Month: July 2009

“Whatever the merits are…”

by dday

For the second day in a row, Chris Matthews ranted about the prospect of a potential public health insurance option covering abortion services, and his lineup of talking heads agreed that this was “the last thing Obama needed” and that Obama was a hypocrite because he met the Pope last week.

MATTHEWS: What do you make of the 19 House Democrats who said there can’t be any abortion funding in this bill? There can’t be any national health insurance payments for abortion. What do you make of that choice? And by the way, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania today voted, yesterday voted with the Republicans to ban any money from this bill that’s supposed to be for national health to go for abortions?

NAVARETTE: It’s the last thing Obama needs. The issue’s complicated and divisive and controversial enough without bringing abortion into it. The American people are giving mixed signals. They say they don’t want to pay for the program but they do want to cut costs, and they want to pay for some kind of reform, but don’t get in the way of my doctor and the tests he might order. So they’re all over the map. Clearly, politicians are trying to be responsive to that. It’s a tough enough issue without trying to bring abortion into it. Obama’s in a tough spot, I don’t think he gets this through.

MATTHEWS: Well, I think he did, I think he will, but he’s gonna deal with this thing. What do you think, Roger, because this could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Because when I see it coming, it came from nowhere. I started reading about it this weekend in the Weekly Standard, and I watched Hatch last night on this show stating that he pushed to ban it. The law says, it has said since the 70s, under a Democratic Congress, no federal money pays for abortions. It has been the law of the land, and now they’re trying to change it.

SIMON: Whatever the merits are, as Ruben said, as you are saying just now, this is just a fight that President Obama does not need. There are other problems with the health care bill. First of all, what is it going to look like, are you going to have a true public option, how are you going to pay for this trillion dollar program. You don’t need to add in a hot-button issue like abortion. To most Americans, abortion is a settled issue.

MATTHEWS: You mean the right to an abortion. But not payment for it.

SIMON: That’s right. Safe, legal and rare, and don’t bother us about it.

MATTHEWS: By the way, the night he tells the Pope, he goes over to see the Pope and says they’re going to reduce the number of abortions, and then that same week he pushes to subsidize abortion? You can’t do that!

SIMON: I think last week is a week the White House would like to have back.

I wonder if Tweety came up with that phrase, “subsidize abortions,” himself, or whether he read it in his beloved Weekly Standard. I expect we’ll hear it a lot in the weeks to come.

And I also want to looks at Roger Simon’s “Whatever the merits are,” which is a classic pundit phrase, where they don’t want to deal with the reality of a situation, so they burrow into the politics. Let me tell you what the “merits” are of including a legal medical service like abortion into a public insurance plan. Actually, let Dana Goldstein tell you.

So when opponents of abortion rights say they’d like to “maintain current policy,” what they likely mean is that Hyde should also apply to any potential public health insurance plan, thus maintaining the federal government’s ban on abortion funding. This would make a public plan much less attractive to women of reproductive age. A full 90 percent of current private health plans cover abortion services, and 89 percent cover contraception. According to a poll by the Mellman Group on behalf of the National Women’s Law Center, 71 percent of Americans support coverage for reproductive health, including contraception, under a public plan. Sixty-six percent support coverage for abortion in a public plan. Americans hope that a public plan will provide services comparable to what they can purchase on the private market. They don’t see health reform as grounds for a culture war.

Let’s go further than this. 17 states cover abortion under Medicaid by using their portion of state funding to pay for it (another reason why letting the federal government fully fund Medicaid might be a problem). The Matthews/conservative version of a public plan would be worse than Medicaid in those 17 states. In addition, the entire premise of Matthews’ critique, ripped from the pages of The Weekly Standard, is just wrong. As the just-released House Tri-Committee bill describes, the public insurance option is completely self-sustaining and pays for everything out of its own premiums. There’s public money involved in the sense that the Health and Human Services Secretary would have to hire administrators, but basically this is a self-funded insurance program.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY
Public option must be financially self-sustaining, as private plans are.

Public option will need to build start-up costs and contingency funds into its rates and adjust premiums annually in order to assure its financial viability, as private plans do.

As Goldstein notes, the Hyde Amendment, that law from the 70s that Tweety cites, “is not under threat from any of the proposed House or Senate health reform bills.” Meaning that Medicaid and other public health programs will continue to deny legal abortion services as part of their coverage. It’s sad that Democrats are already conceding that, but Republicans want more. Not only do they want reproductive choice banned from a self-sustaining public option, they want it banned from any private insurance company that offers coverage inside these “insurance exchanges” designed to provide small businesses and individuals more choice and greater purchasing power to receive health insurance. As said before, 90% of all private insurers include abortion services in their coverage. Anti-choice Republicans don’t just want to follow existing law, they want to create new policy that says anyone the federal government does business with cannot offer abortion services as part of their coverage to consumers. The Hyde Amendment already discriminates against poor women who cannot afford health insurance; the anti-choicers would extend that.

Under Tweety Bird’s construction, Obama walked into a minefield by trying to “subsidize abortion.” That’s absurd. And the merits of the policy, contra Roger Simon, are important and shouldn’t be set aside because old men consider them icky:

If the public plan does not cover reproductive health services, it will be a weak public plan. And a weak public plan, by failing to attract a constituency, is bad for the overall goals of progressive health reform; it will mean that our employer-based system is not fundamentally transformed. Could this be the true goal of most Congressional Republicans? Hmm….

And since we have a religion-industrial complex telling Democrats constantly to give ground on this issue, and a leadership willing to oblige them, they now have to choose between making their reform bill demonstrably worse and making Chris Matthews uncomfortable. Sadly, I fear they’ll opt for the latter former. I’m very sorry that the continuing discrimination against women’s rights to their own medical choices is a tough policy under which to find middle ground, but that’s no reason to disable health care reform by hamstringing it.

By the way, you know who I didn’t see in that Hardball discussion? A woman. Funny how that is…

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Weenies On Greenies

by digby

I think we often make the mistake that the worst journalism in the world is on FOX News political shows, followed closely by the horrors of CNN and MSNBC and the lowest forms of the MSM. But that is incorrect. The very worst, the lowest of the low, journalism so bad that it is almost enough to make your brain explode, is the financial news media, in particular the cretinous greedheads and wingnut homunculi of CNBC.

This is what the Masters of the Universe mainline from dawn to dusk and it tells you a lot about why they are the way they are. It requires megadoses of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to cleanse the brain of such toxic pollution and I doubt that most of the Wall Street Playas have the time, what with all the graft, corruption and outright theft they have on their plates right now.

If you doubt me, just watch this clip from earlier today.

Hayes is a very nice man and smart enough to intellectually drop kick this bozo, which he very capably did without batting an eye. But he’s also something like 6’20”. This snotty little twit should be grateful they weren’t actually in the same room.

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Phantoms Of The Sarahdice

by digby

Boehlert has a great post up today about the Alaskan bloggers influence on Sarah Palin’s decision to quit. It’s clear that Palin is very thin skinned and was very bothered by the annoying blogger mosquitoes that continued to pester her after the general election.

I don’t know if this can be replicated anywhere else. This is the strange combination of a very small population with a very inexperienced politician who doesn’t have the skill or emoptional capability of governance beyond the small town city council stuff she was used to. But it certainly is an indication that under the right circumstances, local and state blogs can have an impact.

Boehlert wrote about the Alaska blogs in his book “Bloggers on the Bus” and it’s a chapter worth revisiting if you have the chance. For all the hoohah about the national blogger profiles in the book, this may be the most important chapter. The Alaska blogs had far more impact than the rest of us did on the 2008 race — and possibly the 2012 race as well.

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Stop Or I Won’t Shoot

by dday

The President summoned the Democratic members of the relevant finance committees (Ways and Means in the House, Finance in the Senate) to the White House yesterday to urge them to get their work done on the health care reform bill. He didn’t ask for the leaders of the Senate HELP Committee, or other members of the relevant House Committees working on the bill. That’s because their work is progressing well, with the House Tri-Committee releasing their bill today and the Senate HELP Committee marking up their bill, with a final vote as soon as this week. For all of the attention in the blogosphere about the presence of a public insurance option, which will be included in the House bill and the Senate HELP Committee bill, the real problem with health care reform, as evidenced by this meeting, is how to pay for it. And someone doing organizing and advocacy needs to focus on that at some point very soon, or this whole thing will fall apart.

The President wants the finance-writing committees to resolve their differences before the August recess, and I didn’t completely understand the focus of that deadline, but Brian Beutler makes a compelling case.

If a lot of work remains to be done on health care after the August recess, Congress will find itself fast upon its deadline to pass a budget reconciliation bill. Democrats have suggested that they’d use the reconciliation process to pass health care reform if a bipartisan bill is unable to pass via normal legislative channels by mid-October–Obama’s current goal. The very possibility of going the reconciliation route–and thereby avoiding a filibuster–has served as a weak lever of sorts for congressional leaders–a call to health care reform fence-sitters and opponents to play along, or be shut out of the process altogether. But in reality this isn’t how Democrats–or anybody else on the Hill, really–wants health care to pass.

And yet, if Congress enters recess with weeks of work left to do, party leaders may have to make a call; and those who oppose passing health care through the reconciliation process–Republicans and some Democrats–might be trying to run out the clock–to call leadership’s bluff, or, at the very least, to touch off a game of legislative chicken. If that’s what it comes to, the political fight will be fascinating to watch. But it’s pretty clear that party leaders and a cautious White House would prefer not to have to make the call.

It’s clear that the White House wants reconciliation used as a stick to prod the process rather than an actual tool for writing legislation. The reconciliation process could turn any legislation into Swiss cheese – although it doesn’t have to – and it would probably include sunsets for the major provisions. So if Congress keeps writing the bill in September, they’d have to make that decision sooner rather than later. What Obama is signaling is that he doesn’t want to make such a decision, that health care will need to overcome a Republican filibuster on debate in order to pass.

This makes me wonder why reconciliation was sought at all. It’s like aiming a gun that everybody knows isn’t loaded.

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Going After The Princes

by digby

Since it’s obvious that there is more than meets the eye about Cheney’s awesome plot to kill all the terrorists in their beds just like in the movies, I figured I’d throw out this little tidbit which came my way via email from a reader. I have no idea if it’s connected, but since we are all once again playing the old parlor game of “what was Cheney really up to?” I figured I’d throw it out there.

This is from a TIME magazine review of Gerald Posner’s book Why America Slept from 2003, in which he was portrayed as a great Al Qaeda mastermind who blew the lid off the Al Qaeda and Saudi royal family connection. But there are some actual facts involved which make one curious as to whether or not Cheney and the boys might have thought they really had something — and acted upon it:

In Posner’s stark judgment, the Saudis “effectively had (bin Laden) on their payroll since the start of the decade.” Zubaydah told the interrogators that the Saudis regularly sent the funds through three royal-prince intermediaries he named. The last eight paragraphs of the book set up a final startling development. Those three Saudi princes all perished within days of one another. On July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed was felled by a heart attack at age 43. One day later Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, 41, was killed in what was called a high-speed car accident. The last member of the trio, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, officially “died of thirst” while traveling east of Riyadh one week later. And seven months after that, Mushaf Ali Mir, by then Pakistan’s Air Marshal, perished in a plane crash in clear weather over the unruly North-West Frontier province, along with his wife and closest confidants.

Obviously, this is all just Ouija Board stuff. But it is an intriguing reminder of just how rudiculously credulous both the government and the press were in those early days. Anything was possible. Certainly, assassinating Saudi princes is a hell of a lot more credible as something that would make Pete Hoekstra choke than orders for special forces to kill bin Laden in the dead of night. Talk about not passing the smell test …

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The Rush To Judgment

by dday

Pretty much every news outlet has confirmed that the secret CIA program held from Congress by Dick Cheney concerned targeted assassinations of Al Qaeda members abroad, basically the “executive assassination ring” discussed by Sy Hersh earlier this year.

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.

Former counter-terrorism officials who retain close links to the intelligence community say that the hidden operation involved plans by the CIA and the military to launch operations, similar to those by Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, to hunt down and kill al-Qaida activists abroad without informing the governments concerned, even though some were regarded as friendly if unreliable.

The CIA apparently did not put the plan in to operation but the US military did, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the programme.

I’d like to know more about that Kenya incident. Put it this way, when 15 year-old kids who committed no crime other than being valuable to an Afghan warlord seeking a bounty ended up at Guantanamo, I can only imagine what the fever dreams of Dick Cheney led to out in the world.

But something’s not right here. Targeted assassinations of heads of state are illegal, President Ford signed that in 1975. But Peter Bergen explains that we have had assassination policies on Al Qaeda since before 9-11 and after.

Peter Bergen, a senior security analyst at the New America Foundation, said that the secret operation must have gone further than that to have created such a backlash in Congress: “If it’s an assassination programme of al-Qaida leaders that is hardly surprising. Clinton had an assassination programme against bin Laden. There have been 27 drone missile strikes against al-Qaida alone this year.”

It could be the case that Congress is merely upset about not being properly informed, also a crime under the National Security Act of 1947, and not the contents of the program. But two things stick out. It’s completely unclear why this action, out of all the others, would be hid by the Bush Administration from Congress. Most terror policies were justified under the concept that we were at war with Al Qaeda, and the executive has broad discretion to carry out the policies he sees fit to protect the nation. I don’t agree with the expansiveness of that view, but this kind of assassination ring would fall squarely inside that construct, no? Why would the Bush White House not be afraid to argue that we can torture suspects in the war on terror but terrified to explain that we can take out Al Qaeda safe houses with targeted strikes, the way that the Clinton Administration clearly did in the past? Why would it be so radioactive that Leon Panetta couldn’t hear about it for six months after being made CIA Director?

The second thing that bothers me about this is the lightning quickness with which the program has been explained to the press, mostly through unnamed sources. You’d almost think that some members of the Bush Administration wanted to convince the public that their secret program only dealt with killing bad guys. And when I say some members, I mean Dick Cheney.

Bobby Ghosh at TIME has some different information:

But two former ranking CIA officials have told TIME that there’s another equally plausible possibility: The program could have required the Agency to spy on Americans. Domestic surveillance is outside the CIA’s purview -– it’s usually the FBI’s job – and it’s easy to see why Cheney would have wanted to keep it from Congress.

Both officials say they were never told what was in the program, and that they’re only making calculated guesses. But their theory gibes with other reports, quoting ex-CIA officials, that say the program had to do with intelligence collection, not assassinations.

“People may want this to be about hit squads bumping off shady Saudis in Geneva, but that’s very unlikely,” says one official. “More likely, it was a plan to spy on some suspicious American citizens or organizations, without telling the FBI.”

A third CIA official who is familiar with details of the program says it was deemed unworkable and cancelled in 2004. It is not clear when or why the program was revived as a possibility, but it never got very far from the drawing board, as Republican Congressmen who received a confidential briefing about it by CIA Director Leon Panetta said.

The Cheney Administration ran so many secret programs that only him and David Addington, in all likelihood, know which program corresponds to which set of briefings or lack of disclosure from Congress. In fact the Inspector General report stated that the wiretapping program had little effectiveness precisely because of all the secrecy. So when every newspaper in the world reports about targeted assassinations within a day of the disclosure of some secret program hid by Cheney, I’m immediately dubious of the information, or rather the disinformation.

One thing is clear – there are potentially tons of unturned out there, unbeknownst to the President and his staff, and these landmines can detonate at really any time, throwing the White House off track. They might want to send in a special prosecutor simply to defuse them.

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Simply The Best

by digby

It’s good to have George W. Bush back, isn’t it? I missed him:

“In addition to immediately increasing unemployment in the energy sector, even more American jobs will be threatened by the rising cost of doing business under the cap-and-tax plan. For example, the cost of farming will certainly increase, driving down farm incomes while driving up grocery prices. The costs of manufacturing, warehousing and transportation will also increase. The ironic beauty in this plan? Soon, even the most ardent liberal will understand supply-side economics.”

“We are ripe for economic growth and energy independence if we responsibly tap the resources that God created right underfoot on American soil.”

“Westerners literally sit on mountains of oil and gas, and every state can consider the possibility of nuclear energy.”

Oh wait, that’s Sarah Palin. Ah, what’s the difference?

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Looking Different

by digby

Steve Benen capably deconstructs Ron Fournier’s offensive little exercise in mind reading the Sotomayor hearings and he mentions one line that I found particularly revealing of Fournier’s (and probably Jeff Sessions’)mindset:

[F]or example, the audience heard Sotomayor thank her family this morning, and tell the Judiciary Committee, “If I introduced every one that’s family, we’d be here all morning.” Sounds like a person who appreciates her large family? Not to Fournier, who re-interprets the comment for the rest of us: “I may not look like all of you but, trust me, I’m no different than every other family-loving American. I’m surrounded by people who love me.”

Does Sotomayor really look different from all of “us?” She’s a middle aged woman with brown eyes and dark hair, which describes a rather large portion of the population. She looks as American as anybody in that room. Of course, any member of the human species could be equally described that way. “American” isn’t an ethnic or racial identity — unless you are a privileged white person who thinks that anyone who doesn’t look like you is an interloper (not to mention an untrustworthy, anti-family freak.)

This kind of remark says far more about the person who says it than the person they are ostensibly describing. It reminds me of Junior’s forays into racial outreach:

“There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern,” Bush said.

“I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren’t necessarily — are a different color than white can self-govern.”

Because people whose skin looks like “ours” is white. Except for all the brown and blacks ones. But then, they aren’t really “us” are they?

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Gasbag Denuncia

by digby

Rush Limbaugh has his granny panties so twisted up about the DenunciaRush.com ads that he’s strangling on them:

Now, the Democrats want to make this all about Sotomayor versus me. We have a spot, a new ad run by a liberal Latina organization called “Presente Action.” They have a website called DenunciaRush.com. DenunciaRush.com and they’re running these radio ads in Florida against John Mica and Adam Putnam.

RUSH ARCHIVES: She doesn’t have any intellectual depth. She’s an angry woman. She’s a bigot. She’s a racist…

RUSH: Must have hit home on that one if they’re running ads out there trying to denounce — they’ve got a whole website called DenunciaRush.com because I called her a “racista,” a “racista and a bigot,” and they’re taking that… By the way, I sounded pretty good in that sound bite, don’t you think? I’m the only one in English in the whole bite, but you get the drift here. The last line of this: “We asked Republican Congressman John Mica if he would denounce Limbaugh’s words. His response? Silencio.” Silence.

[…]

… we have crashed, ladies and gentlemen, we have crashed DenunciaRush.com. They are at the moment finito. DenunciaRush has been crashed. So Russ Feingold, a couple of words that Sonia Sotomayor said taken out of context. You mean like Macaca? George Allen saying Macaca? We heard about that for weeks and months as the Washington Post and the Democrats sought to destroy Allen. He’d been a congressman, a governor, and a senator. Sotomayor’s comments are much worse than Macaca, and they’re frequent, and they are long held. You see how this race thing works, folks. If you’re a liberal nothing you say can be held against you.

Read the whole thing. He’s starting to babble like Sarah Palin. Talk about thin- skinned.

The GOP must think that they are in serious danger of losing the white male, conservative blowhard vote or they wouldn’t pay fealty to someone whose every word is designed to ensure that they are the only ones voting for Republicans. They obviously don’t want the Hispanic vote.

One word to the wise to the fatuous one: when you’re talking about long held racist views, it’s probably not a good idea to hold up a guy who had confederate flags and hangman’s nooses in his office as being innocent as a lily white lamb. It’s not like “macaca” came out of nowhere.

Let’s keep those ads going, folks. Every time Rush calls Sotomayor a racist a future wise latina gets her progressive wings.

Donate here. (And kick in a couple of bucks for the bravest man in congress, Alan Grayson, while you’re there.)

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Which Americans?

by digby

I felt from the get that the WSJ story about Cheney’s secret program was a little too good to be true. He was just going to send in some brave and handsome commandos to kill the Al Qaeda boogeyman with prejudice. Uh Huh:

Speculation abounds about the nature of the secret program Dick Cheney asked the CIA to keep from the Congressional oversight committees. The most sensational reports suggest it was plan to find and kill top Al Qaeda leaders – like the covert Israeli campaign to take out the perpetrators of the Munich killings.

But two former ranking CIA officials have told TIME that there’s another equally plausible possibility: The program could have required the Agency to spy on Americans. Domestic surveillance is outside the CIA’s purview -– it’s usually the FBI’s job – and it’s easy to see why Cheney would have wanted to keep it from Congress.

Both officials say they were never told what was in the program, and that they’re only making calculated guesses. But their theory gibes with other reports, quoting ex-CIA officials, that say the program had to do with intelligence collection, not assassinations.

“People may want this to be about hit squads bumping off shady Saudis in Geneva, but that’s very unlikely,” says one official. “More likely, it was a plan to spy on some suspicious American citizens or organizations, without telling the FBI.”

A third CIA official who is familiar with details of the program says it was deemed unworkable and cancelled in 2004. It is not clear when or why the program was revived as a possibility, but it never got very far from the drawing board, as Republican Congressmen who received a confidential briefing about it by CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Please. This is something so far off the charts that even the wingnuttiest wingnuts distanced themselves from it:

Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, said last week that he believed Congress would have approved of the program only in the angry and panicky days after 9/11, on 9/12, he said, but not later, after fears and tempers had begun to cool.

Does that sound like something about killing Al Qaeda or spying on Muslims in America? They did that anyway. This is something else.

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