times of economic trouble, black women are more likely to take on the additional burden of assisting friends and family, with fewer resources available to assist them, and thus, they're the most likely to have greater debt and less wealth. Nice catch, huh?

Meizhu Lui, director of the Closing the Gap Initiative, who contributed to the report, and works every day to improve the economic circumstances of women of color, was nonetheless shocked by the report.

"Even for those of us who have been looking at the wealth gap for a while, we were shocked and amazed at how little women of color have," Ms. Lui said.

The study recommends five policy changes to address these horrible imbalances and improve the financial realities for women of color:

• Improve data collection
• Improve employment opportunities for women of color
• Support self-employment and microenterprise
• Provide low-income women with subsidies and incentives to save
• Modify social insurance to provide adequate protection for women of color, who often fall through the cracks because of significant gaps in coverage

The entire study is devastating in its assessment of women's wealth, or lack thereof, but well worth reading.

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...

Still Yellow After All These Years

My goodness, time flies when you're living off of dust mites and stray cookie crumbs while cowering under the bed.

As of today, America has spent eight years (2,922 days---yes, I keep count) under the watchful eye of  the federal government's color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System.

Tom Ridge changed---or was pressured to change---the colors ten times during the system's first two years, mostly due to the dire threat of Democrats winning elections. He then apparently lost the key to the color-changing control box and we've been stuck at "Yellow" ever since.

(Despite spending untold billions of dollars on security, our nation's airports are stuck at level "Orange." This makes me wonder if most of the money isn’t going towards lavish TSA "strip-search parties," where employees lounge in gold hot tubs, suck shots off each other's stomachs and play games of "Bobbing for Diamonds." But I digress.)

DHS helpfully spells out what you're supposed to do [pdf] in each color-coded phase. But given how thoroughly they're ignored these days, I've updated them to be slightly more useful:

Level Green ("Low"): Yawn
Level Blue ("Guarded"): Scratch tummy, rub eyes
Level Yellow ("Elevated"):  Plop down in La-Z-Boy with TV remote, six-pack and bag of Doritos. Pull handle on side of La-Z-Boy to elevate feet.
Level Orange ("High"): Twist up a big fat one. Light. Check program guide to see if The Big Lebowski is on.
Level Red ("Severe"): SHIT! Your mom just pulled in the driveway! Extinguish joint and spray entire can of Glade throughout house ASAP!

Sadly, the days of what I call the "Ruh-roh Rainbow" may be numbered. Last year President Obama---who once called the system "the color-coded politics of fear"---ordered a review of the effectiveness of the system. Given that such a review would take about five seconds, we can only assume that it was completed but the report got lost between Janet Napolitano's sofa cushions.

So, on what may be (but probably won't be) its last birthday, let's all take a moment to raise our three-ounce bottles of hair gel and offer our traditional salute---which also happens to be the motto of the GOP---for perhaps (but probably not) the final time to the Department of Homeland Security's Threat Advisory System:

"Ooga Booga!"

Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts in There's Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

What's coming up on Sunday Kos ....

• In honor of Women's History Month, Angry Mouse will explain what's wrong with Women's History Month.
• Page van der Linden will take you on a virtual tour of the Hanford Site in Washington State, with an updated look at the environmental legacy of the Cold War nuclear arms race.
• DemFromCT will take a look at the changing health reform landscape in “why I support health care reform” and argues for passing the current bill despite its flaws because it’s the right thing to do.
• exmearden will examine the political and functional obstacles of broadband access on Native American reservations in the US, and how upcoming proposals by the FCC may impact this access.
• Dante Atkins will extol the virtues of pragmatism.

Needless to say, California GOP gubernatorial frontrunner Meg Whitman has had a week she'd probably rather forget. After all, our own DK/R2K poll showed that despite a month of saturation level advertising, she still trails the in absentia campaign of Democrat Jerry Brown by four points. Of course, that came after her absurdly bad press availability in the Bay Area this week, where she got the "deer in the headlights" look when reporters began peppering her with questions, tagging off to her press aide who promptly ushered the reporters out of the room with great haste.

This "press event without the press" fed an already growing campaign narrative that Whitman is deeply fearful of finding herself in unscripted situations.

This will do little to disabuse people of that notion:

A funny thing happened when Camp Whitman was filming its 30-minute info-mercial last night in Orange County. Oh, besides stuff like covert filming by her opponents, cops being called, crowd screening and Meg goosing the audience for applause.

* * * * * *

The tickets to this "private" Meg event --- which didn't tell the ticket-holder that they were going to potentially be part of infomercial history -- found their way into the hands of Whitman's political opponents, both Democratic and Republican (of the Insurance Commish Steve Poizner variety.)

Somehow operatives from the two camps were giving off some sort of musk that told Team Whitman that they weren't Meg's type of people. The Poiz operative was told to stop filming. But before he did, he managed to get shots of Meg asking the crowd to make sure to applause loudly for her. "A lot of cheering would be good" she tells them.

The Democratic operative booted from the festivities was a Californian named Jeremy Thompson, who made the charge on his Twitter page that Team Whitman actually called the cops on him for being there, despite the fact that he had been invited to the event.

On its own, the incident probably would not amount to much embarrassment for the Whitman team. Stacking the crowd for a Town Hall is hardly political breaking news, nor is it a grand aberration for politicos or their subordinates to coach a crowd prior to cameras rolling.

But for a campaign that has already taken no small amount of heat for both secrecy, and for keeping their candidate in a hermetically sealed bubble, this was a gaffe targeted right at their Achilles' Heel.

Jerry Brown, whose campaign as of the close of the year had spent less than Meg Whitman had on staff travel alone, has to be thanking his good fortune that the Whitman campaign is building this quite perilous narrative for their candidate without his help.

Earlier today we found out that things weren't exactly as they seemed last night with regard to the Senate parliamentarian's supposed ruling on the order in which the health insurance reform and reconciliation bills had to be considered.

Now things are getting muddied again:

Now, however, House Dem leaders appear to have adopted the former view. At her presser today, in a reference to the president,  Nancy Pelosi said:

“People would rather he waited until the Senate acted, but the Senate Parliamentarian said in order for them to do a reconciliation based on the Senate bill, it must be signed by the President.”

Separately, on the House floor today, Eric Cantor pressed Steny Hoyer on the issue, asking Hoyer whether it’s his position that the Senate bill “must be signed into law before the Senate can even take up the reconciliation package.”

“I think the gentleman correctly states the Senate parliamentarian’s position,” Hoyer replied.

Well, no. The gentleman likely did not state the Senate parliamentarian's position correctly, at least if he thinks the position is that the Senate bill must be signed into law first.

If the House no longer needs the Senate to pass the reconciliation bill first in order to corral House votes for the Senate health insurance reform bill, then that's one thing. That was the whole aim of laying out this strategy, and if it's not necessary right now, that puts things in a different light.

But House Democratic leaders should not concede to the Republican position on this, if only to preserve the ability to use this procedure in the future should it ever prove necessary. There's no reason in the world to surrender this weapon if it's available to you. You don't have to use it if it's unnecessary, but you should never concede its legitimacy. That's just foolish.

Stories like this ought to give pause to those who make the argument that the Republican Party has finally regained its mojo and is back on track to attaining majority status:

Et tu, Rob Portman? Ye of sensibility and rectitude? Ye of maturity and political resolve?  Despite inquires from Cincinnati Enquirer and Plain Dealer, Portman's campaign won't  directly answer the question of whether the candidate believes that President Obama is a citizen.  (Obma is.) So now, we're up to five Republican Senate candidates -- major ones, not including J.D. Hayworth in Arizona for the moment -- who have flirted with Birtherism.

Several of these candidates have later corrected their initial hesitation, but it precisely that initial hesitation that contains so much information about what Republican candidates fear right now.

In the (slightly less than) fourteen months of the Obama Presidency, there's no question that Republicans have improved their national standing to some extent. But it's important to remember that they've gained ground amidst the worst job market in more than fifty years, and they've done so while engaging nonstop in political warfare against a majority party that has been more preoccupied with the actual (and messy) process of governing than it has in playing politics.

Still, Republicans -- despite having the political advantage of a terrible economy and having been mostly ignored by their opponents -- have at best begun to approach parity in public opinion polls.

Now that we're getting closer to the election, no longer will Republican attacks go unanswered. Democrats are going to start firing back at Republicans with increasing regularity. There will be less intraparty fighting. The economy will continue its path of recovery. And in all likelihood the signature accomplishment of health care reform will have been achieved.

And so as we head into the beginning stages of the 2010 midterm elections, you have a Democratic Party that will start to unify after having successfully implemented major reforms. More importantly, you have a Democratic Party base that will see that the party was in fact able to deliver on important pieces of its agenda, giving them confidence that the long list of things to be done can be achieved.

Meanwhile, you have a completely ineffective Republican Party that has no new ideas, and is almost entirely animated by its hatred of President Obama -- hatred that is so extreme that its own U.S. Senate candidates can't even repudiate the wildly insane notion that President Obama is not in fact a natural born American citizen.

The notion that this GOP is anywhere near regaining majority status is almost as crazy as the birthers who are bringing it down.

So reports The Hill:

Democratic leaders have been able to pick off members of the anti-abortion-rights bloc Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) claimed to have, the congressman said Friday.

[...]

[T]he Michigan Democrat, who claimed he had carried with him a dozen votes against the healthcare bill, suggested that his bloc of votes may be cracking, providing Democratic leaders with valuable votes for their pending healthcare measures.

"At this point, there is no doubt that they’ve been able to peel off one or two of my twelve," he said. "The others are having both of their arms twisted, and we’re all getting pounded by our traditional Democratic supporters, like unions.”

Nancy Pelosi may yet be able to attract the 216 votes necessary to pass healthcare reform through the House and send it along to the President. The 30 million Americans without coverage today who would have health insurance as a result of this legislation -- including the 15 million who will be added to the rolls of government plans like Medicaid and CHIP -- may actually be on track to leave the ranks of the uninsured.

Nancy Pelosi has refused to take possession of the hot potato.

"We're talking about something that is not going to be part of the legislation," Pelosi said, noting "with sadness" that the public insurance option won't be part of legislation. "I'm quite sad that the public option is not in there," she said....

"I'm not having the Senate, which didn't have a public option in its bill, put any of that on our doorstep," she said. "It did not prevail. What we will have in reconciliation will be something that is agreed upon, House and Senate, that they can pass and we can pass... It isn't in there because they don't have the votes."

Progressive activist Adam Green, who's been leading an outside effort to reintroduce the public option into the debate, said that Pelosi's whip count is unconvincing. "When the Senate Whip says he will aggressively whip the House reconciliation bill through the Senate unamended and onto the President's desk, the Speaker doesn't get to say the Senate lacks the votes," said Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "Mark Warner, Tom Harkin, Herb Kohl, Claire McCaskill, and other undeclared senators are not going to vote against the president's top priority, and if Speaker Pelosi refuses to even allow a vote on the public option, than she killed the public option. She needs to step up."

Whatever the political reality in the Senate -- and it does appear that the votes exist there -- Pelosi faces her own public-option problems in the House. Even were she to push for a public option, she might not be able to get it through her chamber this time around, despite succeeding the last time. Several Democrats who have backed the bill, and are supporters of the public option, are bucking the Speaker this time, objecting that their restrictive abortion language is not in the legislation. Pelosi said after the briefing, asked if abortion law changes could be made in the reconciliation, that the process must stick only to budget matters.

Whatever the political reality in the Senate -- and it does appear that the votes exist there -- Pelosi faces her own public-option problems in the House. Even were she to push for a public option, she might not be able to get it through her chamber this time around, despite succeeding the last time. Several Democrats who have backed the bill, and are supporters of the public option, are bucking the Speaker this time, objecting that their restrictive abortion language is not in the legislation. Pelosi said after the briefing, asked if abortion law changes could be made in the reconciliation, that the process must stick only to budget matters.
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That means Pelosi needs to flip 'no' votes who thought that the earlier House bill was too liberal, and adding a public option could complicate that process.

It doesn't help Pelosi that the Obama administration has shown no interest in the public option over the past year.

Pelosi argued that she should not be blamed for the failure to implement the public option, charging that she has been a supporter of single-payer health care before most reporters at her briefing were born.

She makes a good argument when it comes to the blame game. Of the three parties involved in these negotiations, the House, Senate, and White House, the only entity to actually pass the public option and to keep it alive was the House, propped up by a fired up base and activist network that saw both the key policy reasons for the public option, as well as the political popularity of it--popularity that would have done the Dems some much needed good come November. Common sense, however, rarely seeps through the walls of conventional wisdom in DC. So if--and if we know anything, it's that this entire process is iffy--the public option is dead the smoking gun isn't in Pelosi's hand. Jon Cohn is right on this one, the Senate killed it. Although they had an accomplice in the White House, which obviously felt it was a disposable element. Had Obama wanted it, and fought for it like he did the highly unpopular excise tax, it probably would have survived in some form, just like the excise tax.

The push hasn't ended. Rep. Grayson is gaining steam with his Medicare buy-in public option proposal, a smart idea. We know that a different version of Medicare buy-in, one that would allow people over 55 to obtain Medicare coverage, only had one real opponent in the Senate--Joe Lieberman. Smart progressive congress people and Senators would do well to keep that in mind as they are whipped for their votes.

• Neil Cavuto claims the "Polls Are Increasingly Looking Worse" for the Democrats on passage of health care, just as the polls are, uh, not looking worse.
• More alternative history from Glennbeckistan:

  Well, they bombed Pearl Harbor. We went after them for Pearl Harbor. You want to know why they bombed us? It didn't come out of the blue. You want to know why? Because Woodrow Wilson told England, "You need to align yourself with us and not Japan." And so we humiliated Japan. ... So, yeah, it was terror. The progressives started it, then pretended it was a big surprise.

  Jonathan Schwarz tweets: I'm intrigued by Glenn Beck's new book, "Protocols of the Elders of Progressivism."

• No Big Pharma dollars for you, Governor:

  Gov. Brian Schweitzer said Thursday that he is seeking federal permission to import cheaper drugs from Canada for use in state insurance programs.

  Schweitzer said he thinks the move could chop 40 percent off the $100 million the state spends each year on prescription drugs for Medicaid, the children's health insurance program, state employees, and inmates at the prison.

• digby remembers:

  ... whenever I hear the Republicans lugubriously wax on about the president and the Democrats acting against the will of the people, I can't help but think back to the early days of the Bush administration when the man who had been installed by a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court was rolling over the 50-50 Senate as if he'd won a landside.

• At Mother Jones, Matthew Power discusses How Your Twitter Account Could Land You in Jail.
• Conservadem pollsters Caddell and Schoen warn against passing health reform. Of course, in DC, there’s no penalty for failure if you’re a pundit. In 2008 Schoen thought McCain would guarantee a win by choosing Lieberman.

  "Remember, Sen. John F. Kerry tried hard to recruit McCain as his running mate in 2004. Had McCain agreed, Kerry would almost certainly be president today. By offering the vice presidency to a well-regarded moderate such as his old friend Joe Lieberman, McCain would go a long way to ensuring victory in November -- unless Clinton or Obama beats him to the punch."

  How’d that work out again?

• Environmentalists cheer as Los Angeles Department of Water and Power drops plans for an 85-mile power transmission line across the desert.
• The Council on Foreign Relations has a fascinating interview with former Secretary of State George Shultz on "Confronting the Nuclear Tipping Point". The interview touches on some interesting Cold War history, as well as Shultz's strong support for President Obama's nuclear security agenda.-- Page van der Linden
• The Census Bureau reported that retail sales were up 0.3% for February, but revised sharply down for January. The previously reported December to January increase of 0.5% was revised to 0.1%. Retail sales are now up 6% from their bottom in the Great Recession, and 6.4% down from their pre-recession peak.
• Fossil Fuel Influence Surrounds Senators as Ex-Staffers Turn Lobbyists: Sunlight Foundation Maps the Web Spun Around Sen. Blanche Lincoln.
• Approaching the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Idious Buguise remembers Baghdad, Then and Now:

  Baghdad was an ancient and modern Arabic metropolis of electricity, and vibrancy, and vitality, and questioning, and answering, and dinner parties, and bright-red nail polish, and Armani-clad gentlemen, and Marks and Spencers-clad tumbling tots, and young, bright-eyed, short-skirted Kurdish women working in government offices, and well-educated, high-powered Iraqi women holding the reins in sprawling schools and sky-scraping offices, and gallant mustached old men shrouded in elegant gowns and headscarves helping even older men in more elegant attire across the bustling roundabouts and past hordes of honking, newly imported cars hurtling over newly constructed highways past heavily laden donkey carts and state-of-the-art water treatment plants and modern hospitals and schools and electrical substations and stadiums with roaring, cheering crowds. And above all these signs of "we are no longer a third-world country," fleets of planes arriving and departing on time from every corner of the earth.

• Michelle Alexander talks about The New Jim Crow: How the war on drugs gave birth to a permanent American undercaste.
• Want to sign Alan Grayson's petition for allowing any American to buy into Medicare at cost? You can do it here.

Tom Toles nails it:

It's a line Democrats would do well to remember.

The President is considering and seems likely to nominate Janet Yellen, currently the Governor of the San Francisco Federal Reserve and an economist at Berkeley, for the position of Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, a post that becomes vacant in June when current term of Donald Kohn expires.

From the New York Times:

The Obama administration has settled on Janet L. Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, to serve as vice chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, a senior administration official said on Thursday night. Ms. Yellen, 63, who was chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors in the Clinton administration, was widely considered to be the front-runner for the position. She would succeed Donald L. Kohn, who intends to retire when his four-year term expires in June.

Ms. Yellen is viewed by some economists as relatively more inclined to keep interest rates low to stimulate economic growth and reduce the high rate of joblessness. The Fed now faces a tricky balancing act of trying to nudge rates up from historic lows while not choking off a recovery.

Two other seats on the Fed’s seven-member board also need to be filled. The President did nominate one other Fed Governor, Daniel K. Tarullo, who took office in January 2009.

Janet Yellen is an excellent choice. She was appointed to the San Francisco post in 2004 and had previously served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999 under President Bill Clinton. Significantly, she has published widely on a variety of macroeconomic topics and is an authority on unemployment.

[UPDATE] The Obama Administration today announced its nominees to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Two are economists and another is a lawyer with expertise on financial regulatory environment. The three nominees are Janet L. Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, who is the top choice for vice chairwoman, and Peter A. Diamond, an economist from MIT who is an authority on Social Security, pensions and taxation. The lawyer, Sarah Bloom Raskin, is the Maryland commissioner of financial regulation. More at the New York Times.

Having been rebuffed in his quest for the Governorship of California, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is now setting his sights on the number two job in the state and will announce that he is a candidate for Lt. Governor. Frankly, it's time that Gavin Newsom goes away, runs his wine business, raises his daughter and seeks massive amounts of therapy. The antipathy is personal and if he doesn't get that well then he's more clueless than we thought. His tenure as mayor of this fair city has been nothing short of a disaster. Instead of running this city and doing the job he was elected to do, he has spent the last two years plus seeking higher office. Singlehandedly, he has turned half of San Franciscans into Chris Daly fans, a feat I would have thought impossible. The most compelling reason to have Gavin Newsom elected Lt. Governor is to have him leave Room 200 at City Hall a year early but then why would we want to inflict our pain and his incompetence on the rest of the state even if the office is of little consequence?

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Mayor Gavin Newsom finally put an end to the questions of will he or won't he, and announced this morning that he is running for lieutenant governor.

Newsom dodged reporters' questions for weeks about whether he would trade in City Hall for Sacramento. However, he promised to reveal his decision today, which is the deadline for candidates running for statewide office to file their paperwork.

He did just that in an interview on CBS5 with our colleague Phil Matier.

"I'm in full steam ahead," he said.

The Democratic primary is June 8 and Newsom's challengers are Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn and state Sen. Dean Florez of Kern County.

Hahn has hired Newsom's former campaign strategist, Garry South, (aka The King of Mean) and before Newsom even announced his candidacy South fired off a letter saying that when the two worked together, Newsom showed nothing but "disinterest in and disdain for" the job.

If Newsom wins the primary, which he's expected to do, he will square off with Abel Maldonado, the recently appointed lieutenant governor, Nov. 2. Speculation is already rampant about who will end up in Room 200 to serve out Newsom's term that ends in January 2012.

Newsom, however thinks that "it should be up to the people to decide" who will replace him. A group is meeting today to determine how to place the issue before voters in November.

The other main candidate in the race is Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who has been attacking Gavin Newsom as indecisive. I think she is onto something. Incompetent, inept, egotistical, prone to delusions of grandeur, out-of-touch, obnoxious, arrogant and narcissistic also come to mind. For San Franciscans January 2012 can't come soon enough.

And if you want to see the Mayor as an inglorious bastard, then this November 2009 interview with CBS 5 political reporter Hank Plante pretty much does it.

On Wednesday the House of Representatives unanimously approved HR 4261, the Prevent Deceptive Census Look-Alike Mailings Act. The short bill would ban fundraising letters like those the Republican National Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee sent last month, which gave the appearance of being official census documents. Those mailings were legal because they did not "use the full name of the U.S. Census Bureau or the seal of any government agency." However, even Republicans have admitted that the tactic crosses a line, and no one in the House GOP caucus wanted to go on record opposing the bill on Wednesday.

On the other hand, it costs Congressional Republicans nothing to vote for this bill. Their committees are already cashing checks from this year's deception, and the next census won't roll around for ten years. If Republicans truly believe it's wrong to raise money with a fake census letter, they should return all contributions from suckers they've duped this year.