Obama Calls For Up-or-Down Vote On Health Care, The Quake In Chile, The Right Fired Up

February 28th, 2010 - by: danny

Welcome to March, no lambs this time. It is the 60th day of the year, the anniversary of the Korean independence movement, the day that the Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, the day the Salem Witch Trials got underway, and in 1954, the day that Puerto Rican Nationalists attacked the US Congress.

Today, Congress is under attack from within with late night battling Saturday in the Senate over one member’s unilateral decision to object to, and thus put a hold on an extension of unemployment benefits.

A former ball player, Mr. Jim Bunning of Kentucky stayed on his own mound and took all sorts of balls aimed at his head. He would not back down insisting that the benefits be paid for first. As a result, tens of thousands of families on the edge will not have money to buy food or anything else this week. The Dems raised a ruckus but then backed down.

RELATED:

Ã¢â‚¬Â¢ A Fast-Growing, New Labor Union For People WITHOUT Jobs! h/t Carolyn Baker

The Unemployed Now Have Their Own Union, and It’s Catching on Quickly – An ingenious grassroots union for the unemployed is only a month old – and its numbers are growing.

It’s been only a month that a union for the unemployed has come into existence through an ingenious grassroots organizing campaign. In case you haven’t heard about it, the union’s name is “UR Union of the Unemployed” or its nickname, “UCubed,” because of its unique method of organizing. [More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

UnionofUnemployed.com: Useful. Unique. Unified.

You lost your job. You’re not alone. 31 million Americans face the same challenges. You want your job back. You want your life back. But you can’t do it alone. Neither can anyone else. You all need each other. That’s what UCubed is here to do: Help you and 31 million other Americans organize, work together and get back to work. Let UCubed help you connect. Form a cube, and multipy your political and economic power by 6. Then by 36. Eventually, by 31 million. Take Control. [More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

• Obama Is Going For It (Supporting the plan, flaws and all)

WASHINGTON — The White House called for a “simple up-or-down” vote on health care legislation Sunday as Speaker Nancy Pelosi appealed to House Democrats to get behind President Barack Obama’s chief domestic priority even it if threatens their political careers.

In voicing support for a simple majority vote, White House health reform director Nancy-Ann DeParle signaled Obama’s intention to push the Democratic-crafted bill under Senate rules that would overcome GOP stalling tactics. [More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

More Lobbyists On The Way

There were rallies on all sides of the health care war with the insurance companies vowing to spend more and even send more lobbyists into the fray – there are already 8 Lobbyists working on each member of Congress, wearing them down with a mountain of minutia and probably dooming the prospects of any change that will cost them a dime.

The New York Times ran a long piece in the Week in Review making clear that killing the bill will not kill an increasing cycle of increases in costs and higher rates with devastating consequences for the economy. Inaction will have a high cost but its not one the industry and its allies worry about.

• HP: BATTLE CONTINUES ON THE AIR: A ROUND UP OF THE SUNDAY INTERVIEW SHOWS

Hello, good morning, welcome to you Sunday Morning Liveblog. My name is Jason and today we will talk about health care reform for the 4,398th time in the past year on a Sunday because of the Health Care Summit where no one solved the problem but nobody killed each other either, so, win for America. I think that the Congressional Democrats are going to finally nut up and try to pass the reform or not.

I hope that’s the case. It’s been so long that I cannot remember a time before health care reform. As far as I can remember, this nation was founded specifically so that we could have a health care crisis. Someone hit me up on IM on Friday asking if it was true that Obama was going to ask for three more months of deliberations on health care reform, and I was like: “Uhm? Is having a hole

The Earth Is Quaking

The makings of a catastrophe are here but more physical disasters are all over the news. The threatened tsunami in Hawaii did not happen, disappointing the mad surfers who had vowed to ride the big waves in. In Haiti, flash flooding arrived with the rainy season further jeopardizing the million people who are still homeless. The quake in Chile was causing aftershocks with two million said to be affected a state of catastrophe in effect and over 700 dead as of last night. That number will go up. Who knows if somehow the Gods weren’t mad at the people there for choosing another right-wing government.

• AP reported:

AP – Heroism and banditry mingled on Chile’s shattered streets Sunday as rescuers braved aftershocks digging for survivors and the government sent soldiers and ordered a nighttime curfew to quell looting. The death toll climbed to 708 in one of the biggest earthquakes in centuries. (NOTE: How quickly The Chileans responded. There was no three day “assessment” delay as there was in Haiti.)

The Daily Beast reported earlier:

National Emergency Agency officials say the Chilean death toll is over 300 after the 8.8-magnitude earthquake shook the South American country yesterday. The shock was the most powerful earthquake to hit the area southwest of Chile’s capital, Santiago, in 100 years, damaging nearly half a million homes and throwing residents from their beds. After the shock, seven-foot high waves rattled the Pacific, killing at least five people on remote islands. While a massive disaster in itself, the quake poses an incredible challenge for Sebastian Pinera, who will take office as Chile’s president in two weeks. “We’re preparing ourselves for an additional task, a task that wasn’t part of our governing plan: assuming responsibility for rebuilding our country,” he said.’

While the world reacts in shock and with offers of help that the Chileans have yet to accept, this is the news that is twittering young America according to the timelife blog:

“You’re probably aware of the 8.8 mega-earthquake that shook parts of Chile Saturday morning. American Idol’s Elliott Yamin was present for it, and tweeted the details of the earthquake in Chile about what he’s calling the “scariest nite/morn of my life.”

By Saturday morning Elliott Yamin had nearly 15,000 followers on Twitter. He spent the early part of Friday complaining about a competition he’d been participating in while he was in Chile, saying, “Thanks 4 nothing Chile!…what an awful experience!” and calling his trip “an incredibly huge waste of time” during which he was “treated like an amateur.” [sic]”

Poor dear.

• TIME was quick to assess the comparisons between Haiti and Chile:

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Chile early on Feb. 27 was 500 times stronger than the 7.0 quake that killed an estimated 200,000 Haitians last month. And yet the number of casualties in Chile appears to be exponentially smaller, with the official death toll still in the hundreds. Far fewer people were rendered homeless than in Haiti, and much of the telephone service in Santiago and parts of central Chile had been restored within five hours.

Comparisons between the two countries will no doubt be much discussed when the U.N. hosts a conference in New York City on March 31 to hash out how best to help Haiti rebuild. Donor governments already know why there was so much less destruction in Chile: it’s because the government there forces builders to adhere to rigorous codes, while Haiti’s incorrigible corruption and carelessness left such regulation all but non-existent. (NOTE: No reminder here of the history of oppression, exploitation, US invasion, US backed dictatorships, massive poverty, extraction, etc. It’s all their fault implies the “blame the victims” boneheads at TIME.)

Michael Moore.Com, HAITI’s New Needs Assessment Rejects Militarization of Aid

• You can see citizen videos from Chile on GlobalVoices online

• Undernews: Reality Check — Big Earthquakes

THE GUARDIAN has a lot of interesting data about past earthquakes such as: “the most deadly earthquake to strike over the past 110 years hit Tangshan in China in July 1976. Measuring 7.5, the quake caused 255,000 deaths.

Over the past ten years the world has averaged about 15 earthquakes a year that were strength 7.0 or higher and about 1.4 a year that were strength 8.0 and higher. The world has average about 26,000 earthquakes a year with last year’s total – 14,788 – being the lowest of the decade. If earthquakes continue at the rate of the first two months of 2010 the figure for the year will be even lower – around 10,000.

Death rates vary markedly, however, ranging from the over 200,000 this year and in 2004 to only 712 in 2007.

• Afghanistan: the Big Picture

• RT: Feminist Group Accuses Israel in Ethiopian Baby Contraceptive Scandal

• IRIN: Fighting for Peace in Congo

Millions of people around the world have been forced to leave their homes. Some have been driven out by conflict, some by natural disasters. Some have been displaced in the name of development, others by climate change.

Even before a devastating earthquake hit Haiti on January 12th, tens of thousands of Haitians were internally displaced. Meet the residents of Haiti’s homeless hotel.

Almost two years after election-related violence in Kenya forced more than half a million people from their homes, some communities are using government payments to buy land and build new settlements from scratch.

Now that the war in Northern Uganda has largely subsided, hundreds of thousands of people have left protected camps and returned to their villages but many of the most vulnerable remain.

Meet Kamarik and his wife Dharma, who, in 2001, were chased out of their mountain village in Nepal by Maoist rebels. For the past eight years, they and their six children have lived “worse than dogs” in the capital Kathmandu.

Hear the moving story of 50-year-old Sum Rin, displaced from a shanty town in the centre of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh to make way for a new commercial development.

Or ex-child soldier Emmanuel, who witnessed his parents’ murder and, as a consequence, can never go back to his village in Liberia. More IRIN coverage of displacement and refugee issues here.

Fighting the Right

• FRANK RICH: NYT, The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged

• Ocean Beach Progressives visit Tea Party In San Diego

• Pelosi says GOP has hijacked ‘tea party’ movement

“Pelosi spoke in an interview with ABC’s ‘This Week’ that was airing Sunday.”

• George Packer of the New Yorker on Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck delivered the keynote speech at the CPAC conference over the weekend. He spoke for almost an hour, and I watched so you don’t have to. In a recent Times story about the Tea Party movement, Beck’s Fox News show comes up again and again as the bolt of lightning that illuminated the dark sky of Obama’s America for the – mostly aging – people who are turning to radical anti-government politics for answers. One of them is a sixty-six-year-old woman from Sandpoint, Idaho, named Pam Stout. [More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

“David Sirota observes in his column this week the really ugly nature of Glenn Beck’s express hatred of progressives, embodied in his CPAC speech:

To wild applause, he labeled this alleged tumor of “community” the supposedly evil “progressivism” — and he told disciples to “eradicate it” from the nation.

The lesson was eminently clear, coming in no less than the keynote address to one of America’s most important political conventions. Beck taught us that a once-principled conservative movement of reasoned activists has turned into a mob — one that does not engage in civilized battles of ideas. Instead, these torch-carriers, gun-brandishers and tea partiers follow an anti-government terrorist attack by cheering a demagogue’s demand for the physical annihilation of those with whom he disagrees — namely anyone, but particularly progressives, who value “community.” [More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

The News Dissector