Month: July 2009

Something’s Happening Here…

by tristero

…but you don’t know what it is,
do you, Mr. Jones?

Last night, the president of the United States said nothing surprising when he observed that members of the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in arresting a man in his own home after he had identified himself as the owner. Even the whitest and rightest of morans could figure out that’s a stupid, outrageous, disgraceful way for cops to behave. Talk about government overreach!

No, the real shocker was the audible gasp from the mostly white press corps as Obama said it. They don’t seem to understand, truly understand, that the United States elected a black man to be its president. I know this may be hard for them to grasp but there were a lot of reasons for that, not the least of which being that America is no longer, by any stretch of the imagination – and no matter how desperately Republicans want it to be true – Leave It To Beaver. (In fact, it never was. Go here. And pick up Vol. 2 while you’re at it. You’ll thank me.)

America is shocked at Professor Gates’ arrest, but, as Soledad O’Brien reported on CNN where she was broadcasting live from Times Square, they cheered and applauded the president’s remarks deploring his arrest. That’s the real America of the 21st century applauding Obama, and you’d have to be even dumber than the Washington press corps to conclude that they were – what did Republicans used to call people who decried racist cops? Oh yes – “soft on crime.” That’s the real America that is slowly, and with great difficulty, regaining a political voice that has been systematically ridiculed and marginalized over the past 40 or so years from the national discourse.

Get used to it, folks. The times are indeed… well, you know, don’t you?

Summer Magic

by digby

This is unbelievable. I walk in the door and Mr Digby is watching the game, Dodgers vs Reds. It’s Manny Ramirez bobble head night, but Manny’s injured, hasn’t played. I grab a beer, sit down on the couch and see that it’s tied 2-2, bases are loaded.

Manny comes off the bench, hits the first pitch out of the park for a grand slam. And he hits it right into “Mannywood” (a section of lower left field seats )for the very first time.

And Vin Scully was calling the game.

Good times.

.

Press Conference

by digby

Howard Fineman says that Obama failed to hit it out of the park in his press conference because he didn’t sound enough like Ronald Reagan. He was like, totally, boring. I guess the honeymoon really is over. They’re responding to him like they used to respond to Clinton. They prefer the president to speak like a six year old as Bush did or an addled elder comedian like Reagan. It’s more fun.

Luckily, if actual Americans were listening they likely learned something tonight. Just as they did with Clinton, they like information and explanations that don’t insult the intelligence and prefer it when the president speaks to them as if they aren’t in some sort of remedial classroom.

All the gasbags can talk about is how Obama “handled” the Henry Louis Gates question, which is typical.

Update: I don’t think I need to tell you that I’m with Obama on the Gates question. I personally don’t care if Gates was screaming at the top of his lungs, he was in his own house, presented no threat to anyone and had broken no law. The cop arrested him for failing to be properly deferential, which the last I heard, was not illegal.

But let’s face it —- Gates was lucky they didn’t taser him, wasn’t he?

Update II: Krugman recalls a famous Fineman assessment of George W, Bush. Here’s another one from a Hardball appearance after a Bush press conference in March of 2003:

“If he’s a cowboy he’s the reluctant warrior, he’s Shane… because he has to, to protect his family.”

.

Common Ground

by digby

Speaking of abortions, there’s lots of talk today about Tim Ryan being kicked out of Democrats For Life for being insufficiently hostile to contraception in addition to being hostile to abortion.

“I can’t figure out for the life of me how to stop pregnancies without contraception,” he said.

Apparently, he was under the impression that “common ground” only meant shaming women out of having abortions, not shaming out of using birth control too. His bad. He hasn’t been paying attention.

This article from the NY Times Magazine in 2006, spelled it all out very clearly:

As with other efforts — against gay marriage, stem cell research, cloning, assisted suicide — the anti-birth-control campaign isn’t centralized; it seems rather to be part of the evolution of the conservative movement. The subject is talked about in evangelical churches and is on the agenda at the major Bible-based conservative organizations like Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition. It also has its point people in Congress — including Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, Representative Joe Pitts and Representative Melissa Hart of Pennsylvania and Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma — all Republicans who have led opposition to various forms of contraception.

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is considered one of the leading intellectual figures of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. In a December 2005 column in The Christian Post titled “Can Christians Use Birth Control?” he wrote: “The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age — and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals, and it threatens to set loose a firestorm.. . .A growing number of evangelicals are rethinking the issue of birth control — and facing the hard questions posed by reproductive technologies.”

[…]

Many Christians who are active in the evolving anti-birth-control arena state frankly that what links their efforts is a religious commitment to altering the moral landscape of the country. In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex. Dr. Stanford, the F.D.A. adviser on reproductive-health drugs, proclaimed himself “fully committed to promoting an understanding of human sexuality and procreation radically at odds with the prevailing views and practices of our contemporary culture.” Focus on the Family posts a kind of contraceptive warning label on its Web site: “Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary.” Contraception, by this logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality) and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage.

This is why the “common ground” movement is such crap. The social conservatives don’t care about “life” they care about sex. In fact, they are the ones who are obsessed with it. And until they can establish social and legal sanctions against other people having unapproved sex, they will not stop. That is what moves them.

Tim Ryan says that he can’t think of a way to stop unwanted pregnancies without contraception. But that’s because he knows that human have sex regardless of whether it’s sanctioned by some busy bodies down at the corner mega-church. These social conservatives do not accept that. They think that sex must be controlled and that they should be the ones to control it. Perhaps they think they need this in order to control themselves.

It may be news to many people that contraception as a matter of right and public health is no longer a given, but politicians and those in the public health profession know it well. “The linking of abortion and contraception is indicative of a larger agenda, which is putting sex back into the box, as something that happens only within marriage,” says William Smith, vice president for public policy for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. Siecus has been around since 1964, and as a group that supports abortion rights, it is natural enemies with many organizations on the right, but its mission has changed in recent years, from doing things like promoting condoms as a way to combat AIDS to, now, fighting to maintain the very idea of birth control as a social good. “Whether it’s emergency contraception, sex education or abortion, anything that might be seen as facilitating sex outside a marital context is what they’d like to see obliterated,” Smith says.

Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, an abortion rights Republican who has sponsored legislation that would require insurance companies to cover contraception, has seen a major change. “Two decades or more ago, I don’t think there was much of a divide on contraception and family planning,” she says. “It was one area both sides could agree on as a way to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Now it becomes embroiled in philosophical disputes.”

The Guttmacher Institute, which like Siecus has been an advocate for birth control and sex education for decades, has also felt the shift. “Ten years ago the fight was all about abortion,” says Cynthia Dailard, a senior public-policy associate at Guttmacher. “Increasingly, they have moved to attack and denigrate contraception. For those of us who work in the public health field, and respect longstanding public health principles — that condoms reduce S.T.D.’s, that contraception is the most effective way to help people avoid unintended pregnancy — it’s extremely disheartening to think we may be set back decades.”

This was written in 2006. And yet the Democratic Party has since then embraced the Religion Lobbyists “common ground” strategy and asked those of us who are pro-choice to go along as if the other side was acting in good faith. It’s galling beyond belief.

Controlling other people’s sexual lives and women’s bodies is the agenda. There’s no point in pretending otherwise. You can search for common ground but I can’t find any with people who believe thse things. And every inch you give them only encourages them to take another mile. It’s a losers strategy.

.

Flummoxed

by dday

I saw this as well, and David Axelrod was squirming for dear life when Tweety asked him about covering abortion services in the public plan, in alleged contravention of the Hyde Amendment. They haven’t figured out talking points for this yet, including the most obvious one, that the public plan authored in the House is self-sufficient and as such doesn’t involve public funds. Instead, Axelrod wants nobody to get “bogged down” by this divisive debate. The President said the same thing today.

Katie Couric: Do you favor a government option that would cover abortions?

President Obama: What I think is important, at this stage, is not trying to micromanage what benefits are covered. Because I think we’re still trying to get a framework. And my main focus is making sure that people have the options of high quality care at the lowest possible price.

As you know, I’m pro choice. But I think we also have a tradition of, in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government funded health care. Rather than wade into that issue at this point, I think that it’s appropriate for us to figure out how to just deliver on the cost savings, and not get distracted by the abortion debate at this station.

People just aren’t going to buy that, and they shouldn’t. The President and his staff need to say what Bill Clinton said in 1993, that any government-run option should offer the same kind of services that private health insurance plans offer, including reproductive choice. And the Hyde Amendment doesn’t apply to services funded by individual insurance premiums. Period.

But they instead hem and haw and really accept the biases of people like Chris Matthews, who are looking at the issue from a narrow perspective, who don’t have the facts, and who enable crazies like Todd Tiahrt who say things like Barack Obama’s mother under the public plan would have aborted the President. You’d think someone basking in the glory of telling off a stupid Birther about “appeasing the whackos” would have attention to that. But abortion is just icky and nobody in the Village wants to talk about it.

Including the President and his staff. But we’re going to have to talk about it. Because a public option without the same kind of coverage as private insurance options will not reach a critical mass. It will discriminate against women, and women won’t choose it. And we will have flawed competition between those insurance options. That’s what’s at stake.

And by the way, let me agree with John Cole:

On Hardball right now, Matthews is grilling Axelrod that abortion may be covered under the potential health plans, and said “what about people who think abortion is immoral.”

Well, screw ‘em. The government is constantly doing things that some people think is immoral. Lots of people think it is immoral to wage war. We got two of ‘em going right now. Lots of people think it is immoral put people in jail for nonviolent drug offenses. Got a few of those folks in jail right now, too. And on and on.

‘Xactly. The only time morality comes into play for these media types is when conservatives are screaming about it. Killing brown people with bombs from 30,000 feet never really comes into play in such a moral analysis.

.

No Health Care Bill, No Recess

by dday

On Monday John Amato asked the President a fairly self-evident question. Since there is a desire to pass health care reform this year, since Republicans want to use the August recess to distract and delay, shouldn’t Congress forego that recess and continue work on the bill? The President dodged the question. But over the next 48 hours, the media got the message on this option, and started asking members of Congress about it. Yesterday Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) indicated he would be willing to stay in Washington in August to hammer out a deal. And today, the House Speaker agreed. And she actually has the ability to put that into place.

Asked at a press conference whether she’d support keeping the House of Representatives in session into the August recess to complete work on health care reform, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was fairly adamant.

“I think 70 percent of the American people would want that,” she said. “I want a bill.”

That could prove crucial if Blue Dogs hold up House Democrats’ health care bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee much longer. The House is scheduled to adjourn on August 3rd. Whether or not she pushes that date back, though, it sounds like she’s confident a bill will pass whenever it comes to the floor.

Blue Dogs in the House don’t want to walk the plank until the Senate Finance Committee reveals its bill, and in particular how it deals with cost controls and paying for the expenditures. But Pelosi thinks she’ll have the votes, though she may tweak the bill to move closer to what the Senate recommends. Foregoing the August recess makes it less possible for the Finance Committee to keep delaying and forces Congress to knuckle down on the bill.

Slinkerwink writes:

You know what happens if they allow health care reform to be delayed until after the August recess? These Members go home, they get hit by hundreds of TV ads from the murder-by-spreadsheet industry, and they get phone calls from angry voters about “socialized health care.” Then they come back, scared to pass real health care reform, so they end up passing health care reform that may not include a public option or a national insurance exchange. The stakes are very high this week.

We have to keep up the phone calls from yesterday. We’ve got to let Members of Congress, the Democratic leadership, and the White House know that we don’t want them to go on vacation in August until they deal with health care reform FIRST. We can’t have them be scared by the Blue Dog Democrats and the lying Republicans into cutting back subsidies for Americans, getting rid of the national insurance exchange, and putting in state-based co-ops into the health care reform package.

Please keep up with the phone calls to the Democratic leadership, the three chairmen of the House committees, the leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the members of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and the White House today!

The numbers are at the link.

I don’t totally agree with the idea that members of Congress will get whacked if they go home in August – those who favor reform will show up at those meetings, too. But there are a lot of reasons to argue against delay, which simply slows momentum. It turns out that Republicans enacted a pro forma one-week delay on voting for Sonia Sotomayor in the Senate Judiciary Committee just so they could push out her confirmation vote on the floor an extra week, taking up time for the Senate and delaying the bill further. All of this could go away simply by eliminating the three-week August recess and forcing Congress to keep doing their job. It’s smart politics in addition to smart policy.

No recess. Spread the word.

…Sen. Jay Rockefeller just said he’d stay in Washington to work on reform. Dick Durbin, by contrast, doesn’t think the Senate will have a bill by the recess. There’s an easy answer for that – don’t have the recess.

.

Trigger Rigger

by digby

Via Steve Benen, I see that Olympia Snowe snowed us more than we realized we were being snowed:

Snowe’s office sent Brian Beutler the complete quote from the prepared text:

“I believe that the reforms we are creating will result in more competitive, affordable and innovative options for Mainers, yet we can all agree that we must not leave universal access to chance. That is why I support a public plan which is available from day one — in any state where private plans fail to ensure guaranteed affordable coverage.” [emphasis added]

This, in other words, is the same position Snowe has maintained all along. A public option would get the job done, but she’d prefer to give private insurance companies yet another chance to achieve the same goals that a public plan would accomplish. “Throughout the entire health care debate, Senator Snowe has emphasized that we must first, reform health insurance, and if plans then fail to offer affordable coverage, a public plan should then be offered from day one,” Snowe’s press secretary said.

I never thought Snowe was given to Bushian gibberish, but that’s what that is.
Snowe is obviously for a trigger although she won’t admit it. And that is unacceptable.
.

The Kerry Fee

by digby

For the latest news around health care, be sure to check out Bill Sher’s Progressive Breakfast every morning. It’s the best round-up out there and will give you a quick rundown of where we are day to day.

Today, he points to this part of an article in the Wapo that I think may end up being important:

Orszag also said the White House is open to a proposal by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), a Finance Committee member, to tax insurers for very generous health policies. The idea is a variation on a provision that Baucus, Grassley and others on the committee had pushed: to tax beneficiaries who receive generous policies through their employers. Obama staunchly opposed taxing beneficiaries as a candidate, and on Monday he threatened to veto a bill that targets individuals. But Orszag said that the White House is open to the Kerry alternative, noting that a fee on high-value policies would “create an incentive for companies to create more efficient plans.” A senior House leadership aide said Democratic lawmakers there are keenly interested in the Kerry provision, along with other revenue measures with consensus support in the Finance Committee, to replace the wealth surtax that Baucus and others have already declared dead on arrival. “Our guys want to see some movement there,” the aide said. “They’re loath to vote on a tax increase if it is not going anywhere in the Senate.”

I totally agree with dday in his post below about changing the dialog on taxes. I’ve been agitating for that for years. (I use the term “paying the bills.”) All you have to do is look at the Mad Max Thunderdome that is California to see the results of fetishizing tax cutting. It’s part of the long term progressive project that has been ignored for years.
Having said that, I still think the Kerry proposal is a good one, although I’d be happy to pass the surtax as well. I realize that unions were upset about the earlier proposals because they have fought long and hard for good health benefits. But if this Kerry proposal really goes after the Cadillac plans of the small number of people who get 1/3rd of all the compensation in this country (!) then it’s worth doing. Making the insurance companies pay the “fee” is brilliant. (It will be passed on to the companies that buy them, of course, but because we have even fetishized the idea that businesses can’t be taxed — only the insurance companies are villainous enough at the moment to be targeted.)The fact that these masters of the universe believe they are entitled outlandish policies on top of their other compensation — at at the expense of their own employees — is yet another scandal. I’ve fumed about it for years. If they can raise some money for health reform by demanding a tribute for the privilege of being greedy, piggish bastards, then I’m all for it.And, by the way, members of congress have the best cadillac plan available.
.

America Is Worth Paying For

by dday

The Wall Street Journal today takes a look at inequality and produces a startling statistic.

The nation’s wealth gap is widening amid an uproar about lofty pay packages in the financial world.

Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Social Security Administration data — without counting billions of dollars more in pay that remains off federal radar screens that measure wages and salaries.

Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total U.S. pay in 2007, the latest figures available.

So much for trickle-down economics. Incidentally, the same people who tell you that the top 1% pay 30% of the taxes won’t tell you that they also make 30% of the money, or that the after-tax income, adjusted for inflation, of the top 1% grew 256% over the past 25 years, compared to just 21% for those in the middle. So the rich are doing pretty well, and they can probably pony up so that nobody goes without health care in this country.

This brings us to a larger point about the success of the conservative movement in this country. Despite this extreme inequality, which causes asset bubbles, threatens programs like Social Security that cap payroll deductions at $100,000 a year and invariably destroys national economies, talk about progressive taxation – indeed, any taxation – is considered heresy.

One of the bigger, but more under-reported, sea changes in American politics is how any kind of tax increase — whether in war or peace, good economic times or bad ones — has become absolutely unacceptable. After all, Ronald Reagan raised taxes. So did every modern American president involved in war, until George W. Bush. But not anymore. Indeed, as one of us pointed out on Nightly News last night, only 29% (or 157) of the 535 and House members and senators serving in Congress were around the last time — 1993! — the federal government raised taxes, and that was on gasoline. Think about that for a moment: Congress hasn’t really had a TOUGH vote in 16 years, if one defines a “TOUGH” vote as the government asking for a financial sacrifice from the American people. This is the political climate that President Obama faces in trying to pay for health reform. Republicans and some Democrats are opposed to a tax on the wealthy, and unions and Obama’s political strategists are against taxing health benefits.

Congress raised the tobacco tax this year to pay for expansion of children’s health care, but the point is basically true.

Barack Obama has not been a profile in courage on this front, stressing a tax cut for “95% of all Americans” and failing to act definitively to roll back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Joe Biden made one statement during the campaign about how it’s patriotic to pay taxes and he got rapped on the skull for it, and we never heard it again.

But look. If Democrats cannot stand up and say that America is worth paying for, that we have an overclass in this country that’s had it very good for a long, long time, that rampant inequality threatens economic stability, and that the way to a sustainable future includes paying for the commons that we all share, we’ll really never get anywhere. Republicans have made taxes more of a four-letter word than liberals, to the extent that they threw an entire round of tax “tea parties” despite Obama having cut taxes in the stimulus for practically everyone. Conservatives since the Reagan era have determined that America has an innate selfishness that they can exploit, to claim “the other guy” is getting your tax money, and everyone should resist it. As government has provided little of perceived tangible value since the invention of Medicare in the 1960s, they’ve been able to get away with this. But it’s not a path that can hold.

It starts by making the argument that while nobody likes taxes, nobody builds their own roads, or schools, or police and fire departments, or health care infrastructure, and government needs to act as a provider of services. This is basic stuff that has been pushed aside in our national debate for far too long. In the final analysis, we have a selfish and cruel segment of society that has been allowed to rule the roost for decades, promising their constituents endless services and endlessly low taxes forever. Democrats have the choice of accepting that and permanently nibbling around the edges the few times they get into power, or making the argument that we can have a better society.

.

Where In The U.S. Does Your Food Come From?

by tristero

Fantastic post from U.S. Food Policy which collects Google Maps of Smithfield, pineapple fields in Hawaii, farmland being turned into suburban housing, and so on. My favorite is the shot of farmland on the Canadian/US border, which graphically illustrates the profound impact that food policy has on land use.

h/t Obama Foodorama