Norfolk Democrats Blog

The Copenhagen Disaccord

2010-01-18T08:34:00.001-08:00

The Nation

We have entered the post-Copenhagen era of climate politics--but just what that means is still very much undecided. The summit was widely regarded as humanity's last good chance to prevent catastrophic climate change. It plainly fell short of that goal, but giving up is not an option, not for anyone who cares about preserving a livable planet for our children. Instead, we need the most unfettered, open-minded discussion possible of the terrain confronting us post-Copenhagen and how best to traverse it. Which actions and strategies make sense now? What should governments be pressed to do, and what role should activists, media and civil society play?

Unfortunate as Copenhagen's outcome was, all is not lost. Bear in mind, the goal was to reach an agreement to take effect in 2012, when key provisions of the Kyoto Protocol expire; that timetable might still be met if governments make sufficient progress at meetings this June in Germany and this December in Mexico.

One clear sign of hope was the emergence of a mass movement on behalf of climate action. Of course, this movement did not achieve all it wanted at the summit--mass movements rarely succeed right away--but its massive presence signaled to power brokers that civil society was watching and would not be satisfied with a weak agreement. Indeed, one important achievement of civil society, including the news media, at Copenhagen was that it prevented governments from spinning the summit's outcome as a success. Witness, for example, the about-face by President Obama. On the summit's closing night, he labeled the side deal he brokered with China and other large greenhouse gas emitters an "unprecedented breakthrough." A few days later, after activists and journalists had made clear the so-called Copenhagen Accord's sharp limitations, the president acknowledged in a PBS interview that people "are justified in being disappointed" about Copenhagen.

As civil society decides what to do next, it's important to recognize how much it has already accomplished. US activists have brought about a de facto moratorium on building new coal-fired power plants, notes Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute. Brown argues that such grassroots pressure, both here and around the world, may prove more important to halting climate change than international negotiations like Copenhagen, with their glacial pace and lowest-common-denominator results. Hundreds of local and regional governments have also implemented ambitious green energy programs ahead of federal policy. A pioneer of this effort, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced in Copenhagen the formation of the R-20 Group--twenty regions around the world that will "set high standards for cutting carbon and creating green economies, then invite others to join them," in the words of Terry Tamminen, the governor's former environment adviser. Tamminen argues that the work of the R-20, along with improvements in national government policies, will end up putting a price on carbon by 2012. That would be transformational, leading corporations, governments and citizens to shift their economic behavior in climate-friendly ways.

But there is no getting around the central role the governments of China and the United States, the two climate superpowers, play in the drama. Differences between the two appear to be the main reason for the outcome in Copenhagen, though again it is crucial to remember how far both nations moved in the lead-up to the summit. At their November Beijing meeting, Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao broke decisively from the past by pledging for the first time that each nation would limit its future greenhouse gas emissions. Although the emissions cuts announced a few days later fell well short of what science says is necessary, the shift in direction was profound. Now the task is to get the superpowers to extend and honor their promises of better climate behavior.

In this regard, one of the most fascinating post-Copenhagen commentaries came from Mark Lynas, a British writer and activist who has written one of the essential books on climate change, Six Degrees. Lynas serves as an unpaid science adviser to the Maldives, the Indian Ocean island nation that led the fight in Copenhagen to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million. Writing in the Guardian, Lynas charged that it was above all China that wrecked the summit. Lynas was in the room during the final hours of negotiations between Obama, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and other world leaders--talks that, he argued, could have produced an agreement that would have had environmentalists "popping champagne corks." But China repeatedly blocked progress, according to Lynas, including by demanding the removal of all specific targets for emissions reductions, even the 80 percent reductions by 2050 that the United States and other rich industrial nations were proposing for themselves.

Such accusations are "totally unjust and irresponsible," responded Yunliang Zhou, chief of the political and press office at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. Referring to China's pledge before Copenhagen to reduce its economy's carbon intensity by 40 to 45 percent by 2020, Zhou added, "Our voluntary target has no conditions attached, nor [is] it linked to any other country's goals. Given the performance of some countries at the conference and their long failed commitments, they have no right or qualification to blame China and other developing countries." Zhou declined to address China's alleged veto of the 80 percent emissions cuts by 2050 by developed countries.

But the United States cannot easily stand in judgment of such foot-dragging. Citing domestic constraints, the Obama administration has pledged to cut US emissions by a mere 4 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, well short of the 25 to 40 percent cuts the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says are required to (perhaps) limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. China offers its own domestic justifications: with 150 million Chinese living in poverty, economic development must be the top priority, and that for now means more fossil fuels. Some independent experts also refute Lynas's claim that China's commitment to reduce its carbon intensity is a mere PR move. "[That commitment] is a very big deal," says Mark Levine of the China Energy Group at the University of California, Berkeley, who has collaborated with China for the past twenty years to improve energy efficiency. "If other emerging economies were to do likewise, it would cut projected global emissions by 2050 in half."

One root of the US-China disagreement concerns the historical responsibility for climate change. Developing countries have long argued that it is not fair to expect them to slash their emissions when millions of their people live in poverty. After all, it is the historic emissions of rich industrial nations that caused global warming in the first place. The planet has only so much "atmospheric space"--the capacity to absorb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. With global temperatures having risen 0.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and with another 0.6 "in the pipeline" because of the long life span of carbon dioxide, much of the atmospheric space has already been occupied.

This distribution of atmospheric space is the apparent basis of China's objection to the 80 percent target for developed countries and to a related proposal for 50 percent reductions in global emissions by 2050. "If you agree to 2C and a global 50 percent reduction and then accept [the developed countries' 80 percent reductions by 2050], it has the effect of locking in your own future emissions," says a China expert who requested anonymity for fear of jeopardizing professional relationships. "That would allow China much lower per capita emissions than those of the US and other developed countries."

Lynas rejects such arguments as a recipe for disaster. "The historical responsibility argument makes sense in one way only: as an argument for adaptation financing," he wrote in an e-mail. (One of the few bright spots in the Copenhagen Accord was a pledge to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries cope with climate change, though it is unclear whether the money will materialize.) But such historical responsibility, insists Lynas, "is not an argument for others to pollute just as much....That is the logic of 'mutually assured destruction'--where human concepts of equity triumph over the necessity for planetary survival."

The world's leverage over China would doubtless increase if the other climate superpower was moving more aggressively. The Obama administration, Congressional Democrats and many mainstream environmental groups are pinning their hopes on the climate legislation that passed the House last summer and, in somewhat different form, awaits Senate action this spring. More radical environmental groups, such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, have criticized the bill as woefully weak--not just on its emissions targets but because it would cancel the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate greenhouse gases. Instead, the bill would rely on a cap-and-trade system, which critics complain is fatally compromised by its giveaways of the vast majority of pollution permits.

The most persuasive defense of the climate bill comes from Joe Romm, an assistant secretary of energy in the Clinton administration who blogs at ClimateProgress.org. Romm points out that the legislation's "lame" 2020 targets get much tougher after 2020 and hit 80 percent by 2050. "If you put in place a shrinking cap on emissions, that will inevitably raise the price of carbon, and that will be transformational," says Romm. He sees legislation as superior to EPA regulation, in part because he suspects that industry lawsuits would cripple EPA action, at least regarding existing power plants and other pollution sources. "I would love to keep EPA authority," Romm says, "but it makes no sense for progressives to take down this bill [on those grounds]. Once you've set up the economy-wide shrinking cap, the only thing you get from EPA authority is easy regulation of new--though not existing--coal-fired plants. But if the climate bill passes, no one is going to build those plants anyway."

"Contrary to what we keep hearing, Obama's hands are not tied by the tragically weak cap-and-trade bills," says Kassie Siegel, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity, whose report "Yes, He Can" outlines the case for unleashing the EPA. "Extremely deep emissions reductions are feasible with today's on-the-shelf technology.... Moreover, the Clean Air Act is a 'technology forcing' statute, so the EPA is supposed to do what's necessary to protect the public health, even if [that] appears impossible with current technology." As for potential lawsuits thwarting the EPA's effectiveness, Siegel replies, "Sure, industry can bring lawsuits, but that doesn't mean they will win, and there is nothing to stop them from suing over a cap and trade system either. Of course we want climate legislation too. But that legislation must build on the foundation of highly successful environmental law we already have, not roll it back."

Romm responds that canceling EPA authority is the price Republicans and wavering Democrats demand for backing climate legislation. "That's a price I'm willing to pay," he adds.

So, tough choices, tough challenges, tough timetables. As we grapple with them, we must above all reject the temptation of despair, which only warps thought and paralyzes action. The fight against climate change has reached a decisive moment. We must seize it with all our hearts.

Obama's First Year: A Success

2010-01-01T18:04:00.000-08:00

Despite the rhetoric that many are hearing in the mainstream media, I would strongly say that President Obama had a wonderful first year. Let's examine some of the highlights of his nascent administration.

The first piece of legislation President Obama signed into law was the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. This authorized equal pay for women in the workplace. It's a bit of a shame that it took until 2009 to enact such legislation, but it was much needed nonetheless.

The next was expansion of SCHIP to cover an additional four million American children. As many of you may remember, this was one piece of legislation that passed both houses back during the end of the Bush Administration, but was sadly vetoed by the last President. Its a shame that the previous leader of this nation decided that helping sick children was not worth the additional $32 billion, but spending over a $12 billion a week in a war we were lied into, was more important.

Then came President Obama's first big victory, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or more commonly known as the stimulus package. Surprisingly, this recieved bi-partisan support in the Senate, and has created or saved roughly 640,000 jobs, while providing this nation with much-needed infrastructure improvements and helping to offset many of the loses to state budgets.

President Obama also nominated the first Hispanic-American to the United State Supreme Court, once again recieving bi-partisan support in the Senate. On August 17, 2009 Justice Sonia Sotomayor cast her first vote as an associate justice on the US Supreme Court.

One of the grievances I hear is from the LGBT community and about Obama's inaction for their causes. In my opinion, President Obama has done two great things for that community, both occurring in the month of October. On October 28, Obama signed into law the The Matthew Shephard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which finally extended federal hate crimes law to include sexual orientation. A mere two days latter, Obama signed an extention of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Act, an afflication that unfortunately affects a misproportionate amount of members of the gay community.

President Obama also had the political courage to stand up for what is right in relation to the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, calling on December 1st for an additional 30,000 troops to that conflict. He showed that he is taking a hardline stance against terrorism and understands the investment we've already made in that conflict and the need to stabalize before withdrawal.

Finally, to end the first year off right, the Senate managed to muster a filibuster-proof 60 votes passing a landmark comprehensive health care reform bill. This is the largest piece of social legislation since the New Deal during the Roosevelt Adminstration. He has done something Democratic administrations for years have tried to do, and in his first year.

Despite what many people would like to say about the first year of the Obama Administration, I would applaud the President for a highly successful first year. Hopefully President Obama can add 2010 as another successful year. I think many, especially those on the left, want to see change quickly, but must also realize that change doesn't come overnight. We can quickly get disillusioned when we don't get exactly what we want, when we want it, but remember folks, we still get three more years (maybe seven) and there is still plenty left to change. I trust President Obama to make the right decisions.....let's just hope that Congress keeps delivering good bills for him to sign. One thing the left does not have to worry about with this President, is the threat of a veto on any of their issues, and that's something we can all be proud of.

Best Albums of 2009

2009-12-23T07:57:00.000-08:00

1. Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

I discovered this band a few years ago off a compilation CD I bought in Spain. The song then was "If I Ever Feel Better," little did I realize that a few years later, they would become a Grammy nominated band here stateside. I love this album, with songs like "1901" "Lizstomania" and "Armistice" this album would have to be my favorite of the year.

2. La Roux - La Roux

If Phoenix wasn't so awesome, La Roux would have easily won this contest. I first heard this while at the club on Indie night, it got stuck in my head and didn't know what it was called. A few weeks later I heard it again at XXI in the mall and my friend knew what it was. I went home and heard the album all the way through and fell in love. Some of my favorites include "Bulletproof", "In It For the Kill" and "Quicksand."

3. Passion Pit - Manners
I first heard this band when the DJ at the Wave played it in a set, at the time, I didn't know much about the band. A few weeks later a friend added this whole album to my iPod and I loved it. There are plenty of great dance tunes on this one. My favorites include "Sleepyhead", "Little Secrets" and "Make Light".

4. Wilco - Wilco
I have to thank my dear friend Katrina for introducing me to Wilco. They are a fantastic band to listen to when you're cleaning, driving, or doing work. They help pass the time, plus, who can deny how great the voice of lead singer Jeff Tweedy. Fav's include "Wilco," "Bull Black Nova" and "You Never Know."

5. Peaches - I Feel Cream
If you love to dance, then you probably already know Peaches. This is probably the least vulgar of all of her albums, and my personal favorite. You can dance to every song on this album, there are a large variety of great beats and rhythms on this one, a must listen. Fav's include "Talk to Me", "Trick or Treat," and "Mud".

6. Röyksopp - Junior
Credit for introducing me to this album goes to my best friend Justin. He essentially brought this album back from Germany with him. These Norwegian boys really know how to toss together some great beats. You probably can't dance to all the songs on this album, but that doesn't take away from the fact that this album is great. My fav's include "The Girl and the Robot," "Happy Up Here" and "You Don't Have a Clue."

7. Miike Snow - Miike Snow
Bill Trina gets credit for this album. I only got introduced to Miike Snow towards the end of the year, but quickly became attached. There are plenty of dancy grooves and more slower R&B sounding stuff here. I love "Plastic Jungle," "In Search of Main" and "Animal".

8. Matt & Kim - Grand
This fantastic duo from New York has really produced a good number with this one. These songs are really catchy and it totally deserves a spot in the top ten. "Lessoned Learned" "Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare" and "Daylight" are the best.

9. Calvin Harris - Ready for the Weekend
This Scottish hottie really produced a great album with "Ready for the Weekend". Although this is pretty mainstream electronica if you live in Europe, hardly anyone here in the States has heard of Calvin Harris, but they should. Gotta love these tracks "Ready for the Weekend," "You Used to Hold Me" and "Flashback".

10. Lady Gaga - The Fame Monster
No matter how much you hate her, you got to admit, her songs sure are catchy, and everywhere. I wanted to not include this, but I still haven't learned to hate songs like "Bad Romance," "Telephone," and my namesake "Alejandro". If you're going to a mainstream club where Flo-Rida and T-Pain dominate, this is a Godsent.

Climate Change: Copenhagen Jobs Summit – by Krystal Ball

2009-12-17T12:20:00.001-08:00

I was born and raised in an area of Virginia surrounded by the Chesapeake Bay. The bay is a priceless treasure and the largest estuary in the United States. It is second only to New Orleans in its vulnerability to climate-change induced flooding. I believe that man-made climate change is a scientific fact and confronting the reality of greenhouse gas emissions a critical moral and environmental imperative. Our failure to rise to this challenge would be a betrayal of our children and future generations. Right now, the world’s attention is focused on the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. My attention is also focused on Copenhagen. But not because I am an environmentalist, rather it is my patriotism, my experience as a small business owner and my study of economics that focus me on Copenhagen.

Eliminating our dependence on imported oil is a national security imperative. Our consumption of foreign oil bought from petro-dictators is the financial engine of worldwide terrorism. When I think about our men and women in uniform killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by improvised explosive devices and road-side bombs, as I marvel at their heroism, I can’t help but think about where the money came from to buy the explosives and the nails and ball bearings launched at them by jihadi cowards. Our purchase of foreign oil funds the regimes who fund the terrorists. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t matter whether you want to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels because of global warming or because you want to cut off funds to the terrorists…the patriotic thing to do and the environmental thing to do are the same. The US has 3% of the world’s proven oil reserves. Osama Bin Laden’s birthplace of Saudi Arabia has 25%. “Drill baby drill” may be the Saudi energy strategy, but it is no strategy for the US.

Cutting out our reliance on fossil fuels isn’t just about national security, it’s also about jobs. That’s why I think about the Copenhagen Summit as the jobs summit. Our car companies went bankrupt because we ignored world-wide demand for more fuel efficient cars and focused on higher short-term profits from SUVs and trucks. China leads the world in manufacturing, not just in the manufacture of the household goods that used to be made in America, but in solar power production and electric vehicle production. Our universities, our scientists, our venture capitalists are the best in the world by far. We have the largest consumer market in the world and are the world’s largest consumers of energy. The US is the natural choice to lead the world in energy-efficient, green technology and alternative and renewable energy. India, China, Japan and Europe are all aggressively promoting green technology as part of their economic growth strategy.

We work longer hours and have more productive workers than India or China. We are the best positioned in the world to lead in green technology and if we invest in that leadership, the entire world will buy green technology produced in America by American workers.

In the US, a fierce political debate rages about whether climate change is real. In the rest of the world, there is no such debate. The rest of the world accepts the reality of climate change and they are gearing up industry, research investment and regulation to make their economies more energy efficient, less reliant on fossil fuels, to turn their buildings green, to develop electric cars and affordable solar power in order to confront the reality of climate change. Those focused on events in Copenhagen are derided by “global warming skeptics” as tree-hugging internationalists who care more about world opinion than the economic reality of job creation in the United States. They deride climate change legislation as “Cap and Tax” and sound alarm bells about the economic consequences of higher energy costs that come with controlling greenhouse gas emissions. I say, for the cleanliness of our air, the purity of our water, the diversity of our wildlife, the national security of our homeland and the job creation of the 21st century, we need to heed the warning of Copenhagen and take the lead in the world-wide reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. And in the process, if we just happen to avoid a civilization ending climatic catastrophe, we can call that a bonus.

How to Save Journalism

2009-12-08T10:12:00.000-08:00

THE NATION
by: John Nichols

We will give you the good news first: the politicians and regulators who have it in their power to do something about the decline of American journalism are finally paying attention.

Already this year, House and Senate hearings have investigated the crisis. And even as Congress focuses this fall on healthcare reform and rising unemployment, all signs suggest that media matters will be back on the front burner in 2010, one hopes with less focus on what's gone awry and more on proposals to set things right. Encouragingly, federal agencies are taking tentative steps that could produce those proposals.

In early December the Federal Trade Commission will hold an unprecedented hearing to assess the radical downsizing and outright elimination of newspaper newsrooms and to consider public-policy measures that might arrest a precipitous collapse in reporting and editing of the news. The FTC staffers who have organized this hearing give the distinct impression of being seriously concerned about the crisis and seriously interested in responding to it. The Federal Communications Commission is also launching an extraordinary review of the state of journalism. The work was spearheaded initially by FCC commissioner Michael Copps, who has as firm a grasp of the problem as any player in Washington. The FCC review likely will emphasize the disintegration of local journalism. Its findings could also lead to sweeping changes in fundamental regulations.

Now for the bad news: the way the challenges facing journalism are being discussed, indeed the way the crisis itself is being framed, will make it tough for even the most sincere policy-makers to offer a viable answer to it.

The FTC's conference is titled "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" FCC chair Julius Genachowski explains the crisis as the result of "game-changing new technologies as well as the economic downturn." The assumption is clear: it's the Internet that's the problem. But just as MTV's debut pronouncement that "Video Killed the Radio Star" proved to be dramatically overstated, so is the notion that journalism's disintegration can be attributed to a brand-new digital revolution or even an old-fashioned economic meltdown.

The decline of commercial journalism predates the web. Newsrooms began to give up on maintaining staffs sufficient to cover their communities--effectively reducing the number of reporters relative to the overall population--in the 1980s. Real cuts came in the 1990s and have accelerated since then. All the pathologies blamed on the rise of the Internet--declines in science reporting, the disappearance of serious business and labor coverage, cutbacks in investigations and the shuttering of statehouse, Washington and international bureaus--began before anyone knew what it meant to Google.

These trends went largely unnoticed because the dominant news-media firms continued to rake in colossal profits. By downsizing reporting staffs and ramping up less expensive journalism based on trivia, sensationalism and press releases, they were able for years to maintain boomtime profits. But the party was destined to come to an end, as readers and viewers gave up on "products" that no longer contained much in the way of news.

Don't get us wrong. The Internet has shaken up the commercial model of journalism. People don't pay for what they can get free online. Advertisers that subsidized journalism for more than a century now bypass news media to reach consumers directly (most devastating for the dailies has been the loss of classifieds, which have gone to Craigslist). They aren't coming back. But the primary impact of the Internet has been to accelerate and make irreversible a process that began before the digital age.

The market has voted journalism off the island. This necessary nutrient of democracy will be washed away unless we recognize that commercial values are no longer going to provide us with sufficient quality journalism. It's a waste of valuable time attempting to cook up new schemes to make the process of news gathering and distribution as profitable as it once was.

Policy-makers need to take a page from American history. The framers understood that the government must not simply assure that a free and independent press may exist; it must set policies and expend resources with an eye toward guaranteeing that an independent free press will exist. No one in the first generations of the Republic thought the market would suffice; as a result, the American independent press was built on extraordinary and massive postal and printing subsidies that lasted well into the nineteenth century, remnants of which remain with us to this day. Similar subsidies--for instance, a massive increase in funding for public and community broadcasting outlets, which have never enjoyed the advantages bestowed by regulators upon commercial broadcasters--could foster the vibrant independent journalism of the twenty-first century.

Today, as in the early Republic, our system of government cannot succeed and our individual freedoms cannot survive without an informed, participating citizenry, and that requires competitive, independent news media. For that to happen, however, the FTC, the FCC and Congress must stop blaming the Internet and start thinking about how enlightened subsidies could revitalize the very necessary public good that is journalism.

Leaving the Right

2009-12-07T20:47:00.000-08:00

THE ATLANTIC

by: Andrew Sullivan

It's an odd formulation in some ways as "the right" is not really a single entity. But in so far as it means the dominant mode of discourse among the institutions and blogs and magazines and newspapers and journals that support the GOP, Charles Johnson is absolutely right in my view to get off that wagon for the reasons has has stated. Read his testament. It is full of emotion, but also of honesty.

The relationship of a writer to a party or movement is, of course, open to discussion. I understand the point that Jonah Goldberg makes that politics is not about pure intellectual individualism; it requires understanding power, its organization and the actual choices that real politics demands. You can hold certain principles inviolate and yet also be prepared to back politicians or administrations that violate them because it's better than the actual alternatives at hand. I also understand the emotional need to have a default party position, other things being equal. But there has to come a point at which a movement or party so abandons core principles or degenerates into such a rhetorical septic system that you have to take a stand. It seems to me that now is a critical time for more people whose principles lie broadly on the center-right to do so - against the conservative degeneracy in front of us. Those who have taken such a stand - to one degree or other - demand respect. And this blog, while maintaining its resistance to cliquishness, has been glad to link to writers as varied as Bruce Bartlett or David Frum or David Brooks or Steve Chapman or Kathleen Parker or Conor Friedersdorf or Jim Manzi or Jeffrey Hart or Daniel Larison who have broken ranks in some way or other.

I can't claim the same courage as these folks because I've always been fickle in partisan terms. To have supported Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Dole and Bush and Kerry and Obama suggests I never had a party to quit. I think that may be because I wasn't born here. I have no deep loyalty to either American party in my bones or family or background, and admire presidents from both parties. My partisanship remains solely British - I'm a loyal Tory. But my attachment to the Anglo-American conservative political tradition, as I understand it, is real and deep and the result of sincere reflection on the world as I see it. And I want that tradition to survive because I believe it is a vital complement to liberalism in sustaining the genius and wonder of the modern West.

For these reasons, I found it intolerable after 2003 to support the movement that goes by the name "conservative" in America. I still do, even though I am much more of a limited government type than almost any Democrat and cannot bring myself to call myself a liberal (because I'm not). My reasons were not dissimilar to Charles Johnson, who, like me, was horrified by 9/11, loathes Jihadism, and wants to defeat it as effectively as possible. And his little manifesto prompts me to write my own (the full version is in "The Conservative Soul"). Here goes:

I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.

I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.

I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government's minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.

I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.

I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.

I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.

I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.

I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.

I cannot support a movement that criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.

I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.

I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.

I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.

I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.

I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.

I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.

I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations.

Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.

To paraphrase Reagan, I didn't leave the conservative movement. It left me.

And increasingly, I'm not alone.

Snowe Rejoins Dems at Public Option Negotiating Table

2009-12-05T15:43:00.000-08:00

THE HUFFINGTON POST
By: Ryan Grim

In a breakthough in Senate negotiations around a public health insurance option, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) sat down with centrist conservative Democrats for the first time Saturday since the bipartisan Gang of Six broke up shortly after returning from the August recess.

Since then, Snowe, the most likely Republican to cross the aisle on health care reform, has been meeting individually with Democrats, but had yet to rejoin negotiations in a formal way.

Snowe, emerging from a meeting on the first floor of the Capitol, Saturday afternoon, told a few reporters hovering outside the room that she had been approached earlier that morning about attending.

She said that no agreement had yet been reached, but that the group was considering "another option," aside from those already under discussion. An agreement had been reached that it would not be publicly discussed, she said, until more details were worked out. Earlier Saturday, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) also mentioned the new option being kicked around but said he couldn't discuss it.

Kerry said that Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) was one of the leading intellectual fathers of this new approach, an assertion Snowe confirmed, adding that Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) were also closely involved.

Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colorado), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) also attended the meeting.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) was not at the meeting and has vowed to filibuster any bill that has any version of a public option. If Lieberman holds to his threat, Democrats would need Snowe to break a GOP-Lieberman filibuster.

Snowe said she was still pushing her "trigger" proposal and met yesterday with Kerry to discuss it. Kerry, she said, has long been open to such a plan. Under her trigger, the public option would only be available in states where private insurance is deemed unaffordable to a certain percentage of residents. Advocates of the public option say a trigger is as good as no public option at all, because it will be gamed by insurance companies so that it never "triggers."

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Snowe said Kerry's been in discussions with her about her proposal for months. "[She and Kerry] have, even prior to this, [had discussions] on the Finance Committee about the possibility of a trigger and how it would work and so on," she said.

As the conservative meeting was breaking up, a separate meeting on the Hill began, where liberal Democrats met to discuss their own strategy around the public option.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was also in the Capitol Saturday, but didn't attend either meeting.

"I've talked to a lot of senators and encouraged the good work that's gone on," she said as she left the building and was met by a driving snow. "I know that lots of very positive conversations are underway with lots of members of the Senate and that's just what needs to happen."

President Obama plans to address the Senate caucus on Sunday afternoon, a meeting she said she planned to attend, as well.

HuffPost asked what she thought Obama would tell his party.

"Pass health care," she said.

UPDATE: Conservative Arkansas Democrats Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor joined the liberals on the second floor of the Capitol following the centrist meeting earlier. Snowe didn't join, but said she'd continue talking.

Following the meeting, Pryor declined to get too specific, but did say that a leading proposal involves increasing the ability of the Office of Personnel Management -- which oversees the federal employee health plans -- to negotiate on behalf of individuals and small businesses. Pryor told a HuffPost and an AP reporter that it was unclear how exactly it would be set up, but that it would take the place of the public option managed by the Health and Human Services Secretary.

Lincoln, also interviewed after the meeting, said that the OPM plan would not need additional seed money and would be similar to a proposal she introduced earlier this year called the SHOP Act. She said that she continues to oppose a "government-run plan," but that this proposal would meet the twin goals of keeping down costs and increasing competition. Snowe and Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) are cosponsors of the SHOP Act.

The Lincoln proposal appears to be the alternative option that the conservatives and centrists discussed at the earlier meeting. Snowe had said the proposal was both old and new and Lincoln's measure answers that riddle.

It does little, however, to answer liberals' demands for a nationwide public option. Pryor said, however, that the progressive senators they met with were willing to continue discussions and cautioned that it would be several days before a deal was reached.

They plan to meet again Sunday evening after Obama departs.

12 Tips for a Green Holiday

2009-12-05T08:28:00.000-08:00

By Mike Kernels
The Virginian-Pilot
© December 5, 2009

Real tree or fake? LEDs or incandescents? Paper ornaments or plastic? Are these things naughty - or nice? The eco-minded need to know. So, in honor of the 12 days of Christmas, here are a dozen environmentally friendly ways you can bring joy to the world.

1. Real tree or fake?

We hate to break it to the tree huggers, but go real. Always. So says just about every environmental group out there. The reason: You can't recycle a fake tree after it's worn out; you can a real one.

2. The right stuff

Consider giving things that your friends and loved ones can actually use. Like a car wash. Or a homemade meal. Gifts like those consume your time but not the planet. For those who need a bar code for it to feel like a present, there's www.treehugger.com/giftguide. That Web site sells all things recycled, from a necklace made from reused cassette tapes ($20) to organic chew toys for pets ($10).

3. House of no cards

Environmental impact aside, let's just say it: Sending Christmas cards isn't easy. The time. The stamps. The frustration of trying to say The Right Thing. And, of course, the paper. Sure, it's fun to get them. So try sending e-cards instead (just search for "e-cards" in your Web browser). They're easy and often free.

4. Party on

For holiday parties, try to reduce the amount of trash you create. Do use metal utensils, glass and china. Don't use plastic or Styrofoam. Do use cloth tablecloths. Don't use throwaways. Do wash things in cold water (and, yes, there will be much to wash).

5. LEDs or incandescents?

Use light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, instead of incandescent bulbs to decorate your tree and home. The con is that they're slightly more expensive. The pros? A ton of them, according to Consumer Reports. LEDs last 2,000 hours longer. They use from 80 to 90 percent less power. And they're cool to the touch, keeping your tree - and fingers - from being burned.

6. Buyer beware

OK, it's time to come clean. Who hasn't re-gifted something - or at least thought about it? Now you'll have a good excuse. It's a form of recycling. "This can only be good for mankind, the environment and gift-giving in general," writes Jodi Newbern in her book "Regifting Revival!"

7. It's in the bag

This one requires a leap of faith - by you and any retailers you visit. Instead of lugging home umpteen number of a store's shopping bags, just use your own. Of course, that raises the possibility you'll be stopped for shoplifting. To avoid trouble, author Danny Seo advises in "Simply Green Giving," fasten receipts to the outside of the bag.

8. It's only natural

Fruitcake might be the only thing with a shelf life longer than your average Christmas decoration. Whenever possible, ditch the artificial decor and go for the biodegradable. Christmas ornaments can be cinnamon sticks, popcorn and pine cones. Wreaths can be branches trimmed from your backyard. Stockings can come from old clothes. Time spent storing decorations after Christmas is yours again. Go to ecobites.com for more tips.

9. Taking the wrap

Why bother buying wrapping paper when it's just going to get shredded in seconds anyway? Paper grocery store bags and magazine and newspaper pages work just as well. If you must have traditional paper, Pristine Planet (pristineplanet.com) offers a recycled version ($5 to $9 for every two sheets) as well as biodegradable ribbon ($5 to $7).

10. Batteries not included

In our high-tech world, this might sound unreasonable, but try to give gifts that don't need batteries. As stuff that's bad for the planet goes, a battery ranks right up there with deforestation, greenhouse gases and, dare we say it, "America's Got Talent." That's because, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, batteries contain high concentrations of mercury and lead that, when incinerated at landfills, get released into the air.

11. Dude, where's my car?

Instead of many shopping trips, just make - are you ready for this? - only one. That's right. Do everything. In a single pop - or two. Yeah, we know, that's easier said than done. But who said saving the planet would be easy?

12. Talking trash

Christmas is over. Now it's time to panic about the balance on your credit card - and clean up with these tips from the Discovery Channel. Start by using your tree - real, of course - as mulch. Many wrapping papers can be recycled. Bags and bows can be reused. If you're getting rid of the old to make way for the new, donate it to a thrift store. And, by all means, regift. Just not to us.

Mike Kernels, (757) 446-2732, mike.kernels@pilotonline.com

Reform or Else (Op-Ed)

2009-12-04T07:45:00.001-08:00

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Paul Krugman

Health care reform hangs in the balance. Its fate rests with a handful of “centrist” senators — senators who claim to be mainly worried about whether the proposed legislation is fiscally responsible.

But if they’re really concerned with fiscal responsibility, they shouldn’t be worried about what would happen if health reform passes. They should, instead, be worried about what would happen if it doesn’t pass. For America can’t get control of its budget without controlling health care costs — and this is our last, best chance to deal with these costs in a rational way.

Some background: Long-term fiscal projections for the United States paint a grim picture. Unless there are major policy changes, expenditure will consistently grow faster than revenue, eventually leading to a debt crisis.

What’s behind these projections? An aging population, which will raise the cost of Social Security, is part of the story. But the main driver of future deficits is the ever-rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid. If health care costs rise in the future as they have in the past, fiscal catastrophe awaits.

You might think, given this picture, that extending coverage to those who would otherwise be uninsured would exacerbate the problem. But you’d be wrong, for two reasons.

First, the uninsured in America are, on average, relatively young and healthy; covering them wouldn’t raise overall health care costs very much.

Second, the proposed health care reform links the expansion of coverage to serious cost-control measures for Medicare. Think of it as a grand bargain: coverage for (almost) everyone, tied to an effort to ensure that health care dollars are well spent.

Are we talking about real savings, or just window dressing? Well, the health care economists I respect are seriously impressed by the cost-control measures in the Senate bill, which include efforts to improve incentives for cost-effective care, the use of medical research to guide doctors toward treatments that actually work, and more. This is “the best effort anyone has made,” says Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A letter signed by 23 prominent health care experts — including Mark McClellan, who headed Medicare under the Bush administration — declares that the bill’s cost-control measures “will reduce long-term deficits.”

The fact that we’re seeing the first really serious attempt to control health care costs as part of a bill that tries to cover the uninsured seems to confirm what would-be reformers have been saying for years: The path to cost control runs through universality. We can only tackle out-of-control costs as part of a deal that also provides Americans with the security of guaranteed health care.

That observation in itself should make anyone concerned with fiscal responsibility support this reform. Over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office has concluded, the proposed legislation would reduce, not increase, the budget deficit. And by giving us a chance, finally, to rein in the ever-growing spending of Medicare, it would greatly improve our long-run fiscal prospects.

But there’s another reason failure to pass reform would be devastating — namely, the nature of the opposition.

The Republican campaign against health care reform has rested in part on the traditional arguments, arguments that go back to the days when Ronald Reagan was trying to scare Americans into opposing Medicare — denunciations of “socialized medicine,” claims that universal health coverage is the road to tyranny, etc.

But in the closing rounds of the health care fight, the G.O.P. has focused more and more on an effort to demonize cost-control efforts. The Senate bill would impose “draconian cuts” on Medicare, says Senator John McCain, who proposed much deeper cuts just last year as part of his presidential campaign. “If you’re a senior and you’re on Medicare, you better be afraid of this bill,” says Senator Tom Coburn.

If these tactics work, and health reform fails, think of the message this would convey: It would signal that any effort to deal with the biggest budget problem we face will be successfully played by political opponents as an attack on older Americans. It would be a long time before anyone was willing to take on the challenge again; remember that after the failure of the Clinton effort, it was 16 years before the next try at health reform.

That’s why anyone who is truly concerned about fiscal policy should be anxious to see health reform succeed. If it fails, the demagogues will have won, and we probably won’t deal with our biggest fiscal problem until we’re forced into action by a nasty debt crisis.

So to the centrists still sitting on the fence over health reform: If you care about fiscal responsibility, you better be afraid of what will happen if reform fails.

Sarah Palin: A Birther

2009-12-03T21:24:00.000-08:00

From the HuffingtonPost

During an interview on Thursday with conservative talk radio host Rusty Humphries, former Governor Sarah Palin joined the 'birther' movement -- those who doubt the authenticity of President Obama's birth certificate, thus calling into question the legitimacy of his presidency.

About 9 minutes into the conversation (which began with a rendition of the song "Sarah, Queen Of The Wild Frontier") Humphries asked if Palin would "make the birth certificate an issue" if she ran in 2012.

"I think the public rightfully is still making it an issue." Palin said. "I don't have a problem with that. I don't know if I would have to bother to make it an issue, because I think that members of the electorate still want answers."

Humphries pressed on: "Do you think it's a fair question to be looking at?"

Palin answered that she did think it was fair. "I think past association and past voting records -- all of that is fair game." She went on to explain that the reason she thought it was fair game, is because of the way people went after "the weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn't my real son -- 'You need to produce his birth certificate, you need to prove that he's your kid,' which we have done."

"Maybe we can reverse that," she said.

Zombie Nuke Plants

2009-12-03T08:58:00.000-08:00

THE NATION
by Christian Parenti

Oyster Creek Generating Station, in suburban Lacey Township, New Jersey, opened the same month Richard Nixon took office vowing to bring "an honorable peace" to Vietnam. This nuke plant, the oldest in the country, was slated to close in 2009 when its original forty-year license was ending. It had seen four decades of service, using radioactively produced heat to boil water into high-pressure steam that ran continuously through hundreds of miles of increasingly brittle and stressed piping.

If constructed today, Oyster Creek would not be licensed, because it does not meet current safety standards. Yet on April 8 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)--the government agency overseeing the industry--relicensed Oyster Creek, extending its life span twenty years beyond what was originally intended.

Seven days later workers at the plant found an ongoing radioactive leak of tritium-polluted water. Tritium is a form of hydrogen. In August workers found another tritium leak coming from a pipe buried in a concrete wall. Radiation makes metal brittle, so old pipes must be routinely switched out for new ones. The second leak was spilling about 7,200 gallons a day and contained 500 times the acceptable level of radiation for drinking water.

That leaking pipe had erroneously--or perhaps fraudulently--been listed in paperwork as replaced. How this error occurred remains unclear. What seems likely is that the plant's previous owner, GPU Nuclear, was deliberately skimping on maintenance as it approached the end of the plant's license. Then Oyster Creek was sold to Exelon and won relicensing. How many other mislabeled, brittle, old components remain in the plant's guts is impossible to determine without a massive audit and investigation. Unfortunately, stories like this are all too common: crumbling, leaky, accident-prone old nuclear plants, shrouded in secrecy and subject to lax maintenance, are getting relicensed all over the country.

In the face of climate change, many people who are desperate for alternatives to fossil fuels are considering the potential of nuclear power. The government has put up $18.5 billion in subsidies to build atomic plants. As a candidate for president, John McCain called for forty-five new nuke plants.

Environmentalists have rightly pointed out the dangers this would entail. But new nukes are not the issue. As laid out in these pages last year [see Parenti, "What Nuclear Renaissance?" May 12, 2008], new atomic plants are prohibitively expensive. If enough public subsidies are thrown at the industry, one or two gold-plated, state-of-the-art, extremely expensive nuclear power stations may eventually be built, at most.

The real issue is what happens to old nukes. The atomic power industry has a plan: it wants to make as much money as possible from the existing fleet of 104 old, often decrepit, reactors by getting the government to extend their licenses. The oldest plants, most of which opened in the early 1970s and were designed to operate for only forty years, should be dead by now. Yet, zombielike, they march on, thanks to the indulgence of the NRC.

More than half of America's nuclear plants have received new twenty-year operating licenses. In fact, the NRC has not rejected a single license-renewal application. Many of these plants have also received "power up-rates" that allow them to run at up to 120 percent of their originally intended capacity. That means their systems are subjected to unprecedented amounts of heat, pressure, corrosion, stress and embrittling radiation.

These undead nukes are highly dangerous. But constant, careful (and expensive) inspection and maintenance would mitigate the risks. Unfortunately, the NRC does not require anything like that. And the industry often operates in a cavalier profit-before-safety style.

At the heart of the matter is the culture of the NRC. During his campaign Obama called the NRC "a moribund agency...captive of the industry that it regulates." Unfortunately, since then Obama's position has softened considerably.

The NRC is run by a five-member commission. When Obama came to office he inherited one open seat; another opened soon after. Filling those seats with safety-conscious experts not in thrall to the industry would have done much to change the culture of the NRC.

The president's first move was a good one: he made commissioner Gregory Jaczko chair of the commission. Jaczko has openly questioned the safety culture of both the NRC and the industry and is respected among environmentalists as a serious and safety-oriented regulator.

But in October Obama nominated two people for the open seats. In classic fashion, he cut it down the middle. The relatively decent appointment, in the view of environmentalists, is George Apostolakis, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. He sits on a safety oversight board within the NRC. His academic specialty is probabilistic risk assessment of complex technological systems, risk management and decision analysis.

"He is safety-minded," says Ed Lyman, senior staff scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But I worry that his approach might be a little too theoretical, too academic. He might not be ready to really regulate the industry."

The other nominee, William Magwood, is described by environmentalists as a disaster. Magwood worked at the Department of Energy as the director of its nuclear energy program. In that capacity, he acted as a booster for the industry. He's made numerous public speeches promoting atomic energy. And most recently he worked as a consultant for the nuclear industry.

Because the NRC is an independent regulatory agency, the president's nominees must be confirmed by the Senate. A key player there--notorious climate-science denier Senator James Inhofe, ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee--greeted the appointments with a backhanded compliment to the president: "At the very least, the selection of these individuals indicates President Obama understands the importance of the NRC in rebuilding our nation's nuclear capabilities." Given the source, this was damning praise indeed.

Lax safety culture at the NRC is at least in part a result of the revolving door between the atomic power business and the commission, including both middle- and upper-level staff. The most prominent example of this involved commissioner Jeffrey Merrifield, who championed accelerated licensing and other major policy initiatives that directly benefited the Shaw Group, the self-described "largest provider of commercial nuclear power plant maintenance and modifications services in the United States." Twelve days after Merrifield left the NRC, in 2007, he became a top executive at--yes--the Shaw Group. Then, in late October of this year, after pressure from public interest groups, the NRC's Office of the Inspector General found that Merrifield had violated government ethics rules by courting industry while still at the NRC.

This corrupt symbiosis between the industry and NRC is even found at the level of language. Critics say the staff habitually defers to the industry, rarely double-checking corporate assertions about safety. During relicensing, the NRC has used industry language verbatim in its reports. A recent random sampling of NRC relicensing reports conducted by its Office of the Inspector General found that almost half the language in the documents had been lifted verbatim or nearly so from industry applications. In other words, not only is the NRC failing to conduct its own research; it can't even rewrite the nuke industry's boilerplate self-justifications when issuing new licenses.

"Politically, the nuclear industry is very effective," says Richard Webster, legal director of the Eastern Environmental Law Center, which represents five citizens' groups fighting Oyster Creek. "If only they ran nuclear plants as well as they lobby."

This cozy relationship is helped by the fact that the nuclear power industry's drive for profit coincides with the NRC's bureaucratic will to survive. If all the old plants were mothballed, the raison d'être of the NRC (and maybe much of the bureaucracy itself) would disappear.

Environmentalists describe the relicensing and up-rate process as highly opaque, rigged in the industry's favor, designed to exclude public participation and marginalize opposition. They say safety is closely linked to transparency--which is in short supply.

Over the past two decades the NRC has also promulgated rules that effectively exclude from consideration many of the grounds on which the public could intervene to oppose relicensing. For example, the public cannot raise the issue of terrorism. Nor can it question maintenance plans, or waste storage plans, or even evacuation procedures.

The NRC's Office of the Inspector General found that its own agency had "established an unreasonably high burden of requiring absolute proof of a safety problem, versus lack of reasonable assurance of maintaining public health and safety, before it will act to shut down a power plant."

The parameters for relicensing are sometimes shockingly permissive. For example, Oyster Creek, only fifty miles from Philadelphia, lacks a reactor containment shell strong enough to withstand a jet crash. And the geography around the plant isn't possible to evacuate: originally built in a rural area, the plant is now surrounded by sprawl. But the NRC takes none of that into account.

Even more amazing, Oyster Creek's relicensing process did not require testing metals in the plant's core for embrittlement. The containment shell, such as it is, was found to have been corroded down to half its intended thickness. Citizens' groups had to file a lawsuit just to get the NRC to hold a public hearing that would yield a ruling. And that was the first one the NRC had held during more than forty-five relicensing processes.

Indian Point, forty miles north of Times Square, is also applying for a new license. It too leaks radioactive water like a sieve: tens of thousands of gallons of radioactive, tritium- and strontium 90-laced water from one of its spent fuel pools have polluted groundwater and the Hudson River. The first of several leaks was discovered in 2005, but the plant's owner, Entergy, failed to report the problem for almost a month.

Vermont Yankee, also owned by Entergy, has one of the worst operating records in the country, runs at 120 percent capacity because of a 2006 power up-rate, and is well on its way to being relicensed. As detailed in these pages last year, Vermont Yankee has recently suffered a number of almost comical problems: a fire set off emergency mobilizations in three states; a cooling tower collapsed; a crane dropped a cask of atomic waste; parts of a fuel rod even went missing. To save money Entergy has been caught skipping routine maintenance and not hiring needed staff. This year the plant has been battling what seem to be unending leaks: in February the water cleanup system leaked, in May a condenser tube leak was identified but not repaired, in June there was a leak in a service water pipe. Then a recirculation pump unexpectedly reduced power and locked up, preventing the operators from changing its speed. And in August Entergy announced that it was not doing all of the required monthly radiological monitoring of its spent fuel.

FirstEnergy's Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ohio also wants a new twenty-year license. In 2002 that plant came very close to calamity. Largely by chance, staff discovered a six-inch-deep hole in the reactor vessel head; only three-eighths of an inch of metal remained. This barrier protects against a reactor breach and a possible chain of events that could have led to a reactor meltdown. The hole could have been found and fixed earlier, but the plant's owner, FirstEnergy, requested that the NRC allow it to delay a mandated inspection. In October 2008 Davis-Besse workers also discovered a tritium leak.

This fleet of poorly regulated zombie plants is the real story of nuclear power. Building hundreds of new nukes to save us from climate change is a pipe dream--the time and expense necessary for that would be impossible to overcome in the decade or two remaining. And so the debate about the future of atomic power in the age of climate change functions mostly as a smoke screen behind which these old, leaky, crumbling plants are being pushed to the limit of their endurance. Half the fleet has already been relicensed and many up-rated to run at more than 100 percent of their designed capacity. To avoid dangerous accidents over the next two decades, the industry must be subject to real oversight. For that to happen, the NRC must be reformed.

There will likely be one more opening on the commission. If the risk of a real nuclear disaster is to be diminished, Obama must nominate a robust safety- and transparency-minded commissioner who will stand up to the powerful companies that own the zombie nuke fleet.

About Christian Parenti

Christian Parenti, a Nation contributing editor and visiting scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (New Press), and is at work on a book about climate change and war.

The Hospital That Could Cure Health Care

2009-12-03T08:31:00.000-08:00

CLEVELAND CLINIC IS BOTH HIGHLY EFFECTIVE AND FIERCELY EFFICIENT. So why are its methods so rare?
NEWSWEEK, by: Jerry Adler and Jeneen Interlandi

The Cleveland Clinic, where president Obama went in July to see high-quality, cost-efficient medicine in action, has miniaturized robotic tools that can repair a heart valve through an incision less than an inch long, a computer system that allows doctors to read patients' charts and write orders from anywhere in the world, and the last word in networked, interactive supply closets. Any time a nurse takes something from a shelf, it's recorded by a program that keeps a running count of 350 items in hundreds of locations, and can dispatch a self-guided robot cart to bring replacements from the warehouse. A century after Henry Ford began building cars on an assembly line, Cleveland Clinic has brought that technique to medicine, updated to reflect the latest Japanese-inspired thinking on "lean manufacturing" and "continuous-cycle improvement." Cleveland Clinic is a hospital trying to be a Toyota factory.

In his efforts to improve the efficiency of medical care, Cleveland Clinic president and CEO Dr. Delos M. Cosgrove, a former cardiac surgeon, has enlisted every tool of modern management, obsessively tracking metrics of performance from blood-bank usage to market share, even redesigning hospital gowns in an initiative to "improve the patient experience." He has expanded the system to nine community hospitals and 15 "family health centers," plus satellite facilities in Florida and Toronto and one under construction in Abu Dhabi. Riding roughshod when necessary over the prerogatives of the existing staffs, he has consolidated some services (such as cardiac surgery) in the 1,100-bed main hospital campus and distributed others (including primary care and routine obstetrics) to the communities.

He has even taken on the most intractable driver of American health-care costs: Americans. Having already banned the hiring of smokers (a dictate enforced by urine tests for nicotine), Cosgrove declared this year that if it weren't illegal under federal law, he would refuse to hire fat people as well. The resulting outcry led him to apologize for "hurtful" comments. But he has not backed down from his belief that obesity is a failure of willpower, which can be attacked by the same weapons used to combat smoking: public education, economic incentives, and sheer exhortation. "You have to be an optimist to be a cardiac surgeon," says Cosgrove. You also need a measure of self-assurance, bordering on arrogance, to take a beating heart into your own hands, and Cosgrove—who is imposingly tall and fit, with an unsettlingly intense, unblinking stare—gives the impression he wouldn't hesitate to snatch a potato chip from the hand of anyone who dared pick one up in his presence. It would have to be brought from home, though, because under his administration, potato chips have been banished from the clinic's vending machines.

As Cosgrove told a Senate hearing in June, the clinic's business practices offer a potential model for the American health-care industry as it strains to bend the ever-rising cost curve. The evidence was in the 2008 Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which reported that of the five medical centers ranked best by U.S. News in 2007, Cleveland Clinic provided the most cost-efficient care, measured by expenses incurred during the last two years of life—$31,252, nearly 50 percent below the most expensive. The clinic's distinctive feature is that in contrast to most other American hospitals, where doctors are essentially autonomous professionals, at the clinic physicians work on fixed salaries and yearly contracts. An outsider might describe this relationship as "employer-employee," although Cosgrove prefers a teamwork analogy; he calls Cleveland Clinic "the world's second-largest group practice" (after Mayo Clinic, which is organized similarly). This saves money in many small ways, such as on expenses for medical supplies and devices. "Because we're all on a team," says Dr. Joseph Sabik, chairman of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery, "instead of stocking 30 different heart valves, we can stock two or three, and unless there's a good medical reason to do otherwise, that's what we use." And it saves money in one large way, by divorcing doctors' income from the number of procedures they perform. That, in turn, reduces the incentive for unnecessary tests, whose cost to the economy was estimated at $210 billion a year in a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

That's an eye-catching number, even in the context of $2.2 trillion in overall health-care expenditures. Along with many other health-care experts, Cosgrove worries that the bills now making their way through Congress won't do enough to control expenses. "They set out to improve quality, access to health care, and cost control," Cosgrove said after the House bill passed. "I give them an A so far on access, a C on quality, but I'm not sure they're going to get a passing grade on costs." A number of proposals have been floated to improve cost efficiency by "bundling" reimbursements—paying hospitals a fixed amount to treat a given condition, rather than require itemized bills for each test and procedure—or rewarding hospitals for improving care and holding down expenses. Cosgrove believes even more fundamental reforms are needed, including better coordination among hospitals and doctors, and between hospitals—along the lines of what the clinic has already achieved. But a broad reorganization of American health care may be a bridge too far, at least for now.

The same study estimated that another $210 billion is wasted each year on medical paperwork. That, though, is one potential savings that has mostly eluded Cosgrove. At the clinic's patients' accounts office, rows of cubicles are piled high with file folders and printouts, testimony to its dealings with thousands of different health plans from hundreds of insurance companies all over the country. Thousands of times a day, clerks pick up the phone and get put on hold like anyone else who calls an insurance company. Industry estimates put the average cost of handling a phone call at $3, to each party. This is the hidden cost of competition; whatever else a government-run health-insurance system would accomplish, it would impose a uniform billing system on the current one, in which clinic's 2,000 doctors require 1,400 clerks to handle their billing.

Cleveland Clinic works so well as a business in part because it works so well as a hospital. Cardiac medicine and cardiac surgery are its crown jewels, a major reason that it attracted 39,309 patients from other states and 2,380 from 102 foreign countries last year. Many were transferred from other hospitals aboard the clinic's fleet of helicopters and jet transports, outfitted as flying intensive-care units and kept on 24-hour standby. They will pick up any patient not actively receiving CPR, including one who was flown to the clinic on heart-lung bypass. When they take off, they don't know and don't ask whether they're coming back with a homeless drug addict, whose care may run into hundreds of thousands of virtually unrecoverable dollars, or a senior partner in a law firm. Like most hospitals, the clinic counts on privately insured patients, who generally are profitable, to balance those on Medicare, which pays about 6 percent below cost, and Medicaid, whose payments average about 14 percent below. Unlike most hospitals, though, its reputation assures it a steady stream of wealthy patients, including foreigners, whose bills do not have to pass the needle's eye of an insurance-company claims examiner.

Dr. Steven Nissen, the chief of cardiovascular medicine, sees many transfer patients on his morning rounds. "Ninety-nine percent of the hospitals in the world would walk away from this guy," Nissen says of one patient, an elderly man in acute heart failure who was flown in the night before from a hospital in another state. "He's 79 years old, diabetic, with three bad valves. But this is what we do here. By our standards he's a reasonable surgical candidate."

As he talks, Nissen scans patient charts on a cart-mounted computer that can also call up X-rays and lab results as soon as they're posted. Cosgrove was an early and enthusiastic adapter of electronic medical record-keeping. Orders can be entered on the keyboard; the software's "decision support" function alerts the doctor to possible adverse drug interactions and will even suggest medications for specific conditions. Under development, according to Dr. C. Martin Harris, the clinic's chief information officer, is a "smart IV" system that will record in real time the actual administration of intravenous medications. But the most revolutionary feature of the clinic's record-keeping system is that patients can access their own charts, including test results, diagnoses, and procedures. (Doctors can hide some information—such as a cancer diagnosis—from patients until they've had a chance to explain it to them in person.) Nearly 200,000 patients are enrolled in this program, called MyChart. A pilot program in cooperation with Microsoft supplies home-monitoring equipment to outpatients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and congestive heart failure. The hardware measures weight, blood pressure, or glucose, and the software enters it on the patient's chart and automatically alerts the doctor by e-mail to abnormal results, which otherwise might be caught only at a bimonthly checkup or when the patient shows up in the emergency room. This is a microcosm of the kind of medicine—harnessing advanced technology to basic preventive procedures—that Cosgrove wants the whole country to adopt. But it raises the question of why the model that has worked at the clinic hasn't been adopted more widely. Medicine is a notoriously conservative profession. Its prime principle, "First, do no harm," was also the foundation of Edmund Burke's political philosophy, and of 16 physicians in the U.S. House and Senate, 11 are Republicans. There's a built-in resistance to changes such as the shift to "evidence-based medicine," which simply means being guided by the latest scientific data rather than "what I remember from med school" or "what worked with the last guy I saw with this." Most laypeople were probably surprised to learn that medicine didn't work this way already, or that the idea could be dismissed as a plot to undermine doctors' autonomy. Cleveland Clinic has also been in the forefront of measuring and publicizing its results; of a dozen leading hospitals contacted by NEWSWEEK recently to compare outcomes for cancer patients, the clinic was the only one that could provide its own data, compiled, analyzed, and easily accessible to patients and the public. That goes even for statistics—such as readmission rates for heart attack and heart failure—that display what the clinic delicately describes as "opportunity for improvement."

The clinic has also revolutionized its table of organization. Most hospitals are organized by traditional specialties, each with its own medical perspective, records, and business practices. You may have been seeing the same gynecologist for 20 years, but if you get referred for a hysterectomy, the surgeon's office treats you as if you dropped into the waiting room from another planet, and it's up to you to prove your health insurance is good on Earth. But in 2006 Cleveland Clinic abandoned the traditional departments in favor of 25 "institutes" organized by disease or organ system. This works well for patients, who don't care whether their back pain is cured by a rheumatologist, a neurologist, or an orthopedic surgeon. But, says Regina Herzlinger, an expert in health-care economics at Harvard Business School, it runs afoul of the dominant fee-for-service system of medical billing, which discourages cooperation across fields. When Duke University Medical Center set up a disease-management system for congestive heart failure, coordinating the efforts of cardiologists, primary-care doctors, pharmacists, and nurse practitioners, it drove down the cost of treatment by 40 percent in a single year, while reducing readmissions and improving outcomes. But that highlighted the central paradox of health-care economics: a patient's "cost" is the hospital's "revenue." The unintended result of the Duke experiment, says Herzlinger, was that the unit lost tens of millions of dollars a year. The chief beneficiaries were the insurance companies, which saved on reimbursements.

At Cleveland Clinic, by contrast, the institute system worked because all its doctors were already on salary. This eliminates the competition for patients between departments, and the incentive for doctors to perform additional tests and procedures. The system also "drives our quality up," Cosgrove says, because it frees doctors to concentrate on their practices, not the minutiae of running a small business. "Day after day for 30 years I did nothing but fix hearts," he boasts. "That's how you get good at something." Only a relatively few hospitals have adopted the salary model, including the Veterans Administration system, Mayo Clinic, and the cancer-specialty hospitals Fred Hutchinson and M.D. Anderson. It's a question of how you export the culture; Cosgrove himself admits that "teamwork doesn't come naturally to doctors." Running a hospital this way requires evaluating every doctor annually on a long list of criteria including infection and readmission rates, patient satisfaction, research, and even how much blood they used. Most doctors aren't used to being treated like…well, like ordinary employees. But Cosgrove thinks the world is moving in his direction; young medical-school graduates don't want to deal with the ever-increasing expense of setting up their own offices, and are willing to trade some independence in exchange for not being on call seven days a week in a solo or small-group practice.

It's no coincidence that the salary system has been adopted first by hospitals with world-class reputations. If you put doctors on a salary, it had better be a good one. Most of the doctors at Cleveland Clinic say they are being paid a little less than the maximum they could earn in a more traditional practice, but they would have to work a lot harder and longer for it elsewhere. According to its 2007 tax filing, the highest-salaried doctor at Cleveland Clinic, excluding those who were also officers or trustees, was $1.2 million. That's comparable to the highest compensation—$1.1 million—reported by Cleveland's other leading medical center, Case Western Reserve's University Hospitals. (For medical students considering a specialty, those were, respectively, a bariatric surgeon and a plastic surgeon. Cosgrove was paid about $1.5 million.) Cosgrove says he brought up the salary model at a White House meeting on health-care reform with policy adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle. "There were 10 other heads of hospitals there and every one of them said, 'Oh, no, we could never do that.' Then I asked them, 'Who would do it by themselves, if they could just make it happen?' And they all raised their hands." Admittedly, not everyone buys the argument that salaries reduce costs. Joseph White, an expert on health economics at Case Western Reserve University, is one skeptic, based less on the data than on his knowledge of human nature. "If they claim they're not interested in doing more reimbursed procedures, they're lying," he says. "Even if you [the doctor] don't put the money in your own pocket, someone is keeping track of it. Your boss can always tell you to do more."

Perhaps only someone coming from outside medicine can fully appreciate how irrational and inefficient most American hospitals are. Cosgrove—although he has been a doctor his entire working life—thinks even nonprofit hospitals, such as the clinic, should be run like businesses. McKinsey & Co., the management experts, and Hill Holliday, a marketing firm, were paid nearly $5.2 million by the clinic in 2007 for consulting services. Cosgrove established a department called Strategic Planning and Continuous Improvement with 50 employees, headed by Darryl Greene, a systems engineer with experience in appliance manufacturing. Here is how Greene and chief medical operations officer Dr. A. Marc Harrison approached the problem of managing patients on blood-thinning drugs. These patients have a variety of underlying conditions, but they all face the same problem, Greene says, "that you don't want them to bleed to death, and you don't want them to clot, either." So the clinic created a unit just to manage their anti-coagulant levels, but it quickly had more patients than it could handle. By analyzing the steps involved in a visit and assessing their contributions to patient care, a process Greene calls "mapping the value stream," his team cut the standard visit from 30 to 15 minutes. Doctors were giving the same introductory talk to every patient who came in, so they made it into a DVD instead. If you doubt how seriously the clinic takes these issues, ask to see the "enterprise business intelligence performance management dashboard," which displays real-time updates on waiting times in various departments around the hospital, updated every 30 minutes.

What Cosgrove hasn't been able to do, though, is rationalize the other side of the balance sheet, the billing procedures. Even Cleveland Clinic has almost no leverage over private insurers. Cosgrove has been urging them to move toward bundling their payments, reimbursing a fixed amount for a given diagnosis. "Insurance companies have as many people looking at our claims as we do," he says, "so I'm saying to them, can't we work something out? Let's say you give birth in the hospital. We'll figure out what the average cost is, and instead of having a tug of war over $50, the differences will cancel each other out. We're spending our time checking up on each other. It seems crazy." But perhaps not so crazy, from the insurers' point of view. Except for Medicare, which is a uniform system where the rules, if complex, are at least consistent and transparent, every state Medicaid system and every insurance company sets its own policies and procedures. If you do a catheterization into the three branches of the cerebral artery, is that one procedure or three? Lyman Sornberger, executive director of patient financial services, keeps asking the insurance companies for their rules so he can submit a "clean claim," but without much success. One reason, he suspects, is that it would "upset their assumptions." That is a polite way of saying that insurers count on rejecting a proportion of claims the first time they are submitted, delaying as long as possible the disbursement of actual cash.

Cosgrove has carefully avoided choosing political sides in the health-care-reform debate. But a visit to Cleveland Clinic makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that if you're looking for "waste" in the health-care system—defined as expenses that do not directly contribute to medical outcomes—a good place to look is the nation's cobbled-together system of competing private insurers. Nissen, who considers himself less bound by the need for circumspection, points out that "the overhead for private insurers is 29 percent. For Medicare, it's 3 percent. If what's left over is what you can spend on patients, I think 97 percent is a much better deal." A message comes in to the critical-care-transport ready room; a suspected stroke case needs airlift to the main hospital, stat. A crew scrambles to the helipad on the roof and is airborne within minutes, disappearing over the trees. In the tunnels below, the robot carts whir and beep. And in the billing office, the phones blink and blink and blink, a reminder of how some things never change.

Think Obama Hasn't Gotten Much Done?

2009-12-02T20:46:00.000-08:00

NEWSWEEK: Jacob Weisberg

About one thing left and right seem to agree: Obama hasn't done anything yet. Maureen Dowd and Dick Cheney have found common ground in scoffing at the president's "dithering." NEWSWEEK recently ran a sympathetic cover story titled "Yes He Can (But He Sure Hasn't Yet)." The sarcasm brigade thinks it has finally found an Achilles' heel in his lack of accomplishments. "When you look at my record, it's very clear what I've done so far, and that is nothing. Nada. Almost one year and nothing to show for it," Obama stand-in Fred Armisen recently riffed on Saturday Night Live. Jon Stewart asserts "it’s chow time" for a president who hasn't followed through on his promises. (Click here to follow Jacob Weisberg).

This conventional wisdom about Obama's first year is sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20. If, as seems increasingly likely, Obama wins passage of a health-care-reform bill by that date, he will deliver his first State of the Union address having accomplished more in his first year than any other postwar American president. This isn't an ideological judgment. It's a neutral assessment of his emerging record.

The case for Obama's successful freshman year rests above all on the health-care legislation now awaiting action in the Senate. Democrats have been trying to pass national health insurance for 60 years. Past presidents who tried to make it happen and failed include Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. Through the summer, Obama caught flak for letting Congress lead the process, as opposed to setting out his own proposal. Now his political strategy is being vindicated.

We are so submerged in the details of this debate—whether the bill will include a "public option," limit coverage for abortion, or tax Botox—that it's easy to lose sight of the magnitude of the impending change. For the federal government to take responsibility for health insurance will be a transformation of the American social contract and the single biggest change in government's role since the New Deal. If Obama accomplishes nothing else, he may be judged the most consequential domestic president since LBJ. He will also undermine the view that Ronald Reagan permanently reversed a 50-year tide of American liberalism.

Obama's claim to a fertile first year doesn't rest on health care alone. There's mounting evidence that the $787 billion economic stimulus he signed in February—combined with the bank bailout package—prevented a depression. Should the stimulus have been larger? Should it have been more weighted to short-term spending as opposed to long-term tax cuts? Would a second round be a good idea? Pundits and policymakers will argue these questions for years to come. But few mainstream economists dispute that Obama's decisive action prevented a much deeper downturn and restored economic growth in the third quarter. The New York Times recently quotedeconomist Mark Zandi, who advised candidate John McCain (and who now offers guidance to the Democrats), on this point: "The stimulus is doing what it was supposed to do—it is contributing to ending the recession," he said. "In my view, without the stimulus, GDP would still be negative and unemployment would be firmly over 11 percent."

When it comes to foreign policy, Obama's accomplishments have been less tangible but hardly less significant: he has put America on a new footing with the rest of the world. In a series of foreign trips and speeches, which critics derided as trips and speeches, he replaced George W. Bush's unilateral, moralistic militarism with an approach that is multilateral, pragmatic, and conciliatory. Obama has already significantly reoriented policy toward Iran, China, Russia, Iraq, Israel, and the Islamic world. Next week, after a much-disparaged period of review, he will announce a new strategy in Afghanistan. No, the results do not yet merit his Nobel Peace Prize. But not since Reagan has a new president so swiftly and determinedly remodeled America's global role.

Obama has wisely deferred some smaller, politically hazardous battles over issues like closing Guantanamo, ending "don't ask, don't tell," and fighting the expansion of Israel’s West Bank settlements. Instead, he has saved his fire for his most urgent priorities—preventing a depression, remaking America's global image, and winning universal health insurance. Chow time indeed, if you ask me.

Jacob Weisberg is chairman of the Slate Group, also the author of The Bush Tragedy and In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington .

© 2009

A Message from Senator Mark Warner Regarding His Health Care Vote

2009-11-22T14:31:00.000-08:00

I will vote to move this legislation onto the Senate floor because I want an opportunity to work to strengthen and improve the bill. If we do not move forward on health insurance reform, premiums for Virginia families will continue to rise, employers will remain at a competitive disadvantage in the global marketplace, and federal budget deficits will go from bad to worse.

Thus far, only those senators on the Health and Finance committees have had an opportunity to shape this legislation. Advancing the bill to the Senate floor provides an opportunity for the rest of us in the Senate to have a constructive role in making this legislation better.

For weeks now, I have been working with several of my colleagues on a series of potential floor amendments that we believe will further reduce the cost of health care, strengthening transparency and encouraging innovation to cut costs across the health care delivery system.

Tonight's vote to move forward with debate on the bill is a starting point, and it allows us to continue working to include these amendments in the final legislation. I will only support a final bill if I am convinced it will lower the deficit, drive down health care costs over the long term, and improve the value and quality of the health care Virginians receive.

First off, let me say how proud I am of our Senators today, both of them voted to allow for floor debate on the Senate Floor. This is an important moment in our history, as this would be one of the largest public bill's since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid.

I would first like to urge everyone to call the Senators and thank them for their votes as well as to urge them to support continued debate and eventual passage of this long overdue legislation. This debate has been going on for months and its finally good to see some tangible progress being made. Two weeks ago, we witnessed the passage of the House version of the bill, props goes out to Speaker Pelosi for all her hard work.

The battle is not over, there is still plenty of work to get done. I'm sure like myself, lots of us as Democrats would like to see a strong public option as part of the final bill. There are forces against us in this battle, many from within the party. Like I said, I would encourage everyone to call Senators Mark Warner and Jim Webb and tell them what you personally would like to see from reform. Mark Warner (202-224-2023) and Jim Webb (202-224-4024)

VA's Own Jim Webb Travels to Burma, Releases American Prisoner

2009-08-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

From TIME online:

The novels of U.S. Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) — the ex-Marine starting writing fiction long before he went to Washington — has depicted swashbuckling Americans seeking out thrilling adventures in exotic locales. Still even he might not have imagined a scenario in which the Vietnam-war-veteran-turned-politician jetted in on a U.S. military aircraft to the heavily fortified Burmese capital to meet with the reclusive leader of the country's ruling military junta. On Aug. 15, Webb, who serves as chair of the Senate Foreign Relation's subcommittee on East Asia and Pacific Affairs, became the first top-level American politician to meet with junta head Senior General Than Shwe.

The confab, which occurred in the recently constructed Burmese administrative capital of Naypyidaw, marked a momentous juncture in U.S.-Burma affairs. For more than a decade, Washington has maintained a virtual blackout on Burma relations, declining to assign an ambassador to the country and promoting a policy of economic isolation to keep its leaders from benefitting from trade ties. The Senator's visit could signal a softening of American strategy toward what has long been considered by the U.S. as a rogue state.

Webb also met with detained democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi. The inspirational leader of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), Suu Kyi was sentenced to 18 months of house arrest on Tuesday after a bizarre case in which an American swam to her lakeside villa in commercial capital Rangoon. According to the junta's judiciary logic, the appearance of an uninvited guest at the Nobel Peace Prize laureate's home meant that she had contravened the terms of her previous house arrest. (Suu Kyi has been locked up for 14 years of the past two decades.) This month's verdict ensures that Suu Kyi, whose NLD overwhelmingly won 1990 elections that the junta ignored, will have to sit out nationwide polls that the military regime has promised for next year. (Read "Viewpoint: Why Foreigners Can Make Things Worse for Burma.")

Although Suu Kyi's sentencing met with the usual condemnation from Western powers, the United Nations on Thursday issued a relatively muted statement expressing "serious concern" for the 64-year-old's continued confinement. A previous draft that castigated the junta more strenuously did not survive opposition from Russia and China, which are generally loathe to comment on human-rights issues in other countries.

Webb's visit occurred at a moment when the Obama administration has been making noise about a possible shift in the U.S. position on Burma. During President George W. Bush's tenure, Washington strengthened economic sanctions against the Burmese regime, which has maintained an iron grip over the country since 1962, and ruled out any talk of engagement. But earlier this year Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that such trade barriers weren't having an effect on the junta's behavior. (Shortly after the Suu Kyi verdict, the European Union announced the tightening of its own sanctions against the regime.) In the same way that it has re-engaged with North Korea in recent weeks, so, too, may the Obama Administration pursue a less isolationist stance toward Burma.

Nevertheless, the State Department has made it clear that Webb was not acting as an official emissary during his Burma trip. As speculation over the rationale for the Senator's trip grew, some Burma-watchers wondered whether Webb was traveling to Naypyidaw in order to secure the release of John Yettaw, the American who embarked on the midnight swim to Suu Kyi's home in May. Like Webb, Yettaw is a Vietnam-war veteran. Earlier this week, Yettaw was sentenced to seven years of hard labor by a Burmese court. Over the past decade, Westerners who have been handed harsh sentences by the Burmese judiciary have been released before their prison terms were completed. Indeed, in the hours following Webb's meeting with Than Shwe, the senator's office released a statement saying that the convicted American would be deported from Burma on Sunday. The twists and turns of Yettaw's case are stranger than that of any fiction — even that of Sen. Jim Webb's.

First Lady to visit Norfolk Today!

2009-07-31T08:43:00.000-07:00

By Julian Walker
The Virginian-Pilot
© July 31, 2009

NORFOLK

Michelle Obama and Virginia first lady Anne Holton will attend a ceremony in Norfolk today marking the return of Navy personnel from deployment.

Service members with the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group and the hospital ship Comfort returned to American soil this week.

Obama will speak at an event and meet with Navy leadership and families during her visit.

Obama has made a focus on military families part of her agenda – during the 2008 election, she visited with military families in Norfolk to outline proposals to provide improved services for veterans and more predictable deployments.

With Deepest Sympathy

2009-07-31T08:18:00.000-07:00

Recently, Councilwoman Daun Hester's brother passed away.

Earlier this week, the father of Norfolk Clerk of the Court George Schaefer, passed away in New York State. Because of this, Paula Miller has postponed her birthday party planned for this Saturday night.

Yesterday, Phyllis Ander, a Democratic activist and Virginia Beach Democratic Committee Treasurer passed away suddenly. At this time funeral and service arrangements are incomplete.

Our thoughts are with their families.

2009-07-30T14:01:00.001-07:00

Norfolk City Democratic Committee Monthly Breakfast

Saturday, August 1st, 8:30 am
Piccadilly's Restaurant, 530 N. Military Hwy, Norfolk
Breakfast buffet $7.79 (includes tax)