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....)
I know he's a conservative because he's such a bad dad.
Amanda talks about Torture and TV, and it's a problem I've been mulling over for quite some time, as well. Back in the days when it was normal to see news shows or stories discussing the fact that torture doesn't work (and not giving any credence to the illusion that it does work), I didn't worry so much about the way torture seemed to work in dramatic fiction. Trouble is, everyone now talks like this fakery works in real life, and there's no good speech allowed to counteract the bad speech. This stuff was "just a movie" or "just a TV show" back when no one was trying to claim the effectiveness of torture as fact - but those days are gone.
I don't get thisstuff. I mean, the John McCain they're talking about became nationally famous for being involved in the S&L scandal. He had a brief moment of trying to polish his image up a bit by pushing campaign finance, but if he'd been serious it would have been a different kind of bill altogether, and he would have opposed other moves Congress took that did much to shore up the influence of money in politics - and he didn't. It's also the same John McCain who made a big show of opposing torture, only to quietly vote for it when it was put in front of him. There really is nothing new about McCain being a dick. Seriously. (via)
"The founders of the discipline of economics, almost to a man - and they were only men - thought that the problem of distribution between classes - they used the word classes - was the key to understanding why nations grew or not," Bowles says. What Bowles sees as the essence of his profession [is] problems of wealth distribution...
Isn't inequality merely the price of America being No. 1?
"That's almost certainly false," Bowles tells SFR. "Prior to about 20 years ago, most economists thought that inequality just greased the wheels of progress. Overwhelmingly now, people who study it empirically think that it's sand in the wheels." ... Bowles offers a key reason why this is so. "Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources," he says.
In short, in a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive.
In the face of tightening up the financial regulations, watch out for Stupid Banker Tricks meant to keep you paying for the rest of your life on even the smallest expenditures.
The Republicons, of course, want to do exactly what they warned that the health care bill would do: cut Medicare and kill Social Security. That's their plan. It has always been their plan.
I was entertained to learn that Obama had quoted a headline from The Village Voice in scolding the Democrats about a need for leadership. It was a good headline, too, although Obama really should have taken that as a message about his own leadership. But let us not forget that the headline in question came from the VV blog Runnin' Scared, where a couple of our friends write. That post, "Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate," came from our much-beloved Roy Edroso.
I can't actually see this video due to living in the UK, but we saw it on TV and bless you Jon Stewart!
The right-wing has always claimed that Lyndon's Great Society programs failed, although in fact they cut poverty in America by 50%. (And I'll tell you, it was a good time to be looking for a job, whoever you were.) The funny thing is, the GOP started calling them a failure after Nixon had gutted them and, of course, they weren't doing the job anymore. They've also always said that the New Deal didn't work, but that didn't much go anywhere until they'd gutted financial regulations and people have started to see what it's like to live in a country run by the most reactionary economic policies again.
Susan Collins is not, of course, a moderate in any real sense, although in most cases she moderates her language in attacking Democrats or "the left" better than most other Republicans. However, she slips now and then and shows her real face, as she did recently. Nevertheless, it is sad to say that the belief that the protections in the Constitution only apply to Americans has ceased to be a far-right belief, at least among the Villagers, and is now pretty much common to all of them. But of course, the Constitution doesn't reserve rights to Americans - it says there are things the government cannot do, to anyone.
Way back when, VastLeft did what Obama's admirers told us to do - read the books - and didn't like what he read.
As someone who has been on TV opposed to an "expert" who hasn't actually studied the evidence, it doesn't really surprise me to know that the "expert" who went on TV to talk about the wonderful success of waterboarding was only repeating what he'd been told by its defenders.
At Open Left, Paul Rosenberg observed that the Obama illusion is wearing thin: "THEY JUST DON'T GET IT! Talking about jobs does not create jobs. And just about everyone outside of Versailles knows this."
I think it was someone like Greg Palast who remarked that if you actually had read Obama's books, you saw they read like an advertisement that he was for sale to any big buyers. I never read his books, because my first look at Obama told me that he was a marketable commodity, but I wanted to hear what came out of his mouth to decide which army he'd be in. What came out of his mouth convinced me he wasn't on our side, and at best had no idea what liberal politics was about. I always had the suspicion that he was someone who simply knew the right trajectory to take to have the right "liberal" credentials, someone who'd hung around long enough to pick up some of the lingo - but not someone who actually shared those values. The more I learn about Obama, the more I have concluded that my worst suspicions were true, and that he is just a neoliberal jerk who was grabbing for the main chance. To others, he's a sell-out, but I don't really think that's it. John Caruso finds the latter explanation more comforting, it seems:
While I was reading Howard Zinn over the past few days, I happened across Adolph Reed's take on Obama -from January of 1996:
In Chicago, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program--the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics.
[...]
I found this interesting because people whose opinions I respect have somehow waded through Obama's books and concluded that he used to be more than the grasping, soul-dead imperial roach he is now. I more or less took their word for it, in large part because I couldn't possibly care less about his past (and I only pay attention to his present unwillingly, because of the position he holds); I just assumed that his abandonment of this core humanity was a recent development, necessitated by his single-minded pursuit of power. But it did give his story a cut-rate tragic dimension. So it's reassuring to hear that no, he's actually been sucking the life essence out of every authentic movement he's been around - cynically co-opting their language while tossing aside their genuine concerns, in service to his own ambition - from the very beginning of his political career.
A smart guy looking for the main chance. He sure found it.
Eliot Spitzer on Banksters, politicians and their minions, and how they caused "this entire cataclysm". Of course, he had to be stopped. But I was rather impressed by the basic humanity and intelligence of what he said about how he (and others) screwed up. I think he gives some of his adversaries too much credit (and Obama, too, of course), but that's kind of the trouble with being a decent human being - you really want to give people the benefit of the doubt.
I admit it, I did get a chuckle over the fact that FOX cut away from Obama's speech because it was going too well. (And I think I prefer "Pox News" to "Faux News" and "Fox Noise".)
Reminder: Avedon Carol and nyceve were on Virtually Speaking talking about health care, and you can listen to the archive noise/podcast at BlogTalkRadio.
Remember Danny Goldberg, the nitwit who once proclaimed that Democrats were losing big because Dem politicians were unable to talk to the kids, because they didn't listen to the same music or something - and thereby lost the "teen spirit"? And remember he's the same nitwit who helped drive Air America Radio into the ground by firing some of it's best people? He wasn't the only bad manager who helped kill AAR, but he played a significant role in the process. And Down With Tyranny! let him do a post making his excuses and purporting to tell the real story of what ruined AAR, now finally deceased - and the readers (including a few names familiar to ex-listeners) really let him have it: "Morning Sedition's last broadcast was on December 16, 2005. This was, in a twist not lost on us, Howard Stern's last day on terrestrial radio. With a legion of young fans looking for something else on the radio dial, a subversive comedy show with a growing audience and rising ratings that catered to a youthful demographic was removed from the airwaves by the author of 'How the Left Lost Teen Spirit.'"
It kind of makes your brain bounce around inside your head to know that the ACLU got rolled into helping out on that lousy Supreme Court decision. On the other hand, as I have said before, how much money corporations spend on backing political candidates during the last weeks of a campaign is kind of irrelevant when they already own the media and back right-wing narratives 24/7.
"The Smirking Poodle: "I would simply like Tony Blair to look me in the eye and say he was sorry [her son had died because of his "mistake"]. Instead, he is in there smirking."
"Scurrilous Videos Besmirch, Enrage Forum, Leaders, World [...] In a series of diabolically stupid video manipulations, a cabal of anti-poverty filmmakers have performed an elaborate slander of the World Economic Forum, showing its "leading lights" taking a dramatic departure from the litany of meaningless pledges they usually make at the annual gathering in the Swiss resort town. In response, WEF spokesperson Adrian Monck could barely contain himself. "The only defense to satire is common sense!" he sputtered, before racing back into the WEF war room to deal with the burgeoning crisis. Fortunately for the WEF, few media outlets picked up on the WEF's fantastic but fictional approach to world poverty ("World Leaders Pledge Strategy to End Poverty Now"). Instead, the media was dominated by coverage of a real WEF press release warning of "Over Regulation of the Financial Sector" (sic)."
The idea of a special panel to "study" the national debt (that is, try to figure out how to kill Social Security and cut taxes for the rich) was so awful that even the Senate rejected it. so Obama is putting together his own stupid panel.
You can listen to the podcast of Digby and McJoan talking on last Sunday's VIrtually Speaking lefty bobbleheads show at the link. (Last night's episode with Jay Ackroyd and Juan Cole here.) Sunday at 5:00 PM Pacific, guests are DKos diarist nyceve (who coined the phrase "Murder by spreadsheet"), and The Sideshow's Avedon Carol, talking about - would you believe it? - health care. You can listen live here.
While this article discusses the radically decreasing economic power - and circumstances in general - of 90% of the population - it doesn't mention that even the rich really do better when wealth is more evenly distributed than it is now.
Betty the Crow says, "From Foreign Policy Magazine, a story about the CIA guy who went on ABC News to claim that waterboarding was a miracle interrogation tool but now says, well, not so much; 'it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.' ABC's response? No comment, but they've apparently removed the video of the interview and altered the story about it."
Logan Murphy discovers that, though Republican family members seem just as disgusted with right-wing ideology (and can no longer stomach FOX News!), they still end up saying, "Yes, but you're so left wing ...."
Atrios really isn't prone to apocalyptic language, and he's a lot more hesitant than I am to come right out and say just how bad the situation looks, but when Duncan Black says something like this, you should pay attention:
Happy to be wrong, but the failure to deal with the underlying problems in housing and finance under the theory that prices will magically rebound and everything will then be ok is going to doom the economy....
It's dooming the economy. Yes.
So, what do we do with these people, who should be jumping out of Wall Street windows or at least in jail? We keep them in charge of the economy, and thus Ben Bernanke, the man who insisted there was no housing bubble, was reconfirmed.
Meanwhile...there are a lot of things I disagree with Lakoff about, but he is right about this: We have a disaster on our hands. If we don't get together and show we are a movement, nothing will happen. "Where's the movement?" is actually a pretty good question. Waiting for Obama to play 11-Dimensional Chess was stupid. Sitting around saying we have to support his legislation (largely with silence) is stupid. You want what you need? Get together and then get out there and demand it. Movements are not composed entirely of people sitting at their keyboards or even sending money. You have to be a body and a voice. You have to make real contact. You have to do all the things that people did before there was an internet, because that still works - if you just do it.
Attaturk says it's getting tougher to focus on Republicans "as being uniquely and tragically mockable" - because the Democrats appear to be giving them a run for their money.
And for my money, Rahm himself deserves all the mockery we can muster when we see stuff like this: "Back in December, the Wall Street Journal reported that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has been telling congressional Democrats that passing the insurance-industry-written Senate health bill will do for Democrats what NAFTA did for them in 1994. Amazingly, Emanuel has been billing this as a positive - as if NAFTA somehow wasn't a major part of what drove down Democratic base turnout in the 1994 election, helping usher in the Gingrich Revolution." Well, he's right that it will do for Democrats what NAFTA did, as polls show. If Obama doesn't stop giving money to the banksters, quit threatening Social Security and Medicare, and do a 180 on pushing through this giveaway to the insurance industry right now, he can expect to lose Congress the same way Clinton did. And for exactly the same reasons.
And then we have the alleged "liberal media", in which MoDo informs us that the idiot in Boston who took advantage of a self-made Democratic failure is the new It Boy, bringing the sexy back. She's ready to run him for prez, while the rest of us just recoil in disgust whenever we notice that the Pulitzer-winning gossip columnist is getting wet again: "He's The One, all right. The handsome, athletic pol with the comely wife and two lovely daughters who precipitously rose from the State Legislature to pull us all together." Oh, gods, we've heard all this before....
As I've mentioned before, it's interesting to me that "contracts" are only meaningful on one end - you have to uphold your end of a contract, but corporations don't.
Charles has written up his conclusions about Honduras.
Ross Perot wasn't wrong about the bully pulpit - the one the Reagan team used so effectively and that Obama and the conservadems use only to help Republicans further their idiotic ideas. From the White House, you can make stories. Right now, the story Obama and the Democrats are making is that Obama and the Democrats are just as uninterested in the plight of ordinary Americans as Bush and the Republicans were. If you don't think that will lead to disaster, you're just plain dumb.
You know, it really is stupid to think that moving the Overton Window farther and farther to the right is harmless. It is not harmless to let people think that spending on good things (stimulus, Social Security, real universal health care) is bad for the economy, but spending on bad things (stupid wars, subsidies to bloated corporations) is vital and necessary. It is not harmless to buy into the same right-wing memes that have brought us to our current crisis in the first place. It is not harmless to refuse to fight back against lies that the only problem is spending, and that it's spending that the public is against. The public's problem isn't that we aren't being mean enough.
The public is against spending when "spending" means taking all their money and giving it to rich, irresponsible bankers and insurance companies. People who assume this means the public is really against all spending - that is, people who have their heads getting stuck in the ever-narrowing Overton Window while making cracks about how whacky the left is for worrying about Overton's Window - are the real stupid.
On the bright side, you can believe Atrios when he says it is actual good news that the Senate has killed Obama's stupid plan "to create a powerful commission that would recommend ways to slash future federal budget deficits" by getting rid of some more good government in the name of tax cuts. If Obama was smart, he would stop trying to trot out creeps like Kent Conrad and pretend they are not trying to do us harm.
But, of course, Obama is not smart if he thinks his continued pandering to the right wing will buy him anything but trouble.
Oh, yes, it's all about change - the kind of change that gets you Enron. "The same lobbyist that sold Washington on Enron is now touting Ben Bernanke. [...] Robertson played a key role in some of Enron's most scandalous moments in the year prior to its collapse. For starters, she was at the center of negotiations involving the highly secretive energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. A review of Enron email shows that Robertson guided Lay through pivotal meetings with Cheney and other officials, and actually authored the Enron memo and talking points that were later integrated into Cheney's controversial energy plan." Yep, these are the kind of people we wanted in government when we voted for Democrats.
I found this neat graphic over at Gail's place, where I also found this revealing quote from Barney Frank: "A bill being passed [is in Democrats' best interest]--as long as it's being done in a way that's invulnerable to charges that it was jammed through, or the rules were disregarded. That's what I was afraid of was a disregard for the procedural rules: Bending the Byrd rule out of shape, or doing something with Paul Kirk's vote while awaiting certification--those things would be fatal." Got that? Barney Frank thinks that the only thing a health care bill needs is that no one accuses it of being "rammed through". It doesn't have to have anything good in it, and it doesn't matter how much everyone hates it, as long as the right-wing Villagers don't accuse it of being "rammed through". Doing a pretty minuet with the Republicans to hide the fact that this entire bill has been rammed through over the objections of most Americans will make it good for Democrats - to be known for the triumph of the health insurance industry and big pharma over everyone else. (Anyway, you might consider using that graphic on the leaflet you're going to print out informing your neighbors that Americans pay more in taxes to maintain our health care structure than almost any other country.)
The thing that tickles me most about Harold Ford is that, having turned out to be too right-wing for Tennessee, he is now planning to a career in New York politics. Oh, and did you realize this piece of crap is the current head of the Democratic Leadership Council? Seriously.
I'm sorry, but this really isn't a reason to reconfirm Bernenke.
I like this: "Because the Court ruled that a corporation's free speech is so important in being able to present its position, we need legislation to make sure that such expenditures do represent the views of the board of directors by requiring a public vote of the board on any such expenditures. It will be hard for the Republicans to oppose such legislation, although they will. But that should be part of a concerted effort to show how the Republicans are for the rich and powerful and why they are opposing every reform that is brought before Congress."
Not that Meadows and Day don't put in stellar performances, mind - and Astin just about defined "sleazy" in his role - but I've always loved the interplay between Cary Grant and Gig Young in That Touch of Mink, a fantasy movie about surviving beyond your wildest dreams in tough times. We may start seeing a lot of that again, soon....
Thanks to the NHS, I never have to worry about these things, but our friends in America do, and Diane just got one of those ugly letters from her so-called health insurer raising her rates and demanding money yesterday, so perhaps you could chip in a bit for her so she can do things like, you know, eat.
The thing about "make-work" is that sometimes it works.
Every now and then I hear someone come up with the idea that we need a Constitutional convention and I think, "And in your little fantasy, are you the chairman, or does Thomas Jefferson come back to do that for you?" I mean, seriously, if there really was a Constitutional Convention, who do you think would be running it?
Larisa Alexandrovna on the gag rule now being imposed on evidence surrounding the murder of David Kelly: "No credible expert believes that Kelly killed himself. Yet Lord Hutton continues to not only force the suicide claims down the throats of the medical experts who examined Kelly's body and of the British public, he has also now sealed all of the records. If Kelly killed himself, then why are the medical records being sealed?" And for 70 years? That's like, gosh, they want to guarantee that anyone who remembers these events - this crime - is dead. "The question remains: just how far were the Blair/Bush administrations willing to go in order to fabricate a reason for the Iraq war? The Bush administration was at the very least willing to out a covert CIA officer, committing treason in the process. What was Tony Blair willing to do?"
There are, of course, many things I don't post about (Palin) because they are actually fairly boring distractions. But sometimes there are things that are so important and so awful that I just go into a state of denial for a few days until I can't ignore them anymore.
But Ian Welsh is right: The Supreme Court has affirmed a right of Malefactors of Great Wealth to buy elections, thus making the United States officially a fascist state. Absent a Congress willing to impeach the anti-Constitutional scum who currently infest the court, you don't have anything resembling Constitutional government anymore and you aren't going to.
And that means you have to make a decision: Fight or escape.
And you have to ask yourself: "Do people like me have sufficient strength to win this fight? Is there any hope of getting it?"
And I can't bring myself to tell you that you should fight, at the expense of everything you've got. Not you, not your economic well-being, not your family will be safe from the evils and predations of these truly vile people and the hideous system they have created out of what used to be a fairly promising country that once held out hope and lighted a path for the world.
The United States that used to be a beacon of light is now shadow of darkness over the world, but where they used to at least try to protect Americans, and even some other allied countries, from their machinations elsewhere, the people who run things now feel free - indeed, almost morally obligated - to harm ordinary Americans at least as much as they have the people of other nations, and possibly more.
And the thing is, a lot of other countries that never got their people used to having to spend upwards of $60,000 a year in order to eat and keep a roof over your head are probably going to be better places to be living.
And I'm afraid Welsh is not being overly pessimistic when he says:
This decision makes the US's recovery from its decline even more unlikely than before - and before it was still very unlikely. Absolute catastrophe will have to occur before people are angry enough and corporations weak enough for their to even be a chance.
So, my advice to my readers is this.
If you can leave the US, do. Most of the world is going to suffer over the next decades, but there are places which will suffer less than the US: places that have not settled for soft fascism and a refusal to fix their economic problems. Fighting to the very end is very romantic, and all, but when you're outnumbered, outgunned, and your odds of winning are miniscule, sometimes the smartest thing to do is book out. Those who came to America understood this, they left countries which were less free or had less economic hope than America, and they came to a place where freedom and opportunity reigned.
That place, that time, is coming to an end. For your own sake, and especially for the sake of your children, I tell you now - it is time to get out.
I am not the only person thinking this. Even before the decisions, two of my savviest American friends, people with impeccable records at predicting the US meltdown, told me that within the next few years they would be leaving.
There's always hope, and those who choose to stay might stop this terminal decline.
But you need to ask yourself, seriously, if you are willing to pay the price of failure: if you are willing to have your children pay the price of failure. Because it will be very, very steep.
Yes, for the last few decades I've been telling people that there is no such thing as escaping the damage that the US does, no matter where you go. If you move to another country, you just have one more government to be angry at, but you still can't lose awareness of what a mess is being made by - or in - the US. (A little light background reading.)
But let's face it, it's a lot better to be horrified from inside the protection of little things like, say, a National Health Service, not to mention national borders (especially if those borders involve a nice, big ocean). It's a lot safer not to be at the epicenter of it all.
But of course, there's a little problem, in that you are not all young and healthy and unencumbered, you aren't a linguist, and you don't have the money or skills that would ease your acceptance by another country's immigration service. In which case, I really don't know what to tell you.
But, you know, just in case you were still feeling some hopey-changey, check out this catch:
Hope for lasting liberal change was washed away on Tues day - not just with the loss of the Democrats' super-majority in the Senate, but with a closed-door deal that would lead to cuts in bedrock liberal programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. While Massachusetts voters were casting their ballots to install Republican Scott Brown in Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, President Obama was hammering out an agreement with Democratic leaders to support a commission on the deficit with the power to propose reductions to entitlement programs. This proposal represents a capitulation to conservatives in both parties, and leaves liberals surrendering not only on health care, but on the core achievements of the New Deal and the Great Society.
Only Nixon could go to China, and only Obama could go to Hell.
What happened in Massachusetts? Coakley ran a lousy campaign characterized mainly by having so much contempt for the voters that she thought she just didn't have time to go meet a few of them, Obama has broken all his promises, and a complete refusal to give the voters (consistently identified not just by the Republicans, but by the Democratic leadership as "the left") a single thing they want and need. (And why would Massachusetts vote for universal Romneycare? It's jumped their health care costs by 44%, fergodssakes!) What does the Village say is happening? Clearly, It's the fault of the all-powerful left. (And just how out of touch do you have to be to think that the people who want the public option can be called "the farthest left elements" of the Democratic Party? No, no, the farthest left elements want complete socialization of medicine, something absolutely no one has been talking about doing.) I liked Andrew Sullivan's response to Bainbridge's claim that, ""Obama and the Congressional Democrats (especially in the House) governed for the last year as though the median voter is a Daily Kos fan." He said, "This must come as some surprise to most Daily Kos fans. But if one had traveled to Mars and back this past year and read this statement, what would you assume had happened? I would assume that the banks had been nationalized, the stimulus was twice as large, that single-payer healthcare had been pushed through on narrow majority votes, that card-check had passed, that an immigration amnesty had been legislated, that prosecutions of Bush and Cheney for war crimes would be underway, that withdrawal from Afghanistan would be commencing, that no troops would be left in Iraq, that Larry Tribe was on the Supreme Court, that DADT and DOMA would be repealed, and so on." Funnily enough, none of that happened. As The Rude One points out, Americans voted overwhelmingly for change. What he doesn't say is that, thanks to Obama and his right-wing corporatist friends in the leadership, we did not get it. And that is the problem the Democrats have.
Of course, Obama is talking a good game again about financial regulations and controlling the size of "too big to fail" types of organizations, but, you know, I'll believe it when I see it. Like that "change" thing.
A few years ago we had a bad strawberry season, but it turned out to be good weather for blueberries, so a few strawberry farmers repurposed for the season, as a result of which there were lots of nice blueberries available at reasonable prices for the first time since I've lived here. Alas, as soon as we went back to good strawberry weather, we got some tasteless imports at ridiculously high prices. I really wish that hadn't happened - we didn't even get to the point where people started thinking about making blueberry pie. Think of that! I live in a country where they don't have blueberry pie! And I want some.
Atrios is so succinct: "People in this administration really are not very bright." And, indeed, you have to be stupid to even suggest that bipartisanship is going to win the day just as soon as the Democrats are forced to embrace it. Or, as Benen says:
This is a great idea, isn't it? All the White House and Democratic congressional leaders have to do is continue to work on their policy agenda, while reaching out in good faith to earn support from congressional Republicans. Bills will start passing with bipartisan support; the public will be impressed; David Broder will start dancing in front of the Washington Post building; a season of goodwill and comity will bloom on Capitol Hill; and Lucy really will let Charlie Brown kick the ball.
Or maybe not.
Look, much of the political landscape has changed over the last year, but if there's one thing that's been consistent throughout, it's that congressional Republicans aren't interested in working with Democrats on bipartisan policy solutions. Boehner, McConnell, Cantor, & Co. have a list of priorities -- destroy the Obama presidency, block the legislative process by any means necessary, undermine confidence in American leaders and institutions, rally the right-wing base -- but "getting things done" isn't on it.
At this point I think more than half the country throws up whenever they hear the term "bipartisanship", and the Democratic leadership still think they can win with it. No, they can't. People didn't vote for Democrats because they wanted Republican policies; they voted for Democrats because they were sick of Republican policies. And they still are, no matter what name they come under.
I think most of America is ready to join The Torches & Pitchforks Party, and I don't think they even care anymore whether you have a (D) or an (R) after your name - you're either on our side, or you're on theirs. (I mean, really. No, really.)
Gee, that David Patterson really is a poor replacement for Elliot Spitzer - cut aid to schools, legalize ultimate fighting, and tax sales on Indian reservations? That's a joke, right?
Even Ezra Klein gets it, and he's quoting Ted Kennedy: "If the Democrats run for cover, if we become pale carbon copies of the opposition, we will lose - and deserve to lose. The last thing this country needs is two Republican parties."
Yeah, I want to reach across the aisle to people with these priorities.
I think I may have linked to a version of Naomi Klein's thing on branding before, but I'm linking it again because I still feel like smacking someone every time I remember having a deluge of spam excitedly inviting me to buy Obama coffee mugs and everything else coming straight from the Obama organization - at which point, of course, they got put on my MailWasher blacklist, which is the best that they deserved.
Oh, damn, even Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank are mistaking The Village for "America". But, see, we haven't had an opportunity to forget the last decade, because nothing has changed but the name of the party in power - oh, and the fact that the drunken white moron has been replaced by that other guy.
There were hands in the air in Washington this week, but it wasn't a stickup. The new Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, appointed by Congress to find out how America got rolled, began hearings this week. These four are not the victims of one of the greatest bank heists in history - they're the perpetrators, bankers so sleek and crafty they got off with the loot in broad daylight, and then sweet talked the government into taxing us to pay it back.
Watching that scene on the opening day of the hearings, it was hard enough to believe that almost a year has passed since Barack Obama raised his hand, too -- taking the oath of office to become our 44th President. Even harder to remember what America looked like before Obama, because we've also been robbed of memory, assaulted by what the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz described as a "fantastic proliferation of mass media." We live in a time "characterized by a refusal to remember." Inconvenient facts simply disappear down the memory hole, as in George Orwell's novel, "1984."
President Obama's made plenty of mistakes during his first year, and we've critiqued them frequently here on the JOURNAL, but hardly anyone talks any more about what happened in the years before. He inherited from George W. Bush the biggest financial debacle since the Great Depression, along with two unpopular and costly wars, and a dysfunctional and demoralized government.
No, no, just more of the same - of course the media and the conservatives pretend that the persistent failure of conservative and/or Republican government didn't really happen, that Republicans are Responsible and Serious while Democrats are all flakes (which, in some ways, is true, but not the way they mean it). And of course, the presumption that liberal policies aren't any use. Always. I can't really remember a moment since Reagan got into office when there were any real cracks in that mantra. And people like Glenn Beck and Hannity don't promote such lies because they have amnesia, they do it because they are part of the conservative propaganda apparatus. They're not "America". America knows it's been having problems with jobs and healthcare for a lot longer than just the past year.
As far as I can tell, the only people outside of the insurance industry who actually support the current version of the health care bill are party hacks who see it as advantageous to Obama to be able to credit him with a political win, or party hacks on the other side who know that passing it will just about kill any possibility of real health care reform. People who actually care about health care, such as National Nurses United, have come out against it. Because the thing is a disaster, and as LarryE says, "one that even as its advocates avidly, breathlessly, declare its vital, indeed "historic," nature, even they have to admit is seriously (although, they insist, not fatally) flawed." I'm sure the administration will explain to us that 150,000 nurses are just wild-eyed lefties or crazy teabaggers.
This kind of nonsense is the kind of nonsense that is being treated as a perfectly sane, rational part of the discourse. That's what we're up against. And we have a president who finds it too distasteful to unleash the truth against insanity. It's up to you to do that, because President Change wants nothing to do with it.
Digby thinks (and I concur) that it's time we should be Sending a Message: "If my comment section, email and other blogs are to be believed, there is a lot of netroots angst about the Democratic party these days. It's certainly understandable. With the free floating anxiety that's pervasive out in the country as a whole, the horrific spectacle of health care reform sausage making and the toppling of President Obama from his heavenly pedestal, we have the making of a full blown insurrection on our hands. The question is what to do about it."
Between Reaganomics and conservative judgmentalism and the punitive nature of their ideology, it's no surprise that America is the land of Big Prison. Why, just yesterday, I said, "Remember when people used to say, 'It's a free country'?" And the younger ones said, "No." You can see why...
From now on, I really don't think I have any use at all for Bill Clinton. People in Haiti need water, he runs around talking about how we have to shovel out the UN. And now this.
Glenn Greenwald points out that Obama seems to like the idea of government-funded propaganda, and so does Cass Sunstein, who "is currently Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs." In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-"independent" advocates to "cognitively infiltrate" online groups and websites -- as well as other activist groups -- which advocate views that Sunstein deems "false conspiracy theories" about the Government. This would be designed to increase citizens' faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists." Oh, I don't think it would increase confidence in the government much at all....
Of course, anyone who follows the drug war knows that lying about the facts has become pretty solidly a part of our government - even to the point of requiring the "Drug Czar" by law to lie. And what is abstinence-only sex miseducation other than a big, expensive lie? So no surprises there. And I don't expect to be hearing very much about the showing that we could cut disabling fallout from traumatic combat injuries significantly if we went back to the old method of treating injured soldiers - with morphine.
But now we have reached the sad state of affairs where even Paul Krugman is attacking Marcy Wheeler (and Glenn Greenwald) for pointing out the similarity of the Armstrong Williams case (an "independent" voice of someone being paid by the Bush administration to comment on its policies) and the Gruber case (an "independent" expert being paid by the Obama administration to promote its policies). Glenn notes that being paid gives one a powerful incentive to say what the administration wants to hear, but it's more than that: It's government rewarding people for being on their side while supposedly maintaining their independence. It's not just propaganda, although it's that, too - it's also the gravy train for public figures and experts who know the money is in agreeing with the government.It corrupts well beyond the actors we know are involved, but increases the likelihood that honest questions will not be part of the debate - and we already have plenty of that.
And no, the Democrats don't need an excuse to go right - they already are. It's no good accusing dissenters of "helping the right-wing" when we're being asked to support people whose policies are the right-wing's policies. Either Obama is no progressive or Obama is a naif who is shooting himself - and us - in the feet with his incompetent leadership. It doesn't matter. We're ending up with right-wing policies that made us livid for the last eight years and should make us livid now, and new policies that will be even more damaging to liberal causes. Stop enabling this man!
And thanks to Lana for alerting me to the problem with the feed link - I never would have noticed that on my own.
I'm pleased to say that my clever ploy of posting links to Lindt chocolate commercials worked.
Let me apologize for messing up the link below to Down With Tyranny!'s "You Know Why Americans Are Unhappy About The Healthcare Bill, Right?" - but you should definitely go read it as it is now updated with a film of Rep. Alan Grayson's recent musings on why Republicans hate government. And while you're there, you might also check out "Harold Ford Starts His Campaign With A Long List Of Easily Refutable Lies" - especially useful if you encounter anyone who still believes the fiction that Ford lost his campaign last time just because he's black, or because his state is terrified of liberals, or whatever. No, it's that no one can stand him - especially liberals.
Bob Somerby has a site up with his book How he got there - that is, how George Walker Bush ended up in the White House instead of, oh, I dunno, in jail or something.
The really depressing thing about this discussion with a union leader and a teabagger is that there is one clear message: Obama is losing the unions for the Democratic Party. In fact, I can't think of a single part of the Democratic Party faithful Obama hasn't pointedly spit on. (Oh, wait, he sorta kinda pretends to care about global warming - except that, well, he's still playing the Republican role in making sure nothing happens.) And here's that episode that starts off with Laura chatting with Marcy Wheeler and The Rude One.
So, Obama has really screwed the Democratic Party and liberals/progressives - but if the Democrat loses in Massachusetts, will that be a wake-up call, or just another excuse to say what they always say when a Democrat loses to a Republican - that it proves the Dems are "too liberal"?
It was snowing again today when I woke up, and kept snowing for a few hours, but it was still only a light dusting and then it melted.
These days the conservatives have their own cadre of trained seals seeded in everything everywhere that might be able to make a difference. But once upon a time, they didn't have their own Generals in their stables, and they asked the wrong guy to help. Maybe legislators who intended to perform as the opposition to conservatives have become so tame and useless today because they are all too aware that this time, the conservatives will not make the mistake of asking a Smedley Butler. Butler warned Roosevelt, and then he wrote a little book called War is a Racket. It should be taught in schools everywhere.
Conservatives want you to think that Europe's economy is a shambles because they're just too "socialist". Of course, they have to make up the numbers to hide the fact that European socialism is a whole lot healthier than American capitalism, and the countries that are faring the worst are the ones that have been imitating America the hardest. (Also: To no one's surprise, Harold Ford is a lying sack of crap.)
"You Know Why Americans Are Unhappy About The Healthcare Bill, Right? You see, most people who don't like the healthcare reform bill, are disgruntled for the right reasons: the bill doesn't go nearly far enough to provide healthcare coverage, to control costs or to regulate the avaricious insurance gangsters. This is the most tepid and insubstantial reform imaginable, something designed-- unsuccessfully-- to get Republicans to not make such a godawful ruckus. Well, it wasn't only designed for that. It was also designed to please the Big Insurance Giants and other bad players in the Medical Industrial Complex who Obama and the Democrats are counting on to keep funding their political careers. Is that working, you ask?" And Charlie Rangel says Democrats have a problem.
Commenting below, Jack K. wonders how it can be true that snow at Christmastime is almost unheard of in London when it's in every movie of A Christmas Carol we've ever seen. And haven't we all seen drawings of ice-skaters on the Thames? And, as it happens, A Christmas Carol is not the only place Dickens plays this bit of poetic licence - but poetic licence it is to put an ice fair on the Thames well after the "mini-ice age" that once made that possible. We can speculate that this romanticized view of a snowy Christmas was as much a part of Dickens' Christmastime mythos as it is of ours, but the fact remains that it's been a good long time since London had any expectation of having a white Christmas. Even in February, which I'm pretty sure is our coldest month, it's still usually more than a decade between anything resembling a real snowfall. Speaking of which, I'm told it's supposed to have been a degree above freezing yesterday, and the snow in my back garden mostly melted, having never achieved a height sufficient to scoop up enough for a cup of fresh snow & maple syrup. Before I went to bed last night I looked outside and saw that a new dusting had fallen at some point, but that was gone when I woke up. There are still bits of snow out there, but it's already starting to feel normal again in London.
"You can only push people so far: Pity the poor American bankers in Britain! Atop a 50% tax on their earnings, passed by a Parliament overwhelmed by populist anger, American bankers in Britain now face a 'vesting' requirement that allows them to take only 40% of their taxable earnings this year, with the rest paid out over the next three years - if financial circumstances warrant. And they do not like it. Not one bit. They are, in fact, fed up." Of course, European countries are small enough that the threat of physical reaction from the populace against the excesses of the wealthy is still a real one, so they really do have to do something before the people start reminding them about the guillotine. My favorite part is where the Americans are threatening the Brits with the possibility that they will pull their irresponsible, illegal, and fraudulent practices out of London if this keeps up. And it occurs to me that a country that really cleaned up its banking industry and rode hard over any institutions doing business with them could eventually become an important financial center just on that fact alone, because even people with real money are getting sick of trying to do business in a free-for-all.
"Court to FCC: You Don't Have Power to Enforce Net Neutrality: A federal appeals court gave notice Friday it likely would reject the Federal Communications Commission's authority to sanction Comcast for throttling peer-to-peer applications." The FCC's main purpose is to protect the public's ability to communicate and to be an informed electorate. Making money for Comcast doesn't enter into it. They are supposed to protect our airwaves on our behalf. If the court's are now saying that it exists solely to keep us from seeing Janet Jackson's nipples or top us from hearing Howard Stern's sexual obsessions, they really aren't needed at all.
Move Your Money out of big banks and into smaller, local institutions that don't feed the monster. If the government won't rein in Wall Street the way they should, that leaves it to us.
This Week In Tyranny there is actually some good news, and it's now possible to get a good look at what you think is important in the Federal Register via GovPulse, to see some documents the ACLU pried loose from the Justice Department as well as the formal withdrawal of the torture memos, and a bunch of other stuff, but: "The DC Court of Appeals gave away more power to the president. It seems as though a significant part of the judiciary wants to rule itself out of existence. What good are checks and balances when they are entrusted to those with an authoritarian streak?"
It's nice to see someone on Maddow reminding people of what it means to take convicts out of their own communities and count them toward the census in the counties where the prisons are. And yes, I want you to think about the war on drugs in that context.
Speaking of liberal media, I can't believe I got so distracted Thursday I forgot to listen to David Waldman (KagroX) on Virtually Speaking Thursday, but, thankfully, I still can. And Sunday night we get Marcy Wheeler and Cliff Schecter.
Avram Grumer: "Patrick referred to 'international terror klutzes' yesterday, but I think maybe Charlie Stross's 'murderous clowns' was more accurate. So far, we've had the recent exploding underpants, and Richard Reid's exploding shoes, both classic bits of circus clown comedy. This implies that the TSA's obsession with fluids and spray canisters is actually right on target for preventing a future seltzer bottle attack. Variants on the 'suitcase gag' are also clearly anticipated and taken care of. A ban on pies and rubber chickens would seem to be in order."
McJoan says the FCC is taking public comment on Net Neutrality, and "Save the Internet has an easy-to-use online tool that you can use to add your support for the proposed rule. But you have to act soon--the comment period closes next Thursday, Jan. 14." (But, in our experience, rumors that suggest Obama is backing away from campaign promises usually precede denials of same followed by Obama backing away from campaign promises.)
I guess California has too much money in the state coffers, because now Arnold wants to waste a bunch of it on privatized prisons. I still think whoever came up with this idea should be strangled in his cradle by a helpful time-traveller.
Oh, no! We're losing All Spin Zone. (And I was interested to learn that Law & Order eventually got a social conscience. Or is that a gag? We're a few years behind on it over here last time I looked, when it was still pretty much a show where any pretext was good enough for a charge and even the thinnest circumstantial evidence was more than enough for an indictment. Much as I loved Lenny as a character, he did seem to think everyone was guilty and manage to convince the DA of same with just a raised eyebrow and smart remark.)
Pictures likethis might make you think it's dramatically snowy in London, but it's really only dramatic if you actually live here and are surprised to see snow sticking at all, which usually only happens once every couple of decades. We haven't had more than a few inches of snow at any one time - the point is that it's sticking at all, and it's not melting away by afternoon. There is a thin layer of snow in my garden that's been there most of the time for the last couple of weeks, I think. And yesterday afternoon I looked out the window and there was a flurry - I know it didn't last longer than an hour at the outside, but it was actually snowing for a bit. And it's been snowing for the last hour now, too, but the ground isn't all covered out back. If I think of this in terms of actual snowfalls I've known in America (Maryland, DC, Virginia, NYC and upstate NY, and those terrifying drives up to Chicago and Ann Arbor, not to mention that incredibly long night driving back from New Haven), well, I mean, this barely qualifies as snow. But in a town where no one owns a snow shovel because you're not likely to need one (and most houses aren't really insulated), seeing snow that stays for a week, and seeing the snow come down in the afternoon several times in a couple of weeks, it's just spooky.
Someday I hope people will begin to understand that evidence of the conservative movement "tearing itself apart" is just another cycle in the conservative movement routine of re-emergence that they have been successfully pulling at least since Nixon failed to beat Kennedy, if not longer. We're still looking at the same bad ideas that the American Revolution was fought to get rid of, and the people with the money always manage to bring them back. Now they're back with a vengeance and we have not cleansed the people who run the country of those ideas. So quit laughing and start paying attention.
Glenn Greenwald has a nice video up of Helen Thomas asking the right question - and not getting an answer. It's funny how these days there is nothing more impertinent than a pertinent question.
Bernie Sanders says he's really going to try to defeat Bernenke's renomination, I learn from an article that weirdly identifies him as "the far, far left". There is nothing far-left about wanting to kick Bernenke out of our government, given the mess he's made already that everybody hates him for. People who are actual fiscal conservatives - that is, people who want to actually be fiscally prudent rather than spend our money on crazy right-wing giveaways to rich people and loonies - want to kick him out, too. Truth is, there's nothing really "far-left" about Bernie altogether. He may call himself by the fear-word "socialist", but it's the kind of socialism Americans have learned over the last century to expect from the American form of government - well, until Reagan came along and started dismantling it. Anyway, I'm not holding my breath waiting for Bernie to succeed, let alone for Obama to appoint someone more sensible, but if President Change wants to be more than a one-term president, he should do his best to let Bernie save him from himself. (Via Suburban Guerrilla.)
Mog Decarnin was a genius, and funny and neat and I loved her, and now I can't send her that letter I owe her. Once, a long long time ago, she said to me in a letter, "Do you realize you and I are creating a new analysis of S/M?" Yep, long enough ago that it was still "S/M" rather than "BDSM" even to someone like Mog. And, my, that was really something, coming from Mog, who was out there with Califia while I was just a sort of armchair anthropologist who hadn't even done any field work - you know, reading about people's arguments about S/M in amongst all the other piles of feminist articles I used to pore over in those days. Mog was probably the best person in the world for me to be talking to in order to get a handle on what this S/M thing was about, and I was always fast at crystallizing and articulating insights. Talking to Mog made a lot of things - not just about S/M, but about the female role and sexuality in general - fall into place for me in a new way that made more sense than the existing feminist analysis of the time. A lot of the stuff we talked about is still a bit radical in feminist circles. It wasn't just a new analysis of S/M, but of how the feminist movement had missed the larger analysis of male and female roles and stereotypes. You just don't get better brainstorming than that.
If you're in New York on January 22nd, you might want to go to the benefit the Fugs, Lou Reed, and a bunch of other people are holding for Tuli Kupferberg, who has had a couple of strokes in the last year and lost his sight (although he still posts to YouTube). Tuli, now 86, needs regular nursing care as a result of the impairments caused by the strokes, and I'd like to know that he's getting taken care of - it's not as if pro-sex poet-musicians usually make a lot of money from their work, especially when it's the kind of work you can't put on TV. He's been good for some of the great thrills of my life, from his arrest at the Pentagon march, and then going to see the Fugs at their very own theater and seeing "Couldn't Get High" performed live for the first time when I was 15, all the way up to being stunned to receive fan mail from Tuli Himself at Feminists Against Censorship HQ not that long ago. So if you can't be in New York on January 22nd, you might like to send them some bucks anyway, or buy their stuff, or any little thing you can to help. Besides, they're still fun. (And still cooler than the Sex Pistols, too. After all, the Sex Pistols were on TV.)
One thing that has been irritating me is the kind of blanket denial Obama-defenders keep making that Obama ever suggested he supported single-payer or any other liberal program. That simply isn't true. While his campaign speeches may have lacked any real substance (and they did, for the most part), he and his campaign were constantly sending out little messages directed at the left meant to assure us that he was One of Us, a real progressive liberal who intended to promote liberal policies and undo the messes (NAFTA, Iraq) left by his predecessors. That is, he promoted himself to the left as a liberal even as he progressively moved to the right. Susie has found one example of this, but what particularly interested me about his letter was this: "In other words, I believe that politics in any democracy is a game of addition, not subtraction. And I believe deeply enough in the decency of the American people to think that progressives can build a winning majority in this country, so long as we're not afraid to speak the truth, and so long as we don't write off big chunks of the electorate just because they don't agree with us on every issue." Of course, it's one thing to say we aren't going to "write off big chunks of the electorate just because they don't agree with us on every issue," and quite another to write off big chunks of the electorate (some 60-80%) just because the media refers to them as "the left". (Also: Shouldn't Tim Geithner be arrested?)
Drew Westen's original article I didn't see last month, "Leadership, Obama Style, and the Looming Losses in 2010: Pretty Speeches, Compromised Values, and the Quest for the Lowest Common Denominator", in which he says, "What's costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn't a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both. What's costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting." He's right except for the part where he says it's not ideological. The idea that you should care at least as much for "the common man" as you do about those powerful interests is liberal ideology - the one shared by pretty much everyone in America except the powerful interests. But people in the media - even the internet media - still make the mistake of thinking ideology can be categorized in terms of whether you identify yourself as conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican. It can't. Even half of rank-and-file Republicans have liberal ideology where government is concerned, they just don't know that's what it is. They may watch Fox News and see a world where Democrats waste time on silly left-wing junk, but when you listen to their concerns, they are the same things liberals are concerned about: They want to live in a world where they have the right to an honest day's pay for an honest day's work and the right to be left alone to live our lives. They are absolutely right that what we had of that has been slipping away. Many of them blame the Democrats or liberals because obviously wrong things like NAFTA happened under a supposedly liberal Democratic president who they have been led to believe was having affairs and paying attention to rich corporations and silly liberal stuff like gays in the military when he should have been paying attention to them. But "left" or "right", what's sticking in the craw of most Americans is that our leaders are not giving us what liberal government is supposed to give us. They aren't actually complaining about the things real liberal policies provide.
Interesting sidelight from the always fascinating and linky Pruning ShearsThis Week In Tyranny post from last week is a bit from Science Daily: "Researchers sought to determine whether power inspires hypocrisy, the tendency to hold high standards for others while performing morally suspect behaviors oneself. The research finds that power makes people stricter in moral judgment of others - while being less strict of their own behavior."
I heard a rumor that Marcy Wheeler and The Rude Pundit were going to be on Laura Flanders' GRITtv today, or were on it, or whatever, and I went looking for the podcast and found a couple of other things that might interest you. Laura Flanders, for those who aren't familiar with the name, was one of the many good things about the original Air America Radio line-up that frayed in the liberal purge. We lost the ability to listen to it even before they decided to charge money for their increasingly tepid and boring feed, and now I don't even know if there are actually any liberals left on that network. Anyway, while I was still waiting to see what Laura and Marcy and The Rude One would do to poor old Dangerstein, who somehow got tricked into going on a show with people who actually know and care about important issues, I listened to yesterday's episode on Who's Better Organized Post-Obama: the Left or the Right? - which only barely scratched the surface of why the right is so much better organized, but made the point I've been trying to stress that with nowhere to go on the left, an awful lot of people are connecting with the right because the right-wing is the only place they find disaffection with the obvious wrongness in the country being given any kind of voice. Meanwhile, the "organized left", by which we mean people who can still bring themselves to support Obama, thinks they are part of a grassroots movement because they get listened to on their ideas - as long as their ideas are about how to support Obama's agenda. Separately, Laura wondered whether you can be called a civilized country when you export barbaric ideas.
Also: I'm cold. I can't believe there has been more snow. This is just like a real winter! We don't have that, here.
David Swanson on Shooting Handcuffed Children: "The occupied government of Afghanistan and the United Nations have both concluded that U.S.-led troops recently dragged eight sleeping children out of their beds, handcuffed some of them, and shot them all dead. While this apparently constitutes an everyday act of kindness, far less intriguing than the vicious singeing of his pubic hairs by Captain Underpants, it is at least a variation on the ordinary American technique of murdering men, women, and children by the dozens with unmanned drones. [...] In a civilized world, the alternative to vengeance is justice. Often we can even set aside feelings of revenge as long as we are able to act so as to deter more crime. But at the same time that the puppet president of Afghanistan is demanding the arrest of the troops who shot the handcuffed children, the puppet government of Iraq is facing up to the refusal of the United States to seriously prosecute the Blackwater assassins of innocent Iraqis. Justice will not be permitted as an alternative to vengeance -- the mere idea is anti-American."
Dave Ettlin attended two remembrance services on the same day - one for "Baltimore's best-know socialist", A. Robert Kaufman, who advocated for "crazy" ideas like universal health care and an end to racism, and the other for his long-time friend and co-founder of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, Mark Owings.
At the other end of the spectrum, David W. has been down in comments defending Debbie Howell's performance as Ombud for the WaPo, insisting that she lived a better life than Osama bin Laden, and saying that her behavior was okay because she was defending a reporter at the paper. Um, David W., could you at least look up the word "ombudsman"? It doesn't mean she was the paper's lawyer.
Listen to the podcast of CSKappler and clammyc of DKos chatting about the economic, political, and health crisis in America in the kickoff to the Sunday night Virtually Speaking talking heads show.
I seem to have figured out what was confusing me about Echo, now, but I can't see a way to link to individual comments. But somewhere in there, I think CMike was making his nomination for my best post of the year, like this: "Ever see a 63 yard field goal attempt split the uprights? Here's another one but New Orleans lost this time. Sure, these days it looks like anyone could have made that second kick. That's not how it looked back then." Any other nominees?
Glenn Greenwald notes that the agenda of the American right-wing often seems to coincide with that of Al Qaeda Terrorists. This is true, but then, in America, the American right usually are the terrorists. (Oh, and in a fine example of conservative family values, Karl Rove got a divorce. Again.)
Harvard and a few other academic institutions are starting to question whether it's a good idea to have faculty shilling for corporations. They've introduced caps on outside earnings - but, frankly, I'm not so sure those caps are low enough.
Wow, has the NYT actually been reading Krugman? They seem to be channeling him in today's editorial on Avoiding a Japanese Decade.
Ruth's road trip took her on a tour of a country with a failing economy.
It's nice to see anyone being hammered for being all wrong, especially if it's Larry Kudlow.
Deborah Howell's wrong-headedness as the ombud for The Washington Post quickly became legend as she promoted GOP spin over facts time and again. Now, it seems, her facility for looking the wrong way has killed her. Sad, maybe, but not as sad as what she did with her life.
I can't forget the last decade, and I can't forget George W. Bush, because the new decade and the new president are carrying on with the same horrible policies.
I don't know why John Yoo merits an interview in the NYT mag, but apparently he became a conservative because President Carter made a speech in a funny sweater that Yoo never heard because he thinks it's "the malaise speech" rather than a speech about how we can be independent of foreign oil.
Dan did his Best Music of the Year again, and it's all stuff I haven't heard, and maybe I will get around to listening to it to see if he's got any taste. Personally, I'm still listening to a lot of music from before I was born in between going through the Beatles re-mastered albums package.
Snowy conditions in December are actually unusual in Britain. Mr. Sideshow says in all his life he has only seen a white Christmas once - I remember that one, too, when we went out to Cardiff for the holiday. This picture of frosty rose-hips is not something one would normally expect to get in Scotland at Christmastime, either, but there it is. Pretty, but hearing about the Gulf Stream moving south scares the hell out of me.
Glucose is the energy of life, but the real bitter truth is about non-glucose sweeteners - all of them. This guy is concentrating on the harmful result of pouring fructose down your neck without the fibre that's supposed to go with it, but anything that gives you the *taste* of sweet without satisfying the part of you that reacts to glucose specifically is actually going to make you fat - so artificial sweeteners are seriously bad for you. And your diet drink helps make you fat. Fructose itself does the same, only it contains more calories.
My first science fiction convention was the 1974 Disclave at the much-missed Sheraton Park (aka Sheraton Gormenghast), where I met Dave Ettlin, Mark Owings, Roger Zelazny, and a lot of other people for the first time. I had already met Jack Chalker a few weeks before, and when I mentioned my earlier meeting that day with Mark, Dave told me then about how they had founded the Baltimore Science Fiction Society "in the back of a bus" while returning from a Washington Science Fiction Association meeting. I met Mark when I was mentioning to someone that there was a book I was looking for but I couldn't remember anything about it so I didn't know how to look for it or ask for it. I was worried that I was going to have to look at the covers of thousands of books in the huckster room individually before I had any chance of finding it, and she dragged me across the room and introduced me to Mark and said, "Tell Mark about your book." So I explained that I didn't remember the name, the author, or anything else much except that I'd started reading it at camp but hadn't been able to finish it before the owner went home at the end of the summer, and there was something about a disease and some secret pathways or something, and I thought it had been published originally under a different title from the one I read - and Mark turned around and pulled a copy of Highways in Hiding by George O. Smith off of his table and handed it to me with a grin. A brief flip through the first pages revealed that it had also been reprinted at some point under the title Space Plague. All the right bells rang. So I bought it and was finally able to read this book I'd started reading when I was ten. And though I had many conversations about more serious things with Mark over the years, I also saw that same grin many times, and it's how I remember him - especially, when I picture him in my mind, I remember that grin the moment he handed me Highways in Hiding. I don't talk about him often, but I've always looked forward to seeing him when I went back home for Disclaves and then Capclaves, and I'm sorry I'll never see that grin again. Thank you so much, Mark, and farewell.
I have been having the worst tech week I've ever had this week. And I was already a nervous wreck before the phones went out - which BT says they can fix by January 4th. Even lost broadband for a few hours, but at least have that back. And Echo? Um, well, I think I may have messed something up, or encountered a glitch, or something, so that's still waiting for resolution. For a while there this was proving to be the worst birthday I've had since I was 19. Every time I tried to do something, I lost another bit of tech. Eventually I decided I was not going out to see a movie because I knew if one more thing went wrong (and I was sure something would) I would burst into tears, and I'd rather not go out in the rain just to do that in public.
Things did get better, but I still want to say I am so disappointed in people like BooMan, who appear to think that supporting the neoliberals is the "realistic" approach to progressivism. No, it isn't. It's the design of corporatist conservatives.
Here's Armando's response to Booman, and Booman's reply. But we need to fight the corporations, not lay down for them. Obama and the Democratic leadership are pushing right-wing corporate policies. That's not a theory. And it's not about "ideology" in the sense these comfortable gentlemen are speaking when they explain that we have to be "pragmatic" and "realistic". It's about hungry bellies and broken limbs that might be yours and your children's and siblings' and friends' in the very near future. This isn't abstract; it's about the simple, obvious fact that which way the money goes determines how our lives go. Our lives. We don't actually care about which politician you happened to fall in love with.
Since the comment thing is taking longer than expected, feel free to add any you have to the last thread - I don't know when there will be a new one.
00:35 GMT
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm alarmed at how, as soon as Jane Hamsher stepped off the reservation on health care, on killing our government, and on Rahm's secret slush fund, she started being attacked by "progressives" for doing something many other "progressives" have done, but no other progressive was attacked for. And, interestingly, we are getting the false equivalence of pretending criticisms from the left are somehow identical with weird attacks from the right - such as questioning Rahm's unsavory behavior being, you know, just like the right claiming the Clintons murdered Vince Foster. But, you know, I guess Katrina vanden Heuvel wants to be sure her place is secure on the TV. Sometimes I wonder if these people haven't been explicitly told they have to decry anything and anyone that's actually liberal in order to keep getting those seats on the talk shows.
FAIR's Peter Hart on how the NYT talks: "In this worldview, "ideologues" are those who push for reforms--including single-payer--that they believe will lower costs and offer more comprehensive coverage. "Pragmatists," meanwhile, are moving in the opposite direction, toward higher costs and less coverage, in order to theoretically win the political support of some conservative lawmakers." Good policy is "ideology", bad policy is "pragmatic". And it's true that good policy is an ideology - it's the one the American system is supposed to be aimed at. The belief that passing bad policy to get conservative support is a higher priority is also an ideology, but I think you'll find that most American prefer the "ideological" position.
Man, I was hoping Steve Bates could help me out with this Echo migration thing, but he just took it as an invitation to just migrate his whole blog to Blogspot. Which is fairly amazing, since he's already got enough on his plate. I can't even contemplate the idea. He's right about the math, though - it ain't universal coverage if it still leaves more than 16 million people uninsured.
Meanwhile, I still can't figure out how to get the Echo code right, and I apparently no longer have the ability to check it before uploading, so I may or may not be messing around with this post to try to figure out how to add comments, but for right now, I just wanted to get these links out of the way, so I guess you can either hold your fire or e-mail me. *sigh* 15:55 GMT
This Week In Tyranny, Dan contributed a word to the English language: "divo (n.): A male diva. The most substantive discussion on health care reform has been on the liberal blogosphere. Nate Silver initiated a back and forth series of posts that really illuminated the details under consideration. Meanwhile, mainstream outlets preferred to focus on the arias being belted out by the preening, narcissistic and sociopathic divos Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson. And no, I will not link to any of them." Also, Dan on Why the Filibuster Isn't Going Anywhere.
Jon Swift hasn't posted since March, so he hasn't asked me to name my best post of the year. However, Dan submitted his opinion anyway: "Hey, isn't this about the time of year for you to take "Post of the Year" nominations? I had this one as a shoo in until this. So now it's a toss up." I like having my readers tell me if there's anything I wrote all year that they find memorable, so your suggestions are welcome.
I think I'm going to bite the bullet and switch to Echo to avoid losing data and what would probably be a lot more work than I feel like doing on such short warning. Anyone who would like to kick in a few bucks to help out would earn my gratitude, of course. And a little more help from Toast about how to do it wouldn't go amiss, either.
In 2007, public expenditure (i.e., tax money) on health care per person, was around $3,300. That's before you paid your "insurer", before you paid your doctor, before you paid for any form of treatment, you paid $3,300 whether you needed it or not. (As an American, you also had the privilege of paying even more than that for commercial costs, bringing your total to an average of $7290.) In that same year in England, the total expenditure of taxation and private expenditure was$2,992 per person. *
Let me put that another way:
US paid by your taxes: $3,300 (or thereabouts) UK taxes plus private: $2,992
And the kicker is, even relatively low-income minorities in the UK get better health care than the well-off in America.
But if you were doubtful that the health care bill bites, how do you feel knowing that the AMA, a perennial opponent of good health care reform that represents a minority of physicians, has now endorsed it?
Democrats will consult some celibate men from an ancient superstitious cult operating an international pedophile ring led by a former nazi currently living in Rome [about] whether American women should have control over their own bodies or if the U.S. federal government should do it.
I can't believe anyone would say that single-payer was ignored by Obama and Congress because it got no traction in the primaries. As far as the public knew, all of the candidates were advocating that the government "do something" about health care, and when you look at what it was specifically that people said they thought government should be doing, the only way to do it is with a single-payer system. So whether they identified it as "single-payer" or not, that's what they wanted and what they probably thought they were voting for. They didn't withhold their votes from Dennis Kucinich because they didn't like his policies, they voted in large part for candidates who they assumed had similar policies, but chose the one they thought was more likely to be able to deliver on them. Obama, you may recall, was known to have supported single-payer himself - it was one of the reasons he was so much more popular than Hillary. Of course, throughout the primaries, when we questioned Obama's dedication to liberal causes, we were told at every step of the way about those things in his history that "proved" he could be trusted - he'd advocated single-payer, he was a Constitutional scholar, he was a community organizer - so of course, he'd never be the kind of guy who would sell out health care to the insurance companies, enforce Bush's shredding of the Constitution, or oppose a mortgage "cramdown" bill. Single-payer itself was never on the ballot, but the public did vote in a candidate who, as far as they knew at all, had been an advocate of single-payer. (Remember when Obama attacked Hillary for wanting mandates? Mandates are pretty much the only enforceable content in this bill.)
Everyone seems to think I should use WordPress. Can I use it as just a commenting system patched into my blog? I really don't want to have to use online blogging software. I mean, I currently use TextPad.
As previously noted, Americans want health care reform, but do not like the bill. There are good reasons for this - real health care reform would help our economy as well as protecting Americans, just aside from saving us hundreds of billions of dollars. Now that the polls are showing it, Republicans are happy to talk about the unpopularity of the bill. What they don't say is that Americans do want a health care reform bill - just not this one.
See, the question I can't get past starts with the fact that there have been numerous no-brainer issues where the Democrats were supposed to come in and fix things, things just about everyone favored, and they can't even do those. Health care reform was itself a no-brainer that even the president himself occasionally admitted was a vital emergency issue, and look how much trouble they've had even passing this really, really bad bill that has been continually tweaked to make it more attractive to the alleged "moderates" and "centrists" and the insurance industry. So why on Earth should I believe that if we would just pass this crapfest of a bill, we will then somehow make it better? Krugman is talking about procedural changes to get better legislation passed, but, seriously, how's that going to happen? The simple fact of the matter is that if the Democrats wanted to get good legislation past the Republicans, they could do it. They simply haven't bothered to try, and it is long past time y'all admitted the possibility that they aren't trying because failure is the plan.
Wait a minute - does this mean they actually believed all that crap about how Al Jazeera was sending out secret coded jihadist messages? (via)
What thanks does President Bipartisan get for his insistence on including the Republicans even though everyone hates them? Not a lot.
Somerby has a list of things the press didn't discuss in the healthcare debate. I guess that's getting to be pretty old news, now. The press isn't suddenly going to start talking about them, either, so, you know, have you started putting leaflets out around your neighborhood and various hangouts. No? What's wrong with you?
So, should I stick with Haloscan/Echo, or go to something else? If something else, what? Is it free? Or should I just fork over the cash and go with the new regime? You can throw money in the tipjar if you think I might as well just, pay up and not have to throw my attention to trying to replace it with something else.
Sirota on The Three Assumptions Driving the Push to Pass the Insurance/Drug Industry Health Bill. And, really, he's right - there's no reason we have to pass this bill right now. Sleep on it, people, and pass a better bill next year. There's time. RJ Eskow: "the bill now has more breaks for business but harsher punishment for uninsured individuals, it eliminates the already-weakened public option, it pays doctors less - and it costs the Federal government $23 billion more. Hey, what's not to love?" (And I do like Don Parker's fantasy of Harry Reid turning into LBJ. Yeah, like that could happen.)
We are now at the point where merely expressing annoyance at anyone in authority makes you a terrorist. And when I say "authority", they don't have to have much authority. As with the case of the shopper who said something sassy to a cashier and got tased by - who was it, cops, or just security? - the issue isn't whether you're involved in any kind of crime or violence, it's whether you know your place. You are just acting as a private citizen, and you have to recognize that as such, those who are acting as servants of those in power have greater authority than you. As a mere American citizen, you are not the equal of anyone who is acting for Big Property. And, while it's true that the cops might beat you up whether you sass them or not, they pretty much will subject you to violence if you suggest, in any way, that they may possibly be overstepping, making a mountain out of a molehill, or simply incorrect in their assumptions. This gets amped up well beyond the Kafkaesque when there is any possibility of employing use of the utterly vague and horrifically overbroad term "terrorism". In these cases, you don't even have to express that you are annoyed or upset at them to earn a conviction - you merely have to show some sign that you are concerned with anything other than showing them their due deference. And then you may end up at the mercy of the Supreme Court, which is currently dominated by people who don't actually believe you should have any rights, And the result of this "protection against terrorism" that we have been gifted with is that the American people are becoming well and truly terrorized.
How would they know if it was a bad bill? I mean, what if everyone hates it because it stinks?
(And I really would like to know why this doesn't seem to matter to them. But then, I assume that's why it doesn't go into effect 'til after the next general election. Maybe they really think they can keep getting away with it. Worse, maybe they're right.)
Kucinich says the Class War is over, and working people lost: "The separation between the finance economy and the real economy is real. This is not some fake idea. You can't call that class warfare. That's a fact."
Even if we did have to pay higher taxes for a single-payer system, our overall costs would be lower because we wouldn't be paying the same again (or more) to insurance companies the way Americans are now. And everyone wants better health care at lower costs. And yet, when you phrase it as "government intervention and higher taxes", people suddenly object to it, despite the fact that they are, in fact, asking the government to "do something". The government "doing something" is government intervention, but the right-wing has some people convinced that some government interventions are government interventions while other government interventions are not government interventions. How does that work?
Thereisnospoon tells you explicitly why No One Is Going To Save You Fools. Because the right got organized and learned how to persuade people to believe things that make no sense, while the rest of us sat back expecting someone else to counter them. "That's partly because the American political Right never quits and never gives up. They know that organization is the key to their success, and they don't trust politicians to do their work for them. Democrats, on the other hand, get disappointed and quit when our politicians don't pan out the way we wanted. That's why we lose." Ironically, they learned that from the left, who seem to have forgotten.
I love this story about the guy who was planning to run against Brownback but just "suddenly" pulled out. "Still, Democratic leaders had touted him as the party's best chance to beat Republican U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback in next year's gubernatorial election." Democratic leaders had touted him, but constituents were just not interested. I wonder if they were influenced by this: "Wiggans is a native Kansan who returned to the state a year ago after a career in the pharmaceutical industry. His background as an entrepreneur and his personal wealth immediately were attractive to the state's minority party."
The Rude Pundit knows that Bernie Sanders is what a real liberal sounds like, because Bernie stood up and told the truth in the Senate - that we don't need the health insurance industry and that they shouldn't get a thing from the health care reform bill. And that the Senate has no plans to pass a good bill. I guess that's right, because Rahm is crowing that he has squashed all the liberals and doesn't have to worry about them anymore.
Caregiver's Resume is just a little reminder of how quickly everything can change, and how little support our society is prepared to supply. As Tata says over at Brilliant at Breakfast, "As long as health care is a shell game with clear financial winners and broken losers, catastrophic illness or injury anywhere around us threatens each of us and there's no protecting ourselves from it. We think we can by tut-tutting when our cousin smokes or when Uncle orders a steak or when Mama pours herself a scotch, but clucking doesn't help. Clicking your seat belt won't prevent the semi from missing the exit ramp. Some suffering is random; it is without meaning and that's all there is to it. The best we can do is provide health care for all people so the suffering doesn't spread. And when suffering does spread, it is the duty of an enlightened society to refuse to make it worse."
Ripley wants to ask our representatives, "Who matters to you? May we see the list? [...] It's a rather simple question to answer, really. There's something like 320 million people in the United States and, obviously, most of us don't matter to the folks in D.C. Frankly, I can't imagine there are more than a few thousand people whose welfare, health and/or families actually hold any meaning to the folks in our government. So, why can't we see the list?"
Yeah, yeah, I've heard all this before, but without an enforcement mechanism to make the insurance companies do the things the bill says they are supposed to do, with real threats of real punishments if they do the things they are not supposed to do, the only thing the bill really does is force Americans to be a captive market to a bunch of thieves. Really. And if you aren't willing to fight to make this bill better by, at the very least, explaining why it is actually a bad bill and insisting that it be made better, your "realistic" approach is just so much empty self-righteousness. Why, yes, I do tell people to call their representatives and write to the newspapers and complain to television news shows, but unless the complaints from the left (as opposed to the tea-baggers and birthers) start to be heard, it will make no difference - and so far, I'm not hearing any concrete proposals for a strategy to make the bill better from the people who think I should tone it down - I'm still just being told, mainly, to STFU. At the moment, the largest health insurance boondoggle in history is on the table, and you want me to calm down? This bill, as currently proposed, should not pass. It shouldn't. Instead of yelling at me, you should be yelling at some Senators yourself and tell them that if they can't get rid of the crap in it and give the good parts some real teeth, they should not vote for it. There is no reason why, if the Brits can give everyone free healthcare at a cost of $2992 per person a year, the United States can't do the same even for $7290 per person a year. We have the money for war, so why not for health care? Just don't tell me to support this giant kick-back scheme. We want better health care, not more executive compensation for insurance honchos.
Guess What? Casual Sex Won't Make You Go Insane. [...] Last week, for example, researchers from the University of Minnesota announced the findings of a study looking at the effect of casual sex on young adults. After studying 1,311 sexually active 18- to 24-year-olds, researchers were somewhat surprised to discover that, "young adults engaging in casual sexual encounters do not appear to be at increased risk for harmful psychological outcomes as compared to sexually active young adults in more committed relationships." And back in 2007, another study at the same institution found that despite what many people believe, non-marital sex doesn't negatively affect a teen's mental health or make a young person more prone to depression.
I'm really not sure what to do about this. The new owners of Haloscan seem to have come up with a fool-proof plan to totally piss me off. Apparently, this is so I can have all the "exciting" features I hate in other commenting systems. They want me to pay them for the elimination of the things I liked about Haloscan. I mean, there isn't even a field for your homepage URL, which means I can't go look at a commenter's blog easily - I guess they want to reduce, rather than aid, communication It's not that they're asking for much money, true, but it's the principle: A sudden announcement that if I don't give them money it's all over between us. They say they are giving me a whole two weeks to make the decision, but they don't let me see anything but their announcement when I log into the management page to try do things (like delete spam). Or I can terminate my account and "export" all my comments to another system, but as near as I can tell from the discussion thread, that just means pulling it all out to save in a single document on my hard drive. And you can try using their exciting new commenting system right there on the blog, and it is apparently broken. I would think they'd have fixed that before inviting us to buy it from them. I seem to recall back in the dark ages that there was another commenting system around that I liked for the same sort of simplicity as Haloscan, but I liked Haloscan more. Anyone have any suggestions for what to switch to? (Remember, the comment threads themselves can't appear on my own pages, because there's no place for them, and I have to be able to patch the code in by hand.)
Let's all phone my Congressman and ask him whether the bill does any of the things that reduce rising premiums. Is there a cap on premiums? A rate freeze? Competition from a solid public option available to all? A limit on executive compensation? Is there, in fact, any reason to think the bill will do anything to keep premiums from rising? Oh, there isn't?
David Axelrod thinks it's insane to want a better bill. Strangely, Peggy Noonan seems to get it better than Axelrod does: "Peggy Noonan, the columnist and former Reagan speechwriter, told Axelrod: 'On the issue of health care, you are losing the left, you are losing the right, you are losing the center. That looks to me like a political disaster.'" Y'think? Via Atrios, who also linked to this astute post from Aimai on the White House's crap negotiating skills - what they did, versus what they should have done if they wanted to pass a bill.
You're gonna love this little honey in Obama's mortgage plan: "In the fine print of the form homeowners fill out to apply for Obama's program, which lowers monthly payments for three months while the lender decides whether to provide permanent relief, borrowers must waive important notification rights. This clause allows banks to reject borrowers without any written notification and move straight to auctioning off their homes without any warning."
From cgey in comments:: "Damn, this bill sucks so bad it has a Schwarzchild radius, if such measures are needed by its apologists. And let's not forget that the insurance companies have no enforcement mechanism whatsoever to keep them honest or non-mercenary, but somehow the IRS becomes the health insurance enforcer for the entire country. Dammit, it's as if somebody *wanted* to revive the militia movement, from Obama gun-confiscation disinfo to this...."
"The John Birch Society to Co-Sponsor CPAC." They were known, not that long ago, as being a far right as you could go without wearing either a hooded sheet or a swastika. Now they are "mainstream". Ho ho ho.
"Gaps found in young people's sex knowledge [...] 'Abstinence-only curriculums have gone explicitly out of their way to teach misconceptions about contraception,' she said. 'This generation of 20-somethings have missed many opportunities to get medically accurate and correct information.'"
You're about to lose more money to the freeloading rich - that is, the useless children of the dead rich. But remember: Estate taxes aren't just there to collect money, they are also there to keep the immorally rich from becoming so rich they can take over the government. Whoops, too late!
If I had slept through the last eighteen months and woke up this morning and you had told me that it's 2009 and we have a new President who:
a) not only refuses to prosecute known war criminals and torturers, but whose DoJ files legal briefs to stop all inquiries in the matter, AND promises to keep 'terrorist' defendants locked up no matter the results of their 'trials' (including Bush's kangaroo military commissions)
b) escalated the war in Afghanistan while continuing to occupy Iraq
c) Let Republicans, right-leaning Democrats, and the Pentagon set the agenda for his four-year term
d) promised health care reform, but only offered a larger version of the incestuous insurance company/government circle-jerk enacted in Massachusetts
e) fired minor government employees at the behest of Glenn Beck
f) gave numerous other gifts to the Right and corporations, while slapping the liberals in the face at every opportunity
I would have thought 'Well, maybe President Romney will only last one term.'
I keep links to The Constitution and The Bill of Rights on the sidebar because I hope people will read them and remember that they define the purpose and fundamental charter of The United States of America. And that the name for that is "liberal government". If you don't believe in liberal government, you don't believe in the United States of America. You're not a "moderate" or "centrist" if you oppose liberal government, you're not even remotely close to the center of the American political spectrum.
In terms of the spectrum of American policy - that is, what is within the framework of the Constitution - you don't get to call your politics "moderate" just because you don't wear a white hood and burn crosses on people's lawns. But that, apparently, is what most of the Villagers think a "moderate" is. The fact that Obama is only quietly dismissive of liberals and liberal policy is supposed to mean he's "moderate" - that is, he has moderate language compared to, say, Rush Limbaugh and the Republican leadership. He isn't seething with obvious hatred. He just doesn't really care that much. And he knows better than to shout at the top of his lungs that he is killing liberal government while he still has the bloody knife in his hands.
It is now abundantly clear that Obama wants "government by, for, and of the people" no more than George W. Bush did. He does not want democracy - he has actively opposed allowing Americans to get what they need and what they voted for.
And what did they vote for? They voted for a candidate who they were told by the captured media was a socialist. Many of them actually believed that, and others believed it was mere hyperbole for describing some kind of deep-rooted liberal, but what they didn't believe is that they were voting for a conservative who worked for the robber barons and wanted to impoverish what we call "the middle-class" - that is, the working classes
As I have tried to remind you, Obama never intended to pass a public option. He may use Lieberman for cover, but this was Obama's plan all along. That's because Mr. "No Drama" was more concerned with preventing the insurance companies from running ads calling him names than he was with securing decent health coverage for Americans. It was just a bargaining chip he intended to throw away. And that puts him far to the right of the American people. Do not tell me that just because he has gotten away with this so far, this proves that the American people are "moderate". The American people are not "moderate" in Village terms, they are moderate in American terms, which means they are not insane enough to want to be, as so many smart people have noted, forced to buy lousy insurance they can't afford. And once they realize that this is what Obama is forcing on them, they will hate him even more than they hated George W. Bush.
Here's a clue: One reason commercial insurance mandates work in the few countries that have them (although at far greater expense than the other countries that don't have them) is that in all of those countries, health insurance is non-profit. It has to be. That's the law. Oh, and they have to deliver, too.
That is not the situation we now have in the United States. We have absolutely predatory insurers who jack up prices to make immoral profit margins and then don't deliver as promised. And Obama has no intention of changing that.
To add insult to injury, a lot of the people who want to hurry up and pass this bill feel that way because there is some small portion of the bill that positively affects them, and they want it as fast as they can get it. And I certainly understand their feeling that way - and I would sympathize, if hurrying up and passing this bill would actually get it for them.
But take another look, because those parts of the bill don't even kick in any time soon. We're still in hurry-up-and-wait mode - force the bill through now, then sit on our hands and wait out a couple of elections before anyone has to enforce the thing.
So what is the point? There's no law that says the bill has to be passed now and then we don't get anything for several years. We could just as easily decide to slow down, take the time to re-write the bill to be a better one, and then pass it next year to come into effect shortly thereafter.
Yes, we could do that, if the point of this was to get good health care for the people of the United States, rather than just to have a fake political "win" on Obama's ledger that won't go into effect until after those elections have gone by without people realizing what's been done to them.
Total spending on health care, per person, 2007: United States: $7290 Switzerland: $4417 France: $3601 United Kingdom: $2992 Average of OECD developed nations: $2964 Italy: $2686 Japan: $2581
And you are paying more in taxes to maintain our commercialized health care system than Brits pay for a fully socialized health care system that is free at the point of use.
That is, I pay less in taxes, and no one sends me a bill.
Full coverage for necessary treatment.
No pleading with insurance companies.
No denial of claims.
No co-pays.
No bill.
Oh, and you know what else? A pre-existing condition doesn't mean I get less coverage, it means I get more.
What is Obama offering in exchange for not getting any of that?
There you have it. Everyone knows that liberals must lose, so down goes the public option and the Medicare Buy-in. The question remains whether King Joseph will allow the government to help older people with long term care needs or any of the other things that anyone could possibly construe as liberal policies.
I think we have a way to go before this bill is bad enough for him and his cronies to allow the Democrats to commit political suicide with it.
Now that one senator has the power to torpedo the bill, a few more will get some ideas. And demand things. And it will get worse and worse until it is the Dem Suicide Act of 2010, if it isn't already.
And, though no one is explicitly saying so, it turns out that the best way to get any kind of reasonable healthcare reform would have been to demand a British-style National Health Service and declare even single-payer an unacceptablecompromise.
Thanks to Lambert for supplying a quote in defense of my reference to Obama's "far-right royalist policies":
The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age - other people's money - these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in. ...
Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.
An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.
The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.
Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.
Of course, that was back in the days when the royalists did concede that "political freedom was the business of the government" and did grant "that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote." Things are worse, now. It would be more accurate to say:
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we know they already have.
I found this neat graphic over at 
And except for updating the 
