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I know some liberals will object, but the inclusion in a same-sex marriage bill of an explicit exception for religious organizations seems to me to be a powerful combination, which both assures civil equality and religious freedom, which seems to be the main fear of those who oppose equality. I notice too that a poll just taken in California comes to the same conclusion:

I propose that any initiative wording in a future California ballot specifically include a religious exemption. It shows we are serious about religious freedom and a church-state divide.

As president of General Motors when Eisenhower tapped him to become Secretary of Defense in 1953, ?SEngine Charlie? Wilson voiced at his Senate confirmation hearing what was then the conventional view. When asked whether he could make a decision in the interest of the U.S. that was adverse to the interest of GM, he said he could.

Then he reassured them that such a conflict would never arise. ?SI cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country.?

Wilson was only slightly exaggerating. At the time, the fate of GM was inextricably linked to that of the nation. In 1953, GM was the world?"s biggest manufacturer, the symbol of U.S. economic might. It generated 3 percent of U.S. gross national product. GM?"s expansion in the 1950s was credited with stalling a business slump. It was also America?"s largest employer, with over 460,000 employees. Its blue-collar workers received (in today's dollars) $60 an hour that year in wages and benefits.

Today, Wal-Mart is America?"s largest employer, the majority of whose employees receive just over $10 an hour. And General Motors is filing for bankruptcy. Wilson?"s reassuring words in 1953 now have an ironic twist. There will be little difference between what is good for America and for GM because it is soon to be owned by U.S. taxpayers who have forked out more than $60 billion to buy it.

But why would U.S. taxpayers want to own today?"s GM?

The answer, after the jump.

--Robert Reich

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by Mark Silva

Brian Williams already has gotten a lot of public mileage out of his private time with President Barack Obama, in preparation for a day-in-the-life of the president series that NBC News will air this week, Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

The anchorman got the president to walk his Supreme Court nominee back from the remark she made about the relative wisdom of Latino women, as compared with white men. He got the president to say that he's not interested in the government owning GM. -- just a 60 percent stake, for now.

"Our viewers will see a view of the White House never televised before,'' Williims says of his program, Inside the Obama White House. "Senior staff, the president himself, the first lady and yes... Bo will make an appearance with us on television.''

Williams tells of a president who is not confined to the Oval Office, who walks from study to study dropping in on sessions, popping m&m's for snacks along the way.

"We had something like 20 camera crews....we have something like 150 hours of video tape,'' he says, and that's after a day in the White House last week, which Williams will follow up with another interview of Obama on Tuesday. "e're going through all of this to distill it down to two hours.

Williams also got a cheeseburger out of the deal - joining the president in his outing for a take-out pickup of burgers at a Five Guys in Washington.

Williams also asked Obama about the early part of his day that he hadn't seen: "I got my workout in,'' Obama said, "saw the girls off to school... always eat a hearty breakfast.''

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Howard Kurtz previews a two-part prime-time series -- Inside the Obama White House -- airing on NBC tomorrow and Wednesday "that so far has produced 150 hours of tape.

Said host Brian Williams: "There's stuff we've never seen of how the White House operates. We were pretty stunned at how much we were able to record and how natural events seemed to be."

Over the weekend, there's been a minor uproar over New York Representative Charlie Rangel's remarks about President Obama's visit to New York. When a reporter asked Rangel what Obama should do when he visits the city, Rangel replied, ?SMake certain he doesn?"t run around in East Harlem without identification.?

The remark was a reference to the killing of police officer Omar J. Edwards by fellow officer Andrew Dutton. Edwards was in plainclothes, and chasing after someone who was breaking into his car. He had his weapon out. Three other plainclothes officers arrived and yelled for them to stop. One, Dutton, shot Edwards three times as he turned around.

The thing about Rangel's joke is that he's not wrong: We're living in a country where a black man can be president but where black men are still so at risk of accidental violence from police that even black officers are concerned about it. That said, Rangel is a public official whose constituency includes some of the officers he was criticizing. It's his responsibility to make sure that when he does criticize the police, he does so in a respectful and constructive manner. His remark would have been appropriate for a comedian, not a congressman.

In the meantime, it's worth pondering the significance of such an event. There's no indication that Dutton harbors any special animosity towards black people -- rather, racial bias is so socially ingrained that we draw on our biases subconsciously, when we aren't even thinking. That kind of racism is a much greater problem than the forthright prejudice of yesteryear, which for the most part has become socially unacceptable.



-- A. Serwer

Steve Herzfeld managed an admirably inventive end-run around high healthcare costs for his Parkinson's- and Alzheimer's-afflicted parents. After in-home care was no longer possible, he priced American nursing homes, but found that the cheapest acceptable option was still $6,000. So he sent them to India. Quality elderly care in Puducherry cost less than his father's fixed income. According to the Guardian:

[In India, Herzfeld] could give his parents a much higher standard of care than would have been possible in the US for his father's income of $2,000 (£1,200) a month. In India that paid for their rent, a team of carers—a cook, a valet for his father, nurses to be with his mother 12 hours a day, six days a week, a physiotherapist and a masseuse—and drugs (costing a fifth of US prices), and also allowed them to put some money away...."In India, they really like older people," says Herzfeld, describing how the staff seemed to regard his parents as their own family.

Of course, the care was inexpensive because a couple thousand bucks goes further in Puducherry than it might in, say, Fort Lauderdale. Herzfeld, though, apparently believes that it was cheap because elderly care in America is greedily overpriced by providers. He vents about about healthcare and the profit motive: 

[Herzfeld] believes that India could teach the US and UK a lot about care of the elderly. "In America, healthcare is done for profit, so that skews the whole thing and makes it very inhuman in its values," he says.

I try not to begrudge a man his fantasies, but the idea that the nurses, valets, and masseuses of Puducherry were doing it all out of the goodness of their hearts—rather than the goodness of their paychecks—is condescending. It was simple outsourcing, not subcontinental altruism, that saved Steve Herzfeld so much money.

In Reason's May 2009 print edition, Ronald Bailey wrote about the outsourcing of hip replacement.