Rachel Maddow devoted an entire hour to health insurance reform, and, most especially, the liars in Congress and the special interests who oppose it. And she did a good job on that, spelling out the relationships between the "grassroots" and the industry scum, as well as calling the GOP lies lies. Unfortunately, she didn't spend any time on the liars and special interests who support it. Aside from distractions like "death panels", she didn't talk about any of the problems with the bill - or the way the Democratic leadership has played health reform (except for Max Baucus' dilly-dallying) - that are the real reason the bill has had problems and, frankly, still shouldn't pass. (She notes that the Democratic position Grassley is currently opposing was originally his idea - which should tell you something about how stupid that position actually is. Someone like Hatch never proposes a positive reform.) She calls it "health reform". It isn't. Being forced to pay con men in the insurance industry for fraudulent insurance is not health.
I can't help but wonder what Matt Yglesias thinks "the left" is. Like so many journalists based in Washington, he seems to think that "the left" can be defined by a single point that isn't even far enough left to have reached the center yet. If you're not a Republican who spends all your time screaming about how evil liberals are, I guess that makes you "the left". But the actual left of center does not support the current version of the health insurance bill; it supports single-payer or fully socialized medicine, but not forced mandates to buy "insurance" from unregulated mobsters. For that matter, even the center doesn't support this version of the bill. What they support is a program that makes health care available to all without having to decide between eating and seeing a doctor - which, by the way, will not be provided by this bill, but would be provided by single-payer. And MoveOn.org is not "the left", regardless of how the Capitol Hill mob sees it - they are an organization that was formed to promote censure for Bill Clinton in lieu of either the far-right demand to impeach him or the opposing view that he should be let off the hook entirely. (Oh, and Oliver Willis should be ashamed of equating Jane Hamsher and FDL with PUMA. Refusing to be in love with Obama doesn't make you PUMA.)
This Week In Tyranny, the Cheney wing may have gone too far for some right-wingers, some right-wingers amp up the looniness even more, and right-wing extremism is rising. a marine was killed by private contractors in Afghanistan (Congress still hasn't thought the better of privatizing the military), the surveillance state continues to expand, we do torture and it's a virtue, and we have a crappy mass media.
I had tech issues this week and today I'm just too tired to think after a trip to the clinic that I thought was going to be routine but took a lot more out of me than expected, so just a few items:
The "serious people" insist that there is nothing to worry about, even though it's all coming apart and every promised reform has turned into nothing more than another gift for the corporatocracy and wealthy dynasties. And the real message from the White House and the serious people is not that Rahm Emanuel is trying to undermine the president or that the president has been "weak", but that it's all because Obama needs to betray his promises to progressives, because wanting something better than corporate giveaways is wanting "the impossible". (And, via the same post from Scarecrow, "Obama Applauds Mass Firing of Teachers, Just Like When He Applauded the Mass Firing of Banksters. Oh wait. [...] So yeah, the position of Barack Obama's administration is that when schools aren't doing well, it's totally cool to clean house and fire everyone but the food service workers, no questions asked. And the position of Barack Obama's administration with failing banks and financial institutions? Keep every single one (except the guy forced out by shareholders), and hell, keep their ludicrous pay - cause it's in their contracts." But the relationship is even more direct.)
Mick Arran says Chris Dodd and His Non-Reform Banking Reform Comedy Crew are unfunny. Looks like Dodd had to retire because his efforts to secure his post-Senate career would kill him with the voters anyway. Also: "Lawyers have been examining the SCOTUS' Corporate Rights decision more closely and it turns out that not only can corpos spend an unlimited amount of $$$ buying as many conservatives as the Congress can produce (talk about productivity!), but they can do it anonymously and not to have to take the heat for it." And that's how they'll deal with the possibility of being investigated for their criminal activities - by buying elections.
Pruning Shears: "Senate reform is a hot topic. David Waldman has two great posts this week, one on the filibuster crazy GOP and another on the use of anonymous holds. The second explains how proposed reforms are basically meaningless PR because anonymous holds are already not permitted. So at least some delaying tactics can be stopped, but they still go on. Here is why: Senators like the filibuster. Democrats like it. Republicans like it. Senators have a downright regal sense of self regard. They may be frustrated by particular instances of obstruction, and individual Senators may seem like sensible folks with low maintenance egos, but get them inside the building and all of a sudden it's the World's Greatest Deliberative Body and the Cooling Saucer* where comity is worshipped." Dan's prescription is the same one I have: Stop letting the Republicans get away with holds and threats to filibuster and make them filibuster every single thing, starting with all the unconfirmed nominees who have been piling up. Let 'em bring all other business to a standstill while they prove to the public that what they are about has nothing to do with protecting America.
Demosthenes on Damage Control at Newsweek: "That Jones bit is really the crux of it. Newsweek had already decided that it was going to equate the word "terrorist" with "foreigner". That wasn't humor or hyperbole; it was a simple statement of policy. Hirsh stating that "Al Qaeda co-opted terrorism after 9/11" wasn't humor either. It was denial of Newsweek's own culpability for equating "terrorist" with "foreigner"."
Atrios made Obama Wanker of the Day for reversing Attorney General Eric Holder on military tribunals - that is, Obama is denying Sheik Mohammed a civilian trial. But Matt Yglesias notes that our civil liberties atmosphere has become even more toxic in that we now seem to have a two-party push to kill civil liberties.
Thursday's talking heads at Virtually Speaking were Jay Rosen and Jay Ackroyd ("Jay Rosen has been on the NYU Journalism School faculty since 1986, and from 1999 to 2005 he served as chair of the Department. He lives in New York City. Rosen is the author of PressThink, a weblog about journalism and its ordeals (www.pressthink.org), which he introduced in September 2003. In June 2005, PressThink won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 ") - listen to the archived stream at the link. And Sunday's bobbleheads will be Digby and nyceve.
Gary Farber has an action-packed collection of links complete with tales of space Nazis, and also a bagel.
Once upon a time, when the US led an invasion of Iraq under President George H.W. Bush, Osama bin Laden offered America his help and support.
Yet not too many years later, and not too many years ago, the "news" media treated it as absolutely normal that the George Walker Bush/Dick Cheney White House was claiming that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, who were well-known to be enemies, had somehow acted together to attack the United States in the events now known as "9/11".
Even more ludicrously, no one suggested that you had to have the knowledge of a new-born baby or be completely out of your mind to claim that Iraq, which had never even tested a nuclear device and had no delivery systems for one, posed a nuclear threat to the United States or its allies.
Yet for some reason, these same people think it makes perfect sense to suggest that Alan Grayson is "crazy". because he derided the Republicans approach to healthcare as: If you get sick, die quickly. (This was a charitable interpretation by some lights, since what the Republicans really want is for you to take a long time dying and paying "health care providers" a lot of money. But for you, it's exactly right - the only way you can afford to get sick is if you die almost instantly and therefore save your family the cost of your care.)
So, asks Glenn Greenwald,
What conceivable basis exists for disparaging as "crazy" one of the few members of Congress who is both willing and able to bring attention to some of the most severe corruption and worst excesses of our political establishment?
Clearly, that is the basis. It's simply crazy to bring attention to some of the most severe corruption and worst excesses of our political establishment.
Just how crazy is Grayson? Or rather, how threatening to the Conventional Wisdom? The guy is so crazy that in his district, he is currently more popular with voters in both parties than any other candidate or elected official in the state, apparently:
324 registered republicans in the 8th that were part of a recent poll showing Grayson has the support of nearly 28 percent of Republicans in his district. Grayson's opponents - combined - have only a 14 percent approval rating.
[...]
Grayson received high marks from Republicans for his Constitution initiative. Over half of all Republicans said that they were more likely to vote for Grayson because he passed a resolution urging high schools to teach the Constitution, and he had distributed tens of thousands of copies of the Constitution throughout the district.
Why haven't Democrats been demanding that teaching the Constitution be returned to the classroom, by the way? Why haven't they made a point of saying as often as they can that ever since the Reaganauts and Horowitz started attacking education, fewer and fewer of our students have the first clue what's in the Constitution? Why haven't they been asking: If conservatives claim they love the Constitution so much, why haven't they been demanding it be put back into the public school curriculum everywhere?
Asked to comment, Congressman Grayson said, "it's like I've been saying: People like a Congressman with guts. They want someone who works hard, pays attention, and gets things done. For goodness sake, we increased federal competitive grants in this district by 98% in our first year. That extra $100 million benefits Republicans, Independents and Democrats equally. People of every political persuasion want to see action to help solve their problems, and that's what they're seeing from us."
Yes. As Ron Beasley reminds us again:
A lesson the Democrats have failed to learn is that when given a choice between a Republican and a Democrat that sounds like a Republican they will chose the Republican nearly every time. But speak your mind as a proud progressive Democrat and you can get some Republican support. It's possible that the Democrats could lose the House and/or the Senate in 2010 and Obama may be a one term President and it will be because they refused to be progressive Democrats.
Or, to put it another way, if Obama really wants bipartisan support, he should sound like a liberal. When Republicans feel like the voters will take revenge on them for not being able to answer liberal questions, even they will find they need to vote for those whacky liberal programs.
Sunshine in London at this time of year usually means it's cold. It's kinda like that with everything today - on the one hand, Bunning's one-man filibuster on unemployment comp finally sank, but no one argues against Republican lies that Medicare and Social Security are what's responsible for the deficit. On the one hand, I managed to get through a day without exploding, and on the other, I learned this morning that the invaluable Jon Swift has died. Regular readers of The Sideshow of course remember his that his nom-de-blog was followed through with his lovely performance as a "conservative" blogger (before Colbert grabbed that spotlight for himself), and also that "Swift" performed another important service in making us remember what lesser-known bloggers had done well in the course of the year. What many of us did not know is that he was really Al Weisel, the author of Live Fast, Die Young, about James Dean and the making of Rebel Without A Cause. But we've missed Jon since he stopped posting a while back, and that's who we will mourn and remember. Tributes from other friends and fellows include Jurassicpork, Libby Spencer, Tom Watson, Pam Spaulding, Blue Girl, Melissa McEwan, and Skippy, who lists a lot more.
Dan Froomkin clearly doesn't share the views of his former collegues at The Washington Past who have been singing the praises of Rahm Emanuel, who Froomkin calls "Obama's Chief of Sabotage".
It was nice watching Anthony Weiner go on Fox to tell them they're liars (and also nice that he did a short post saying we should stop negotiating with right-wing losers at FDL), but not so nice (if you keep watching) to see a "centrist" Democrat go on MSNBC to pretend that the left's complaints about Blanche Lincoln are comparable to the teabaggers. That's obviously the White House line, but the so-called left is really the people who know that Obama's plan has always been to undercut the single-payer plan we need, and he's also just another warmonger who rationalizes torture - in other words, he's done the opposite of what he told voters he would stand for and bring.
Glenn Greenwald was on Morning Joe talking about why "bipartisanship" is stupid - but if you stay tuned in, you'll get a chance to hear Arkansas Lt. Governor Bill Halter explain why he is running against evil GOP Democrat Blanche Lincoln.
Krugman is not optimistic about the way things are going: "But that's a fantasy. For one thing, governments always, when push comes to shove, end up rescuing key financial institutions in a crisis. And more broadly, relying on the magic of the market to keep banks safe has always been a path to disaster. Even Adam Smith knew that: he may have been the father of free-market economics, but he argued that bank regulation was as necessary as fire codes on urban buildings, and called for a ban on high-risk, high-interest lending, the 18th-century version of subprime. And the lesson has been confirmed again and again, from the Panic of 1873 to Iceland today."
Warren Buffet gets it when he says our health care system is a tapeworm eating our economy: "If it was a choice today between Plan A, which is what we've got, or Plan B, which is the Senate bill, I would vote for the Senate bill," he said. "But I would much rather see a Plan C that really attacks costs, and I think that's what the American public wants to see"
Stop-and-search policies are, of course, intrinsically unAmerican, not to mention that the police use them to treat funny-colored people like criminals when they are doing nothing wrong: "Upward of 90 percent of the people stopped are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. And yet the New York Police Department is compounding this intolerable indignity by compiling an enormous and permanent computerized database of these encounters between innocent New Yorkers and the police." (Hands up if you think it's just New York.)
"The Unemployed Now Have Their Own Union, and It's Catching on Quickly: The idea is that if millions of jobless join together and act as an organization, they are more likely to get Congress and the White House to provide the jobs that are urgently needed. They can also apply pressure for health insurance coverage, unemployment insurance and COBRA benefits and food stamps. An unemployed worker is virtually helpless if he or she has to act alone."
"The Great American Bank Robbery: How did the big banks nearly take down the entire economy and still continue to profit? Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains."
A lot of the "respectable" press likes to pretend that they are oh-so-far above "marginal" whack-jobs like Rush Limbaugh, but when it comes to content, they are really no improvement
I've actually seen some right-wing idiot in my own comment threads attack people for their language when they used one of the seven words the FCC won't let you say on the air, and I've always been fascinated by their willingness to believe that there is anything particularly "liberal" about using that kind of language, as if right-wing Republicans aren't the ones who use that language on the Senate floor.
One of the cops who stopped people from escaping from New Orleans during Katrina "pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice in the Danziger Bridge shootings, which left two people dead and six others injured after police fired on a group of civilians trapped in the submerged city days after Hurricane Katrina."
Also viaEschaton, Kos makes a good case for supporting Bill Halter, Blanche Lincoln's primary opponent. Blanche is a classic GOP Democrat who votes with the corporations every time. Halter is the Lt. Governor of Arkansas, so he has experience in winning the state - and the Democratic leadership in DC seems to hate him, which is a nice recommendation right there. And I'm all for kicking Lincoln out. (Also, the funniest news I read all day - and don't skip the comments.)
Balloon Juice: "I still have to wonder how the Sunday shows could not find a moment to mention that Senator Jim Bunning is obstructing 1.2 million Americans from getting unemployment benefits just to be a dick. One would have thought that this might merit a comment somewhere. On ABC there was ample time to discuss the departure of the White House Party Planner, but not the real world impact of obstructionism on so many people's lives. I guess important 'journalists' can't be bothered with things like news when catty Georgetown gossip is at hand."
I dunno, maybe the Rude One is right and it needed a whole wasted year of Republicans getting away with it while Obama sat on his hands, but I don't think he looked that smart suddenly noticing that the Republicans are not acting in good faith. From where I sit, Obama refused to take the high ground for a year or even let other Democrats do it, with the result that the GOP has had all this time to slow the health care train to a standstill. And maybe that's Obama's real job: to make sure there is never any real health care program. I mean, it's how I would have done it if I was opposed to Americans having health care. And it still seems to be working.
Digby looks at Ron Paul's arguments against fixing the system; like all "libertarian" arguments, it fails to acknowledge that the destruction of civil liberties caused by corporatism is a feature of the protection of wealth rather than people.
OK, so a private army run by a right-wing lunatic is in the pay of the State Department and is stealing weapons from the United States for their own purposes. And, um, are we okay with that?
Apropos of which, thanks to Atrios for finding this quote from Adam Serwer: "The Senate is holding a hearing today where several current and former Blackwater employees will be testifying, but honestly the only way Congress would stop giving Blackwater money is if it started registering black people to vote."
And here all your life you thought it was already illegal: "Rep. Reyes Introduces a Measure Re-Criminalizing Torture: Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, introduced an amendment to the 2010 intelligence authorization bill imposing a 15-year criminal sentence on any 'officer or employee of the intelligence community' who tortures a detainee. (Twenty years if the torture involves an 'act of medical malfeasance'; life if the detainee dies.) [...] Basically, it clarifies that the entire parade of outside-the-Army-Field-Manual-on-Interrogation horrors during the Bush administration are criminal acts. We'll see if this ever actually makes it to President Obama's desk."
They had to destroy our country to "save" it, or Krugman on The Bankruptcy Boys: "But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: in effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn't enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first. " Of course, no one will mention that we've seen a nation restore itself from financial catastrophe (not to mention having the Luftwaffe bomb the hell out of it): Make a better welfare state. You don't think Britain would have survived without it, do you?
In a rare moment of not being a mere distraction, Nicholas Kristoff considers the ridiculous nature of dealing with your health insurer - if it were the news business.
Digby notes that selling women out has become all the rage on the left, when we should be demanding that Bart Stupak put his personal mania aside so that Americans can have health care. (Meanwhile, there is one thing that has bipartisan agreement....)
Here's Dick Durbin making an argument on "socialized" health care at the "summit" that even a Senator can understand. Frankly, unless all these people finally round on Obama and say they are tired of fighting for one little slice of bread from a moldy loaf and they want a real health care bill with single-payer, I'm still of the opinion that it's all kabuki. Or do I mean "noh"?
Jamie Galbraith says, "We Need Jobs, not Deficit Cuts [...] The broad outline of a program is therefore plain. There is no mystery about it. In 1929, Keynes wrote, 'there is work to do; there are men to do it. Why not bring them together?' Today as then, it is that simple."
The murderous National Right to Life Committee is protecting your freedom by opposing the government's ability to control health insurance premiums. This actually doesn't appear to have anything to do with abortion, either - they simply don't want government to take away your freedom to be gouged by health insurance companies.
ACORN has been dissolved as a national entity. ACORN's crime, of course, was that it helped real American citizens use their right to vote, and helped poor people. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney is still on TV.
This Week in Tyranny, "I hate to sound like a broken record, but Dick Cheney is shameless and is eager to be publicly guilty. He has made his life an open, defiant challenge to the US government. Does anyone have the courage to take him down, and unleash the inevitable whirlwind? Or does the entire DC establishment prefer to live in quiet, peaceful acquiescence? Those are the only options at this point. Cheney wants to cast as wide a net of complicity as possible; he wants not just his White House implicated but future ones. Not just the White House, but the executive branch. Not just the executive branch but the legislative and judicial branches as well. He wants as much company as possible so he does not go down as a singular villain. It is working, and will continue as long as our leaders prefer to put their immediate comfort over their obligations. [...] Cheney is even crazier than many of us suspected, by the way."
All you need to know about Howard Kurtz is that a few weeks ago he referred to The Washington Post's left-leaning editorial page. Those are the pages that contain George F. Will and these people.
Via ql, I see Cenk has an interesting take on Dana Milbank's paean to Rahm Emanuel - that Rahm is basically toast. I'm still wondering about the back-story, though.
It's hard to believe that Tom Friedman was ever regarded as any kind of a liberal, and there is still a part of me that finds it incredible that he didn't end up fired and broke and living in a ditch somewhere after going on television and saying we should murder hundreds of thousands of innocent people because we needed to tell them to "Suck on this." Now, as Dean Baker reports, he needs to tell the rest of us to suck it, too:
Thomas Friedman told readers that: "But now it feels as if we are entering a new era, 'where the great task of government and of leadership is going to be about taking things away from people,' said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum."
Unfortunately, Mr. Friedman apparently doesn't talk to anyone who has ever taken any economics. There are no serious forecasts that do not project that productivity will continue to grow for the indefinite future, and many project that productivity will grow at a more rapid pace than it did in the years from 1973-1995. This means that there is no reason, except incompetent economic management and/or the continuing upward redistribution of income, why the vast majority of the population should not experience improvements in living standards. This would mean an increase in both public and private services.
Of course when people say things like that, and especially when GGP Friedman parrots it, he of course means things will only get worse for the proles, that this is inevitable and there's nothing elites can do about it, and we'd all better suck it up and learn to be polite to our wealthy overlords.
Maybe if we hadn't spent all that money to tell Iraqis to suck on this. Oh well.
Our owners are telegraphing that some magic formula dictates that we have to be made miserable. Of course, what's making us miserable isn't magic - it's them.
"The Bush 400: For Democrats wavering in their resolve to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, shocking new data from the IRS should hopefully stiffen their backbones. Between 2001 and 2007, the 400 richest taxpayers doubled their annual incomes to an average of $345 million, while their effective tax rate plummeted to only 16.6% from 29.4% in 1993."
Unlike Atrios, I don't think there's anything at all wrong with Geithner taking a little time out to spotlight a very good and important program that probably shouldn't be his top priority - hell, maybe he just needs to do something decent for a a change. I'm much more worried about how he spends the rest of his time - like running around pretending that all will be well if we just give all our money to those few hundred really, really rich people and ignore the wreckage they have been leaving in their wake. Punishing those malefactors and re-redistributing wealth downward (instead of upward) should be his top priority, but he's not doing that. (I also see via Atrios that the allegation that a school district had passed out computers to students and then used a security features to remotely spy on them at home via webcam appears to have real legs.)
Bill Maher (having revealed the exciting news that the Obama administration was said to be lifting the ban on haggis - alas, too late for this year's Burns night - but the USDA denies they have any intention to do so), on cults: "...cult members always attribute all of their problems to one simple explanation. Now here's an amazing statistic. In a recent poll almost ninety percent of Tea Baggers said that they thought taxes had either gone up or stayed the same under Obama. Only two percent thought they went down. But the reality is taxes have gone down for ninety five percent of working families taxes went down. Think about that. Only two percent of the people in a "movement" about taxes named after a tax revolt have the slightest idea what's going on...with taxes."
At Daily Kos, DemFromCT supplies Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up. I was amused to learn that Norm Ornstein thinks the Senate would behave better if they had to work 9-to-5 every weekday in the Senate for three weeks out of four, then spend the next week having to work in their constituencies meeting the people they are allegedly there to serve. There's a certain sense to the suggestion. But I still think they should be forced to actually filibuster when they claim they're going to. Also via DKos's Meteor Blades, Scott Horton's interview with Will Bunch about his book Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy. There's actually some fascinating reading in there, as Bunch not only explains how Grover Norquist and friends created a myth of Reagan's popularity during his presidency and gave him lots of credit for supposedly good things he did that he didn't even do, but also points out that the real Reagan was actually far superior to the lunatics who claim to revere him, and did not share many of their crackpot policies. (Reagan, for example, would have disapproved of yesterday's monstrous op-ed in the NYT by no one anyone has ever heard of - because she has never done anything - complaining that the US is being too timid about murdering innocent civilians.)
Big Tent Democrat looked at one of those op-eds, too, and says, "Dana Milbank's Apologia for Rahm Emanuel demonstrates precisely why he was a terrible choice for Chief of Staff. Leaving aside the questions of his political and policy judgment (which Milbank lauds, I think they are horrid), it is the fact that Rahmbo is interested in his own personal agenda first, that of the President's second." Be that as it may, I think Rahm's agenda does not conflict at all with Obama's policies. (BTD also concludes that the Villagers really love the excise tax on health insurance policies, but doesn't seem to have an explanation for this phenomenon...although we can guess. The better - that is, comparatively decent - health insurance policies in question are the ones unions fought for.) And apparently, our owners are still trying to prevent inflation in a time of deflation. And the Ward Churchill case is more interesting than you think.
I just listened to last week's Sam Seder webcast (because I forgot what time it was) and then this week's live, which was refreshing and brought back old times. Apparently The Young Turks may start doing this regularly (I hope). And presumably he'll be posting today's show when it's ready. Some interesting discussion there with Chris Hedges and Digby.
It's amazing that anyone needs to be told that Democrats would do better at the polls if they would just fight hard to pass a good health care bill. Unfortunately, they haven't even been willing to look at one, preferring to listen to people who want to kill health care rather than those who want to supply it. They could smash the conservatives to smithereens if they'd just gone with a fully government-staffed, government-funded single-payer plan - not just because it's the only good way to do it, but because it's the best rhetorical object - defending single-payer answers every "criticism" the conservatives have about health care simply and without a lot of gobbledygook. Want to save money? Single-payer saves hundreds of billions of dollars over what we have now and any other plan. You cover everyone, you save a third of current costs in administration alone, you don't have to take money out of your pocket and out of the tax base just to enrich already bloated CEOs, you remove reams of red tape - and no one sends you a bill afterwards because it's already paid for. Fight for a good bill, and then make the Republicans defend higher taxes, higher expenses, and higher death tolls. The Democrats need to admit a simple fact about conservative policies generally: They cost you more in taxes, and they take your lives.
Hilariously, conservatives are worried that health insurance companies are not waiting until after the health insurance mandate passes to start gouging the public even more in California: "Health insurance premiums are surging - and conservatives fear that the spectacle will reinvigorate the push for reform. On the Fox Business Network, a host chided a vice president of WellPoint, which has told California customers to expect huge rate increases: 'You handed the politicians red meat at a time when health care is being discussed. You gave it to them!'" Even better, WellPoint insists they have to raise rates because their costs are going up. Their costs are going up because their rates are so high that more and more healthy people are dropping their insurance, meaning that the customers they're keeping are the ones who are already getting treatment for existing conditions. So WellPoint is pricing itself out of the market. So, says Krugman, the insurance companies themselves are providing the argument against the Republican "plan" for "reform" (less regulation) and underlining the need for something at least as strong as...oh, the plan Obama pretended to have ("public option") with strong regulation, no discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions, and of course mandates. Which is, of course, true, but it's also a really great argument for an even better plan.
So, it would be smart if they pass a public option, or at least smarter than what they've been doing. Not that I believe they really mean it (because if they meant it, they would at least talk about the virtues of single-payer as a way to threaten the bad guys with more to come), but if you want to, maybe you can help Whip Congress.
Dan Holzman has started a blog, The Defense Rests, "A blog about security without tears or apology." Really not sure what that means, yet.
We know that Barack Obama, in his heart of hearts, truly wants Real Change. We can tell this by examining the furrows of his brow as he squints meaningfully into the middle distance, by carefully measuring the sincerity-per-pixel count of his campaign posters, by reflecting on the inspirational Martin Luther King quotes he delicately intones before carpet-bombing an Afghan village. But we also know that despite his best efforts, Barack Obama can't achieve Real Change, confounded as he is by such institutional barriers as Congress and the Pentagon and Barack Obama. We know, for example, that Barack Obama wants nothing less than a sweeping overhaul of America's health care system, but has been hopelessly blocked at every turn by conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman and Barack Obama. And we know that Barack Obama did everything he could to oppose a trillion-dollar no-strings-attached bailout of a corrupt finance industry, but was helpless to stop it, boosted as it was by notorious corporate whore Barack Obama. And we know that Nobel Laureate Barack Obama is a devout lover of peace, but has been powerless to prevent the American military's rampant bloodletting throughout the Muslim world, as the nation's armed forces remain in the hands of that bloodthirsty warmonger Barack Obama.
[...]
And we know that as disappointed as we might be in Barack Obama - in his little failings, in his petty slights, in his odd betrayals, in his unseemly habit of dancing naked through the streets of Oslo smeared with the blood and entrails of Afghan children - we also know that the alternative would be far worse. Why, with a Republican president, we might be at war with Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and possibly Iran, or facing some hideously draconian corporatist scheme to compel poor people to buy private insurance they can't afford, with a government that not only excuses the torture regimes of the past but dramatically expands them while giving itself license to murder anyone it likes anywhere on the planet. With Barack Obama, on the other hand, we have all that plus a man who can sparkle wittily on late night television. Now, I think that has to be worth at least a couple thousand dead Muslims, don't you?
"Ruling: No Court Can Hear Abuse and Wrongful Death Claims from Guantanamo: February 17, 2010, New York - Yesterday evening, the district court in Washington, D.C. ruled against two men who died in Guantanamo in June 2006 and their families in a case seeking to hold federal officials and the United States responsible for the men's torture, arbitrary detention and ultimate deaths at Guantánamo. "
Down in the comments, CMike transcribed a section from a Kunstler video:
The amount of delusional thinking that's being generated by this set of very vexing problems [i.e. Peak Oil and the financial collapse] is staggering and it's crippling us ...
I was invited to go to the Google headquarters and give a speech three years ago in Silicon Valley and I went to their headquarters which is an office park building in the suburbs.
The building was tricked out like a kindergarten. O.K. they got Foosball games, and knock hockey, and ping-pong, and video terminal vibrating chairs and Lucite boxes of gummy bears and yogurt covered pretzels and other wholesome sweets. And the whole idea in American corporate life now is the more infantile you are the more that means you're creative. ...
So that's how the headquarters are set up. And the senior engineers and executives came into the auditorium and they're dressed like skate board rats. They're wearing side ways hats and their pants are hanging down so low that their ass cracks are on display. Senior executives, "Oh we're childish, we're playful." So this is the highest level of American high tech enterprise. And I gave my talk on energy.
At the end we did questions. There were no questions, just seventeen comments and they were all the same comment which was, "Like dude, we've got technology." Subtext: you're an a**hole. "We've got technology, dude."
What that clued me into is that they don't know the difference between energy and technology at the highest level of American corporate high-tech enterprise. And that's shocking. They don't know the difference. They think if you run out of energy [you] just plug in technology.
We're going to discover very painfully it's not true ... we're going to discover the hard way that [planes] run on liquid hydro-carbon fuels or we're not going to have an airline industry and the likelihood is that we're not going to have an airline industry ...
By the way, I was reflecting on why do the Google people even think this [way], these are Stanford Ph.D.'s. What is their problem? And I realized what was going on. What you have is a whole cohort of people who have become zillionaires at the age of twenty-seven from pushing pixels around a screen with a mouse.
So they develop what I call this techno-grandiosity, you know, the idea that you can solve absolutely every problem in the world [by] pushing a mouse around and changing the pixels on the screen. And that's where we are in the U.S. We are suffering from this tremendous techno-triumphalism and techno-grandiosity, thinking we'll just tech our way out of these problems. We're going to be very disappointed ...
Natasha Chart: "It's particularly bitter to note that as the ravages of this economy take their toll on people who have to work for a living, the biggest worry of politicians, including President Obama is that they avoid hurting the feelings of extremely wealthy business leaders. One class of people can suffer poverty, depression, the loss of close social ties, higher risks of death, lifetime wage cuts, etc., and it's all right so long as a 'better' class of people doesn't have to be bothered about causing it." Ian Welsh has a list of how to fix it, but, "... the problem in the US right now is that virtually nothing of any significance works. Not the military, who with 50% of the world military budget is being fought to a draw by ragtag militias, not the political system, and definitely not the economic system. Fixing this, fixing America, is a literally monumental task, like building pyramids. It will take a generation, perhaps two, of very committed people. I fear that those people don't exist in large enough numbers, at least not in any position of power or able to seize power. I hope Americans prove me wrong."
Meanwhile, Republicans finally admit that what they mean by "bipartisanship" is to pass only Republican legislation.
There's no doubt in my mind that when the forced-pregnancy people give out the names and addresses of doctors who perform abortions and their staff members, they mean to encourage people to harass them - perhaps even violently.
Neil Gaiman posting his reaction on Twitter to a SouthwestAir pilot kicking Kevin Smith off a plane for being too fat seems to have created an even bigger stir than was already stirring. Some of us had the natural reaction: Neil, could you please twit that Americans already pay more in taxes to maintain our medical system than the Brits pay for fully socialized medicine?
I've been meaning to post the video of Jon Stewart on O'Reilly's show and it keeps slipping my mind, but I did find it interesting to watch.
Downloadable podcasts for this month's Virtually Speaking, including my appearances with Culture of Truth and Eve Gittelson (nyceve), can be found here.
I can't believe I was so busy yesterday I forgot to warn you that Culture of Truth and I had a big Valentine's Day date on Virtually Speaking to talk about how right-wing our so-called liberal media is. But you can stream or download the podcast here.
Okay, so the Bloomberg story somewhat misrepresented what Obama said, but the simple fact of the matter is that what he said was still awful. It was just awful in a smoother, slicker way. We're not talking about Athletes who didn't happen to get to the Superbowl, we're talking about people who belong in jail for defrauding the public and wrecking the economy.
These are the kinds of concerns that make many people support the health care bill, but of course the alleged good provisions of the bill would not kick in soon enough to save their friends and family who need help now, even if those provisions were as advertised. And they're not.
Just about everyone is ahead of the US, in almost everything good. Outside US borders, there is more innovation, better development of infrastructure, faster transport, higher technological advancement, and of course better healthcare. And conservatives want it to stay that way. Ever wonder why?
Looks like Harold Ford is serious about getting into the race in NY if he actually means to start paying taxes there. Finally.
I think it's great that Biden called Cheney a liar on TV, but I loved the fact that Jon Stewart actually corrected Gingrich's BS after an interview with him. (No, I can't see that video, but I saw it on TV when it aired. The reason I want links I can see is so that I can post them for my lazy friends who can barely bring themselves to click links, let alone use proxy servers or anything else to see this stuff. I want all of my readers to be able to gain easy access to these clips, not just people who are willing to go out of their way to see them. I can and do see The Daily Show when it airs in the UK (a day late), but some of this stuff deserves special attention and often bears watching again - easily.)
You may have noticed that I'm advertising my favorite T-shirt over on the sidebar. I think it would be wonderful if no politician or media idiot could go outside without seeing at least a couple of these. Click the link, buy one (and tell them I sent you), and wear it around Capitol Hill, or your state capitol building or the places your local reporters go for lunch, and let them see that we're wise to them.
Democrats and progressives are crying doom over the party's defeat in Massachusetts. The loss, we're told, is a blow to Barack Obama's political agenda, and so it is. They say it's a shame that yet another rightwing zealot who advocates torture is now in the Senate, and so it is. But it is precisely that agenda that led to the loss, and the shame. It is that agenda which has resurrected a rightwing party that was dead in the water, and empowered its most extreme elements.
And what is Barack Obama's agenda? What is his political program? It breaks down into three main elements: unwinnable wars, unconscionable bailouts, and unworkable, unwanted health care "reform" that forces people to further enrich some of the most despised conglomerates in the land. It is, in every way, a recipe for moral, economic and political disaster. It is a gigantic anchor tied around the neck of the Democratic Party, and it will drag the whole lumbering wreck back to the bottom in short order.
It also provides a fertile breeding ground for the willful, belligerent ignorance of the Right to thrive. With such an egregiously stupid and destructive agenda at work in the White House, opponents need only say that they are against it, and they are guaranteed a wide following. Who would not be against unwinnable war, unconscionable bailouts and unworkable boondoggles serving rapacious elites? The actual positions held by these opponents - the actual policies they will pursue once in power - are given little scrutiny in such circumstances. The opponent represents change from a hated status quo - and that's enough. Later, when their odious positions come to light, it is too late.
Where have we seen this dynamic at work before? Oh yes, it was way back in November 2008. Barack Obama represented change from the hated status quo, from the agenda of the ruling Republican party. And what was that agenda? Why, unwinnable wars, unconscionable bailouts and the assiduous service of rapacious elites. The actual positions held by Obama - the actual policies that he would pursue once in power - were given little scrutiny.
In Britain there were the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, and then one day things were looking, well, like this, and along came the Labour Party, and lo and behold, the Liberal Party just became a side issue. And then Labour got co-opted and now they're just like the Tories, only with a more young and "cool" veneer. Both countries, of course, could really use a real liberal party. Maybe it's time we make one.
Last week Ian Welsh gave "the short answer" to why a flat tax is a bad idea, but he was too brief for me and a few others, so I added a comment to the effect that it's not simply a matter of getting the money from the people who have it, or making those who get the most out of public resources pay for them, or fairness, or any of these other niceties, it's the fact that immoral levels of wealth in the hands of the few give them more power than that of the many combined, and they will and do use that power to destroy the society they have taken such advantage of. That is: Billionaires are the most dangerous weapon of mass destruction there is.
An invitation to the White House contains a paragraph suggesting that there actually will be "a proposed health insurance reform package", and that it will be online before February 25th. Think about that for a minute.
But the House candidate who raised the most money in the entire country during the last FEC reporting period - $860,000 in three months - is not a teabagger. He is not boosted relentlessly by Fox News. He's not even a Republican. He doesn't think that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, that President Obama was born in Kenya, or that global warming is a hoax.
This House candidate also, remarkably, had the largest number of contributors. Over 15,000 individuals contributed, many of whom have given time after time, whatever they could. The House candidate who raised the most money did so without French-kissing lobbyists, without flattering the idle rich, and without reaching into his own pocket.
The House candidate who raised the most money, from the most people, is an outspoken populist who tells it like it is on the war, on jobs, and on health care. His website is called CongressmanWithGuts.com. In the 100,000 e-mails that he has received this year, the most common refrain is, "You are saying what I've been thinking."
I know who he is. Because he's me.
Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald and Dennis Kucinich were on Democracy Now! the other day talking about the Supreme Court's decision that corporations can buy elections and about the Obama administration's assassination policy.
Obama has really lost Sadly, No! with his recent show of cluelessness: "Hey Obama: THE TAX PAYERS DIDN'T SPEND HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO BAIL OUT ALEX RODRIGUEZ. This is an important distinction that bears repeating." Also, as I understand it, those athletes who make a lot of money usually aren't getting it for destroying the US economy.
Ruth seems excited about an op-ed appearing in The Wall Street Journal stating flatly that having anti-government kooks running the government is why the government doesn't work too well lately, but it's only Thomas Frank, who has been writing liberal op-eds for the WSJ for some time now - and, frankly, he's more liberal than most of the "liberal" columnists at the supposedly "liberal" NYT and WaPo, nevermind the "mainstream" creeps on most TV networks. It's funny; The Washington Post has "liberals" like Richard Cohen, the NYT has "liberals" like Tom Friedman, but when the WSJ got themselves a liberal columnist for their otherwise right-wing crackpot opinion page, they actually hired a real liberal.
I must say that James Howard Kunstler does find a few nice turns of phrase to tell us that We're Weimar.
Gosh, a race with the name Nixon in it, and in the middle of some GOP squabbling, too.
The original sound recording of Hoagy Carmichael's "Heart and Soul" by Larry Clinton & his Orchestra, not at all like you learned to play it. And here's the sheet music version.
We had some snowflakes yesterday. It was amusing to watch, but it didn't settle or anything. I hear there was more than that back home. But today it's clear and sunny, which I assume will mean it'll be bloody cold when I go out there.
I have to put a post up quick because the threads on the previous post have turned ugly, but I don't have much to say, and I'm just annoyed that process is more important than policy once you're inside the bubble. The right-wing wrote too much of health insurance bill, but instead of talking about that, we're supposed to talk about why they should vote for it since it's so full of their own crap.
If I thought for a minute that Obama meant we should "take our time" with the health insurance bill by going back over it and ripping out the crap to put good things in their place, I'd say, sure, I agree completely! Except I don't think that's what he's doing, so good on Al Franken for letting steam come out of his ears at David Axelrod over the administration's lack of leadership.
Of course, educational achievement for women doesn't mean they out-earn men. (I wish someone had mentioned this to Daniel Patrick Moynahan before he wrote a notorious paper alleging that black women's educational achievements were what was keeping the black man down. Of course black women in the workforce had more education than black men. The same was always true of white women, too, but they still made less money.)
I also remember when "Children are our future" meant we were supposed to try to help them get somewhere in life besides prison. (via)
I'm told I can watch Comedy Central if I use another browser. But, jeez, I don't want to have to install another browser. I'm sick to death of things that make me install another browser just to get this site or that one.
You may recognize a few of our friends in the animated xkcd. (There's credits here for those who don't recognize our friends, or just think maybe that person looks familiar....)
