Month: February 2009

Op-Edder In Chief

by dday

Yesterday, Chris Bowers asked: “Which side is Obama on?” I don’t know if he’ll think the President’s op-ed in the Washington Post will clarify things, but I think it’s pretty decent.

What Americans expect from Washington is action that matches the urgency they feel in their daily lives — action that’s swift, bold and wise enough for us to climb out of this crisis.

Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes. And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.

That’s why I feel such a sense of urgency about the recovery plan before Congress. With it, we will create or save more than 3 million jobs over the next two years, provide immediate tax relief to 95 percent of American workers, ignite spending by businesses and consumers alike, and take steps to strengthen our country for years to come.

This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending — it’s a strategy for America’s long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, health care and education. And it’s a strategy that will be implemented with unprecedented transparency and accountability, so Americans know where their tax dollars are going and how they are being spent.

In recent days, there have been misguided criticisms of this plan that echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis — the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures; that we can ignore fundamental challenges such as energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change. They know that we have tried it those ways for too long. And because we have, our health-care costs still rise faster than inflation. Our dependence on foreign oil still threatens our economy and our security. Our children still study in schools that put them at a disadvantage. We’ve seen the tragic consequences when our bridges crumble and our levees fail.

Much of this reads like a speech on the stump – a speech HE OUGHT TO GIVE, by the way, and as soon as possible, and every day until the bill passes, not in Washington but on a barnstorming tour around the country. The media likes pictures to go with the words, and a half-hour of speechifying mean a half-hour less of Pat Buchanan and Bill Bennett. (This is actually kind of starting, by the way – Joe Biden is standing out in front of a train station in Maryland this morning.) As Chuck Todd said yesterday, Democrats feel “that basically Matt Drudge has been the managing editor for deciding which part of the stimulus package gets highlighted”, and that’s basically true except for the “Democrats feel” part. They are gunning for the young President using the familiar “build-him-up-to-tear-him-down” narrative. It’s all a game to them, and the only course of action is to go fully around the filter, taking the message directly to the people, and making the argument.

Obama’s pretty clear on what he considers a priority in the bill.

Now is the time to protect health insurance for the more than 8 million Americans at risk of losing their coverage and to computerize the health-care records of every American within five years, saving billions of dollars and countless lives in the process.

Now is the time to save billions by making 2 million homes and 75 percent of federal buildings more energy-efficient, and to double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy within three years.

Now is the time to give our children every advantage they need to compete by upgrading 10,000 schools with state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries and labs; by training our teachers in math and science; and by bringing the dream of a college education within reach for millions of Americans.

And now is the time to create the jobs that remake America for the 21st century by rebuilding aging roads, bridges and levees; designing a smart electrical grid; and connecting every corner of the country to the information superhighway.

That makes up the core and well over 80% of the plan, designed to create many jobs across sectors, across demographics and throughout the economy, because the current recession is similarly systemic and broad. It’s not perfect and ought to be improved – some of the Senate amendments have been atrocious, there isn’t nearly enough for transit (despite the Biden train-stop appearance) and way too much for roads and cars, and the pre-compromised business tax cuts aren’t worth being in here. I’m worried that the final bill will be too small, and the axis of Nelson and Collins, who think they’re writing the bill now, need to be fought. But if these core principles are preserved, we have a start. It’s certainly a more rational piece of legislation than the flailing Republicans, now decrying things they’ve previously voted for, could ever muster in eight years.

Obama’s in the arena. More Democrats need to join him, for this reason if nothing else: If they allow the recovery to be hijacked and rendered ineffective, their political futures are bleak.

…also, it appears Obama wants the bill to remain the same size or grow:

Collins, who said she preferred a stimulus package totaling about $650
billion, said Obama made a “very strong pitch to have a bill that is
considerably bigger than what I might like and argued that the economy
is sufficiently troubled that legislation has to be large enough to
have the kind of impact that we all want.” She said she is “committed
to trying to get to a yes vote.”

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Can U Spell “Freudian Slip?”

by tristero

David S. Broder’s unconscious is raging:

For now, however, the Daschle fiasco is the worst embarrassment Obama has suffered since winning the election.

Dear Mr. Broder:

I really don’t think Barack Obama is embarrassed he beat that damn fool McCain and the ignorant, corrupt rightwing lunatic who ran with him. I think he’d be embarrassed if he hadn’t. As would most of the country.

Why do you think Obama should?

Love,

tristero

Blogging The Origin: First Full Rehearsal

by tristero

It’s been busy up here in Oswego, NY as we prepare for the premiere of The Origin , my new piece about Charles Darwin. I don’t have much time right now – I’m teaching four classes today, then have meetings with Bill Morrison, the filmmaker, and Julie Pretzat, the conductor, then a dress rehearsal in the evening – but I did want to post a couple of quick and dirty pictures from my iPhone for you from the first full rehearsal of the entire ensemble. There are so many performers – close to 200, I believe – I couldn’t get them all in one shot! But here’s at least a bit of the orchestra and chorus:

And here’s a quick pic of the awesomely great Balkan music ensemble KITKA rehearsing “The Voyage of the Beagle.”

It’s going to be an amazing performance.

No Need For Mittens

by digby

Please. No More.

Via Avedon

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Making The Argument

by dday

I can’t argue at all with Digby’s post below, and I think Michael Hirsh nailed the dynamic in Washington right now better than anyone.

It seems to me that the Obama team let their foot off of the accelerator. There was a lot of talk during the transition about how economists and elites of all political ideologies knew something major had to be done, and they must have thought they would just coast to a quick victory on this plan. But that’s not what’s happening, as the conservative noise machine forced an argument about small particulars rather than the need to have a massive job creation program as soon as possible to stave off disaster. The bill was pre-compromised and nothing like a Roosevelt-era New Deal but it would be enough to spur job creation, save a lot more jobs that would be eliminated, and face down the abyss of massive job loss and a deflationary spiral. And while ultimately, Republicans may “lose” in that something will be enacted, they will have won because they will preserve the fundamental argument that government spending is negative and suspicious while tax cuts are always positive and righteous. Their goal is to muck up the bill enough to discredit it and make it functionally inoperable, purely for reasons of party and not country.

Of course, at some level, why would Republicans be trying to drive the country off a cliff? Well, not pretty to say, but they see it in their political interests. Yes, the DeMints and Coburns just don’t believe in government at all or have genuinely held if crankish economic views. But a successful Stimulus Bill would be devastating politically for the Republican party. And they know it. If the GOP successfully bottles this up or kills it with a death of a thousand cuts, Democrats will have a good argument amongst themselves that Republicans were responsible for creating the carnage that followed. But the satisfaction will have to be amongst themselves since as a political matter it will be irrelevant. The public will be entirely within its rights to blame Democrats for any failure of government action that happened while Democrats held the White House and sizable majorities in both houses of Congress.

But there’s also a bigger problem here, one that the Obama Administration may not have seen coming, the underlying narrative to government for the last 30 years, one that has sustained through both Republican and Democratic victories. They aren’t just fighting Republicans, they’re fighting an accumulated history.

The great Rick Perlstein has a fascinating article about the late, lamented liberal Wisconsin Democrat William Proxmire, and his role in “shooting Santa Claus” – basically, planting the seed in our collective noggins that government spending is wasteful and unnecessary, that “in fact it will make things worse.” This flies in the face of all reasonable macroeconomic thought, but talk of “porkbarrel projects” and something called the Golden Fleece Awards brought this contradiction into being, gave it power, and unleashed it on America. It’s a ditch out of which we still cannot pull ourselves.

While re-reading old journalism by Tom Geoghegan, I found myself riveted by a piece of his from the New Republic in November of 1972, the same month George McGovern’s landslide loss to Richard Nixon marked a major lurch in the long, slow slide of liberalism away from ideological hegemony. The piece was a profile of Wisconsin senator William Proxmire. Reading it, I began to reflect whether Bill Proxmire wasn’t the most influential politician of the last 40 years—as the grandfather of the Clinton-era Democratic fetish for fiscal austerity.

Proxmire, who left public service in 1989 and died in 2005, may be best remembered—it’s what I remember—for a monthly publicity stunt called the “Golden Fleece Award,” bestowed upon what he would claim was the month’s most wasteful and ridiculous pockets of government spending. The pundits fell in love with the notion’s good-government pretensions, and for all I know the stunt did the nation some good paring the federal budget of waste, fraud, and abuse.

I suspect, though, the exercise was largely a silly waste of time. One of my professors in graduate school won a Golden Fleece award. Senator Proxmire awarded it for a supposed grant to fund her “mountain climbing hobby.” Actually, she’s one of the nation’s most distinguished anthropologists. She has never climbed a mountain in her life, but used her field work among the Sherpas of Nepal to arrive at some of the most incisive theorizing extant on how societies work. Second-guessing the peer-review process of National Science Foundation grants made for nifty headlines. But it was also numbingly reactionary. According to the Wikipedia entry on Proxmire, the prizes sometimes “went to basic science projects that led to important breakthroughs.” […]

Indeed it’s not hard to imagine how during the high tide of no-one-shoots-santa-claus-ism, things might have become rather decadent. The moral hazard is plain: If spending is good in itself, the door opens to boondoggles. The field was ripe, in other words, for Golden Fleeces.

Enter William Proxmire, filled with liberal good intentions, introducing a new story into the American political culture: We can do better. That the problem wasn’t spending as such, but the misdirection and corruption of spending. Proxmire would quote his hero, the late liberal senator Paul Douglas, chastising their fellow liberals: “Say ‘spend,’ and they salivated.” The source of the quote is significant: Even Paul Douglas,—who, in his days as an an academic economist, had done much the work establishing that it was sound fiscal policy to stimulate consumer spending—understood that things could go too far.

And so we’ve done a complete 180 in this country. Instead of recognizing that federal spending isn’t always virtuous but is part of the overall economy, and vital in an economic trap when consumers and investors aren’t ponying up, we’ve been beaten down by and consumed with far-right rhetoric about pork. So liberals say “we can do better” while conservatives say “we can’t do anything.” And since the middle ground is spending too little to matter, the country suffers in the process.

And, of course—this is where the “Santa Claus” idea transformed itself from a witty little metaphor to literal Republican principle—”conservatives” didn’t cut spending at all. They ballooned it. Here were some contrasts between Reagan and Proxmire: His most useful Golden Fleece awards went to Pentagon expenditures. When Richard Nixon, in the spirit of Republican fiscal responsibility, proposed to lower the federal government’s debt ceiling to $250 billion, Proxmire did him one better, saying it should be only $240 billion. Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush after him, provide the plain contrast: Make the idea of reigning in Pentagon spending anathema, utterly unpatriotic, and ignore responsible debt ceilings altogether. They did away with fiscal responsibility, under cover of the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility, only changing government spending into a channel for private pilfering instead of a function of the public good.

Alack and alas, William Proxmire: like it or not, your “critique of pork barrel Keynesians” greased the skids for this big con. You and your enlightened Dem budget-hawk comrades made the usual mistake: presume good faith on the part of the modern Republican Party. “One of Proxmire’s favorite statistics,” Geoghegan reported in 1972, “compares the rate of return on government investment with the rate of return on private investment. (The public sector falls short by five percentage points.) Rather than spend tax money to reach a social goal, he urges the use of tax policy to the same end.” Sound familiar? Says today’s well-dressed wingnut: tax cuts are the only responsible stimulus. Thought Proxmire: “Neither the Executive nor Congress is organized to make spending ‘cost effective.’ That rankles him.” He convinced a nation. Now, concludes the well-dressed wingnut, government spending is inherently irresponsible. And the well-dressed Democrat half believes he must be right.

This is a story that has put liberals—”responsible” ones, “populist” ones, all of them—into a terrible bind. At this late date, decades since anyone in Washington would admit to believing that any government spending is useful spending, when flesh-and-blood Democrats in the White House like Bill Clinton proved themselves such responsible stewards of the public purse that the federal payroll went down under their watch, Barack Obama wants to do some spending. He wants to do it in a way Proxmire the liberal budget hawk would surely have signed off on: targeted, responsible, scientifically—sophisticated spending, on public-service jobs, spending that starts fast and automatically tapers off as the economy recovers.

And what is his reward? Republicans are able to parade themselves before our supposedly most responsible media commentators and proclaim, “Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.”

You have to do more than win an election. You have to win the argument. You have to tell people why your ideas are more worthy of their vote than the opponent’s ideas. It cannot be style, or charisma, or superior resources. Not if you want big change. As Tom Geoghegan said at a chat with LA-area bloggers yesterday, people don’t like taxes because they don’t feel like they get anything for them in return. Instead of blaming those in government siphoning away that money to the rich, they blame the taxes. It’s natural. And it becomes a terrible conditioned response, one that disrupts and distorts progressive change for our whole society.

We have to, in the short term, turn around the flood of calls and fight for this recovery plan. As the months go on, we have to continue to make the arguments, as we have on the blogosphere for years, to our lawmakers, and press them to make those arguments wherever they go. President Obama started this today with a simple statement.

In the past few days, I’ve heard criticisms that this [stimulus] plan is somehow wanting, and these criticisms echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place, the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems, that we can ignore fundamental challenges like energy independence and the high cost of health care, that we can somehow deal with this in a piecemeal fashion and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject those theories. And so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.

Especially in the midst of this meltdown, we cannot sit back for a moment while the forces conspiring to maintain the failed status quo push ever forward. Forget about campaigning, this is governing. And while different rules apply, one thing is constant – nobody ever won the battle of ideas without speaking up.

Call your Reps.

Marshalling Their Forces

by digby

In case you were wondering if there aren’t enough assholes out there trying to Harry and Louise this stimulus package, here come the fiscal scolds:

As the Senate debates an economic stimulus plan whose price tag could come close to $900 billion, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation — a non-partisan group created to bring awareness to the nation’s rising spending and entitlement costs — is launching an ad campaign to urge the Obama White House and Congress to address long-term fiscal challenges. That campaign began today with a print advertisement in the Washington Post and Roll Call. “Today’s economic crisis is just the tip of the iceberg,” the ad says, with the picture of a gigantic iceberg. “We must also focus on a much larger yet less visible threat: the $56 trillion in liabilities and unfunded retirement and health care obligations (that’s $483,000 per U.S. household), and the dangerous reliance on foreign lenders, that threaten our ship of state.” Tomorrow, Peterson Foundation president Dave Walker — along with Sens. Kent Conrad (D) and George Voinovich (R), and Reps. Frank Wolf (R) and Jim Cooper (D) — will hold a press conference to announce the group’s full plans for a $1 million-plus advertising campaign.

Ah look, and it’s bipartisan too! Isn’t that great?Considering how incredibly effective the Democrats have been with this stimulus package, I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that they’ll be “working with” people who want to destroy whatever tattered safety net we still have. These are the people who really understand the principles of the shock doctrine.
Meanwhile, here’s Michael Hirsh from Newsweek assessing the state of politics two weeks in, and I can’t say that he’s got it wrong, unfortunately:

Barack Obama began making his comeback on Wednesday, apparently aware that he has all but lost control of the agenda in Washington at a time when he simply can’t afford to do so. Obama’s biggest problem isn’t Taxgate—which resulted in the Terrible Tuesday departure of his trusted friend, Tom Daschle, and the defanging of his Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. Nor is the No. 1 problem that the president can’t seem to win a single Republican vote for his stimulus package. That’s a symptom, not a cause. The reason Obama is getting so few votes is that he is no longer setting the terms of the debate over how to save the economy. Instead the Republican Party—the one we thought lost the election—is doing that. And the confusion and delay this is causing could realize Obama’s worst fears, turning “crisis into a catastrophe,” as the president said Wednesday.

Obama’s desire to begin a “post-partisan” era may have backfired. In his eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending. This makes very little economic sense when you are in a major recession that only gets worse day by day. Yes, there are still some very legitimate issues with a bill that’s supposed to be “temporary” and “targeted”—among them, large increases in permanent entitlement spending, and a paucity of tax cuts requiring immediate spending. Even so, Obama has allowed Congress to grow embroiled in nitpicking over efficiency when the central debate should be about whether the package is big enough. When you are dealing with a stimulus of this size, there are going to be wasteful expenditures and boondoggles. There’s no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.

But the public isn’t hearing about that all-important distinction right now. And by the time Obama signs a bill—if he can get one approved—many Americans may have concluded that the GOP is right and that the Democrats have embarked on another spending spree, as if this were just another wearying Washington debate. Judging from his flurry of TV appearances Tuesday night and his remarks on Wednesday, Obama himself seems to have realized belatedly that he needs to stop empathizing and take charge. After trying to put the Daschle imbroglio behind him by frankly acknowledging that he, the president, “screwed up,” Obama reminded everyone of the urgency of the moment. “A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe and guarantee a longer recession, a less robust recovery, and a more uncertain future,” he said at the White House. Obama also sought to regain the moral high ground by announcing he would limit senior executive pay at bailed-out Wall Street firms to $500,000. “We’re taking the air out of the golden parachute,” Obama said, adding that it was only “the beginning of a long term effort to examine the ways in which the means and manner of executive compensation contributed to a reckless culture…” That’s a step in the right direction. But now Obama needs to remind the American people that unless the Republicans get on board, they will bear political responsibility for failing to act in the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Proof that that Team Obama and his party are losing the debate can be found in a new poll out Wednesday. The Rasmussen Reports survey found that, even though Obama still has a very high approval rating, only 37 percent of Americans now favor the stimulus legislation, compared to 45 percent two weeks ago. The results were similar to a recent Gallup survey that found just 38 percent of voters now support the recovery plan. Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate minority leader, hinted Wednesday that Obama has lost control of his own Congress. “The president has tried to set some priorities. Unfortunately, Democrats just keep throwing more money on top of an already-bloated bill,” McConnell said on the floor.

[…]

… An administration that two weeks ago set out to change the world, having claimed the first Democratic majority victory in a presidential race since Jimmy Carter, now looks like it’s engaged in a Pickett’s Charge—without the benefit of being led by Pickett. Meanwhile the Senate Dems took off part of Wednesday for a “retreat.”

This is all too leisurely. Speed is of the essence now. No one understands this better than Geithner, whose formative experience as a young Treasury official in Tokyo came in watching Japanese authorities dither and muddle about for a decade after their own giant bubble of an economy collapsed in 1989. “Monetary policy was very slow to respond,” Geithner told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “Fiscal policy was very tentative and then did a lot of zigzagging.” He’s right. Like Geithner, I was working in Tokyo at the time (as a journalist) and watched every one of those zigs and zags. The answer then, as now, was bold leadership. The Japanese didn’t supply it, and they still haven’t fully recovered. What’s the point of historical lessons if you don’t learn from them?

I think the administration thought they could be mediators between the two parties rather than leaders of the Democratic party. That just won’t work, particularly when the Democrats aren’t very good at battling the Republicans in close combat and the Republicans can make those who stay above the fray seem lightweight and insubstantial, which is what they’ve managed to do. They’ve showed they don’t respect Obama and are unimpressed with his mandate — the administration needs to accept that and strategize with that in mind.

He said today that bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake is not desirable. He should just drop that whole schtick. He can have the cocktail parties and the get togethers and talk to them all he wants. And if they happen to have a good idea (very doubtful) then fine. But they are going to represent their narrow interests because that’s what they believe their constituents want. That’s the way the system works. They aren’t partners, they’re political adversaries and they remain adversaries even when there is an emergency at hand. Accept that and fight it out on the merits

Update: The president uses the bully pulpit and writes an op-ed in Washington Post. Good for him.

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Class Warfare

by digby

Mort Zuckerman just said on MSNBC that they should put an overall cap on all financial firm salaries instead of the top executives because these firms will lose all the important talent who will go with other companies which aren’t regulated (and presumably ruin them too.) What he conveniently neglects to note is that if the “overall cap” is put in place in order to keep these valuable and obscenely overpaid executives on board, the middle and lower paid workers will have to be the ones to take a pay cut. Isn’t that a great idea?

I really don’t think these failed executives are going to find a lot of takers for their dubious talents. The entire economy is severely contracting and I doubt there’s any company out there that is anxious to deal with angry shareholders about hiring some former wall street or banking titan who requires that he be paid millions of dollars each year. But let them have at it. The taxpayers don’t need to be on the hook for their dubious services.

And I would actually bet that there are plenty of talented executives out there who would be happy to take on the job for a half a million dollars a year and shares of the new, revived institution. (Especially if the government guarantees shareholders, in which case we’re all being had.) Some of them might even do it out of patriotic duty — or at least in the knowledge that saving the financial system is imperative if they ever want to make big money in the future. They can’t all be short-sighted, Randian morons.

Can they?

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Shouting Down The Wingnuts

by digby

Wingnut radio has gone completely nuts, apparently, and they have their dittoheads calling the Senate to complain about the recovery plan.

So, because the democrats are now going wobbly, we need to call them and tell them to do their duty. (sigh….)

CAF has made that easy for us:

Progressives need to pick up the phone NOW to counter the onslaught of conservative calls to Congress, and push the Senate to fight for a bold economic recovery bill that creates jobs and counters the recession.

Here are 3 simple steps to guide your calls…

Step 1) Dial 1-866-544-7573. You will be given brief instructions (which you can skip by pressing “1”) then forwarded to the Congressional switchboard operator. Tell the operator which state you’re from, and ask to be connected to one of your senators.

Step 2) Tell Your Senators: Pass a bold economic recovery bill that puts America back to work. Here are some talking points to help guide your call.

* I urge you to pass a big and bold economic recovery bill that puts priority on getting Americans back to work and ending the recession.

* Please resist attempts to weaken the bill with more corporate tax breaks and cuts in public investment.

* My community would benefit greatly from investments in infrastructure, green jobs, education, health care, unemployment assistance and state government aid.

(For more background information and talking points, please click here.)

Step 3) Tell us how your calls went. Report back to us so that we know where we’ve got Senate support and where pressure is still needed.

This is the kind of thing they are doing to get their zombies to march:

U.S. Senator Jim DeMint tells The Brody File that a newly discovered controversial provision in President Obama’s stimulus plan is, “an attack on people of faith” … The Brody File contacted the Senator and he gave us the following response:

“Democrats are looking for every opportunity to purge faith and prayer from the public square. This will empower the ACLU with ambiguous laws that create liability for schools, universities, and student organizations. This is an attack on people of faith and I don’t think Americans will stand for it.” – Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina)

DeMint’s spokesman Wesley Denton says, “This is an ACLU stimulus, because any school that gets funds to upgrade a student center or building where Bible studies or religious meetings may be held will be slapped with a lawsuit. This bill declares a war on prayer at college campuses in this country. Students have [a] constitutional right to use public facilities regardless of their religious views, and President Obama needs to step in to ask Sen. Reid and Speaker Pelosi to stop this attack on students of faith.”

That is a complete lie, of course, which Kyle at Right Wing Watch explains at the link.

One of the things I’ve hammered over the past few years in my writing about how the right wing works, it the fact that they rarely go for broke with one big coordinated hissy fit (although they do that at times.) It’s more like the death of thousand small hissy fits. They build an “impression” of corruption, incompetence, weakness etc over time with many small and medium sized “controversies”. By now, the villagers (and probably many in the public) are so attuned to this that they just absorb the impression and regurgitate it without even knowing they are doing it.

Witness Ms MoDo today, writing a column that was so predictable I’m sorry there isn’t a Dowd book in Vegas so I could get rich:

Mr. Obama’s errors on the helter-skelter stimulus package were also self-induced. He should put down those Lincoln books and order “Dave” from Netflix.

When Kevin Kline becomes an accidental president, he summons his personal accountant, Murray Blum, to the White House to cut millions in silly programs out of the federal budget so he can give money to the homeless.

“Who does these books?” Blum says with disgust, red-penciling an ad campaign to boost consumers’ confidence in cars they’d already bought. “If I ran my office this way, I’d be out of business.”

Mr. Obama should have taken a red pencil to the $819 billion stimulus bill and slashed all the provisions that looked like caricatures of Democratic drunken-sailor spending.

As Senator Kit Bond, a Republican, put it, there were so many good targets that he felt “like a mosquito in a nudist colony.” He was especially worried about the provision requiring the steel and iron for infrastructure construction to be American-made, and by the time the chastened president talked to Chris Wallace on Fox Tuesday, he agreed that “we can’t send a protectionist message.”

Mr. Obama protested to Brian Williams that the programs denounced as “wasteful” by Republicans “amount to less than 1 percent of the entire package.” All the more reason to cut them and create a lean, clean bill tailored to creating jobs.

Somebody needs to tell Dowd that Dave is a fantasy and so are Republican talking points. (Do read the entire column to see the sheer scope of her incoherence. By the end, she seems to be blaming Obama for executive jets because he hired Tom Daschle.)

Take a few minutes and call your senators, even the liberals, and tell them that you want them to vote for the stimulus. I can’t believe we have to whip a Democratic senate with 58 goddamned votes, but apparently we do.

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No, No, NO!

by digby

I wrote the other night about that Blue Dog ass Jim Cooper and how he stuck the shiv into Obama and the stimulus. And I noted this important piece by Mike Lux about Cooper’s important role in the tanking of the Clinton health care plan in 1994.

Well, guess what? He’s being discussed as the replacement for Daschle at HHS, which is only slightly less ludicrous than the silly idea of Newt Gingrich in the job.

Jim Cooper is an enemy of universal health care. He will, howver, work to ensure that the insurance industry and the Big Pharma gets more of your tax dollars.

Here’s the history:

I was part of the Clinton White House team on the health care reform issue in 1993/94, and no Democrat did more to destroy our chances in that fight than Jim Cooper. We had laid down a marker very early that we thought universal coverage was the most essential element to getting a good package, saying we were to happy to negotiate over the details but that universality was our bottom line.

Cooper, a leader of conservative Dems on the health care issue, instead of working with us, came out early and said universality was unimportant, and came out with a bill that did almost nothing in terms of covering the uninsured. He quickly became the leading spokesman on the Dem side for the insurance industry position, and undercut us at every possible opportunity, basically ending any hopes we had for a unified Democratic Party position. I was never so delighted to see a Democrat lose as when he went down in the 1994 GOP tide.

Here’s a 1994 article from the great chronicler of the media during the Clinton years, Trudy Lieberman, on how Cooper operated:

In early October Representative Jim Cooper of Tennessee, the conservative Democrats’ guru on health care reform, called a press conference to announce he was throwing his version of reform into the congressional mix. That event should not have been particularly newsworthy since the year before Cooper had introduced similar legislation, which resulted in only a few brief press references.

But this time Cooper was a more clever marketer, and he positioned his plan as a middle-of-the-road approach with bipartisan appeal. At the press conference, he distributed a chart that showed his bill — a laissez faire version of managed competition — smack in the middle of all the proposals on the table. Cooper’s bill does not require employers to purchase insurance for their workers; it doesn’t require individuals to buy insurance; nor does it establish a mechanism (aside from market competition) for cost control.

“The administration started with managed competition and went to the left. The Republicans took managed competition and went to the right. Our bill is squarely in the middle and is the only one with significant bipartisan support,” Cooper told reporters. “It is the first health reform approach since Harry Truman to get major Democrat and Republican support,” an exaggeration that went unchallenged. In 1973, Republicans supported federal legislation that propelled health maintenance organizations into national prominence; and in 1983, Reagan Republicans were the driving force behind major changes in the way Medicare pays hospitals, a significant health reform that has since been copied by other countries.

Reporters also received a statement from The Bipartisan Group on Health Reform which asserted that “with over forty co-sponsors … this bipartisan effort stands to be a major force in developing legislation that can be passed and signed into law during the 103rd Congress.” Even with a handful of Republicans on board (19 of the 176 House members), Cooper’s proposal had far fewer co-sponsors (48 when it was introduced) than other bills, including the president’s with 99, the plan pushed by House Republicans with 138, and the one supported by advocates of a Canadian-type system with 91.

The number of co-sponsors, however, is not necessarily indicative of support, since many co-sponsors of Cooper’s bill, as well as those who have endorsed rival proposals, have attached their names to more than one plan.

As for support from the public, the polls showed that ordinary people knew little or nothing about any proposal, including the Cooper brand of managed competition.

Cooper revealed his marketing plan to Roll Call, the newspaper that covers Congress. He explained that one could try to push a bill through the committee route, a perilous strategy for the administration (and for him as well) since the leadership of the major subcommittees in the House with jurisdiction over health care (Henry Waxman and Fortney Stark, both California Democrats) has expressed support for a single-payer, Canadian-type system. Or one could follow what he called a strategy of “preemptive compromise,” in which a bill with a groundswell of support or a “supermajority,” as he put it, could be positioned as the ultimate agreement. Such a bill could then be substituted on the House floor for a piece of legislation that had gone the committee route. The finer points of this strategy leaked out after a small group of congressmen attended a meeting sponsored by Cooper and Senator John Chafee in late October. Members who were there told The Washington Post that a “goal was to ‘control the debate’ on health care by positioning themselves in the ‘mainstream’ or ‘centrist’ position” and become a force with which the Clintons had to negotiate.

To succeed, Cooper and his allies needed help from the press to give their bill an aura of strong support, generate more co-sponsors, and drum up the public backing the bill sorely lacked. A review of media stories between October and early January shows that the press played right into Cooper’s hands. Looking for something new and dramatic to say in the weeks following the president’s late-September speech on health care reform, the media seized on the language in the Cooper press releases and elevated Cooper’s vision, in the words of Newsweek, to the very “model” of compromise. In a piece decidedly negative toward “Big Sister” Hillary Clinton’s approach and positive toward Cooper’s, Newsweek pronounced the Cooper bill “less bureaucratically cumbersome,” “fiscally more realistic,” and “probably closer to the congressional center than the Clinton plan.”

Liberally donating space to Cooper’s self-serving quotes and sometimes making pronouncements of their own, a number of other influential news organizations helped promote Cooper’s grand compromise. Shortly after the press conference, The Washington Times reported that the Cooper bill is “occupying the political center in the forthcoming battle.”

ABC Nightly, News pronounced the plan “serious and credible.” The Los Angeles Times called it “politically palatable,” and U.S. News & World Report reported in its Washington Whispers column that Cooper’s proposal was “most likely to succeed” because it has “bipartisan middle-of-theroad support” and will cost less — the very points made in the Cooper press materials. The New Republic! flatly endorsed the Cooper plan. The New York Times waited longer than other publications, but it too latched on to the Cooper promotion. In MIDDLE-OF-THE-ROADER RIDES HIGH WITH HIS OWN HEALTH CARE PLAN, published in early January, the Times reported that “a lowly Democrat gains notice with a ‘Clinton lite’ plan,” the catchy phrase Cooper himself coined.

Read on. And keep in mind that this person simply does not believe in universal health care and he is perfectly comfortable undermining his own president without a second thought. He’s already done it to Obama on the stimulus and he will do it again with his very, very clever GOP-style ability to manipulate the press. They need to keep him away from health care.

The country cannot afford another giveaway to Big Insurance and Pharma and desperately needs a complete overhaul of the system in order to get costs into line and get people covered. This recession is going to end up making more than 50 million people without health insurance, very possibly more than that. Many more are terribly underinsured. Obama cannot put some slimy Blue Dog opportunist in charge of it.

Update: Jane Hamsher has more on Cooper’s current reindeer games. He’s quite the operator.

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Better

by dday

This is what needs to be said today, tomorrow, and every 10 minutes in the ear of everyone in Washington until a real and effective jobs bill passes:

In the past few days, I’ve heard criticisms that this [stimulus] plan is somehow wanting, and these criticisms echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place, the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems, that we can ignore fundamental challenges like energy independence and the high cost of health care, that we can somehow deal with this in a piecemeal fashion and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject those theories. And so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.

The collective amnesia on the part of the establishment is astounding, but expected. Winning an election is in many ways the easy part – governing is a daily grind. The zombies will pop up again, spouting neo-Hooverisms and saying bizarre things like “Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job,” maybe the dumbest statement in the past 100 years, particularly from someone who’s spent practically his whole life getting a paycheck from government.

If these right-wing lies aren’t answered forcefully every single day, they become embedded. During the campaign they were rejected but within a matter of weeks they’ve sprouted again. So let’s hear it one more time.

In the past few days, I’ve heard criticisms that this [stimulus] plan is somehow wanting, and these criticisms echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place, the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems, that we can ignore fundamental challenges like energy independence and the high cost of health care, that we can somehow deal with this in a piecemeal fashion and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject those theories. And so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.

More like this, Barack.

…Organizing for America, the new post-campaign outfit, is also re-editing the footage from all the network interviews last night and sending them out directly, with all the good parts of Obama selling the recovery package. People have to be armed with some information before they can go into action – well, at least liberals do. Good move.

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