The Hollywood Liberal

Washington’s Black Community Grapples with Gay Marriage Issue
Tuesday’s vote in favor of same-sex marriage at the District council in Washington, D.C., brought up some tensions among members of the local African-American community. Some have less trouble viewing the issue as a civil rights struggle than others, and generational differences appear to have something to do with it.  —KA The Washington Post: But perhaps the fiercest opposition to the effort to legalize same-sex marriage in the District has come from some members of the generation that led the fight for civil rights nearly half a century ago, many of whom believe that comparing gay rights to the battle blacks waged for equality is misguided, even insulting. “I reject the notion that gay rights is a civil rights question,” said Rev. Anthony Evans, 50, associate minister of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Northwest and head of the National Black Church Initiative. “The great human rights question is what we’re doing with the poor across the world.” When Catania introduced the bill, many of his most avid supporters turned out to be the children of those civil rights movement veterans, who see this cause as the natural continuation of their parents’ and grandparents’ struggle. Council member Kwame R. Brown (D-At Large) noted that although he supports same-sex marriage, seeing it as the next chapter in the fight for equality, his mother, a minister, is “totally against it.” Read more READ THE WHOLE ITEM

Tuesday’s vote in favor of same-sex marriage at the District council in Washington, D.C., brought up some tensions among members of the local African-American community. Some have less trouble viewing the issue as a civil rights struggle than others, and generational differences appear to have something to do with it.? —KA

The Washington Post:

But perhaps the fiercest opposition to the effort to legalize same-sex marriage in the District has come from some members of the generation that led the fight for civil rights nearly half a century ago, many of whom believe that comparing gay rights to the battle blacks waged for equality is misguided, even insulting.

“I reject the notion that gay rights is a civil rights question,” said Rev. Anthony Evans, 50, associate minister of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Northwest and head of the National Black Church Initiative. “The great human rights question is what we’re doing with the poor across the world.”

When Catania introduced the bill, many of his most avid supporters turned out to be the children of those civil rights movement veterans, who see this cause as the natural continuation of their parents’ and grandparents’ struggle.

Council member Kwame R. Brown (D-At Large) noted that although he supports same-sex marriage, seeing it as the next chapter in the fight for equality, his mother, a minister, is “totally against it.”

Read more

READ THE WHOLE ITEM

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Tiger Woods’ determined silence in the aftermath of his wee-hours encounter with a fire hydrant is a timely antidote to the too-much-information celebrity culture. READ THE WHOLE ITEM By Ruth Marcus

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READ THE WHOLE ITEM

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• December 1, 2009 Obama Makes It Official: 30,000 More U.S. Troops to Head to Afghanistan
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Ben Nelson Threatens To Oppose Health Reform Without Restrictive Abortion Provisions
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said Tuesday that he won’t vote for health care reform unless the bill contains the same sort of restrictive abortion provisions…

Greg Mitchell: Who’ll Be ‘The Last Soldier To Die for a Mistake’ in Afghanistan?
Who was the last soldier to die for the Vietnam mistake? And what can we learn from that example?

Tareq Slahi And Michaele Salahi Charity In Disaray: Land Rover America’s Polo Cup Owes $500,000
Tareq and Michaele Salahi’s signature social event, the annual Land Rover America’s Polo Cup, bills itself as the “world’s most prestigious and largest . ….

Scott Kurashige: The Struggle of Hope vs. Fear Continues
We ought to demand more from Obama than the tired trope that we can only achieve peace by waging war. This means we need to challenge ourselves.

Quick Fact: Baier distorts CBO report to claim premiums “will actually go up” under Senate bill

On Fox News’ Special Report, anchor Bret Baier misrepresented the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of the Senate health care bill’s effect on insurance premiums by claiming that “depending on how you read” the report, insurance “premiums for many people will actually go up” under the bill. In fact, CBO estimated that premiums would only increase for individuals purchasing insurance on their own — about 17 percent of the insurance market in 2016 — and that affordability credits would substantially lower costs for many of those individuals, a majority of whom would receive those subsidies through the exchanges.

Baier cites CBO to claim, under Senate health bill, insurance “premiums for many people will actually go up”

From the December 1 edition of Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier:

BAIER: The Congressional Budget Office’s assessment of the Senate bill — in part, depending on how you read it — says that premiums for many people will actually go up and that costs will not be driven down. The White House says that’s not true. So what is the truth?

Fact: CBO found bill would actually result in lower premiums for most individual enrollees

Premiums will only rise for nongroup market — about 17 percent of the market in 2016. In a November 30 analysis, the nonpartisan CBO estimated that for premiums, the “largest effects would be seen in the nongroup market, which would grow in size under the proposal but would still account for only 17 percent of the overall insurance market in 2016. The effects on premiums would be much smaller in the small group and large group markets, which would make up 13 percent and 70 percent of the total insurance market, respectively.”

Federal subsidies will actually lower premiums from current costs for about 57 percent of the individual market. The CBO estimated that while the average premium per person in the nongroup market would be about 10 to 13 percent higher in 2016, “those figures indicate what enrollees would pay, on average, not accounting for the new federal subsidies. The majority of nongroup enrollees (about 57 percent) would receive subsidies via the new insurance exchanges, and those subsidies, on average, would cover nearly two-thirds of the total premium, CBO and JCT [Joint Committee on Taxation] estimate. Thus, the amount that subsidized enrollees would pay for nongroup coverage would be roughly 56 percent to 59 percent lower, on average, than the nongroup premiums charged under current law.”

Premiums would remain unchanged and could decrease for large and small group insurance markets. The CBO also estimated that for the large-group market, which it said would make up 70 percent of the total insurance market in 2016, “the legislation would yield an average premium per person that is zero to 3 percent lower in 2016 (relative to current law).” Further, in “the small group market, which consists of employers with 50 or fewer workers, CBO and JCT estimate that the change in the average premium per person resulting from the legislation could range from an increase of 1 percent to a reduction of 2 percent in 2016 (relative to current law).”

Major cost-saving measures kick in after 2016. The CBO analyzed the impact on premiums for 2016, but as Jonathan Cohn noted on The New Republic‘s health care blog, “many of the cost-saving measures in the bill aren’t expected to yield savings until after that date.” The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein similarly wrote:

CBO is looking at 2016, which is long before the delivery system reforms will have really begun working, or the excise tax will have started restraining the growth in premiums costs, or the Medicare Commission will be aggressively experimenting to bring down costs first in Medicare and then in the system more generally. These are the numbers, in other words, from a world in which none of the cost control efforts work. In that world, health-care reform still does an enormous amount to help 30 or 40 million people, and a bit to help tens of millions more.

Fineman: “I See Nothing Wrong” With Newsweek/Oil Lobby Panel
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Nation Building at Home
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The Most Urgent Threat to World Peace is … Canada
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A Humanitarian Disaster in the Making Along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline — Who’s Watching?
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Let’s Get Rolling on Unemployment — We Need a Direct Govt. Jobs Program
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The Recession Is Taking a Bite Out of Meat Consumption
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Waiting with 45,000 People Afraid of Losing Their Homes — Ground Zero in America’s Mortgage Meltdown
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Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics
When we were just beginning work on our book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, we stumbled on a curious but compelling relationship. In a state level analysis, we found a very high correlation between favoring corporal punishment of children…



Barack Obama – United States – Politics of the United States – Politics – Society and Culture

Would Obama Appoint an “Anti-Israel Lobbyist” to Anti-Semitism Envoy?
Question: Did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration appoint an “anti-Israel lobbyist” as the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat anti-Semitism? Answer: Of course not….


Hillary Rodham Clinton – Antisemitism – Barack Obama – Diplomatic rank – Presidency of Barack Obama

Protesters singing ?Immigration Rhapsody? cut short Arpaio?s Arizona State Unversity appearance.
Yesterday, controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was at Arizona State University’s journalism school for “a public ‘Meet-the-Press’ style interview” with a panel of journalism professors. However, his appearance was cut short after about 45 minutes, when a group of protesters began to sing “Immigration Rhapsody.” From the lyrics of the song: How do you…just kill […]

Yesterday, controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was at Arizona State University’s journalism school for “a public ‘Meet-the-Press’ style interview” with a panel of journalism professors. However, his appearance was cut short after about 45 minutes, when a group of protesters began to sing “Immigration Rhapsody.” From the lyrics of the song:

How do you…just kill a man,
Let him wither on his route,
Criminalized and shut out,
How do you…detain someone,
Because you perceive a threat to your privilege?

At first, Arpaio jokingly placed a hat with a big stuffed wildcat (the mascot of rival University of Arizona) on his head. But when they didn’t stop singing, he became more frustrated and said to one of the moderators, “I thought this was going to be a situation not allowing this to go on.” After a couple more minutes, Arpaio declared, “You know what, this is ridiculous. I’m going to go,” and walked out. Watch it:

(HT: The Political Carnival)

House panel likely to pass final pieces of financial reform
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After police killings, Huckabee defends clemency for suspect
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Analysis: With speech, Obama takes ownership of Afghan war
President Obama assumed full ownership of the war in Afghanistan on Tuesday night with a speech arguing that the fastest way out of the conflict is a rapid and significant escalation of it. But the muted response from key Democratic congressional leaders and the skepticism from Republicans about an…

Fact check: Obama’s address on Afghanistan
8:44 p.m. — Timeline for withdrawal “I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. Taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accel…