WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama, under pressure over the ballooning U.S. budget deficit, said on Wednesday he is preparing to launch an effort to rein in the escalating costs of the Social Security retirement fund and other popular government programs.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Obama said a new commission may be needed to examine reforms for addressing the deficit and the huge programs that contribute to the flow of red ink.

"I think we're in a position to be able to, either at the end of this year or early next year, start laying out a broader picture about how we are going to handle entitlements in a serious way," Obama said.
...
Obama said the reform effort "may start with Social Security because that's, frankly, the easier one." He also said tax reform should be considered. link  

Background on "bipartisan fiscal responsibility commission."

Peter Peterson, a Republican financier who made a fortune doing corporate takeover deals at Wall Street's Blackstone Group, is the Daddy Warbucks of the "fiscal responsibility" crusade. He has campaigned for decades against the dangers that old folks pose to the Republic. ...

Peterson is financing a media blitz. His tendentious documentary--I.O.U.S.A.--opened in 400 theaters and was broadcast on CNN with appropriate solemnity. Last September Peterson bought two full pages in the New York Times to urge the next president to create a "bipartisan fiscal responsibility commission" once he was in office (Peterson was for John McCain). This group of so-called experts would be authorized to design the reforms for Congress to enact. But Peterson does not want Congress to have a full, freewheeling debate on the particulars. The reform package, he suggests, should be submitted to a single "up-or-down vote by Congress, as is done with military base closings." That's one of the gimmicks intended to give politicians cover and protect them from their constituents. link

The entire post, and the Time article, are well worth a read, even if they do leave you, as they left me, feeling quite disturbed and perturbed; the update to Glenn's post provides additional info and summarizes the state of play:

The Nation's Jeremy Scahill reveals that the U.S. military is using Blackwater -- Blackwater -- as part of "a secret program in [Pakistan in] which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives."  McClatchy reports that Obama has made a decision to send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan which, if true, means, as Juan Cole says, that "Gen. Stanley McChrystal has won the struggle for policy decisively."  

So, to recap:  we have indefinite detention, military commissions, Blackwater assassination squads, escalation in Afghanistan, extreme secrecy to shield executive lawbreaking from judicial review, renditions, and denials of habeas corpus.  These are not policies Obama has failed yet to uproot; they are policies he has explicitly advocated and affirmatively embraced as his own.

I am hard-pressed to understand why there has not been more outcry from the so-called progressives, more calling BS on Obama for doing a 180 from what he campaigned on, more demand for the transparency and accountability that were going to be part of the change that electing Obama would bring about.

As Glenn puts it:

By embracing and defending numerous Bush/Cheney policies he once deplored, "Obama hasn't changed, just adjusted."  He's learned secret things that he can't tell you about but which -- you should accept -- do justify his "adaptations."  Whenever Bush followers would run out of arguments to defend their leader's actions, that's the same rationale they'd resort to:   he knows secret things that you don't know and therefore we should trust him.   So Obama has "learned" things that caused him to abandon his vehement condemnations of indefinite detention, state secrets, military commissions and denial of habeas corpus as unjust and un-American travesties and come to embrace them as important and necessary policies?   Wow:  that must have been quite an education.  Don't he and his supporters owe George Bush and Dick Cheney a sincere apology for criticizing them all those years for these policies when, as it turns out, they were necessary and just all along?  And see this insightful argument that makes a related point.

Greg Craig left because no one in the administration, including the president, wanted to hear what he had to say, and they didn't want to have to defend their embrace of Bush-era policies.  Obama allowed himself to be cowed by Dick Cheney's criticism, and panicked at dropping poll numbers.

So how disturbing is this, from the Time article, not just for what it means to counterterrorism policy, but for what it means on a host of issues:

At the same time, he quietly shifted responsibility for the legal framework for counterterrorism from Craig to political advisers overseen by Emanuel, who was more inclined to strike a balance between left and right.

But the good news is that he'll finally be writing that long-planned book about his time working for LBJ.

I'm hoping, perhaps naively, for the flaws and all type of book that a small minority of former public servants are able to manage, as there are some dicey areas Moyers was involved in with Lyndon that he's yet to fully come clean about.  Such as his behind the scenes work to rein in and control skeptics in the media as LBJ launched his wonderful Vietnam adventure.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops released an "Ethical and Religious Directive" this month that would ban any Catholic hospital, nursing home or hospice program from removing feeding tubes or ending palliative procedures of any kind, even when the individual has an advance directive to guide their end-of-life care. The Bishops' directive even notes that patient suffering is redemptive and brings the individual closer to Christ.

[snip]

More quietly, however, the Church has staked out a radical position on end-of-life care, without patients of the 565 Catholic hospitals and other Catholic care facilities even knowing about it. As Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion and Choices, an advocacy group, put it, "When a patient goes to one of these facilities, they don't know that they're choosing Catholic dogma. The bishops see the hospitals as an extension of their ministry."

The "Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services" put out by the Catholic bishops would build upon a Papal elocution given in the wake of the controversial Terri Schiavo case, where the US Congress stepped in to keep Schiavo alive despite her persistent vegetative state and the wishes of her husband to end care. The papal elocution did state that the permanently unconscious should always have access to a feeding tube, but it did not have the force of doctrinal law behind it. "There was always some wiggle room" for Catholic care facilities, said Coombs Lee. Catholics were allowed to use something called a "benefit/burden balance" to determine the ethical, moral and compassionate result in any individual case.

Now, that wiggle room is gone. In the new directive, the bishops state that it is unethical and immoral to withhold or withdraw a feeding tube from patients, whether in cases of permanent unconsciousness, comas, or even cases of advanced dementia when the patient is unable to feed themselves.

[snip]

In many cities, this means that every hospital or medical care facility will not allow the withdrawal of a feeding tube. "In Spokane, Washington, if you don't get Catholic health care, you don't get health care," Coombs Lee said. "In Eugene, Oregon, if you don't get Catholic health care, you don't get health care." Coombs Lee characterized it as a kind of entrapment, with a sense of "my house, my rules." If a patient's family wanted to comply with an advance directive, they would have to leave the Catholic care facility, adding a level of stress and disruption to the already difficult time of aggrievement. "Decisions on feeding tubes are hard enough without adding this extra adversity," said Coombs Lee.

The National Park Service has scheduled a series of public "listening sessions" for next week to take comments about improving its grant program for preserving historic sites where thousands of Japanese Americans were held against their will during World War II...

Earlier this month, the Park Service announced that the largest of the first-year grants was being made to help build a museum at Heart Mountain, an internment camp near Cody, Wyoming, where almost 11,000 Japanese-Americans were detained during World War II.

The $5.5 million Heart Mountain Interpretative Learning Center will be about 11,000 square feet. It will house some major historical collections, including all editions of the Heart Mountain Sentinel newspaper, official records related to the internment camp, hundreds of original photographs, sketches and diaries, as well as materials relating to the 442nd Combat Battalion and the Military intelligence Service...

Prior to announcing the Heart Mountain grant, the Park Service held a hearing in Denver where a number of Japanese Americans held at Heart Mountain made pleas that their internment there be remembered.

Link

Greenberg smoked turkeys.

the best smoked turkey I have ever had. it comes ready to eat.

and while we are in mail order tips mode here is the best smoked ham I have ever tasted. and I am a ham connoisseur.

Petitjean Meats.

Both women rejected plea deals offering no jail, no probation, no community service, and just a conviction on disorderly conduct -- a violation that would not result in a criminal record. But prosecutors had one condition -- the women would have to confess to being prostitutes, thereby implicating the Posners, who are awaiting trial.

You can take it yourself and see how you do.