Rep. Anthony Weiner said Wednesday he was looking into how a health law waiver might work for New York City.

Weiner, who is likely to run for mayor of New York, said that because of the city’s special health care infrastructure, his office was looking into alternatives that might make more sense. Weiner is one of the health care law’s biggest supporters; during the debate leading up to reform, he was one of the last holdouts in Congress for the public option.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51840.html#ixzz1HTrcS7Dy

Some of the text from the attached article:

Almost half the world's nations were rated not free in 1972, but by last year that proportion had dropped below one-quarter.

Political scientists identify democracy's "first wave" as the revolutionary period of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the second as the post-World War II restoration of traditional democracies.

The third wave, they now see, began in the mid-1970s, when people in Portugal and Spain threw off decades of military dictatorship. That upheaval helped inspire their former Latin American colonies to topple their own authoritarians-in-uniform in the 1980s, when the rhythmic banging of cookware in the Santiago night signaled that Chileans, for one, were fed up.

The wave rolled on to east Asia, to the Philippines' "People Power" revolution, South Korea's embrace of civilian democracy, Taiwan's ending of one-party rule. Then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.

Stable democracies "will take a very long time in the Middle East," said Carl Gershman, head since 1984 of the non-governmental U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, whose $100 million in annual congressional appropriations help promote democracy worldwide.

"But now it's clear we're entering a new period for democracy," he said. "There's really no large competing idea."

And what of the biggest democracy vacuum of all, the one-party state of China, where a democracy movement was crushed, with hundreds killed, in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989?

"I don't think China will be able to avoid this trend," Gershman said. "It all amounts to a question of human dignity. And that's universal."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110319/ap_on_re_us/at_democracy_s_door

Maher call Palin a nasty name. Civility.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGE3G5kfzps&feature=feedu

Leadership

"The way the U.S. acted was to let the Germans and the Russians block everything, which announced for us an alignment with the Germans as far as we are concerned," one of the diplomats told The Cable.

Clinton's unwillingness to commit the United States to a specific position led many in the room to wonder exactly where the administration stood on the situation in Libya.

"Frankly we are just completely puzzled," the diplomat said. "We are wondering if this is a priority for the United States."

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/16/european_governments_completely_puzzled_about_us_position_on_libya

Here is the catch. DOJ will only investigate bullying cases if the victim is considered protected under the 1964 Civil Rights legislation. In essence, only discrimination against a victim’s race, sex, national origin, disability, or religion will be considered by DOJ. The overweight straight white male who is verbally and/or physically harassed because of his size can consider himself invisible to the Justice Department.

Apparently, the Justice Department is going by George Orwell’s famous Animal Farm ending: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

“We can only take action where we have legal authority,” wrote DOJ spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa in a December 2010 e-mail to The Washington Times Water Cooler.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2011/mar/18/doj-white-male-bullying-victims-tough-luck/

Posted on drudge

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/dayton-news/city-agrees-to-lower-test-scores-for-police-exam-1103409.html

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/03/13/taking_a_chance_making_a_choice/?p1=News_links

Waiting for Superman.

Jesse Jackson, Jr wants to change the Constitution and put an ipod in every pocket. For some reason, he's not aware that Democrats have figured out a way to pervert our system of government without bothering making changes to our founding document.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhdPrA0b1UM&feature=player_embedded

http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/08/npr-executives-caught-on-tape-bashing-conservatives-and-tea-party-touting-liberals/

A man who appears to be a National Public Radio senior executive, Ron Schiller, has been captured on camera savaging conservatives and the Tea Party movement.

“The current Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian – I wouldn’t even call it Christian. It’s this weird evangelical kind of move,” declared Schiller, the head of NPR’s nonprofit foundation, who last week announced his departure for the Aspen Institute.

In a new video released Tuesday morning by conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe, Schiller and Betsy Liley, NPR’s director of institutional giving, are seen meeting with two men who, unbeknownst to the NPR executives, are posing as members of a Muslim Brotherhood front group. The men, who identified themselves as Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik from the fictitious Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) Trust, met with Schiller and Liley at Café Milano, a well-known Georgetown restaurant, and explained their desire to give up to $5 million to NPR because, “the Zionist coverage is quite substantial elsewhere.”

On the tapes, Schiller wastes little time before attacking conservatives. The Republican Party, Schiller says, has been “hijacked by this group.” The man posing as Malik finishes the sentence by adding, “the radical, racist, Islamaphobic, Tea Party people.” Schiller agrees and intensifies the criticism, saying that the Tea Party people aren’t “just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.”

Schiller goes on to describe liberals as more intelligent and informed than conservatives. “In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives,” he said...

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/08/npr-executives-caught-on-tape-bashing-conservatives-and-tea-party-touting-liberals/#ixzz1G474AInS

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/08/us-cuba-reform-idUSTRE7275PC20110308?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&rpc=22&sp=true

Cuba's program to slash 500,000 state jobs nationwide has barely gotten off the ground in the provinces, as officials scramble to provide alternatives and deal with unease and anger over the layoffs.

Confusion about how to implement the cuts, a lack of alternative jobs and worker resistance have led President Raul Castro to drop a deadline to carry out the plan by March.

The layoffs, aimed at cutting expenditures by the debt-ridden government and increasing productivity on the Caribbean's biggest island, are a key part of economic reforms Castro says are critical to the survival of Cuban communism.

Some 3,000 jobs have been cut in eastern Granma province since the program started in October, a similar number in adjacent Santiago de Cuba and 1,000 in central Camaguey, local officials told Reuters last week.

But that is just 10 percent of the 70,000 jobs they said were slated to go by March in the three provinces and already the experience has proved wrenching for a society where a secure job had been guaranteed for decades under a centrally run socialist economy.

"We never know now if tomorrow we will wake up with a job or not and it was never like that before," said a middle-aged woman in Santiago de Cuba, asking that her name not be used...