Month: October 2008

You Have Too Much Health Care

by dday

Last night I said on the radio (you all listened, right?) that Joe Biden’s answer about John McCain’s health care plan should be an ad. Today, it’s an ad:

“The McCain Health Tax” is a good name for it. It’s a $3.6 trillion dollar tax, by the McCain campaign’s own estimates. And the goal of it is to eliminate the employer-based health benefit system, to tax it so much that employers won’t want to provide it anymore.

Now, some might say that is something we ought to do. But it’s replaced with the wilds of the individual health insurance market. Which is prohibitively more expensive than the $5,000 refundable tax credit McCain’s going to offer. Businesses pay less for health care because they pool their employees for a better bargaining position. McCain’s plan is the insurance industry’s version of union-busting.

McCain’s philosophy on health care is that Americans have too much of it, and if they only knew the costs, they would purchase less. So, 47 million luckie-duckies without health insurance, and the other 40 million who are underinsured, take note – John McCain wants you to be more frugal. Comparison shop for that leg surgery. Maybe find a discount MRI. (Not that McCain’s ever done this – he’s been on government-run health care his entire life and hasn’t complained too much about it.)

Until now, I don’t think it’s been clear how truly radical McCain’s health care plan really is. Bush just ignored the problem. McCain wants to actively make it worse.

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Yes, Not The New Yorker

by tristero

I’m sure David Remnick et al thought this was great, a dramatic endorsement of Obama in an intellectually robust language. I don’t, I find it turgid and overwritten, but some of it is ok:

Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.

UPDATE: Contrast this leaden prose with Anne Lamott’s exquisite, perfectly modulated appreciation of Molly Ivins to get a sense of what nonfiction English is capable of. Yes, the subject is very different, but the goal is the same: to persuade an audience of the greatness of the subject’s character. I have no doubt Lamott could make the same points as the “editors” of the New Yorker and easily avoid sounding like some lumbering elephant trumpeting its own importance in the forest.

Regardless, I cannot let the following slide without comment:

There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime…

Sorry, Mr. and Ms. New Yorker, but among people with working brains and souls, there is no – zero, zip, nada – disagreement. It was a screaming yellow bonkers idea. More importantly, it was an insane idea back in ’02 and it was still irredeemably crazy in ’03 when you shamefully endorsed it.

And no, I won’t forget about it. And no, I won’t get over it. Ever.

But look, I know my unrelenting anger at liberal hawks doesn’t matter in the slightest. It is the dead that matter, and the mutilated, and the tortured. And they are all that matter.

So, dammit, the least the New Yorker could do is not try to finesse things. Not “over 4000” American troops as the New Yorker so roundly puts it, but close to 4200 troops have died because of this insane war, a war enabled by the support of folks like The New Yorker’s editor, not to mention the silence of most of the rest of the liberals/moderates cowering in the interstices of the Bush-licking mass media. And not “tens of thousands” Iraqis, but nearly 100,000 confirmed pointless Iraqi deaths, and if you think that’s even close to the real total you’re being unreasonably optimistic. And let’s not forget: While Bush had a few foolish partners in all this murderous stupidity, the blame is all America’s.

It was unimaginable, unspeakable back in ’03? Nonsense. It was easily imagined and many spoke up. In fact, the great majority of the world foresaw this awful tragedy, including millions upon millions of sensible Americans, including – to his everlasting credit – Barack Obama.

But not the New Yorker.

Yes, not the New Yorker, which employs, among others who were so easily fooled, George Packer – a talented reporter but an immature man who was so narcissistic (“Let’s do some good!”), he actually fell for Kanan Makiya’s primo quality bullshit to put “hope before experience” and “liberate” Iraq for democracy. Some fucking liberation for democracy, watching your child get all his limbs blown off by American bombs. As if you actually have to see such horrors, as Packer had to, before you know with perfect assurance they would occur again and again with ghastly, sickening repetition.

Of course, there are others at the magazine, like the indispensable Sy Hersh and the great Jane Mayer, who have done extraordinary work reporting and writing about the Bush catastrophe. However, the liberal hawks at the New Yorker, like other otherwise sensible people who fought with the worst parts of their character and lost, literally have blood on their hands.

An apology, which, I believe Remnick once gave for his own bad judgment, really is pretty meaningless if you then try to perfume the continuing bad judgment of some on your reporters with conciliatory vapors. To assert, “There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime..” is far worse than a grave insult to all those who have died and suffered. It is an ominous warning that the same intellectual and moral mediocrities who initially supported the Bush/Iraq war have, most likely, learned absolutely nothing. This is not “nuance.” This is the intolerable language of moral equivocation; it makes a mockery of the serious discourse to which The New Yorker aspires to contribute. Quite simply, it is shameful.

So, thank you, editors of the New Yorker for endorsing Obama. Now, don’t bother opining on war and peace until you’re prepared to address these solemn issues in the solemn manner they deserve: by placing the horror of the dead and maimed front and center and ignoring the oh so tender feelings of those amongst you who still excuse the carnage.

Special note for Republicans and others with dysfunctional moral compasses: I never needed Kanan Makiya or George Packer to tell me that Saddam Hussein was a vicious dictator who perpetrated dreadful crimes. On the contrary: Both men need to be reminded repeatedly that the murderous, senseless rampage Bush unleashed upon Iraq – a country which never attacked us – was, and is, both uniquely horrific and entirely predictable.

Freedom

by digby

I’m tired and I don’t have the energy to watch the whole debate tonight. I’ll catch it in the morning. But I have to say that this is so perfect, I’m not sure anything else needs to be said:

Palin’s final quote was from Ronald Reagan, warning that without vigilance, “you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” In fact, Reagan was not warning about a general lack of vigilance about freedom, he was warning what would happen if Medicare was enacted.
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The Green Light At The End Of The Tunnel

by dday

I know people are consumed with thinking the progressive window is permanently closed after this bailout plan, but I don’t think that’s the case. First of all it’s good that Democrats are strategizing to try and present an alternative and make noise on the floor, perhaps for the first time ever. I don’t think their alternative was any good, but we are never going to get anywhere unless the Progressive Caucus recognizes that they actually have as much leverage as the Blue Dogs to impact the debate.

Second, 152 members today united to announce steps to save the planet from global warming.

The legislators describe four key goals:

Reduce emissions to avoid dangerous global warming;
Transition America to a clean energy economy;
Recognize and minimize any economic impacts from global warming legislation; and
Aid communities and ecosystems vulnerable to harm from global warming.
These are the necessary principles that should guide any path out of the climate crisis. What makes this letter significant is the strong, specific details endorsed by the 152 signatories. These include the following measures to respect the severity of the danger of rising greenhouse gas emissions:

– “The United States must do its part to keep global temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels.”

– “Total U.S. emissions must be capped by a date certain, decline every year, be reduced to 15% to 20% below current levels in 2020, and fall to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.”

– “A mechanism for periodic scientific review is necessary, and EPA, and other agencies as appropriate, must adjust the regulatory response if the latest science indicates that more reductions are needed.”

– “Cost-containment measures must not break the cap on global warming pollution.”

– “The United States must reengage in the international negotiations to establish binding emissions reductions goals under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change . . . for the United States and other developed nations to achieve combined emissions reductions of at least 25% below 1990 levels by 2020, as called for by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

That’s a big deal, especially because 152 members is a pretty strong initial caucus. You don’t have to like the bailout package to recognize that it’s significant and vital that we’re finally going to get those renewable production tax credits locked in, saving the wind and solar industries from the very real possibility of ruin. This is the first time all year, maybe this whole Congressional session, that the Congress has put money toward a job-creation engine and the reindustrialization of America, which at the root is the only way we’re ever going to break free of this fundamental economic crisis. And they used additional taxes on oil companies to pay for it. Pelosi and the Democrats have been trying to put this into law for two years. This is significant but insufficient, and yet this letter from House Dems makes me hopeful that they recognize the need for a green economy as an economic engine as well as a way to fight global climate change.

We had the first carbon-trading auction in the nation this week, raising $40 million dollars for Northeastern states. And that money will be plowed directly into renewables and energy efficiency. If this was adopted on the national level it would be a tremendous economic opportunity and it would be paid for 100% by industry. And the House letter is more far-reaching.

The signatories call for “complementary policies” like “smart growth measures, green building policies, and electricity sector efficiency policies.” They also agree that a national system should not preempt state efforts: “Federal global warming requirements must be a floor, not a ceiling, on states’ ability to protect their citizens’ health and state resources.”

The signatories also explain that polluter payments must go into building a green recovery, by calling for strong limits to free allowances, if any are made. Instead, the funds derived from auction pollution permits should go to:

— Clean energy and efficiency measures

– Low and moderate-income households

– Workforce development

– State and local adaptation and response to “more severe wildfires, intensified droughts, increased water scarcity, sea level rise, floods, hurricanes, melting permafrost, and agricultural and public health impacts”

– Assistance for developing countries

– Survival of wildlife and natural ecosystems

The bailout sucks, but it’s has the potential to spur development in the green space like never before. This is a tangible answer to our economic problems. If you combine that with a responsible end to the war in Iraq, maybe you have something positive out of this.

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Bright Side Of The Apocalypse

by digby

I do not necessarily endorse this view because my crystal ball is in the shop. But I’m throwing it out here because it’s a little bit different than anything I’ve read recently in that it says that as bad as the financial crisis is, it’s not actually … that bad:

Yes, the current crisis signals an end to the remarkable free ride we Americans have had for decades, when we financed our rampant, zero-savings consumerism with boatloads of borrowed investment money from abroad. “I think this is the end of that era of a 6 to 7 percent current-account deficit,” says Rogoff. “The financial sector was key to that dynamic. For sure it’s going to drop to half that level. [The current-account deficit] might even go back to 1 percent.”

So consumption will decline. There will be an economic slowdown of unknown severity. But overall that’s a healthy deflation of an economic bubble that the subprime disaster was only a symptom of: as a country, we need to stop buying things we can’t afford. And Washington—the next president and Congress—will have to make some very responsible choices about how to regulate the new landscape that has emerged on Wall Street without overdoing it (the impulse will be to place a regulatory chokehold on banking since it’s now clear to everyone that underregulation got us into this mess). ” There’s no doubt that the U.S. financial model has been undermined,” says Rogoff. “The question is, are we going to come up with better regulation and produce an American finance 2.0 that’s more robust and better than the first one and keeps the financial sector as the flagship of the American economy? Or we going to regulate it into a coma?”

[…]

When times really get tough, when there are belligerent rising powers or threats, the dollar is still the world’s safe haven because America is still the only reliable great power out there. Set aside for the moment the deeply unpopular invasion of Iraq. Every foreign government knows that America is still the main stabilizer of the international system—American power overlays every region of the planet and supplies the control rods that restrain rogues, hostile states and arms races from East Asia to Latin America, enabling globalization to proceed apace. This status quo is unlikely to change over our lifetimes.

Sure, we’ve suffered a lot of self-inflicted damage over the last eight years. Conan O’Brien didn’t have to explain himself when he joked the other day, after the Dow’s record one-day 778-point drop, that “as a result, President Bush was able to cross off the 10th and final item on his administration’s bucket list.” So devoid of credibility and influence is Bush today that the bailout package seemed to move forward in spite of, rather because of, his support. So, yes, as a country we’ve slowed to a crawl in the great global race. But we’re still lapping everyone else. We’ve got time. And there’s no reason we can’t start to get it right come Jan. 20.

There’s much more and you should read it all. As I said, I’m not endorsing this view, but I think it’s important to hear all voices. The gentleman quoted in the piece, Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff, predicted the financial crisis and so has some credibility. On the other hand, he’s advising John McCain and so he obviously has no common sense. Take it for what it is.

Regardless of the details, many of which I instinctively recoil against, I needed to read something today that wasn’t entirely predicated on the notion that we are all doomed. Tomorrow, I’ll be ready to face the apocalypse once again.

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Debate Thread

by dday

I don’t think Sarah Palin intentionally flubbed her pre-debate interviews to lower expectations as much as possible, but that has been the practical effect. And the Obama campaign is trying to dial it back and restore her reputation as an excellent debater, to balance things out.

After repeatedly calling Palin first “an extremely good debater,” then a “great” one, at the end he ramped it up to “Gov. Palin is one of the best debaters in American politics,” at which point the press gaggle interrupted him with its laughter.

“No, she is! Her 2006 debate, she knew where she wanted to take every question, and so I think she’ll be relentlessly on message tonight…”

The interviews were conducted on the turf of the interviewer. The debate will be on Palin’s turf. It’s quite structured, with little time for any back-and-forth between the candidates, so there’s not much chance of going off the prepared script, which will be filled with the type of zingers she delivered very well in St. Paul. And the McCain campaign has seemed to figure out that Palin’s only way through this is to attack her opponent and take the focus off of her positions and knowledge and onto Biden’s.

But more than all of this, Atrios described what is most likely to come out of tonight, and certainly what I’ll be looking for:

I’m guessing they twist something – anything – Biden says into being an attack on Palin’s children/family somehow.

Get ready! The Wahmbulance is coming to town.

This doesn’t have to be picked up by the immediate snap polls – Democrats seem to have an advantage on those – but afterwards, when it’ll be relentlessly hyped by Drudge and Rush and the noise machine. Maybe Lynne Cheney will reprise her role and call Joe Biden “a baaaad man!”

The media is telegraphing this one. They are ready for any slight – Tweety and Kit Seelye obsessed over whether Biden will help Palin with her chair despite the fact that they’ll be at podiums. And the culture of victimhood and self-pity on the right will certainly make it so that their ears will be pricked for anything they can twist into an insult. I’m fully expecting it.

And though the media of late has been calling the Republicans on their B.S. and has really internalized the plain truth that McCain has run a dirty, dishonest and dishonorable campaign, this race is getting a bit out of hand, maybe too much for their tastes:

Much of the news media is reporting that Barack Obama is pulling away from John McCain … and suggesting that, because of low expectations, Sarah Palin need only get through tonight’s debate without accidentally endorsing Obama in order to be successful. Put the two together, and it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the media is more than ready to push a McCain-Palin “comeback” narrative — and, consciously or not, to help that comeback along.

Don’t believe that kind of thing happens? Here’s Brian Williams and Howard Fineman, in a September 21, 2000 exchange:

HOWARD FINEMAN: The media pendulum swings, as you were pointing out before, Brian. Bill Clinton can resurface in this campaign in a way that might not necessarily help Al Gore. And Al Gore himself has a tendency to begin – when he’s ahead especially I think – talking down to the country like he’s the kindergarten teacher talking to the class. I think all those factors are at play right now as Bush has really had probably the best week he’s had since his convention speech. And Gore has had his worst.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Howard, I don’t know of any kind of conspiratorial trilateral commission-like council meetings in the news media. But you bring up an interesting point. And boy, it does seem true over the years that the news media almost reserve the right to build up and tear down and change their minds and like an underdog. What’s that about?

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, what it’s about is the relentless search for news and the relentless search for friction in the story. I don’t think the media was going to allow just by its nature the next seven weeks and the last seven or eight weeks of the campaign to be all about Al Gore’s relentless triumphant march to the presidency.

We want a race I suppose. If we have a bias of any kind, it’s that we like to see a contest, and we like to see it down the end if we can. And I think that’s partly the psychology at play here.

Anyway, I’ll be trying to sort all of this out tonight with Brad Friedman of BradBlog, who’s guest-hosting a special “VP Debate” edition of the Mike Malloy Show immediately following the Biden-Palin matchup. Also appearing:

MARCY WHEELER of Emptywheel
MARC “ARMED LIBERAL” DANZIGER of Winds Of Change
PAMELA LEAVEY of The Democratic Daily, and;
PATRICK FREY of Patterico

Check your local listings for radio stations in your area. You can also find a live stream here.

Or, just chat about the debate here.

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Masterdebating

by digby

I am out tonight and unable to watch the debate in real time so I’ll watch it later tonight and write about it then. As he briefly mentioned yesterday, Dday will be talking about it on the radio starting at 6pm with Brad Friedman who is filling in for Mike Malloy. You can find your local listing here. More about the panel, here.

Meanwhile, if you’d like some really good news, read this post from Howie about the congressional outlook for November. I’m starting to allow myself to get excited.

And tonight’s drinking game will be one drink for every time Sarah says “ya know.” Be sure you have a designated driver…

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Collateral Damage

by digby

Sigh:

A New York City police lieutenant who gave the order to fire a Taser stun gun at a man who then fell to his death in Brooklyn committed suicide at Floyd Bennett Field early on Thursday, law enforcement officials said. The lieutenant, Michael W. Pigott, a 21-year veteran of the force, had been placed on modified assignment without his gun and badge after he gave the order to a sergeant to fire the Taser at a Bedford-Stuyvesant man, Iman Morales.

I wrote about that horrible event the other day, here.

I have no idea why this police officer killed himself. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he just temporarily lost his perspective about the lethality of the taser because it’s so commonly used in those situations. Obviously, it was ridiculous to taser someone teetering on a ledge, but you could imagine that if you think of tasers as being cojpoletely benign that you might just automatically issue a stupid order before you thought through the ramifications.

Tasers are horrible, pain inducing weapons which police now use as casually as handcuffs. The result has been a complete loss of common sense policing — as if the taser is a magic tool that solve all sticky problems by making people drop to the ground, screaming in agony without having to personally lay a finger on them. It promotes, shall we say, a certain abstraction. That leads to double tragedies like this. There’s nothing abstract about shooting a mentally ill man full of electricity so he falls to his death.

H/t to Elliot, David and Jane, among others.

Missing Context

by digby

I’m beginning to think that Palin is making a hash out of every answer just to give the media the opportunity to “correct” her with conservative propaganda.

On the Supreme Court business, the gasbag conventional wisdom is that Palin failed to promote the allegedly bedrock view that the courts shouldn’t “make laws from the bench” or feature “activist judges.” But that’s conservative propaganda. They are happy to have the courts make law from the bench as long as it’s a law they want and they certainly have no problem with activist judges as long as they are conservatives.

Their rhetoric stems from backlash against the Warren Court, and is now just an identifying tribal signal. It has no literal meaning. Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman criticizing Palin for being uninformed or politically inept is perfectly legitimate, but to criticize her for failing to properly parrot rightwing cant without mentioning that the cant is complete nonsense doesn’t help us in the long run.

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Oh Geez

by digby

I’m surprised this took so long too.

I think what’s most frightening is that they aren’t just looking for porn actresses to play Palin, but they’re also casting Hillary, Nancy Pelosi, Condi Rice, Michelle Obama, Cindy McCain, Laura Bush and Nancy Reagan. For one film!

The mind reels.

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