• Promote the collection of sexual orientation data in electronic medical records and encourage researchers focused on LGBT health to share findings and develop new LGBT health research.
• Improve the tracking of hate crimes against transgender persons, publicize resources for reporting violence, and conduct outreach on strategies to avoid violence.
• Develop cultural competency training to help educate health care providers, employers and educators on the health needs of the LGBT community.
• Increase tobacco cessation efforts in the LGBT community to address the high prevalence of smoking, which is at 30 percent, 12 percentage points higher than the 18 percent of the overall population.
• Promote inclusion of same sex couples in programs aimed at healthy pregnancies, childbirth and early childhood health.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who recently committed to supporting marriage equality, lauded the new plan, saying, “Chicago’s strength is in the diversity of its communities and I am committed to ensuring that all Chicagoans have access to the care and information they need to live healthy lives and contribute fully to the vibrancy of our city.” Indeed, the plan was developed in consultation with the city’s LGBT constituents to ensure it best meets the community’s needs. The complete action plan can be found on the city of Chicago’s website.

Today, while delivering a presentation on a new winter attraction in Chicago, Emanuel was confronted by Occupy Chicago. As the mayor was speaking, a cry of “Mic Check!” rang out, and protesters started delivering complaints about Emanuel’s budget and his attacks on free speech. The protesters also tried to deliver a petition requesting access to a public space to continue their 24/7 protest. Emanuel cut his speech short to escape the demonstration. Watch NBC Chicago’s video from the incident:

Earlier, Occupy Chicago attended a town hall meeting of Alderman Joe Moore, taking him to task for supporting Emanuel’s budget. Watch them confronting Moore here.

It’s entirely possible to make shows about politicians without referring to their party affiliations, especially if you show them mostly in isolation, brooding over power and tactics, and even easier if you don’t engage with policy, just with the exercise of brute force. But especially if you’re making a television program about tough-as-nails Chicago politicians, eschewing party politics means you’re giving up most of the means by which that brute force is exercised, and by which the objects of that force are defined. If you’re going to have enemies in political stories, you have to figure out who they are, and parties are useful identifiers, whether your foe is an ideological rival, a procedural one, or your rival for position within the hierarchy of the party itself.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that the folks who make smart television don’t want to risk their audience before a show even starts airing, especially if, like Starz, you’re trying to establish yourself as destination channel for smart original content that doesn’t involve people getting naked and killing each other in arenas. But Democratic and Republican politics don’t play out the same way on the local level — even in big cities — as they do nationally. Parks and Recreation‘s been an incredibly effective demonstration of that. It would be entirely possible to have Kelsey Grammar, who is playing a Rahm-like politician on the show Boss, have Rahm’s personally aggressive style without attaching Rahm’s voting record and stances in the Obama administration to him, using a series of local issues and relationships with local stakeholders to define him as a Democrat or a Republican.

Or even if that’s too touchy, why not invent a couple of fictional political parties? That kind of work happens most often in science fiction, scabrous satirical humor, or in Dave Barry books, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done in more realistic dramas, in ways that are usefully thought-provoking. I’d be curious to see a long-running exploration of what it would be like to have one party that’s fairly interventionist on both moral and social safety net issues, opposing abortion, equal rights for gay couples, and the death penalty while supporting universal health care and heavy taxes on the wealthiest citizens positioned against a much more staunchly libertarian party that’s pro-choice, low-tax, low social services, etc. One of the best things about Kings was that it didn’t spend a lot of time explaining the new framework that it was operating in: the show just sort of plunged in and let you figure out the importance of the powerfully active military-industrial complex. While I like Kings, it’s also reasonably obvious why it didn’t find a network following — the lead actor simply isn’t very good, and the religious stuff is incredible, but probably would have found a more natural audience on a network like HBO, which also would have found alternative ways to support its heavy production costs.

But I don’t think that fate would necessarily attach to a show that was more of our world, with smaller but significant tweaks to the positions that, bundled together, define political parties. We can make a nigh-infinite number of television shows about the nature of power as a raw, elemental thing (especially if they star Ian McShane). But they’re not the only kind of fiction we need to help us consider our political system and the future that our politics will define. Our parties are held together by duct tape, temperamental similarities, entrenched hatred, tears, and determination, but not necessarily by consensus or logic. We’re settled into them for now, but at some point, someone more effective than the Reform Party, or No Labels, or Unity ’08 might come along and present a viable alternative. Our pop culture’s daintiness about parties is in odd contrast to the brutality of our political contests.

-Damn right, She-Hulk is the best lawyer in comics.

-Are we still clutching our pearls over whether graffiti is art?

-The brothers Emanuel and Chicago on film.

-SCANDAL: there are liberals in Hollywood and they’re proud of being liberals and making liberal art!

As a fan of urban policy, I can certainly sympathize with Rahm Emanuel’s desire to be Mayor of Chicago. And I definitely subscribe to the Tim Fernholz theory that the Rahm as History’s Greatest Monster account of the Obama administration doesn’t really add up.

But of course one way in which my sympathy for the “big city mayor rather than senior White House staffer” view reveals itself is that here I am with my job at a national policy organization and I’m still always talking about urban policy issues. By contrast, I’ve never heard Rahm say anything about zoning or parking or barber licenses or anything else. It’s a bit odd.

Odd and—problematically for the country—typical. We tend to treat state and local politics as just a JV version of national politics. So if you like a centrist Democrat as a congressional leader or a Chief of Staff, you’ll love him as Mayor of Chicago! The reality, however, is that there’s very little overlap between the issues the federal government deals with and the issues city governments deal with. And even though each individual locality is relatively unimportant, in the aggregate state and local government has a huge impact on American life. These issues deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms and not just as proxies for national political priorities.

Conservative pundit Sarah Palin quickly blasted Emanuel’s comments on Twitter, calling them “shallow” and “irresponsible.” Parroting Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R-SC) rant against Obama, Palin said “Rahm, u lie”:

The right-wing echo chamber was quick to back Palin’s assertion. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said Emanuel’s statement that Barton reflects GOP philosophy “couldn’t be more wrong.” On Fox News this morning, conservative pundit Andrea Tantoros said “Palin is absolutely right” that Emanuel “has not a leg to stand on.” Watch it:

Despite the conservative howls, some in the media have failed to note that Emanuel’s assertion is evidenced by the Republican Study Committee (RSC). Composed of over 115 Republican congressional members, including House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Chairman of the House Republican Conference Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), the RSC presented a collective view of what it saw as a White House “shakedown”:

BP’s reported willingness to go along with the White House’s new fund suggests that the Obama Administration is hard at work exerting its brand of Chicago-style shakedown politics. These actions are emblematic of a politicization of our economy that has been borne out of this Administration’s drive for greater power and control. It is the same mentality that believes an economic crisis or an environmental disaster is the best opportunity to pursue a failed liberal agenda. The American people know much better.

If a chorus of over 115 Republican members agreeing with Barton isn’t a reflection of GOP philosophy, what is?

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and member of the RSC, even described how he would put that philosophy into action. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent notes, Issa said in a recent speech to fellow conservatives that, were the GOP regain a majority in the House and should he get the power of subpoena, he “won’t use it to have corporate America live in fear that we’re going to subpoena everything. I will use it to get the very information that today the White House is either shredding or not producing.”

Two notorious, right-wing Jewish activists got wind of the bar mitzvah trip, due to take place next week, and warned Emanuel they would “blow up” the celebration. They accuse Emanuel of being behind President Obama’s tough stance against Jewish settlements in occupied territory.

Itamar Ben Gvir and Baruch Marzel wrote to Emanual: “We promise to accompany your son’s bar mitzvah events in Israel, we will make sure to receive you as you deserve to be received … with catcalls and disgust.”

Despite being willing to disrupt his bar mitzvah, the two activists claim their ire doesn’t extend to Emanuel’s son. Ben Gvir told the Jerusalem Post that “if the kid would come alone to the Wall without his father, we would be happy and we wouldn’t complain. But with all that Rahm Emanuel has done against the People of Israel and Land of Israel, we would have no choice but to demonstrate.” “I think he is worse than Hamas,” said Ben Gvir.

Apparently the administration’s jobs plan is to have a lot of profiles be written about Rahm Emanuel. But while previous pieces about which issues Emanuel’s lost out on have dwelled on episodes where liberals are likely to disagree with him on the merits, Noam Scheiber’s version of the profile contains this tidbit:

Then, in July, the White House faced a key decision. Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, probably the most important of the five committees considering health care, had spent months negotiating with his Republican counterpart, Chuck Grassley, with little to show for it. Emanuel was getting antsy. He gathered his top aides and pressed for a way to hurry the process along. The Senate labor committee had produced its own health care bill. Perhaps, Emanuel wondered, Majority Leader Harry Reid could bypass Baucus and bring it to the floor. Or maybe Baucus could just stop bargaining with Grassley and let Reid move a more partisan version of his bill.

But, in the end, Obama himself favored letting Baucus negotiate until September. (Though Axelrod stresses that the president was “just as impatient as Rahm was to get moving.”) In fairness, even internal skeptics believed a bipartisan package might be attainable. The problem was that, overlaid on a strategy based on speed and momentum, the extra two months exacted a major cost.

I think the only real question here is whether Emanuel’s favored approach was possible. It’s all well and good to say “Baucus should cut these negotiations off” but if Baucus was just determined to be stubborn, then it wouldn’t have happened no matter what Obama said. This, however, makes it sound as if the President didn’t make any serious efforts in that direction, which I think was a major mistake.

Overall, Scheiber’s profile gives the impression of a very political animal. Someone who’s crowning achievement was that House Democrats had a very good performance in 2006 when he was DCCC Chairman and who has a lot of opinions about what would or wouldn’t be politically smart. It’s important to have someone like that in an administration—you can’t take the politics out of politics—but it’s hard to be too sad that the President often winds up siding with people who offer policy-driven arguments. The pacing of health care, however, was really just an argument about politics and would have been a smart time to listen to your savvy DC political hand.

The second paragraph of Jason Horowitz Washington Post article about how everything would be fine if only Obama listened to Rahm Emanuel instead of wasting time trying to implement progressive policies, ought to be taught in J-Schools all-across the land:

But a contrarian narrative is emerging: Emanuel is a force of political reason within the White House and could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice on some of the most sensitive subjects of the year: health-care reform, jobs and trying alleged terrorists in civilian courts.

But a sentence is being phrased in the passive voice! An article is being written, and within in a narrative emerges, but nobody knows what’s causing its emergence.

At any rate, I have no idea what the truth of the matter in internal White House disputes is. But I’m struck by the extent to which national security issues play a role in all these Rahm Pity Party Profiles. You’d think that Obama’s national security record was deeply unpopular and dragging the rest of his agenda down. In reality, Obama’s foreign policy rating is in positive territory, much better than his approval rating on the economy or health care. And Obama is overall narrowly in positive territory on job approval. So it’s not at all clear to me what political problem having listened to Rahm about KSM and whatnot is supposed to have solved.

Both common sense and the polling breakdown indicate that dissatisfaction with Obama is driven by the poor performance of the economy since Obama’s inauguration. And none of these Rahm retrospectives have given any indication that he had some secret plan to fix the economy that Obama rejected. All it says about him and the economy is that he helped Susan Collins trim $100 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a course of action that contributed to the situation where when you look at the public sector as a whole there’s been no net stimulus whatsoever.

There’s an awful lot that’s strange about Dana Milbank’s column on how Rahm Emanuel is awesome and all Barack Obama’s problems stem from not listening to him. Many of these have to do with the very fact of the column’s existence. Milbank’s argument that Emanuel was right and Obama was wrong about various controversies introduces new factual claims into the public record about Emanuel’s stances on various controversies. This tends to suggest that the column was written with the Chief of Staff’s cooperation. But what kind of COS brags about how little influence he has over an administration’s decision-making? And what kind of COS complains about the President’s decision-making? It’s strange.

But this substantive call is also strange:

Obama’s greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care. Early on, Emanuel argued for a smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults, that could win some Republican support.

Milbank deems the results of having gone for something more ambitious as “disastrous” but I don’t see what’s been disastrous about it at all. After all, way back on February 4, 2009 Obama signed a massive expansion of children’s health care into law. So it’s not as if failure to play small-ball prevented Obama from achieving the substantive goal of expanding children’s access health care. At the very worst, being ambitious prevented Obama from doing some stuff to help young adults. At the very best, being ambitious may allow Obama to achieve major reform of the American health care system. Personally, I was always skeptical about the feasibility of big picture health reform in the 111th Congress and I’ve been surprised by how successful Obama’s been.

It’s true that by trying something ambitious, Obama ran the risk of failing. But not trying merely guarantees failure. The only thing that’s different is the narrative in the press. Nobody said that George W Bush failed to reform US healthcare in a “disastrous” way, simply because he didn’t try. But the only real lesson of all this is that congressional Democrats who already voted for health reform would do well to vote yes again and pass the thing. Whether reform passes or not, everyone who voted yes wants to raise taxes to finance death panels that will give grandma’s organs to illegal aliens. But if it passes, then everyone involved in its construction is at least a strategic and tactical genius who proved the naysayers wrong. If reform dies, then everyone involved is a idiot who blundered and ruined everything.

Meanwhile, if reform does pass how long will it take for us to see an article claiming it as vindication of Rahm Emanuel’s desire to “throw long and deep” and not shy away from major challenges

PALIN: I agree with Rush Limbaugh. He was using satire to politically correct —

WALLACE: He used the “r” word.

PALIN: He used satire. Name-calling by anyone, I teach this to my children and you teach it to your children and grandchildren, too. Name calling by anyone is just unnecessary. It just wastes time. Let’s speak to the issues and — [...]

PALIN: I didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh calling a group of people whom he did not agree with ‘f-ing retards’ and we did know that Rahm Emanuel has been reported, did say that. there is a big difference there. Again, name-calling, using language that is insensitive, by anyone, male, female, Republican, Democrat, is unnecessary. It’s inappropriate. Let’s all just grow up.

Watch it:

Emanuel, who has apologized for the remark to Special Olympics CEO Tim Shriver, now plans to host “a delegation of advocates, including two people with mental disabilities, at the White House” as part of his effort to make amends. Limbaugh, meanwhile, gleefully used a derivative of the word “retard” at least forty times, saying that “there’s going to be a retard summit at the White House. Much like the beer summit between Obama and Gates and that cop in Cambridge.”

After many months of balking and intransigence, Netanyahu finally announced that he would accept a Palestinian state (although a highly “circumscribed” one at best). And last November, the Israeli government announced a settlement freeze in the West Bank. Yet the move would only be temporary, exclude so-called “natural growth” construction already started and exclude East Jerusalem, where just yesterday, Israel’s Jerusalem municipality approved construction of new apartments for Jewish settlers.

In a recent meeting with Yaki Dayan, Israel’s Consul in Los Angeles, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly expressed his frustration with the situation, saying the U.S. is “fed up” with the Israelis who “adopt the right ideas too late“:

Emanuel’s complaint was made with regard to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s “belated recognition” of the principle of “two states for two peoples,” as well as the Jewish construction freeze in the communities of Judea and Samaria, which was only announced “many months” after the United States asked, or instructed, Israel to carry it out.

Emanuel also lashed out at the Palestinians, who he said “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” for peace. According to Dayan, Emanuel said “if there is no progress in the diplomatic process, we will reduce our involvement and effort in the conflict, because we have other matters to deal with.”

By contrast, in an interview with Middle East Progress just last month, Special Envoy for Middle East Peace former Sen. George Mitchell said the administration is “determined” to get a deal, but that it will take time:

With time, with patience, and with courageous leadership, however, such compromises can be reached for one overriding reason: It is in the best interest of the region’s people — Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arabs. The next generation should not have to live through what the present leadership has endured, and we are determined that peace can be achieved.

Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “have been clear about our commitment both to Israel’s security and to the two-state solution based on the establishment of an independent and viable Palestinian state with contiguous territory,” Mitchell said. “This commitment is unwavering and in the national security interests of the United States.”

AXELROD: The bigger thing is other news organizations like yours [ABC News] ought not to treat them that way, and we’re not going to treat them that way.

EMANUEL: And more importantly, is not have the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led and following Fox, as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization.

Watch a compilation:

ABC News’ Jake Tapper reported last night that the White House planned to “assail” Inhofe’s remarks, though it was unclear whether Obama himself would comment on them:

Whether or not President Obama will personally mention Inhofe’s remarks is as of now unclear, but other White House officials surely will, sources say.

In an interview with NPR, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel took a shot at Inhofe’s desire to play politics with health care reform:

EMANUEL: I’m OK with politics, as you well know. You know, today Senator Inhofe, I don’t have the exact quote, but basically the thrust of the quote was the political importance of defeating this because of what it would do to President Obama. They’re seeing it in political terms, and they’ve decided that if they can beat the president on health care reform, they’ve scored a big political victory. But what they’ve also guaranteed in policy terms is that you have the status quo. I actually appreciate what Senator DeMint said and Senator Inhofe. I’m different than everybody, I’m not going to criticize them. I compliment them. They’re honest. Now –

INSKEEP: Are you telling Democrats there’s actually some truth to that – if you guys don’t stick with us on this it could be a disaster for the Democratic Party –

EMANUEL: No, no. They’re being honest about what they see the stakes. And what I find interesting, I haven’t heard a lot of people in their party criticize them.

Listen here:

The White House previously came out swinging against Sen. Jim DeMint’s claim that the defeat of health insurance reform would be Obama’s “Waterloo” because it would “break him.” “This isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics,” said Obama. “It is about a health care system that is breaking American families, breaking America’s businesses and breaking America’s economy.”

“Ultimately, this is not about a process, it’s about results,” David Axelrod, Obama’s senior political strategist, said during an interview yesterday in his White House office. “If we’re going to get this thing done, obviously time is a- wasting.” […]

“We’d like to do it with the votes of members of both parties,” Axelrod said. “But the worst result would be to not get health-care reform done.” […]

“That’s a test of bipartisanship — whether you took ideas from both parties,” Emanuel said. “At the end of the day, the test isn’t whether they voted for it,” he said, referring to Republicans. “The test is whether the final product represented some of their ideas. And I think it will.”

As former Gov. Howard Dean has been arguing, “If Republicans want to shill for insurance companies, then we should do it with 51 votes.” In the interview, Emanuel left the door open to using reconciliation “as an alternative vehicle.”

Update

Drudge offers this sensationalized headline:

“We have compromised enough, and we are not going to compromise on any kind of trigger game,” Woolsey said she told Emanuel. “People clapped all over the place. We mean it, and not just progressives.”

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) said Emanuel reassured him that he “doesn’t stand by that trigger.”