The Ohio Attorney General, Richard Cordray, is swinging sweet, sweet lullabies:

Ohio’s attorney general sued Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch Ratings on Friday, asserting that they provided misleading credit ratings that led to hundreds of millions of losses for state funds.

The official, Richard Cordray, filed the lawsuit in United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio on behalf of five Ohio funds that assert they lost more than $457 million because of “false and misleading ratings” of mortgage-backed securities by the ratings agencies.

Officials at Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, which is owned by McGraw-Hill, could not be immediately reached for comment. A spokesman for Fitch Ratings, which is owned by Fimalac S.A., had no immediate comment.

I’ve been waiting for this for a long, long time.

From the NY Times:

New guidelines for cervical cancer screening say women should delay their first Pap test until age 21, and be screened less often than recommended in the past.

The advice, from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is meant to decrease unnecessary testing and potentially harmful treatment, particularly in teenagers and young women. The group’s previous guidelines had recommended yearly testing for young women, starting within three years of their first sexual intercourse, but no later than age 21.

Arriving on the heels of hotly disputed guidelines calling for less use of mammography, the new recommendations might seem like part of a larger plan to slash cancer screening for women. But the timing was coincidental, said Dr. Cheryl B. Iglesia, the chairwoman of a panel in the obstetricians’ group that developed the Pap smear guidelines. The group updates its advice regularly based on new medical information, and Dr. Iglesia said the latest recommendations had been in the works for several years, “long before the Obama health plan came into existence.”

There was actually a really good piece on NPR yesterday about the decisions behind the breast-screening guideline changes that explained the reasons for the change in the guidelines. According to one of the doctors, the problem people are having understanding the reasoning for the guidelines is that the statistics are saying something that is counter-intuitive and goes against our long-held belief that earlier detection is better in regards to cancer. Here is the relevant snippet:

BLOCK: We have been getting a lot of email from listeners, as you might imagine. And a number of people have stories of their own. And I want to read a couple of those letters. This is one from Wendy Hickey(ph) of Pittsburgh who says that three years ago when she was 45, a mammogram identified suspicious tissue in her breast. She had a needle biopsy excisional surgery and is now cancer-free, taking daily tamoxifen.

And Ms. Hickey writes: I can’t imagine what would have happened if I had delayed my mammogram for five more years. But I feel safe in guessing that the outcome and treatment would not have been as positive.

Dr. Lerner, what would you say to Wendy Hickey about that?

Dr. LERNER: If people can take away from this show the notion that what she’s saying may be true but may not be true, I think they would learn a lot.

What the data is showing us is that this woman, even though the mammogram found the suspicious cells early on, the argument is that her overall prognosis would not have changed. She would have gotten treated then as aggressively or more aggressively as when it was found by mammogram, and she would have done exactly the same.

That’s what the point is of this data. It’s hard conceptual leap for people to make, even for a doctor, but that’s what the data show.

BLOCK: And you would assume though that the earlier you find something, the better your results would be.

Dr. LERNER: That has been the guiding principle of cancer research since the early 20th century, but the data for some cancer shows that things are not that simple, and that’s what we’re trying to deal with now.

You can listen to the whole piece here. I thought it was interesting and worth the time.

Bart Stupak is either lying or stupid (or both) when he said this:

Whether public funds should be used for abortion services is exactly the sort of issue we should be debating openly on the floor of the House of Representatives. My amendment to include Hyde language in H.R. 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act, is not new or out of line with the current policies regarding federal funding for abortions. There is a strong precedent going back more than 30 years for adding Hyde language. The ban on federal funding for abortions is a long-standing American policy that has been in place since the 1970s and has been upheld by the Supreme Court.

This amendment is not about limiting choice when it comes to abortion services. There is nothing in the amendment that prevents those who choose to obtain abortion services from doing so. The Hyde language simply says taxpayer dollars should not be used to pay for those services. Just as the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) does not provide plans that cover abortion services, nor should the plans for individuals who enter into the public option or receive federal subsidies for healthcare cover abortions. They are free to purchase a supplemental plan or pay for these services with their own money should they so choose.

And this:

No. They’ve been fighting me since July on this. My reaction is that they are saying that no insurance policies will be able to sell abortion coverage, and that is not true. All the members have to do is look at their update that they got from the majority leader, Steny Hoyer [D-MD], that he sent to us about three minutes before 10 [o’clock Saturday night], before we voted on the amendments. Basically, he said, ‘Look, the Stupak amendment is the Hyde amendment. You can’t use federal funds to pay for abortions. However, you can get supplemental coverage, and it does not prevent private insurance companies from selling elective abortion coverage.’ I think the only surprise I have is how much they’ve mischaracterized the amendment, even after their own majority leader report that we all get before we vote clearly states the purpose of the amendment and shows it’s not greater than current law, so all this about taking away women’s rights, restricting it—it’s no different from the restrictions right now.

Because the facts in this case pretty clearly demonstrate that the Stupak amendment goes well beyond Hyde and is a radical piece of legislation:

The George Washington School of Public Health and Health Services has analyzed Stupak-Pitts, and concludes that “the Amendment would produce industry-wide effects, leading to the elimination of health plan coverage for nearly all medically indicated abortions.”

Additionally, “based on past experiences with claim administration decisions involving treatment exclusions,” the analysts conclude that insurers are likely to interpret the exclusion broadly, and exclude not just elective abortions, but also medically indicated abortion and “treatments for serious illnesses, injuries, and medical conditions that include an abortion undertaken for health reasons.” Insurance administrators, they find, are likely to err on the side of coverage denail in order to avoid sanctions.

So not only does Bart Stupak either not know what his amendment does, or he is lying about it, but he wants to blow up the entire health care bill if he doesn’t get his way in the Senate, a legislative body of which he is not even a member.

Who do we send money to to primary this guy? I left the GOP in large part because of the godbotherers.

It’s that time of year again, everyone. When everyone gathers together at their family homes to commence the War on Christmas. Via memeorandum, here is the opening salvo in this year’s battle, which I will call the “War on Christmas, Godwin Edition”:

Nazi Germany celebrated Christmas without Christ with the help of swastika tree baubles, ‘Germanic’ cookies and a host of manufactured traditions, a new exhibition has shown.

The way the celebration was gradually taken over and exploited for propaganda purposes by Hitler’s Nazis is detailed in a new exhibition.

Rita Breuer has spent years scouring flea markets for old German Christmas ornaments.

She and her daughter Judith developed a fascination with the way Christmas was used by the atheist Nazis, who tried to turn it into a pagan winter solstice celebration.

Umm, it kind of used to be a pagan celebration. It wasn’t too long ago that Christian ministers were fighting the concept of the Christmas tree, it was so clearly a Pagan leftover.

I fully expect this news story to make Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly cry tonight. I’m not sure how they will tie it to ACORN and the Obama administration, but you know they will.

Remember that mantra from the past eight years? At any rate, the Democrats finally broke the filibuster on one judicial nominee:

Senate Democrats broke a GOP filibuster Tuesday against a district judge first nominated eight months ago by President Barack Obama for a seat on the federal appeals court.

The Senate voted 70-29 to end debate over the nomination of Indiana Judge David Hamilton, who was tapped by Obama in March to fill a vacancy on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Hamilton was Obama’s first judicial nominee.

The full Senate is now expected to move forward quickly on a final vote on the nomination.

I’m as shocked as you are that the Democrats fought this. In other news, even the media is starting to notice the hypocrisy:

In 2005, Republicans spoke for days about the insult of the judicial filibuster, calling it unconstitutional. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, now the Senate Republican leader, said in 2005 of the Democrats: “For the first time in 214 years they’ve changed the advise and consent responsibilities to advise and obstruct.”

North Carolina’s Richard Burr, like many other Republicans, said the debate was about “fairness” and “about principle and …. allowing judicial nominees an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.”

And the man who is now the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, contended that “the Republican leadership have been consistent on this issue even when it was not to their political benefit to do so. We have opposed judicial filibusters and have not supported them.”

Imagine that- taking what the Republicans have said in the past, show that what they are doing today is completely at odds with their past statements, and point out they are hypocrites. Have these guys been watching the Daily Show to figure out how this reporting thing is done?

More good news about the Goldman boys and Tim Geithner:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York gave up much of its power in high-pressure negotiations with the American International Group’s trading partners last year, according to a government report made public on Monday.

Just two days before the New York Fed paid A.I.G.’s partners 100 cents on the dollar to tear up their contracts with the insurance giant, one bank volunteered to take a modest haircut — but it never got the chance.

UBS, of Switzerland, alone offered to give a break to the New York Fed in the negotiations last November over how to keep A.I.G. from toppling and taking other banks down with it. It would have accepted 98 cents on the dollar.

But UBS’s good-faith gesture was quickly drowned out by Goldman Sachs and the top French bank regulator. They argued, with others, that it would be improper and perhaps even criminal to force A.I.G.’s trading partners to bear losses outside of bankruptcy court.

The banks and the regulator were confident that the New York Fed was not willing to push A.I.G. into bankruptcy, because earlier in the fall the New York Fed had stepped in with $85 billion to prop up the insurer.

The New York Fed, led then by Timothy F. Geithner, who is now the Treasury secretary, therefore had little leverage in the negotiations, according to a post-mortem of what has emerged as the most inflammatory episode in the rescue of A.I.G.

In the Army, we had a saying called “Fuck up, move up.” Looks like that sure was the case for Geithner. And you just have to love the sense of entitlement from the Goldman boys- it would be illegal for them to not get paid in full! And, because of who they are and where their people are in our government, the gambit worked.

I seriously think Goldman Sachs and the folks like them are the biggest threat to the future of this country, but since they own everyone, they’ll just keep siphoning off the money until the nation collapses.

It’s easy to romanticize the past, of course. But I distinctly remember that 20 years ago, things like sudden increases in the number of people going hungry were considered important issues. Nowadays to even muse about whether this is something we can do something about as a society marks you as an unserious hippie. Even as we speak, Slate/Levitt/TNR are probably writing something along the lines of “you think that having a high percentage of the population without access to food is bad, but once you get past the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords, you’ll see that blah blah blah.” David Brooks is probably on the Snooze Hour telling E. J. Dionne that the only solution is food vouchers and, anyway, in Red America, the hungry can always visit the Applebee’s Salad Bar for free. Robert Samuelson and Fred Hiatt are cooking up some bogus figures to tell us that there is no way that we, as a society, can do anything about this. And, anyway, Michael Moore is fat, so how can anyone really be hungry?

What the hell happened? How did all the conservative talking points become so thoroughly internalized in this country?

This sucks:

The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track, according to a government report released Monday that shows particularly steep increases in food scarcity among families with children.

In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children—more than one in five across the United States—were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million children the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

Among people of of all ages, nearly 15 percent last year did not consistently have adequate food, compared with about 11 percent in 2007, the greatest deterioration in access to food during a single year in the history of the report.

I’m going to give more money to local food banks this year than in the past. But only a glibertarian would think that personal charity is the solution to this shameful problem.

Nothing to see here:

Even as drug makers promise to support Washington’s health care overhaul by shaving $8 billion a year off the nation’s drug costs after the legislation takes effect, the industry has been raising its prices at the fastest rate in years.

In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.

The drug trend is distinctly at odds with the direction of the Consumer Price Index, which has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year.

Drug makers say they have valid business reasons for the price increases. Critics say the industry is trying to establish a higher price base before Congress passes legislation that tries to curb drug spending in coming years.

The Prescription Drug Plan really was fiscal conservatism at its best.

This will be entertaining:

The Obama administration will insist on measures to give legal status to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants as it pushes early next year for legislation to overhaul the immigration system, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Friday.

In an address at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group in Washington, Ms. Napolitano sought to dispel any notion that the administration — with health care, energy and other major issues crowding its agenda — might postpone the most contentious piece of an immigration overhaul until after midterm elections next November.

Laying out the administration’s bottom line, she said it will argue for a “three-legged stool” that includes enacting tougher enforcement laws against illegal immigrants and the people who hire them, and streamlining the system for legal immigration, but also what she called a “tough and fair pathway to earned legal status.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the ensuing right-wing freakout will lock up the Hispanic vote for the Democrats in the 2010 midterm. Only, of course, after Bart Stupak and the blue dogs make sure no illegal aliens get abortions.

This makes sense to me:

I don’t want my tax dollars touching even one milimeter of that overly engorged expense.

I realize that many people disagree with my moral objections to men getting erections which God clearly doesn’t want them to get, but my principles on this are more important to me than theirs are to them. So too bad. If you want a boner, pay for it yourself.

And I think those noxious advertisements for the drugs should be banned as well, if only for aesthetic reasons. Having to watch my baby boomer fellows wail “Viva Viagra” is offensive to anyone who has any taste in music.

I’m sure a lot of people have “serious moral concerns” about the government paying for erections, and as we know, all you have to say is that you have “serious moral concerns” and then no one can question your position. I know I don’t want my tax dollars paying for Senator Ensign to be able to bang his workers or Rush Limbaugh’s dalliances in the Dominican (although there is a good chance he bought the Viagra the same way he buys the rest of his drugs- on the street). If our Republican leadership and the panty-sniffing Blue Dogs can’t get it up the way God intended, with a dildo in the anus while wearing two wetsuits, I don’t see why the American taxpayer should be subsidizing insurance for the little blue pill. Public or private.

And that goes especially for the C Street pricks like Stupak.

John +4

This will put a smile on your face- a bunch of videos of dogs greeting their returning veterans. A sample:

Somewhat related, a USA Today piece on the decline of the VFW and American Legion.

Happy veteran’s Day!

Tuesday is trash day around here, so I was gathering up all the trash to take it outside for the garbagemen. Afterwards, I went in and replaced the garbage bag in the kitchen, and as I grabbed the box of trash bags, I saw the Hefty logo and immediately said HEFTY HEFTY HEFTY as I remembered an ad campaign they had years ago:

HEFTY HEFTY HEFTY! For those of you too young to remember, there was a whole string of these commercials.

What other commercials stand out years later for you? I also remember the Bud Light “YES I AM” series, and obviously the Wendy’s “Where’s the beef” group, but what others are there?

Reviewing Republican behavior during the Health Care Reform debate on Saturday, you would think an militant band of spoiled toddlers with Tourette’s had occupied the right half of the House. Or howler monkeys. If it was not the most embarrassing display of bad behavior in recent government history, it is only because of everything else Republicans did lately. When lying didn’t work (they want to euthanize granny!) they tried hyperbole (health insurance reform is LITERALLY THE SAME THING AS STALIN TIMES THE HOLOCAUST!). Then they tried lying again. Then lying plus hyperbole, stamping their feet and shouting.

Normally the side that doesn’t have the law on its side, and doesn’t have the facts either, recognizes that you just lose twice if you throw your credibility and reputation into a losing fight. This fight was clearly different for Republicans, and you know what? They’re right. If the GOP had not pushed the Overton Window way to the right compared with where we started when Single Payer was still on the table (ish), Democratic moderates would have no problem supporting the watered down “moderate” compromise that the House finally passed yesterday. The bills would have steamrolled both houses of Congress with decent support from swing-district Republicans if the party had not made it a hill to die on with an emphasis on die.

Bill Kristol had it right in 1994. If Democrats effectively fix health care then Republicans are screwed. Any health care reform that does not suck even worse would effectively be written in stone as soon as it passed. Realigning their issue set to stay relevant could be quite awkward since Democrats already claimed most of the issues that Americans don’t hate. To stay alive Republicans would need to tack somewhere less crazy, but that would motivate Michelle Bachmann’s twenty-some percent of crazy people to go third party. Those two factors would effectively doom Republicans to share a shrinking back bench with the conservative fruitcake party and their pet schmuck Joe Lieberman.

So yeah, Republicans pulled out all the stops on this one. If they can find another stop before the Senate vote they’ll pull that one too. Pretty much the only institutional incentive not pushing them towards brinksmanship at this point is that desiccated raisin occupying space where most people would have a conscience.

Word on the street is that Dems have the votes to get this whole health care huckleberry through the House tonight.

I know some of the amendments suck. But still, we’re one step closer to getting health insurance for tens of millions of Americans.

I have a hard time writing about health care reform without sounding sappy, so I’ll shut up and throw up a YouTube.

DougJ +5

Update. We are at 212.

Update 218!

As recommended by a commenter, time 4:30 of this.

Update update. Maybe this is a link too far. But I don’t think so.