Matt Taibbi gives Obama obscene cover while pretending to tell the story of how the hedge fund multimillionaires managed to get their obscene 50% income tax break to survive.

Obama’s gotten a limited number of things done in his Freshman Term as the President. The list is disappointing, and certainly not inspiring.

Obama did not have to appoint Liz Fowler. It would have been better to snub Fowler than to snub an entire constituency that mistrusts her.

On Friday afternoon May 21, WellPoint released the official tally for the voting from their contentions annual shareholders meeting on the 18th. Our resolution to return Wellpoint to non-profit status received over 30 million votes, 9.4% of the shares voted. That is a jaw dropping vote of no confidence in the management of this company. But the story isn’t over yet. Our shareholder resolution for WellPoint to return to its non-profit Blue Cross roots will be back next year. And the SEC has proposed a new regulation that would allow shareholders to directly nominate corporate board members called “Proxy Access.” If this goes into effect this fall as expected, I intend to run for the WellPoint board.

Glacier National Park: a story of numbers and ice.

Good news, everyone! Dawn Johnsen passed the Senate Judiciary Committee! That means her floor vote must only be a few months away!

By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger

Olbermann says it’s time to shame the Bluedog Dems into passing real health care reform

If the blue dogs and conservadems change their minds, then Congress will come around to some form of PO, if they don’t we may get no PO, and also mandatory insurance from the “murder-by-spreadsheet” types. Or even if we get a PO, it may only be enough to increase the chances that politicians can convince people that they delivered for them; but not the kind of PO that might, possibly, solve any of our problems, and it may also do us the damage of freezing health insurance reform until 2015. I’d hate to see that happen in return for a sham PO that has almost no effect on the insurance companies. But I’m afraid that may be the outcome of the kind of “common sense” we’ve been getting from the blue dogs, Rahm, and the President, rather than the outcome of Mike’s scenario.

The question which always arises at this point in a pessimistic scenario, is what should the progressives do if a sham PO bill is presented to them in the final stages of the legislative process? In that case, I think they need to defeat such a bill if they can. If they don’t, they, and the Democratic Party, will bear the responsibility for its passage, and its failure, and the Republicans will return to power sooner, rather than later, and then the United States will accelerate its ruinous march toward plutocracy.

But, if the progressives do defeat such a bill, then the Administration and the blue dogs cannot afford to give up. They cannot take no for an answer. They need a health insurance reform bill, even if it is a progressive bill with a robust PO, and even if its passage means a flood of campaign funds into the coffers of their Republican opposition, because having a bill they can sell as a success is a necessary condition for their re-election, and they can certainly sell that kind of bill as a success; and as Mike Lux says, they can always, in the end, get money another way.

Yesterday, Senators Kerry and Boxer introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (CEJAPA). You can view a section-by-section summary and the full text of the legislation here.

Many bloggers have already weighed in with their initial reactions. What follows is a round-up of these first impressions, as well as a few thoughts of my own.