toniD's blog

HR3200
Submitted by toniD on Sun, 08/02/2009 - 9:24pm.

America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 (Introduced in House)

Here's the bill so far...

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.3200:

Remember there are 3 House bills that have to be combined and then combined with the Senate bill.

At least you can get a good idea of what is there and what should be there and what should NOT be there.

This open mic is dedicated to the Pros and Cons of Sonia Sotomayor as a selection for the Supreme Court.

Please leave comments with Facts as background for or against her.

I'll start it out with a Pro:

Ooops: Socialist Quote Sure to Dog Sotomayor

Well won't you lookee here! Now the truth has been revealed about why Barack Obama loves Sonia Sotomayor so dang much—-She's a pinko socialist just like he is, as evidenced by her quoting a six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America in the 1976 Princeton yearbook.

Steven Waldman at Beliefnet cold busted the White House press office distributing the image of Sotomayor quoting Norman Thomas, "the leading American Socialist politician of the 20th century," in the little gay press packet they compiled on their SCOTUS nominee. The quote itself—-"I am not a champion of lost causes, but of causes not yet won."—-and the thinking behind the White House's inclusion of it in its press materials left Waldman flummoxed, which then led him to doing some serious speculating.

Perhaps they figured it would come out eventually so they wanted to be able to say, "That's old news. We thought it was so inconsequential, we mentioned it ourselves." Or perhaps they felt that substantively didn't matter; Norman Thomas was a pretty mainstream figure, as socialists went. Or perhaps they didn't notice.

Yeah, or perhaps the White House planted it there knowing that it'd send the wingnuts into a hysterical frenzy, thereby distracting the sane wing of the party, what little there is left of it anyway, from forming any sort of cogent opposition to Sotomayor, making them all look like rabid fools in the process, just as they have each and every time they've tried to throw the socialist card on Obama in the past?

Then again, maybe Obama's just so confident in his nominee that he doesn't care about trivial horseshit like her quoting a socialist over 30 years ago in her college yearbook?

http://gawker.com/5271119/sonia-sotomayors-socialist-yearbook-quote-sure...

He just added a new thread "Letterman on Cheney" but he goofed something up.

You won't be able to comment here because comments are closed off.

I did email Sam as Gloryoski is doing.

Just an FYI

Someone should TWEET him. He may get that B$ the emails.

CNN is reporting that the Taliban is 60 miles from Pakistan and Pakistan is a time bomb right now.

More when the wires catch up on the net.

Highlights: President-elect Obama's Inauguration Schedule

8:45 a.m. ET: Obamas attend a private service at St. John's Episcopal Church
10:00 a.m. ET: Obama meets with President Bush at the White House for coffee, together they travel to the Capitol for inauguration ceremony.
11:30 a.m. ET: Official inaugural ceremony begins.
12:00 p.m. ET: Obama is sworn in as president and delivers inaugural address.

1:00 p.m. ET: President Obama and Vice President Biden attend luncheon at the Capitol

1:30 p.m. ET: President Bush Depart Washington DC

2:30 p.m. ET: Inaugural parade begins, President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama join inaugural motorcade.

8:00 p.m. ET: Obamas host first-ever Neighborhood
Ball at the Convention Center, the premiere event of inauguration evening, broadcast exclusively by ABC and including live coverage of the President and First Lady's first dance of the night and President-elect Obama's initial speech of the evening, alongside performances and appearances by some of the nation's top recording artists and stars.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/President44/story?id=6655200&page=1

Behind the debate over remaking U.S. financial policy will be a debate over who’s to blame. It’s crucial to get the history right, writes a Nobel-laureate economist, identifying five key mistakes—under Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II—and one national delusion.
by Joseph E. Stiglitz January 2009

There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate over history—a debate over the causes of our current situation. The battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it’s crucial to get the history straight.

What were the critical decisions that led to the crisis? Mistakes were made at every fork in the road—we had what engineers call a “system failure,” when not a single decision but a cascade of decisions produce a tragic result. Let’s look at five key moments.

No. 1: Firing the Chairman
In 1987 the Reagan administration decided to remove Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and appoint Alan Greenspan in his place. Volcker had done what central bankers are supposed to do. On his watch, inflation had been brought down from more than 11 percent to under 4 percent. In the world of central banking, that should have earned him a grade of A+++ and assured his re-appointment. But Volcker also understood that financial markets need to be regulated. Reagan wanted someone who did not believe any such thing, and he found him in a devotee of the objectivist philosopher and free-market zealot Ayn Rand.

Greenspan played a double role. The Fed controls the money spigot, and in the early years of this decade, he turned it on full force. But the Fed is also a regulator. If you appoint an anti-regulator as your enforcer, you know what kind of enforcement you’ll get. A flood of liquidity combined with the failed levees of regulation proved disastrous.

Greenspan presided over not one but two financial bubbles. After the high-tech bubble popped, in 2000–2001, he helped inflate the housing bubble. The first responsibility of a central bank should be to maintain the stability of the financial system. If banks lend on the basis of artificially high asset prices, the result can be a meltdown—as we are seeing now, and as Greenspan should have known. He had many of the tools he needed to cope with the situation. To deal with the high-tech bubble, he could have increased margin requirements (the amount of cash people need to put down to buy stock). To deflate the housing bubble, he could have curbed predatory lending to low-income households and prohibited other insidious practices (the no-documentation—or “liar”—loans, the interest-only loans, and so on). This would have gone a long way toward protecting us. If he didn’t have the tools, he could have gone to Congress and asked for them.

Of course, the current problems with our financial system are not solely the result of bad lending. The banks have made mega-bets with one another through complicated instruments such as derivatives, credit-default swaps, and so forth. With these, one party pays another if certain events happen—for instance, if Bear Stearns goes bankrupt, or if the dollar soars. These instruments were originally created to help manage risk—but they can also be used to gamble. Thus, if you felt confident that the dollar was going to fall, you could make a big bet accordingly, and if the dollar indeed fell, your profits would soar. The problem is that, with this complicated intertwining of bets of great magnitude, no one could be sure of the financial position of anyone else—or even of one’s own position. Not surprisingly, the credit markets froze.

Here too Greenspan played a role. When I was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, during the Clinton administration, I served on a committee of all the major federal financial regulators, a group that included Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Even then, it was clear that derivatives posed a danger. We didn’t put it as memorably as Warren Buffett—who saw derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction”—but we took his point. And yet, for all the risk, the deregulators in charge of the financial system—at the Fed, at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and elsewhere—decided to do nothing, worried that any action might interfere with “innovation” in the financial system. But innovation, like “change,” has no inherent value. It can be bad (the “liar” loans are a good example) as well as good.

No. 2: Tearing Down the Walls
The deregulation philosophy would pay unwelcome dividends for years to come. In November 1999, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act—the culmination of a $300 million lobbying effort by the banking and financial-services industries, and spearheaded in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm. Glass-Steagall had long separated commercial banks (which lend money) and investment banks (which organize the sale of bonds and equities); it had been enacted in the aftermath of the Great Depression and was meant to curb the excesses of that era, including grave conflicts of interest. For instance, without separation, if a company whose shares had been issued by an investment bank, with its strong endorsement, got into trouble, wouldn’t its commercial arm, if it had one, feel pressure to lend it money, perhaps unwisely? An ensuing spiral of bad judgment is not hard to foresee. I had opposed repeal of Glass-Steagall. The proponents said, in effect, Trust us: we will create Chinese walls to make sure that the problems of the past do not recur. As an economist, I certainly possessed a healthy degree of trust, trust in the power of economic incentives to bend human behavior toward self-interest—toward short-term self-interest, at any rate, rather than Tocqueville’s “self interest rightly understood.”

The most important consequence of the repeal of Glass-Steagall was indirect—it lay in the way repeal changed an entire culture. Commercial banks are not supposed to be high-risk ventures; they are supposed to manage other people’s money very conservatively. It is with this understanding that the government agrees to pick up the tab should they fail. Investment banks, on the other hand, have traditionally managed rich people’s money—people who can take bigger risks in order to get bigger returns. When repeal of Glass-Steagall brought investment and commercial banks together, the investment-bank culture came out on top. There was a demand for the kind of high returns that could be obtained only through high leverage and big risktaking.

There were other important steps down the deregulatory path. One was the decision in April 2004 by the Securities and Exchange Commission, at a meeting attended by virtually no one and largely overlooked at the time, to allow big investment banks to increase their debt-to-capital ratio (from 12:1 to 30:1, or higher) so that they could buy more mortgage-backed securities, inflating the housing bubble in the process. In agreeing to this measure, the S.E.C. argued for the virtues of self-regulation: the peculiar notion that banks can effectively police themselves. Self-regulation is preposterous, as even Alan Greenspan now concedes, and as a practical matter it can’t, in any case, identify systemic risks—the kinds of risks that arise when, for instance, the models used by each of the banks to manage their portfolios tell all the banks to sell some security all at once.

As we stripped back the old regulations, we did nothing to address the new challenges posed by 21st-century markets. The most important challenge was that posed by derivatives. In 1998 the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born, had called for such regulation—a concern that took on urgency after the Fed, in that same year, engineered the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund whose trillion-dollar-plus failure threatened global financial markets. But Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, his deputy, Larry Summers, and Greenspan were adamant—and successful—in their opposition. Nothing was done.

No. 3: Applying the Leeches
Then along came the Bush tax cuts, enacted first on June 7, 2001, with a follow-on installment two years later. The president and his advisers seemed to believe that tax cuts, especially for upper-income Americans and corporations, were a cure-all for any economic disease—the modern-day equivalent of leeches. The tax cuts played a pivotal role in shaping the background conditions of the current crisis. Because they did very little to stimulate the economy, real stimulation was left to the Fed, which took up the task with unprecedented low-interest rates and liquidity. The war in Iraq made matters worse, because it led to soaring oil prices. With America so dependent on oil imports, we had to spend several hundred billion more to purchase oil—money that otherwise would have been spent on American goods. Normally this would have led to an economic slowdown, as it had in the 1970s. But the Fed met the challenge in the most myopic way imaginable. The flood of liquidity made money readily available in mortgage markets, even to those who would normally not be able to borrow. And, yes, this succeeded in forestalling an economic downturn; America’s household saving rate plummeted to zero. But it should have been clear that we were living on borrowed money and borrowed time.

The cut in the tax rate on capital gains contributed to the crisis in another way. It was a decision that turned on values: those who speculated (read: gambled) and won were taxed more lightly than wage earners who simply worked hard. But more than that, the decision encouraged leveraging, because interest was tax-deductible. If, for instance, you borrowed a million to buy a home or took a $100,000 home-equity loan to buy stock, the interest would be fully deductible every year. Any capital gains you made were taxed lightly—and at some possibly remote day in the future. The Bush administration was providing an open invitation to excessive borrowing and lending—not that American consumers needed any more encouragement.

No. 4: Faking the Numbers
Meanwhile, on July 30, 2002, in the wake of a series of major scandals—notably the collapse of WorldCom and Enron—Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The scandals had involved every major American accounting firm, most of our banks, and some of our premier companies, and made it clear that we had serious problems with our accounting system. Accounting is a sleep-inducing topic for most people, but if you can’t have faith in a company’s numbers, then you can’t have faith in anything about a company at all. Unfortunately, in the negotiations over what became Sarbanes-Oxley a decision was made not to deal with what many, including the respected former head of the S.E.C. Arthur Levitt, believed to be a fundamental underlying problem: stock options. Stock options have been defended as providing healthy incentives toward good management, but in fact they are “incentive pay” in name only. If a company does well, the C.E.O. gets great rewards in the form of stock options; if a company does poorly, the compensation is almost as substantial but is bestowed in other ways. This is bad enough. But a collateral problem with stock options is that they provide incentives for bad accounting: top management has every incentive to provide distorted information in order to pump up share prices.

The incentive structure of the rating agencies also proved perverse. Agencies such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s are paid by the very people they are supposed to grade. As a result, they’ve had every reason to give companies high ratings, in a financial version of what college professors know as grade inflation. The rating agencies, like the investment banks that were paying them, believed in financial alchemy—that F-rated toxic mortgages could be converted into products that were safe enough to be held by commercial banks and pension funds. We had seen this same failure of the rating agencies during the East Asia crisis of the 1990s: high ratings facilitated a rush of money into the region, and then a sudden reversal in the ratings brought devastation. But the financial overseers paid no attention.

No. 5: Letting It Bleed
The final turning point came with the passage of a bailout package on October 3, 2008—that is, with the administration’s response to the crisis itself. We will be feeling the consequences for years to come. Both the administration and the Fed had long been driven by wishful thinking, hoping that the bad news was just a blip, and that a return to growth was just around the corner. As America’s banks faced collapse, the administration veered from one course of action to another. Some institutions (Bear Stearns, A.I.G., Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) were bailed out. Lehman Brothers was not. Some shareholders got something back. Others did not.

The original proposal by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a three-page document that would have provided $700 billion for the secretary to spend at his sole discretion, without oversight or judicial review, was an act of extraordinary arrogance. He sold the program as necessary to restore confidence. But it didn’t address the underlying reasons for the loss of confidence. The banks had made too many bad loans. There were big holes in their balance sheets. No one knew what was truth and what was fiction. The bailout package was like a massive transfusion to a patient suffering from internal bleeding—and nothing was being done about the source of the problem, namely all those foreclosures. Valuable time was wasted as Paulson pushed his own plan, “cash for trash,” buying up the bad assets and putting the risk onto American taxpayers. When he finally abandoned it, providing banks with money they needed, he did it in a way that not only cheated America’s taxpayers but failed to ensure that the banks would use the money to re-start lending. He even allowed the banks to pour out money to their shareholders as taxpayers were pouring money into the banks.

The other problem not addressed involved the looming weaknesses in the economy. The economy had been sustained by excessive borrowing. That game was up. As consumption contracted, exports kept the economy going, but with the dollar strengthening and Europe and the rest of the world declining, it was hard to see how that could continue. Meanwhile, states faced massive drop-offs in revenues—they would have to cut back on expenditures. Without quick action by government, the economy faced a downturn. And even if banks had lent wisely—which they hadn’t—the downturn was sure to mean an increase in bad debts, further weakening the struggling financial sector.

The administration talked about confidence building, but what it delivered was actually a confidence trick. If the administration had really wanted to restore confidence in the financial system, it would have begun by addressing the underlying problems—the flawed incentive structures and the inadequate regulatory system.

Was there any single decision which, had it been reversed, would have changed the course of history? Every decision—including decisions not to do something, as many of our bad economic decisions have been—is a consequence of prior decisions, an interlinked web stretching from the distant past into the future. You’ll hear some on the right point to certain actions by the government itself—such as the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to make mortgage money available in low-income neighborhoods. (Defaults on C.R.A. lending were actually much lower than on other lending.) There has been much finger-pointing at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two huge mortgage lenders, which were originally government-owned. But in fact they came late to the subprime game, and their problem was similar to that of the private sector: their C.E.O.’s had the same perverse incentive to indulge in gambling.

The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. Looking back at that belief during hearings this fall on Capitol Hill, Alan Greenspan said out loud, “I have found a flaw.” Congressman Henry Waxman pushed him, responding, “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right; it was not working.” “Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan said. The embrace by America—and much of the rest of the world—of this flawed economic philosophy made it inevitable that we would eventually arrive at the place we are today.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, is a professor at Columbia University.

http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2009/01/stiglitz200901

It feels a bit like the primaries at DU, except that Obama's opponent is invisible.

There are some that say that Obama is screwing up big time and is shifting rightward in his actions in the last month since the election. Other folks are saying that this will make it hard of Obama to be re-elected in 2012 as he is reneging on many of his campaign promises.

I am responding to those various posts that I have read on DU, in where the posters have voiced their total disgust with the incoming administration before it is actually confirmed and sworn in. I am reiterating here my previously posted responses to the various gripes that have vocally been heard here and elsewhere.

Additionally, I would hope that Obama is not yet campaigning for re-election in 2012. I would prefer that he concentrates on coming up with solutions to the problems that he will face during his first administration once he is inaugurated.

POST ELECTION MYTH: Obama ran on the promise of repealing the Bush Tax cut on those who earn over $250,000. Currently he has reneged on that promise, and has chosen to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2010 instead.

POST ELECTION FACTS: Obama did not run on the "promise" of repealing the Bush Tax cuts, but rather he ran on the promise of giving the middle class tax cuts. He did, during the campaign, offer to repeal the Bush tax cuts as the way to pay for those Middle Class tax cuts. Since the Middle Class tax cuts will be paid for within the large stimulus package (made possible by the economy taking a nosedive) that is currently being formulated, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2010 should be acceptable. He promised to return to fair progressive taxation, and I don't doubt that allowing the Bush Tax Cuts to expire will do just that, without Obama's first action in office being to "increase" taxes, period. Further, Pres Elect Obama has not determined which he has chosen; repeal or allow expiration. He has stated this clearly.

POST ELECTION MYTH: Obama ran on the promise of taxing oil companies via a windfall profit tax, and now he is backing away from that promise because now that he has won, he is on his knees bowing to the oil industry.

POST ELECTION FACTS: Obama did at one point suggest that he would enact a windfall profit tax on oil companies due to their large profits at a time that Americans were paying a record +$4.00 per gallon at the pump. This was his alternative to his opponents who had offered to suspend the gas tax for a limited period. However, since the economy fell apart in mid September, the price of a barrel of oil has fallen from $147 to under $50 now. The price at the pump has fallen by more than 50%. As early as October of this year, the Obama economic team realized that by the time Obama took office, the profits of the oil companies will have fallen to a point that attempting to tax profits would amount to not much. The October budget numbers that Obama campaigned on starting October DID NOT include a windfall Profit tax as part of any revenue included. Those who proposed to cut the gas tax would have also reviewed their promise, so Obama adjusting his plan due to the facts on the ground is what should be expected of any rational thinking person.

POST ELECTION MYTH: Obama plans to propose taxing health benefits, although he trashed John McCain's plan of doing just that.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/12/01/d... /

POST ELECTION FACTS: Obama does not plan on taxing health benefits. There has been a news story that implies this (link is above), but it is piece of Sen. Baucus' health care proposal, which is not Obama's health care proposal. Obama is working with Ted Kennedy in fashioning the health care proposal that will resemble what he proposed while campaigning, and that plan has not yet been written. Currently, public comments are being accepted by the Obama transition team as input and I would suggest that those concerned about the Health Care plan that will be proposed to participate as well as contacting Sen. Kennedy directly.
http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/join_the_discussion_da... /

POST ELECTION MYTH: Obama is not going to go single payer in his health care proposal, and progressives should fight this. Single payer is the way to go, and there is a clear mandate to get this done due to the economic disaster we are currently facing. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16092.html

POST ELECTION FACTS: Obama did not run on a platform that included Single Payer Health Care as a proposal, and Ted Kennedy's proposal will not be a Single Payer Health Care plan.

Beyond the fact that voters did not vote for such a plan, that Republicans would fight this with every fiber of their being, the hard truth is that government cannot afford what it would cost just to transition into a single payer plan at this time more than any other due to the economy and the growing deficits. There are too many industries tied to health care that would be put out of business if a Single payer proposal was enacted, which would further erode the tax base revenues to the government currently generated by the health care industry.

Single Payer Health care is something that can realistically be arrived at gradually if we enact Universal Health Care....and proceed progressively from there. Considering what Obama promised; Universal Health care by the end of Obama's first term, this is what is doable in a relatively short period, and this is what American voters bargained for, since this is the proposal that Obama ran on. This is the plan Ted Kennedy is working on.

POST ELECTION MYTH: Obama in keeping Sec. of Defense Gates is signaling that he is not that interested in keeping his 16 months pullout of Iraq proposal as was made during the campaign. Plus, he is now warmongering in respect to Afghanistan.

POST ELECTION FACTS: Sec. Gates is accelerating the plans to withdrawal of troops from Iraq even now. He appears to be in si-nc with Obama's proposed plan. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28022197
In addition, Sec. Defense Gates' current deputy staff will be replaced by Obama appointees, another sign that the Pentagon will not remain "as is", and that Obama will have a strong hand in controlling what goes on there.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

Obama's plan for Afghanistan aren't new at all, and he has been consistent on his proposal in reference to this war.

POST ELECTION MYTH: Where is the Change that we can believe in? Obama is not a progressive and that can be proven by the personnel he is bringing into his administration; all Clinton retreads who are strict Center Right folks and who were part of the problems we currently face. Old Boss meet the New Boss is the same boss, etc....

POST ELECTION FACTS: Obama is a progressive, as his life story and track record indicates.
He is someone who saw poverty first hand up close as some of his first memories while living in Indonesia, is of minority status, helped organize the poor on the South Side of Chicago, attended Trinity Church for 20 years, married a Robinson originating out of South Carolina, attended Columbia and Harvard (two of the oldest established liberal universities in the United States), who has family living in huts in Africa, who not only represented some of the undeserved as a Civil Rights Attorney but taught Constitutional law, ran project Vote out of Chicago to get Mosley-Braun Elected (first Black female Senator), chose to lives in Hide Park, represented the South Side of Chicago for 8 years in the State house, has never been a member of the DLC, was adamantly against the Iraq war, and ran a campaign that was anything but status quo. Strictly speaking, Barack Obama is simply not a Centrist nor does his ratings by various progressive institutions on his Senate votes indicate such.

Meanwhile he has appointed to high ranking cabinet/advisory positions, 4 African-Americans, 7 women, Hispanics, several Jews, and Gay folks as well. In addition, he has just begun, and is not near finished with his appointments (I know, diversity no longer matters unless it does).

In addition, to bring brainy realists, many who served in the Clinton administration, and some who have admittedly made prior errors can be effective, as they are more likely to have learned from mistakes in philosophies that they may have subscribed to. Considering that there will be a new leader at the top driving the agenda, blaming all that has happened on those he has chosen, when we know that the problems that we face were caused by a number of factors and timing, not all directly related to certain individuals who have been out of the picture for some time (8 years in some instances) is ignorant. That is like blaming Clinton for 9/11 although it occurred under Bush's watch.

If Obama has got folks fooled, well that's mighty artful of him. Means he's playing a great game of political poker thus far....and will get far before being assaulted by the Corporate media (hopefully, he'll get his FCC pick in before they can strike any blows).

Meanwhile, Obama Teams Are Scrutinizing current Federal Agencies. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

putting out strict rules on lobbyist activity
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/11/11/16698...

So to believe that this man is somehow not a progressive when he is still more than 45 days from taking office is simply absurd. In fact, staying away from labels at this time would bode better in order to get a progressive agenda put through congress (strictly my opinion).

POST ELECTION MYTH: Obama has not named any progressives to his administration, and it appears that progressives will not have a seat at the Obama table. We must fight this, and we shall not be silenced.

POST ELECTION FACTS: Obama has named progressives to his administration, although he has not yet named Dennis Kucinich to a cabinet level Post. Of course he is not finished, and a holding pattern prior to making judgment on who is what within those he named is strongly recommended.

Obama has tapped Melody Barnes, of the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, to serve as his domestic policy director; Patrick Gaspard, a political organizer for the Services Employees International Union, or SEIU, as his politics director; Ellen Moran, of the liberal fund-raising group EMILY’s List, which backs pro-choice women candidates, to run his communications shop; and Phil Schiliro, a former aide to Sen. Tom Daschle, to serve as the White House’s liaison with Congress. http://washingtonindependent.com/20365/progressive-circ...

In addition, Susan Rice is more than progressive enough on world affairs. Another good sign is that Samantha Power is on the Transition Team, and will have a voice on who in addition is selected to complete Obama's national security team.

POST ELECTION MYTH: Obama worshipers are telling the "real" progressives on this board to STFU. Criticism is good for Democracy, and they are squelching dissent which is stunning.

POST ELECTION FACTS: Obama is not perfect by any means, but as a "real" progressive, I believe that we can debate issues and even political personalities without calling folks out of their names, and accusing those who support Obama in all of his endeavor thus far, as well as not accusing those who have real issues with some of the folks that Obama is appointing and some of the stance that he is taking. I believe that we can all have discussions using real facts, as we are all on the same side, and I think that most of us can probably agree that Obama is a vast improvement over Bush in every way, and that he is a blessing compared to what McCain would have been.

Let us look forward toward his inauguration and celebrate the fact that we will all continue to pay close attention to what is proposed during his term in office, and that we should make our voices heard in instances when he does great stuff as well as when he fucks up (which will happen).

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&add...

One morning this summer, my work phone rang.

"Hi, Amy, this is Tom Gosinski," a pleasant voice said.

"No way!"

Every other call I'd gotten about McCain, it seemed, had been from some reporter wanting to know where he or she could find Tom Gosinski, the guy who ultimately had led to the outing of Cindy McCain's drug addiction in 1993. I had told people honestly that I had no idea where Gosinski was; I hadn't spoken to him in many years.

"It's me!"

"Okay, prove it," I said. "Tell me something that only Tom Gosinski would know."

"I was wearing Pepe jeans the day I came to New Times, so you could interview me for the Cindy McCain story."

It was him. True, he could have read that detail in my story about him, but by then, I recognized the voice.

He'd been on my mind.

Tom Gosinski's is a story worth re-telling, since it's been parsed so much in the national press.

Sometime in the spring of 1994, I'd started hearing the rumors that Cindy McCain was addicted to prescription drugs. Bummer for her, but not a story — at least not one that I'd be able to get.

Then I learned something that turned Cindy McCain's personal tragedy into a real news story. Two unrelated sources told me about Tom Gosinski.

Gosinski was in his mid-30s, working two crappy part-time jobs to stay afloat. He'd been fired months earlier from his position as director of government and international affairs for the American Voluntary Medical Team, McCain's non-profit charity, which brought medical relief to poor countries all over the world.

Turns out, shortly after he was fired, Gosinski went to the Drug Enforcement Administration. He'd suspected Cindy McCain was addicted to prescription drugs and was getting a doctor who worked with AVMT to illegally prescribe them in her employees' names.

Later, in an interview with New Times, Gosinski said he was not trying to blackmail the McCains. He was worried about his own culpability, so he asked the DEA officials a rhetorical question: "'If a person knows that prescriptions have been written in their name, and they never met with the doctor and they don't know the whereabouts of the drugs, what is their responsibility?' And I was told it was my responsibility to turn it in. So at that moment, I began to cooperate with the DEA."

Gosinski's suspicions were right. Dr. John Max Johnson, AVMT's medical director, had written two prescriptions for painkillers in Gosinski's name, at Cindy McCain's behest. He'd written more, too, in other people's names. Some prescriptions, the DEA found, were for as many as 500 pills at a time. Johnson told investigators that he never traveled with the drugs; Cindy McCain kept them in her personal luggage. (Johnson later surrendered his medical license.)

Gosinski didn't just go to the DEA. He also filed a wrongful-termination claim against AVMT, which led John McCain's attorney, John Dowd (well known for his over-the-top tactics on behalf of McCain and former Arizona Governor Fife Symington) to persuade then-Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley to open an extortion investigation against Gosinski (it was eventually dropped).

If Dowd had stayed out of it, there's a good chance this story would never have gone public.

I heard that the U.S. Attorney's Office was investigating Cindy McCain, so I asked for the details. Turns out, public-records law protects the feds; there is no legal mandate to turn over materials related to an ongoing federal investigation.

But that law does not apply to Maricopa County. So I asked the County Attorney's Office for all materials related to the Gosinski extortion investigation, and hit the jackpot: Because Cindy's drug problem was the topic of Dowd's extortion case, the county attorney had received copies of all of the federal records related to the case. I made a public-records request.

I got notice that the records were ready. First, though, someone had told the McCains. And so before my piece was even written, I watched their carefully spun version splash across more than one front page and lead at least one morning news show. Cindy McCain talked openly about her drug addiction (although the details of just when John had learned about it and about when she'd gone through rehab remained unclear) and attributed it to the pain of two back surgeries and stress from the Keating Five scandal. The McCains claimed Gosinski was trying to blackmail them.

Later, we did our own story at New Times ("Opiate for the Mrs.," September 8, 1994). Gosinski went on the record, and I also got hold of the journal he'd kept during the time he worked at AVMT. Although he took a beating in the affair, the journal revealed how conflicted he was over her improprieties. For example:

"July 27, 1992: I have always wondered why John McCain has done nothing to fix the problem. He must either not see that a problem exists or does not choose to do anything about it. It would seem that it would be in everyone's best interest to come to terms with the situation. And do whatever is necessary to fix it. There is so much at risk: the welfare of the children; John's political career; the integrity of Hensley & Company; the welfare of Jim and Smitty Hensley; and the health and happiness of Cindy McCain.

"The aforementioned matters are of great concern to those directly involved, but my main concern is the ability of AVMT to survive a major shake-up. If the DEA were to ever conduct an audit of AVMT's inventory, I am afraid of what the results might be . . . It is because of CHM's willingness to jeopardize the credibility of those that work for her that I truly worry.

"During my short tenure at AVMT, I have been surrounded by what on the surface appears to be the ultimate all-American family. In reality, I am working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. Senator has driven her to: distance herself from friends; cover feelings of despair with drugs; and replace lonely moments with self-indulgences."

Ultimately, the U.S. Attorney did, in fact, investigate AVMT and Cindy McCain. In the end, she avoided criminal charges and entered a drug-diversion program. She also paid for the cost of the investigation. She was lucky; if she were not well connected, she could have faced much harsher penalties, including prison time.

When I spoke to him this past June, Tom Gosinski said he's doing well. He left Arizona many years ago and took up a profession that has nothing to do with his previous work. He doesn't want to talk about the McCains. (In fact, when I e-mailed him after our phone conversation, asking if he'd like to talk to me for this story, I never heard back.)

He called me because a private investigator had shown up on his mother's doorstep that morning, looking for him, and they were spooked. He wanted to know if I'd heard of the guy, who didn't identify his political camp. I hadn't.

With a couple of exceptions, McCain never spoke to me again after the Gosinski story. Word eventually trickled back (years later) that a few months after the story was published, he'd cornered a close relative of mine in the Senate Dining Room in Washington, asking why my family couldn't control me.

http://phoenixnewtimes.com/content/printVersion/848709

Many more McCain storys at link. All the BAD McCain.

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