Terrorists Launch Coordinated Strikes in Pakistan

“One was expecting that there would be better planning and more fortifications. Unfortunately it has transpired today that none of them are in place.”

- Faisal Saleh Hayad, a lawmaker with the Pakistan Muslim League-Q. A series of attacks Thursday left at least 38 people dead and raised questions about the ability of the nation’s security and intelligence agencies to thwart a rising Islamist insurgency. (Washington Post)

* Related Title: The Inheritance by David E. Sanger

Olympia Snowe Still the Key Vote on Healthcare

“I think the administration has put her in the driver’s seat; it’s very disconcerting.”

- Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, who is leading an effort in the House to round up votes for a government plan akin to Medicare. The White House and Congressional leaders turned in earnest on Wednesday to working out big differences in the five health care bills. All eyes were on Senator Olympia J. Snowe, the Maine Republican whose call for a “trigger” that would establish a government plan as a fallback is one of the leading compromise ideas.

* Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform by Howard Dean

Justice Ginsburg Released After Night in Hospital

“Prior to the plane taking off, the justice experienced extreme drowsiness, causing her to fall from her seat.”

- A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court, noting that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hospitalized overnight for what appeared to be an adverse reaction to medication after she boarded an overnight flight to London. She was released Thursday. (CNN)

* Related Title: The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

The Battle Over the War in Afghanistan

“This is a ferociously difficult issue, and it bears a lot of thought and reflection and review. Every assumption needs to be tested.”

- White House advisor David Axelrod. President Obama’s review of Afghanistan war strategy has drawn criticism from Republicans and intensified lobbying from advocates and opponents of sending more U.S. troops to that country. (Bloomberg)

* Related Title: The Limits of Power by Andrew J. Bacevich

How Will Nations Pay for a Global Climate Deal?

“The level of ambition in funding is not matching up to the sense of urgency everyone now has. “Financing and an inadequate level of financing are a deal breaker for us.”

- Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado, the lead climate negotiator for Brazil. As world leaders struggle to hash out a new global climate deal by December, they are increasingly concerned how to pay for the new accord, estimated at $100 billion a year by 2020. (New York Times)

* Related Title: The Global Deal by Nicholas Stern

Goldman Sachs 9-Month Compensation: $527,192 a Person

“Our competitors are paying people quite well [and are] very willing to pay employees guaranteed bonuses of very high amounts.”

- David Viniar, Goldman Sachs’s chief financial officer. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. set aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier and enough to pay each worker $527,192 for the period. (Bloomberg)

* Related Title: The Audacity of Greed by Jonathan Tasini

As noted yesterday, Green Metropolis, by New Yorker writer David Owen, contends that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon or Snowmass, Colorado, or someplace in Vermont; it’s New York City. Skeptical? You might be less so after you read this excerpt.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability

By David Owen

From Chapter 1

More Like Manhattan

The history of civilization is a chronicle of destruction: people arrive, eat anything slow enough to catch, supplant indigenous flora with species bred for exploitation, burn whatever can be burned, and move on or spread out. No sensitive modern human can contemplate that history without a shudder. Everywhere we look, we see evidence of our recklessness, as well as signs that our destructive reach is growing. For someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is no longer the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, 175 miles away. Tap water in metropolitan Washington, D.C., has been found to contain trace amounts of caffeine, ibuprofen, naproxen sodium, two antibiotics, an anticonvulsive drug used to treat seizures and bipolar disorder, and the antibacterial compound triclocarban, which is an ingredient of household soaps and cleaning agents. Modern interest in environmentalism is driven by a yearning to protect what we haven’t ruined already, to conserve what we haven’t used up, to restore as much as possible of what we’ve destroyed, and to devise ways of reconfiguring our lives so that civilization as we know it can be sustained through our children’s lifetimes and beyond.

To the great majority of Americans who share these concerns, densely populated cities look like the end of the world. Because such places concentrate high levels of human activity, they seem to manifest nearly every distressing symptom of the headlong growth of civilization—the smoke, the filth, the crowds, the cars—and we therefore tend to think of them as environmental crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, New York City generates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and produces more solid waste than any other American region of comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an intense hot spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of deepening green. Read More

Michelle Obama would seem as likely a candidate as any for the woman who has it all. A stellar education, a successful career in her own right, a seemingly thriving, harmonious family. All that in addition to — and prior to–her life as First Lady of the United States.

But as Gail Collins observes in When Everything Changed, her history of the amazing transformational  journey of American women over the past five decades, while Michelle Obama “seemed destined to become a nonfictional version of that other African-American lawyer-mom, Clair Huxtable,” Mrs. Obama has found that, just maybe, it isn’t yet possible for an American woman to “have it all.” As Collins quotes her as saying, “That was a shock to me. Nobody prepared me for this. We have to be realistic and honest with young women and families about what they will confront, because to say, ‘You can do it all and should do it all,’ and not get the support, to me is frustrating.”

Which is where public policy comes in. During the 2008 presidential campaign Michelle Obama traveled across America and held roundtable discussions with working mothers about the difficulties of holding down a job and raising a family. While she believed young women shouldn’t have to give up on either, she said, “but it becomes a choice you have to make if child care isn’t available and salaries aren’t high enough.” Likewise, this September the First Lady made the case for health reform as a women’s issue, referring to stories she heard from American women on the campaign trail and stating that the status quo is holding women back. She said, “Being part of the sandwich generation, raising kids while caring for sick or elderly parents, that’s just not a work/family balance issue anymore [...] it is a health care issue. It’s something that I have thought a great deal about as a mother.”

[Posted by Sarah Silbert]

New York City — the greenest community in the United States? New York City?

That’s the counterintuitive argument at the heart of Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About Sustainability, by New Yorker staff writer David Owen.  It all comes down to population density. New Yorkers — particularly residents of Manhattan — live closer to each other (because, living on an island, they have no choice), which means they drive less and walk more; they have fewer cars (because running a car in Manhattan is an expensive, endlessly stress-inducing proposition; and anyway, New York has decent public transit); and they live in smaller spaces (location, location, location), which cost less to heat.

Of course, as a matter of raw numbers, New York City is an almost unparalleled energy hog; but on a per capita basis, New Yorkers consume far less energy and emit far less greenhouse gases than the residents of any place, big or small, rural or urban, in the nation. The implication of which is clear: if we want to get serious about conserving energy and addressing global warming, we need to start building communities that look more like New York and less like, well, most other sprawling American towns and cities.

Consider the evidence and Owen’s argument seems commonsensical. That it seems absurd at first blush is the consequence of what Owen calls “a deep antipathy to urban life which has been close to the heart of American environmentalism since the beginning.” He way of illustration he cites numerous examples of city-bashing down the ages. Here’s a sampling:

• Thomas Jefferson described cities as “pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.”
• Outbreaks of diseases such as yellow fever in Philadelphia (1793) and cholera in New York City (1832), combined with rudimentary waste management systems, contributed to both widespread illness and death and a backlash against urban living. Jefferson wrote, in a letter to Benjamin Rush, that “most evils are the means of producing some good. The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation.”
• Henry David Thoreau, who lived in a cabin in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, between 1845 and 1847, represented an image, still potent today, of the sensitive nature lover living in harmony with the environment. This idea was largely popularized through Thoreau’s book Walden, which discussed his experiences living close to nature.
• The National Park Service, established by Congress in 1916, “was conceived as an increasingly necessary corrective to urban life, and national parks were treated in large measure as sanctuaries from urban depravity.”
• The Sierra Club, founded in 1892 by environmentalist John Muir, continues to promote an anti-city ethos while simultaneously protesting suburban sprawl.
• Henry Ford referred to cities as “pestiferous growth” and viewed his cars as tools for liberating humanity.
• The birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s inspired a growing sense of ecological crisis that blamed many of the United States’ problems on urbanism.
• That anti-urbanism still animates American environmentalism, writes Owen, is still evident in the term that’s widely used for sprawl: “urbanization” (Urbanization, at least on the New York model, is in fact the polar opposite of sprawl.)

In this, the latest installment of PBC’s interview with Rep. Henry Waxman, the California congressman — who over three decades has become most powerful and effective lawmakers in Washington — reflects on the highs and lows of his career so far. For more, see Waxman’s recent book, The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works, available at Progressive Book Club.

The high point was to be chairman of the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment and actually to pick issues to pursue for legislation and to push for them and see results.

The low point was the period of time for 12 years when the Republicans were in power, because they had all the chairmanships, they set the agenda.  And they acted as if the  Democrats didn’t exist when they simply tried to get their Republicans united behind a proposal which usually meant they went further and further to the right so that there was no basis to be with them.

But even during that disappointing, discouraging time we were able to figure out ways to get the legislation done.  We worked out some compromises where we had control of things, even though Republicans were in power — on pesticide legislation and safe drinking water.  Because after the Republicans closed down the government, they were looking for something to claim as an accomplishment and they weren’t getting much done.  I knew we had enormous leverage at that point, ironically enough, to get even better legislation in those two areas than we would have had when we were in control.

Congress Takes Up Financial Industry Reform

“The big banks have no clout. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase. Nobody cares what they think, literally.”

- Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, which today takes up key elements of President Obama’s proposal to better regulate the financial institutions that caused the 2008 financial collapse. It seems that small neighborhood banks and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are overshadowing the nation’s biggest banks in influencing lawmakers shaping the reform legislation. (AP)

* Related Title: The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris

Interest groups battle to deflect health taxes

“Let’s charge the millionaires instead of people making $40,000, $50,000 a year.”

- Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, who said his union will press Senate leaders to advance a bill that offers a public option and drops a proposed tax on high-cost insurance policies. Insurance companies, unions, hospitals, and other interested parties are lobbying lawmakers to shift burdens onto someone else rather than pay extra taxes under new health care legislation. (AP)

* Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform by Howard Dean
Hillary Clinton Disavows Presidential Ambitions

“I have absolutely no interest in running for president again.”

- In an interview with ABC News, Hillary Clinton said her job as Secretary of State “is incredibly, all-encompassing” and that when it is over, she may look forward to “taking some time off.” (AFP)

* Related Title: The Battle for America 2008 by Dan Balz & Haynes Johnson

George W. Bush Favors Diplomacy with North Korea

“[Six-nation talks are] the best way to bring peace to the Korean peninsula.”

- Former President George W. Bush, in a speech in Seoul, South Korea, said multilateral diplomacy — involving United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea — is the key to resolving the standoff over North Korea’s nuclear program. (VOA)

* Related Title: The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power by David E. Sanger

J.P. Morgan Posts Huge Profits

“What you have is this tremendous pent-up demand for funding, which burst open in the quarter.”

- Richard Bove, a financial analyst, commenting on word that JPMorgan Chase’s profits increased more than six fold in the latest quarter. Meanwhile, the U.S. unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent in September, the highest level since 1983. (Bloomberg)

* Related Title: The Audacity of Greed: Free Markets, Corporate Thieves, and the Looting of America by Jonathan Tasini

So the Senate Finance Committee has just passed its healthcare plan, 14-9, with Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe joining the panel’s Dems. Here’s what Gov. Howard Dean, PBC chairman and author of Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform, is saying about it.

This bill is a step forward procedurally and it scored well but it is not reform, and it will not help the Democrats in 2010. For that, a real piece of reform must pass this year which allows a significant number of Americans who can not get insurance to become insured by election day 2010. Given the time constraints, Medicare must be made available for a price to some meaningful number of people who are under 65.

The LA Times today quotes Rep. Henry Waxman as saying, apropos of the healthcare legislation edging toward a vote in Congress, “The effort to reform healthcare is a balancing act. And we are limited in how much money we can spend.” This is consistent with Waxman’s pragmatic, get-things-done approach to government, as you’ll see below, in the latest excerpt from our interview with the influential California lawmaker.

In his recent book, The Waxman Report, Waxman tells how he got into politics and explains the principles that drive him. And he draws on his unparalleled experience over three decades to demonstrate, with vivid firsthand illustrations, how Congress really works, and especially how, for all its flaws and institutional torpor, it can — and often does — work in the public interest.

Here he shares his thoughts on bipartisanship and compromise.

Bipartisanship is very, very helpful for a lot of reasons, including, in my reality, that I had Republican presidents that had to sign the bills that I authored.  But it’s helpful to try to get as broad support for legislation as possible. Often the differences are regional, not partisan.

Unfortunately, today the Congress is a lot more partisan than it was when I first entered.  The reality is that since Newt Gingrich was so successful in tearing the House of Representatives where the Democrats were in power in order to gain power for himself, Republicans are still using that same strategy.

The Republicans denied President Clinton an opportunity to get health care reform in ’93 and ’94.  And then they were successful in winning control of the House and the Senate in the ’94 election.  I think they want to replay that dance card, but I don’t think it’s going to work.  And I think they do themselves a disservice by looking like they’re strictly for the status quo, which most people want to change.

There’s nothing wrong with a compromise.  A lot of people, especially progressives — and, I’m sure, the other side of the spectrum as well — think that it’s wrong to compromise, that it’s an abandonment of principles.  I think it’s a way to get your principles in action.  When people tell me health care has got to be only as a single payer system, as much as I could see the advantages of a single payer system that seems to me to say to the tens of millions of people who don’t have health insurance, It’s not important enough to get you insurance coverage even though your life and your family’s lives may be at stake, until we get it perfect.  We’ve got to get the best we can.  It’s better to get a half a loaf than nothing.  And you can always come back and fight another day to improve things.

Russia Cools to Tougher Sanctions on Iran

“Things do not look as good today as they did a week ago.”

- Maria Lipman, an analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center think tank. Russian government officials have made statements that cast doubt on the Kremlin’s willingness to endorse any new sanctions on Iran. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was meeting with Russian leaders on Tuesday to gain their support in pressuring Iran. (AP)

* Related Title: The Limits of Power by Andrew J. Bacevich

Al Qaeda’s Finances in Bad Shape

“We assess that al-Qaeda is in its weakest financial condition in several years and that, as a result, its influence is waning.”

- David Cohen, a senior Treasury official, who says al-Qaeda had made several appeals for funds already this year. By contrast, he says, the Taliban’s funding is flourishing. (BBC)

* Related Title: The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

Healthcare Reform: Democrats Giving Up on Universal Coverage?

“The effort to reform healthcare is a balancing act. And we are limited in how much money we can spend.”

- Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), the House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman and a leading author of the House healthcare bill. As the Senate Finance Committee prepares to pass its plan to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system, senior Democrats are acknowledging that it may be impossible to provide coverage to all Americans — a central goal of President Obama and his congressional allies. (Los Angeles Times)

* Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform by Howard Dean

Liz Cheney Launches Fearmongering Advocacy Group

“It’s clear that there’s a real grassroots fear and concern out there. Everywhere I go people are saying to me, ‘Where can I go to learn more?’ People realize what a dangerous world we live in.”

- Liz Cheney, the eldest daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney has launched a new group, Keep America Safe, aimed at rallying opposition to the “radical” foreign policy of the Obama administration. (Politico)

* Related Title: Republican Gomorrah by Max Blumenthal

Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize: Criticism and Pushback

“We simply disagree that he has done nothing. He got the prize for what he has done.”

- Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland. Members of the committee are pushing back against criticism that the award was premature and a potential liability for Obama. (AP)

* Related Title: The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

Update: Thanks to Michael Huttner and Mike Lux for a great show. Listen to the archived version below.

Tonight’s show will start at 8pm Eastern.

To ask a question, call in at (347) 934-0465

You can also listen live at Blog Talk Radio.

Join us tonight for the launch of Book Talk Radio, an online radio show where progressive authors, activists, and you discuss politics, policy, and the progressive movement.

Our show tonight will feature Michael Huttner, co-founder of ProgressNow and author of 50 Ways You Can Help Obama Change America.  Interviewing Michael will be Mike Lux, Clinton Administration veteran and author of The Progressive Revolution.

The two will discuss the current policy debates, and what ordinary Americans can do to help move forward a progressive agenda.  Listen live at 8pm, and call in with your questions for the authors.

We hope you’ll join us.