Nancy Pelosi’s plan: Wine, dine big donors

POLITICO 8/6/09: By JOHN BRESNAHAN

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moves in a rarefied world of high society and high-level politics — and nothing underscores that fact quite like her plans for the August recess.

Pelosi will spend next weekend quietly tending to top party donors and political allies at a series of private events in Northern California.

The two-day “issues conference” starts next Friday night with a dinner for roughly 170 guests on the back lawn of Pelosi’s multimillion-dollar home in the fashionable Pacific Heights neighborhood in San Francisco.

The following day, Pelosi will shepherd her guests to a Napa Valley winery with buildings designed by world-famous architect Frank Gehry; the speaker and her husband, investor Paul Pelosi, own a nearby vineyard worth between $5 million and $25 million, according to her annual financial disclosure report.

Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama’s ‘Deadly Doctor,’ Strikes Back

TIMES By Michael Scherer / Washington Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the medical ethicist and oncologist who advises President Obama, does not own a television, and if you catch him in a typically energized moment, when his mind speeds even faster than his mouth, he is likely to blurt out something like, “I hate the Internet.” So it took him several days in late July to discover he had been singled out by opponents of health-care reform as a “deadly doctor,” who, according to an opinion column in the New York Post, wanted to limit medical care for “a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy

“I couldn’t believe this was happening to me,” says Emanuel, who in addition to spending his career opposing euthanasia and working to increase the quality of care for dying patients, …

Mommies Who Drink: No Joking After the Schuler Tragedy

TIMES By Ada Calhoun Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2009

As recently as last month, drinking parents seemed to be all the rage. On the bookshelves: Stefanie Wilder-Taylor’s Naptime Is the New Happy Hour, Robert Wilder’s Daddy Needs a Drink and Chris Mancini’s Pacify Me, the cover of which shows a six-pack consisting of five beers and one milk bottle. A pacifier dangles from one of the brews.