Huffington Post:

The White House, aided by Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), is working hard to crush an amendment being pushed by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) to allow for the reimportation of pharmaceutical drugs from Canada, Senate sources tell the Huffington Post. As a result, the Senate health care debate has come to a standstill: Carper has placed a "hold" on Dorgan's amendment and in response, Dorgan tells HuffPost, he'll object to any other amendments being considered before he gets a vote on his.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) is a lead co-sponsor of Dorgan's amendment... The amendment has the support of a number of other Republicans, including Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Charles Grassley (Iowa), John Thune (S.D.) and David Vitter (La.). Opponents of the amendment worry that many more Republicans may join the amendment not because they agree with it, but because they want to put the health care bill in jeopardy.

So the White House and the drug makers are trying to persuade as many Democrats as they can to oppose the amendment despite their previous support for it.... Publicly, President Obama continues to support reimportation, as he did during the campaign. "The President supports reimportation of safe and effective drugs. He made that clear in his FY 2010 budget, which included $5 million to enable the FDA to begin developing policy options," reads a statement from the White House. "The Food and Drug Administration has raised safety concerns about the current proposal and will continue exploring policy options to create a pathway to importing safe and effective drugs."

And: it turns out that the "reform" bill allows InsCo's to continue arbitrarily capping the amount of coverage patients can receive per year. The caps are what cause people to go bankrupt when they get seriously ill.

Tiger has on the one hand played the typical celebrity-sacrifice game, offering an "apology" to people who deserve none: the media and its consumers. On the other, his choice to stop playing golf "indefinitely" is a brilliant fuck-you to this system's nihilistic insatiability. Thus: refuse to provide any further fodder to both informational revenue producers, gossip and sports industries alike, henceforth.

Had Obama any of Tiger's shamelessness or moxie (not, mind you, the libidinal fecklessness, which is indeed a good thing to lack), he would have realized long ago that a similar mechanism is in place to nail him one way or the other. He will never be tough enough or popular enough to not be embarrassed and toppled. Agency only lies the way of refusal; refusal to play along, to feed the monster that exists, to believe your own myth at our expense.

Now let's get on with it:

I see that the process of liberal disllusionment with Obama is well underway, somewhat earlier than I’d expected it to set in.

...

...there’s great political potential in popular disillusionment with Democrats. The phenomenon was first diagnosed by Garry Wills in Nixon Agonistes. As Wills explained it, throughout the 1950s, left-liberals intellectuals thought that the national malaise was the fault of Eisenhower, and a Democrat would cure it. Well, they got JFK and everything still pretty much sucked, which is what gave rise to the rebellions of the 1960s (and all that excess that Obama wants to junk any remnant of). You could argue that the movements of the 1990s that culminated in Seattle were a minor rerun of this. The sense of malaise and alienation is probably stronger now than it was 50 years ago, and includes a lot more of the working class, whom Stanley Greenberg’s focus groups find to be really pissed off about the cost of living and the way the rich are lording it over the rest of us

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Today we heard Obama's Nobel speech, in which he gravely lectured the world about its moral obligation to acknowledge that it deserves American bombing, which should be received without childish resentment. Presumably the international community should welcome mass carnage in the same spirit as it ought to consent to the theft of a large portion of the world's wealth and resources by American bankers.

We also had it confirmed today that the entire process of legislating health care reform, from its beginnings last winter through this morning, was indeed a charade.

Also, I read this:

...the Obama administration has authorized the United States Army Corps of Engineers to design a vertical underground wall under the border between Egypt and Gaza.

In March, 2009 [after the IDF terrorist massacre of Gaza] the United States provided the government of Egypt with $32 million in March, 2009 for electronic surveillance and other security devices to prevent the movement of food, merchandise and weapons into Gaza. Now details are emerging about an underground steel wall that wil be 6-7 miles long and extend 55 feet straight down into the desert sand.

The steel wall will be made of super-strength steel put together in a jigsaw puzzle fashion. It will be bomb proof and can not be cut or melted. It will be "impenetrable," and reportedly will take 18 months to construct.

The steel wall is intended to cut the tunnels that go between Gaza and Egypt. The tunnels are the lifelines for Gaza since the international community agreed to a blockade of Gaza to collectively punish the citizens of Gaza for their having elected in Parliamentary elections in 2006 sufficient Hamas Parliamentarians that Hamas became the government of Gaza...

The underground steel wall is intended to strengthen international governmental efforts to imprison and starve the people of Gaza into submission so they will throw out the Hamas government.

...One more time, the American government and the Obama administration has been an active participant in the continued inhumane treatment of the people of Gaza and should be held accountable, along with Israel and Egypt for violations of human rights of the people of Gaza.

I can just hear the liberal response: how childish are these idealists! They do not know the cost of peace!

What a contemptible sanctimonious prick is Barack Obama.

other great moments in mindbending horseshit:

From 30 Rock:

Jenna Maroney: ...You've got to lie to her, coddle her, protect her from the real world.

Jack Donaghy: I get it! Treat her like the New York Times treats its readers!

link

As this astonishing article makes clear, Denmark is treating its climate change conference as though it were another meeting of the G20, warranting $122 MILLION in security measures. Apparently such measures include a host of bold declarations, all with the same message: the imperative of keeping the conference peaceful permits the police to do whatever they must to curb troublemakers. The excessive beefing up of security is, in a sense, a dare to protest groups who are themselves looking for a fight with police. Any clashes would benefit both sides, justifying the expenditure on the police's end and providing publicity for the leftist/anarchist groups.

We have reached a point where almost all repression and opposition have been radically systematized so as to be efficiently fed into internet- and cable-bound media circuits. Such farcical, carefully preplanned and staged "political violence" has its analogue in Iraq and Afganistan, terrains where US and anti-US forces can meet and act out their aggressions at a safe distance from the serenity of the developed world. Copenhagen's holding pens are a masterful metaphor for what is going on here: all political action will henceforth be contained, delimited in space and time. The holding pens anticipate the protesters who will willingly enter them in devotion to their cause; they are the "event" of the conference writ small, as a parceled unit of "conflict" with previous and future such units around it. More conferences, more street battles, more protests, more deliberations by powerful people, more inaction as a result of said summits-- but no surprises. Without the spontaneous political event, can we really understand that which occurs as "history" at all?