Tagged: Barack Obama
Insurance stocks soar as “reform” bill nears passage
Speaking of Glenn Greenwald, the Salon.com columnist has a fact-filled column eviscerating Barack Obama’s claim that Senate Democrats are “standing up to the special interests” opposed to American health care reform.
Greenwald catalogs the explosion in health insurance company stock prices as the severely watered-down reform bill edges toward passage. By way of illustration, he notes that Susan Bayh, wife of Indiana Democratic Senator Evan Bayh and board member of the Indianapolis-based insurance giant WellPoint, has seen the value of her stock in the company rise between $125,000 and $250,000 since her husband helped defeat the bill’s already lame public option.
Although Greenwald considers the bill, which will force Americans to pay private insurance premiums under penalty of income tax penalties, a massive public subsidy of the insurance industry, he supports its passage as a lesser evil than the current health care void. But he is troubled by the vilification of liberals who oppose the bill by the Obama administration and its friends in the media and the blogosphere. Well worth a read.
Fired up? Ready to go? Sure… after a little coaching.
Remember Barack Obama’s “fired up, ready to go” campaign story? About a tiny Greenwood, South Carolina, city councilor named Edith Childs who saved a sparsely attended, early Obama rally with her rhythmic cheerleading? It became one of Obama’s most effective set pieces, almost on a par with, “Yes we can!”
Well, it turns out the story didn’t trip lightly off the President-to-be’s tongue the first few times he told it. In the clip below, an outtake from a documentary on the Obama campaign broadcast tonight on HBO, Obama aides coach him on how to tell the story more effectively.
Hat tip: Politico.
Annals of US torture – updated
According to the website Raw Story, the Obama administration has reacted the the UK High Court decision (stayed pending appeal) to publish details of the torture inflicted on former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed, and Obamaphiles will thre response hard to stomach:
Meanwhile, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said: “We are not pleased”, adding that Washington kept such information confidential “to protect our own citizens.”
How exactly does it protect US citizens to be shielded from the information that CIA agents used scalpels on an illegally rendered prisoner’s testicles? Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald continues to follow this story.
A Contrarian reader points to this account of the freshly minted Nobel laureate’s unwillingness abandon Bush administration practices at Guantanamo.
Obama’s first bad speech?
James Fallows, author, Atlantic Magazine writer, and erstwhile speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, has cataloged with discernment his admiration for several of President Obama’s landmark speeches over the last 18 months. So it was surprising to read his prediction that the president’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize will flop.
Fallow’s argument is “probabilistic:” Of the hundreds of Nobel prize acceptance speeches delivered over the years, he contends, only one was ever noteworthy: the three-minute oration by novelist William Faulkner, a man notorious for hating to make speeches.
Here is Faulkner’s remarkable address, delivered on December 10, 1950:
The full text is after the jump:
