Is Rahm brilliantly playing some long game of chess on behalf of the American people, or is he so syphilictically corrupt that he can't help but do a Bush-like corporate smash-and-grab robbery of the treasury on behalf of big business?

Progressives and ardent supporters of a healthcare public option are cheering the Senate version of health reform legislation to emerge Thursday. Social conservatives, meanwhile, are attacking the bill for lack of an anti-abortion amendment that had been included in the House version.

Two new public opinion polls show the faltering U.S. economy seems to be taking its toll on President Barack Obama's approval rating.

"...At the request of staffers at City Hall, Eiss filled out a form, which he later learned was a formal request for records access under New York's Freedom of Information Law. A week later, he received a response saying his request was denied. The reason: "Materials requested are protected by copyright and release of materials is through exclusive license only."

Instead of drawing on this excellent, time-tested model, President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have pretended Medicare doesn't exist. Obama went so far as to say on several occasions, including in his address to Congress on health care reform, that while single-payer plans such as those in Canada and France might work well in those countries (indeed they do, and at much less cost than our insane "system" here!), introducing such a system here would mean "starting from scratch." Come again Barack? From scratch? Those countries modeled their systems, in part, on Medicare, which we had here first! And Medicare is actually a bigger program than the entire Canadian health care system!

A Goldman Sachs report projects earnings per share and stock values of the five largest insurance companies under four different health care reform scenarios. It is an excellent example of how vampires think, and shows us which facets of the reform proposals are most frightening precisely because they represent true reform. They are: cuts to Medicare Advantage, regulations that disallow exclusions for pre-existing conditions and recision, and finally, the odious public option.

The largest U.S. private health insurer is urging its employees to lobby the Senate against comprehensive healthcare reform that includes a public option, according to an advocacy organization that has unearthed the effort.

It's just about a 100% certainty that the draft of the senate bill that goes out to the floor for a vote, first facing filibuster, will not include the public option. That way, Lieberman, Baucus and the gang of Republicrats will have no excuse help prevent the GOP filibuster. There may even be Republicans who go along, like Olympia Snowe. They will have been given cover, allowed to only vote on a bill that met the criteria they "so boldly" set. Once the bill gets into conference, the house and senate can get together and add the public option and it will only take 51 senate votes to pass. They might even try to pull out the anti-abortion amendment, since so many of them Bluedogs who voted for the house anti-abortion amendment failed to vote for the reform bill. That's far less likely. The question is in the way Harry Reid handles this. Lieberman and Snowe understand all this. Will they vote to pass a bill without a public option, knowing that it may be added? That's going to be the big question.

Oh, those poor souls who are crying so hard about the legislation provided for Universal Healthcare in the House. I mean, our "leaders" were so concerned with helping the average working American who do not have and cannot afford to buy private insurance for whatever reason that they just were so very unfair to those who have contributed so much to the problems we now face. My heart just bleeds with sympathy for these groups of people.

New York City may be the dirtiest city in the country (per square foot), but New York City residents have the lowest carbon footprint in the nation on a per capita basis. David Owen, author of Green Metropolis, explains why.

Battle in Kentucky with an openly can candidate seeking to unseat an ultra-conservative incumbent. Finally, one of the biggest nightmares to Kentucky's gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex community, Representative Stan Lee (R-Lexington) has competition in the upcoming 2010 election. Lee is not only a nightmare to the LGBTI community, but EVERYONE who wants to move Kentucky forward and stands for equality, justice, and progress. The election is closer than you think, considering the primary is in May 2010. Representative Lee has run unopposed in the last several elections.

Is New York the greenest city in America? Urban planner Jane Jacobs famously talked about population density as the driver of vibrant communities in cities. In this video, David Owen connects Jacob's views on urban planning and community sound environmental planning and sustainable living.

In the wake of Congress Officially Castrating the Public Option, two disturbing news stories have come out that suggest just how much we needed a public option and how very weak and impotent the one we have really is.

The value of top executives's pensions rose an average of 19 percent last year even as their companies' share prices dropped, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Over 200 executives saw pensions jump over 50 percent. The spike, the Journal said, was due in part to "generous" pension formulas based on executive pay and to "arcane" techniques that trigger the increases. Executive pensions grew even though the share prices at the firms dropped an average of 37 percent in 2008, while many companies froze employee pensions and suspended contributions to retirement plans, noted the newspaper.

I have been covering the option ARM fiasco for a very long time now and as I have highlighted before, this is very much a California problem. Apparently I’m not the only one that has realized that option ARMs are a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off. None other than our own attorney general, Jerry Brown is going after the top option ARM banks and servicers. He has a few of the same questions that we have. How in the world are banks going to deal with the coming recasts? Have banks done anything since the crisis has started in addressing these loans? Inquiring minds would like to know. The AG has been busy in the last year. He went after toxic mortgage poster child Countrywide successfully and recently, has gone after State Street. Jerry Brown recently came on CNBC regarding State Street:

"A ’short con’ is an opportunistic scam designed to instantly fleece the victim of all the money they have with them at that time. On the other hand, a long con takes much longer to execute and requires meticulous planning in order to scam the victim out of much larger amounts of money." Scam Types dot Com The Money Party runs both short and long cons. When they weren't able to sell the Iraq invasion, the short con was: Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. He's ready to use them … on you! Get on board now or else! That short con operated within the long con of perpetual threats and endless war. The current health reform debate is a classic long con. The debate is limited to only those positions that will work for the status quo. If reform fails, there's no change from the extortion perpetrated against citizens in need of affordable health care. If reform is adopted, the insurance companies are enshrined at the center of the program. The fight is then over the size of the rake off. That's called bending the curve of health care costs. Bend, don't break. It's a win-win proposition for The Money Party.

Americans have a long history of consuming and/or killing their way out of crisis. And it isn’t looking as if that model will be up for reassessment anytime soon. The parameters of what we like to call the “national conversation” are as narrow as ever, and they are not widening under the current leadership. So far at least, even Obama’s ‘Clean Energy Economy’ has failed to deliver enough ‘green jobs’ (or any other color jobs for that matter) to begin the process of meaningful transition. With the season of consuming just around the corner, many Americans – especially those in blue collar jobs like construction, manufacturing and retail service – are staring into the economic abyss. It is hardly surprising in such an environment that a young person with dismal employment prospects and plummeting self esteem would be easily seduced by an ad that promises “more than $49,000 in GI Bill Benefits” as does the US military’s current promo. The same ad promises that young recruits can “connect with military and veteran-friendly schools that offer VA approved education programs,” or “get information” about high-paying degrees like Criminal Justice, IT and Legal Studies.---

Leave it to the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. After months of Progressives fighting hard for real reform in our healthcare system that will hold the insurance companies accountable and make them drive down costs with a real public option that is something more than a Corporate giveaway we have indeed lost once more.

Do you know what the “public option” does or who it covers? If you’ve had trouble finding out, it’s not your fault. If you think that the current version of the public option will provide a choice for a government administered health program, you’re right. If you think that this option was designed for the general public, then you’re wrong. It will apply to only some of the uninsured, possibly as few as six million citizens.

Should the United States implement a more inclusive, publicly funded health care system? That's a big debate throughout the country. But even as it rages, most Americans are unaware that the United States is the only country in the developed world that doesn't already have a fundamentally public--that is, tax-supported--health care system. That means that the United States has been the unwitting control subject in a 30-year, worldwide experiment comparing the merits of private versus public health care funding. For the people living in the United States, the results of this experiment with privately funded health care have been grim. The United States now has the most expensive health care system on earth and, despite remarkable technology, the general health of the U.S. population is lower than in most industrialized countries. Worse, Americans' mortality rates--both general and infant--are shockingly high. [Note: I am sure we can see how old this article is. Sad!!]