Month: July 2009

Lunatics Part II

by digby

The news sites always have crazy commenters, but with this health care debate some real ugliness is coming out. Check this out from an ABC article about Dr Regina Benjamin’s alleged disqualification for Surgeon General because she looks overwieght:

This is just the beginning of this double standard. If Obama’s health care “reform” is signed into law, government health care rationing will PRIORITIZIE care to black and Hispanic patients and DENY care to Caucasian patients or make them go through LONG waiting periods.

This will happen even if those black and Hispanic patients are overweight and don’t practice preventive health (as Caucasian patients are more likely to do).The rationale for this governmental practice? REPARATIONS for the alleged racism of U.S. society. The rationale will be that black and Hispanic citizens deserve preferred medical treatment now and in the future to make up for past incidents of racism in the U.S., and that Caucasian citizens deserve lower-class medical treatment for the same reason.

Who is the perfect person to validate this public policy in a couple of years? Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who believes that any Hispanic woman’s judgment is ALWAYS better and more correct than any Caucasian man’s judgment. CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVE AND SENATORS. Let them know that Chairman Obama’s latest bid for absolute power should be denied, and that they need to vote against government-run health care.

As I wrote in many posts over the years, this is not your grandfather’s bigotry:

1955 – They are an inferior race
1965 – They are lazy workers
1975 – They make old white customers uncomfortable
1985 – Affirmative action means their diplomas are bogus
1995 – They are a litigation risk for discrimination
2009 – They are racists who discriminate against white people

I guess that’s an improvement of sorts. They are reduced to whining that they are losers because the African Americans and Hispanics get all the breaks.

But one way or another, no matter what happens, there is a significant chunk of Idiot America that continues to believe that the country is going to hell in a handbasket because of the blacks and the browns. It’s baked in.

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Huh?

by digby

Dday mentioned this earlier in his overview of the horror they call a budget deal, but I didn’t understand the full ramifications. They actually gave the oil companies a windfall and didn’t get anything for it at all?

We’ve been focusing a lot here on Calitics in the last day or so on the losers in the recent budget deal. But who are the winners? Pretty high on that list would have to be Big Oil. They were able to convince Democrats to drop their demands for an oil severance tax, and were able to convince Democrats to agree to allow the first offshore oil drilling in 40 years to begin off the unspoiled coast of Santa Barbara County near Point Conception. Every other oil-producing state in the union taxes the extraction of oil from its lands – including Texas and Wyoming. Even Sarah Palin raised the oil severance tax in Alaska to 25% in 2007. Instead, as Paul Hogarth pointed out, California is defining itself to the right of Sarah Palin by refusing to embrace such a tax.

I don’t know how it could get any more insane than this. It’s as if the disaster capitalists have gone beyond the shock doctrine and are just openly looting the treasury now without even trying to pretend they are doing it for any good purpose. They’re just taking it and telling the citizens to go fuck themselves.
If you live in California, you can try to do something about this.

The Courage Campaign is asking our members to zero in on the oil severance tax and ask their legislators to vote “no” on a budget that does not include that tax. We will collect signatures to our letter and deliver it to every legislator in the Capitol ahead of the Thursday budget vote. Californians are being asked to make a choice: give the oil companies a sweetheart deal unprecedented in the United States, or demand that oil companies pay their fair share and help prevent a humanitarian catastrophe that budget cuts will cause. The Courage Campaign thinks the choice is clear. Let’s make sure our legislators hear about that clear choice before the vote on Thursday.

I can’t even wrap my mind around the fact that we would have to do this, but apparently even the most obvious, painless ways of raising revenue are now off the menu. What, are the oil companies going to move to Las Vegas too is they don’t get a bunch of tax breaks?

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Lunatics

by dday

Chris Matthews highlighted this nutcase birther at a town hall with Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE), questioning Obama’s citizenship and forcing a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s unfiltered crazy in action. In the 1990s, the media took these fringe scandals regarding Bill Clinton and gave them a platform and some credibility, seeping them into the mainstream. You can draw a through-line from the out-there lies of the extreme right like the alleged murder of Vince Foster and the Clinton impeachment. Some in the media, like Lou Dobbs, continue to do that today, legitimizing the birther movement. And several far-right Congressmen have co-sponsored a bill to require Presidential candidates to provide proof of US citizenship. Today on Hardball, Rep. John Campbell, who thinks Atlas Shrugged is non-fiction, tried to dodge the issue by claiming that this is merely a technical bill to ensure Presidents meet the requirements of office in some official capacity, but Matthews was having none of it. He called it a “crazy proposal” and tried to peg down Campbell on whether or not he believed Obama was an American citizen. It took him all of 10 minutes to finally say he believed Obama was.

MATTHEWS: Congressman, nice try. But what you’re doing, it’s a nice try, and I’m laughing with you only to this extent, because I know it’s a nice try. What you’re doing is appeasing the nutcases. As you’ve just pointed out, this won’t prove or disprove whether Barack Obama’s a citizen. By the way, let me show you his birth certificate. That’s the way to deal with this. Mail this birth certificate to the whacko wing of your party, so they see it and say, “I agree with this, it’s over.” […] you’re verifying the paranoia out there. You’re saying to the people, “That’s right, it’s a reasonable question whether he’s a citizen or not.”

Campbell squirmed and shuffled, first saying that Obama was an American citizen “as far as I know,” (Matthews responded: “As far as you know? I’m showing you his birth certificate!”) and then eventually saying “I believe he is.”

Now, I don’t remember Matthews being so insistent about “appeasing the nutcases” back in the 1990s, when he had Paula Jones on his shows, and Dan Burton, and the Arkansas State troopers, and every other two-bit huckster peddling juicy gossip about “Slick Willie.” But clearly the atmosphere has changed, at least for Tweety. The birther movement has become a bridge too far.

It just shows you how diverged the conversations have become in this country. Democrats are debating how to tackle health care and whether a public option works best and how best to get costs under control, and the right has become fixated on the idea that Barack Obama’s family faked his birth certificate 47 years ago, knowing he would run for President eventually and need a cover story.

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Talking Points From Dummies

by digby

Just in case you are like me and would like to be able to hit the mute button whenever a Republican is on TV talking about health care, the Huffington Post has conveniently provided the official Republican talking points:

In regard to specific talking points, the RNC Memo has nine of them:

#1 — President Obama and Democrats are conducting a grand experiment with our economy, our country, and now our health care.

#2 — President Obama’s massive spending experiments have created more debt than at any other time in our nation’s history.

#3 — The President experimented with a $780 billion dollar budget-busting stimulus plan and unemployment is still rising. The President experimented with banks and auto companies, and now we’re on the hook for tens of billions of dollars with no exit plan.

#4 — Now the President is proposing more debt and more risk through a trillion dollar experiment with our health care.

#5 — Democrats are proposing a government controlled health insurance system, which will control care, treatments, medicines and even what doctors a patient may see.

#6 — This health care experiment will have consequences for generations, but President Obama and Democrats want to ram this legislation through Congress in two months.

#7 — President Obama’s health care experiment is too much, too fast, too soon. Our country cannot afford to fix health care through a rushed experiment.

#8 — Americans want health care reform that addresses, not increases, cost or debt.

#9 — Government takeover is the wrong way to go — health care decisions should remain between the doctor and the patient.

Let’s respond to these inane talking points one by one.

#1 — Yes it is a grand experiment. It’s possible that it will fail. But we already know that the current system is failing badly and is going to get worse. If Americans wanted to put their faith in the same private sector that just blew up the global financial system to fix this problem voluntarily, they would have voted for John McCain. It’s not like Obama and the Democrats didn’t run on reforming health care. The people knew what they were getting into and they want the Democrats to run their experiment.

#2 — Yes there is a deficit. It’s there because the Bush administration left a global financial crisis, the worst economy since the Great Depression, an imploding health care system and a planet that’s heating up so fast that the polar bears are running out of ice. Oh, and there are two ongoing expensive wars.

I’m sorry those things cost money to fix, but they do and it’s the price Americans are going to have to pay for voting for an ignorant lout and his evil puppetmaster for president. The mess has to be cleaned up and it isn’t going to come cheap.

#3 — the stimulus was never going to have fully kicked in this soon and complaining about it this early is pure political opportunism. But there’s no doubt that it could have been better if a handful of moderate busy bodies hadn’t arbitrarily decided on a certain number for no good reason and then gutted much needed money for the states that would have been spent quickly. That’s what you get for bipartisanship.

#4 — this is meaningless, repetitive babble

#5 — nobody is proposing government run health care. We only wish they were. Instead what we have is a Rube Goldberg contraption that will, nonetheless, at the very least ensure that people will be able to see their own doctor and get the treatments they need. This is just the same stale old lie they’ve been telling for decades.

#6 — Health care reform is not a rushed experiment. People have been thinking about this for 60 years and have been blocked by these same lame excuses every time they try to do something about it. More to the point, the Republicans are already on record saying they want to delay the bill so they can kill health reform. Why would the Democrats want to help them do that?

#7 — Lather, rinse, repeat

#8 — Americans do want a system that contains costs. That’s why the status quo is unacceptable. Even if they are lucky enough to have health insurance, they are getting eaten alive with costs if they are unlucky enough to actually get sick. The Republicans have no solution to any of these problems. If anything they want to make it worse by forcing people to buy their own health insurance on the open market where insurance companies can cherry pick only the healthy patients and kick anyone who might actually need their coverage off the rolls. They are in no position to be critical of anyone else’s plan when that’s the best they can come up with.

#9 — health care decisions should be between a doctor and a patient (unless it’s reproductive health in which case it should be between a doctor a patient and the Christian Right.) Unfortunately, at the moment, health care decisions are now between a doctor, a patient and a faceless insurance company bureaucrat who answers to nobody but his immediate boss and who is being paid a bonus to find reasons not to cover you. I would welcome a government bureaucrat over that system. At least they aren’t allowed to personally profit from my misfortune.

The Republicans have obviously done some focus groups that show the word “experiment” somehow scares people. It’s not surprising that the Republicans would like that considering how it sounds like “science” which they believe is far less trustworthy than the words of preachers and prophets. But the fact is that what we are doing already isn’t working so we have to try something else. If that’s scary “science” so be it.

Health care is a huge issue that was always going to eat up a massive amount of political capital to get passed. The forces arrayed against it are very wealthy and have a lot to lose. It was never going to be easy. The conditions necessary to bring the all the political forces to bear are also conditions that make it more difficult. You need an economic crisis to put health care on the agenda, but it also gives the fiscal scolds a foothold with their deficit propaganda. It quickly becomes a matter of “yes, people are hurting and they need health care, but we can’t afford it.” And that is quickly followed by the all American belief in selfish individualism —“if we give it to them, I might lose what I’ve got. Let them fend for themselves.” It’s an ugly aspect of our national character. Threading that needle is never simple.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. If the political will is there — and the Democrats get it through their thick skulls that they have far more to lose by failing to enact health care reform than by whiffing once again and depending on the Republicans to somehow reward them at the ballot box — they can get it through. I just don’t know if they really want it. Sometimes I think the only difference between the Democrats and Republicans when you strip it all away is that the Republicans tend to win when they lose and the Democrats tend to lose when they win. It all adds up to the preservation of the status quo.

But sometimes a certain confluence of events and people changes things and something happens. Maybe this is one of those times.

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Canadian Sham

by digby

So they did a poll of Canadians and guess what? They like their health care.

Now, there are some things that Americans like better about their health care than Canadians like about theirs. The Canadians complain a bit more that they have to wait longer to see a specialist. But overall their satisfaction is a lot higher. Here’s where the real differences show up:

Looked at another way, 65 percent of Canadians said they had access to all the health care services they needed at costs they could afford; 49 percent of Americans felt the same way.

That difference probably reflects the costs of health care: Patients pay nothing at doctors’ offices in Canada.

It also helps explain the fact that Americans see health care differently based on their incomes, while Canadians see it roughly the same regardless of what they earn.

Just 37 percent of Americans who make less than $50,000 a year say they have access to and can afford all the health care services they need, while 60 percent of those who make more say they can get all they need at costs they can afford.

The gap was much smaller in Canada, where 61 percent of those who earn less than $55,000 and 70 percent of those who make more than that said they had access to all the care they needed at costs they could afford.

Canadians just don’t understand that if you make less than $50,000 a year you are a loser who can’t expect to have access to luxuries like health care at the same rate as the winners. It would be unfair. That’s how we organize our society here — by how much money you make. Those with the money have a greater right to live. It’s just that simple.

I would be thrilled to have the Canadian system. Waiting for six weeks to see a specialist is certainly better than waiting until you wind up in the emergency room on the verge of death. But hey, that’s the excitement of playing America’s health care lottery game. If you make it to 65 when you can qualify for Medicare, you’re a winner at BeatTheGrimReaper and you can have health care just like the Canadians have! yea.

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Let’s Look At The Politics

by digby

There’s a lot of discussion around the beltway comparing the 1994 health care battle to today. It’s certainly worth looking back, it was recent enough to have some relevance. But the political stakes are actually quite different and one of Washington’s most fatal pitfalls is always fighting the last war.

In July of 1993 conservatives were on the rise, the mandate-less, plurality president was under siege in a series of scandals and dealing with a press corps as hostile as any in American history so early in a president’s term.This article came out on June 7,1993, less than five months into his term:

At that moment, almost exactly 16 years ago today, Clinton hit the lowest point in his presidency with a 43% approval rating.

When people say that it was Hillary’s health care plan that propelled the Republicans to victory in 1994, I can’t help but laugh out loud. They didn’t even introduce it until September of 1993, months after he had already hit bottom. Clinton’s majority was on the rocks from the minute he took office for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the successful GOP propaganda campaign to portray the government as being in chaos and the Democrats failing to govern. The health care plan was just one of many bullet points used by Republicans to win their majority.

But the conventional wisdom imparted from that debacle was, as always, that the Democrats had been too liberal, just as Newtie and Arthur Finkelstein and all the other wingnut strategists intended. But it was true nonetheless that the conservative movement was on the march and it’s time had come, so in at least the political sense, if not the policy sense, they were right.

Today, the situation is very different. We have a president with a mandate and an approval rating in the high 50s, a couple of big successful pieces of legislation already under his belt, and an opposition party that is a national joke. The only thing standing in his way is health industry money and Village conventional wisdom about the liberal boogeyman, both of which are very politically potent.

But there are some small cracks appearing in the CW that may just break this open. For instance, Mrs Greenspan interviewed Ron Brownstein today and predictably began by quoting David Brooks’ pathetic little schoolyard taunt from this morning’s NY Times:

“Machiavelli said a leader should be feared as well as loved. Obama is loved by the Dem chairmen, but he is not feared. On health care, Obama has emphasized cost control. the Chairmen flouted his priorities because they don’t fear him.”

First of all, Brooks is lying. The chairmen of the House committees wrote a bill that will be deficit neutral when you put all the legislation together. People know this, but they want to pretend that the CBO scoring incomplete plans is somehow meaningful. Brooks is simply following the Republican strategy to make health care reform Obama’s Waterloo and he’s doing his part here by portraying Obama as a wimp. Nothing unusual about any that. It’s the oldest story in the book.

While the Republicans are starting to engage in the crudest way possible (and to the administration’s advantage) the fact remains that it’s the conservative Democrats who present the biggest hurdle and who hold the power to tank this reform effort.

I believe that Brownstein got it right in his reply to Mitchell:

Brownstein: I don’t know if Obama is feared, but I think the period in the wilderness is feared. And what Obama has increasingly argued in private to democrats is that the lesson of Bill Clinton’s first two years is that no matter how fast you row or no matter hard you try to separate yourself from me, if I fail you will be the ones to pay the cost in these 2010 elections. And I think that argument does have some sway.

The paradox we’re in is that in many ways, the moderate Democrats who are most resistant, especially in the House but also in the Senate, to some of the things Obama wants to do, first on cap and trade now potentially on health care, have the most to fear if his support crumbles because they will be the first ones taken away by a backlash in 2010. I’m sure that is one of the arguments, he has raised that argument before, I would not be surprised if he makes an argument like it again.

He has said in public in the last 48 hours, using Jim DeMint as a sort of pushing off, from the Republican senator, that Republicans are going to use health care to precipitate the same kind of downward spiral that ultimately took Democrats out of control in 1994 and I think that that again is an argument, whether or not they fear him, they certainly fear a repeat of that experience.

Mitchell(speaking for an aghast Village): Well some might say that they are taking a different lesson from that. That they are taking the lesson that to take the risk of going for either the taxes or the employer benefit taxation that any of these measures on health care could lead to those who are in marginal districts losing…

Brownstein: And that really is the fundamental question. Is inaction or action riskier? I think that the lesson of 94 is that failing to govern is the greatest risk. That ultimately, in 1994 Democrats made that calculation that it was too tough to vote for health care and it was too tough to vote for the crime bill and by trying to separate themselves from Clinton they kind of cut out the floor from the entire caucus. This time Obama has the opportunity for something different. He has to hold them for some very difficult votes.

Mitchell: And one of the ways he’s trying to hold them is to put pressure on them. This is an example of the new media. the president in a conference call with liberal bloggers, let’s listen to what he had to say last night.

I also think it’s important to keep the pressure on members of congress because what happens is that there’s a default position of inertia here in Washington and pushing against that making sure that people feel the desperation that ordinary families fell across the country every day, whether they can pay their premiums or not or a loss of insurance when they lose their job, people have to feel that in a visceral way and you guys can help deliver that better than just about anybody.

Mitchell: That tells you everything you need to know about where his focus is and the tools that they’re using to rally …

Brownstein: I really feel that fits in with a lot of other things we’ve seen in the last 48 hours, where Obama seems to be trying to steel congressional Democrats to move ahead on health care without significant Republican participation if necessary.

Yesterday his message on a day when the insurance industry began running ads that were more positive than negative about reform,certainly, Obama went out and sharply criticized the insurance companies. The column by EJ Dionne which seemed to have some high level assistance, again, making the argument that Democrats had to govern, resurfacing, in that call with bloggers, resurfacing the idea that reconciliation as a fallback in the Senate with only 51 votes, warning, as I said that Republicans see this as a chance to undo a Democratic majority, this all seems designed to get Democrats in a place, to use your frame, where they will view inaction as more dangerous than action.

Mitchell (still clinging to stale 20 year old village CW like it’s the last piece of driftwood from the sinking Titanic) … but getting back to David Brooks, is the White House blowing it by not dealing with cost containment, by moving too far to the left on what they’re willing to support, by not going to the middle and not crafting something that has real cost containment.

Brownstein: Yeah, yeah. I think the administration clearly believes that the bills so far from the more liberal committees have not gone as far in cost containment as the president proposed. We are at the point in health care reform that could have been scripted by Samuel Becket. We’re waiting for Baucus. I thought the most interesting thing said today was by some of the Blue Dogs in the House, Mike Ross, Allen Boys, others who said “we don’t necessarily want to go forward and vote until we know where the Senate is going” and that means everyone is waiting for some word from the finance committee until this really crystallizes…

Mitchell: They don’t want to go out on a limb and have it cut out from under them …

Brownstien:… unless they know what’s going to come out of the Senate. Again, they’re focused on the finance committee just as in 1994, it becomes a critical fulcrum of whether health care can move forward or whether it going to go off the rails.

Mitchell: As Yogi Berra would say, deja vu all over again…

As far as she’s concerned anyway.

Brownstein is advancing an alternative view of the Clinton health care debacle as well as the current CW as expressed by David Brooks and the the villagers. That’s significant. He’s not some DFH who Andrea can safely dismiss as some sort of irrelevance.

Brownstein is seeing the politics of this on a bigger scale than the village magpies and it’s useful. Regardless of the merits of the plan itself, which I’m sure will be the subject of arguments for decades to come, the political stakes of everyone concerned will rest on whether or not the Democrats were able to pass a much needed reform when they had the power to do it. This is what Democrats say they want to do and the people said, go forth and get it done — here’s a popular president, a large majority and 0 Senate votes. If they can’t do it now, they will have lost all credibility and the Republicans will be handed an undeserved chance to recover prematurely.

Now, I have no doubt that certain Blue Dogs and Democratic wingnuts think they can personally benefit by distancing themselves from Democratic initiatives. They are stupid. If Obama goes down in flames, as Brownstien says, those in conservative districts will get creamed by a Republican challenger in 2010, regardless of whether they voted against the health care bill. They are the ones who will pay the price for Obama’s failure, not him and not the liberals who voted for it.

Any Blue Dog from a swing district who is listening to little Republican birdies whispering in his ear telling them that he has to vote against Obama’s agenda or risk losing in 2010 is a useful idiot who is engineering his own defeat. This isn’t 1994 and it isn’t 2004, and if these guys don’t see that the only thing that can defeat them at this point is a widespread belief in Democratic failure, then they probably need to go back to the private sector and stand in the unemployment line like everyone else. The glory days of self-serving bipartisan backstabbing and double dealing are no longer operative. They will be the first ones to drown if the Democratic ship goes down. This is party politics now whether they like it or not.

Update: Sirota rightfully points out that the incentives for conservatives in the “swing” districts are skewed by the fact that they need to raise boatlaods of cash to win and so become corporate whores for industry. There’s that too and it lies at the heart of our sick, corrupt system.

But I think they’ll lose anyway this time. The big picture politics are going to have a bigger effect this time because of all the expectations that were raised and the depth of the problems individuals are facing. No matter how slick the ads, I think incumbent Dems are going to face a very angry electorate if health care fails and those in swing districts will pay the price.

Update II:

And here we have the Zen Master of the status quo, the Village Magus with the word from on high:

OFF TO THE RACES
Democrats Must Settle For Half A Loaf

By Charlie Cook
Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Whether or not you agree with the substance of President Obama’s and congressional Democrats’ health care reform and climate change packages, it’s hard to deny their ambition or intentions. They are trying to address enormous, consequential and long-neglected problems that our country, sooner or later, must face.

The magnitude is, to borrow somewhat from one of Obama’s books, “audacious,” to say the least.

But no matter how sincere their intentions and bold their efforts, it is increasingly clear their grasp is exceeding their reach on these two issues. While the Obama White House has always said compromise would be necessary, the cold realities of the state of the economy, budgets and deficits, and, for members of Congress, re-election are going to force a significant scaling down of the health and climate proposals. They find themselves in a situation in which compromising a quarter or a third of their original packages is not nearly enough. Their choice is either half a loaf or no loaf at all.

Perhaps if the recession had not been so deep, or if they had inherited a smaller deficit, the budgetary and political climate would have been such that they could have held out for more ambitious versions of these two proposals.

But the reality is that Americans have been hit by sticker shock. They fear that mounting deficits will rob them and their children of a prosperous future. The fact that the economy fell harder than virtually any economist expected and is rebounding more sluggishly than anticipated has created doubts that have shaken confidence in this government.

While it may well have been unrealistic to expect the economic stimulus package to have worked miracles this soon, and Obama warned that the economy would not rebound overnight, public expectations of a rebound were too high and now their disappointment is great.

In an era of immediate gratification, when the public sees massive amounts of money being shoveled into the economy, they expect immediate results, whether it is realistic or not. CBO’s finding of no savings in the emerging Senate Democratic health proposal was the nail in the coffin for those holding out for a full loaf there.

Most Americans still like Obama a great deal. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and Pew Research polls show high personal favorability ratings and his overall job approval ratings remain good as well, according to ABC News/Washington Post and Gallup tracking polls.

Americans want him to succeed, but the unrealistic sense among many that he is a cross between a miracle worker and a magician, capable of pulling off the impossible, has been shaken.

Making things perhaps the most difficult have been moderate members of Congress, particularly in the Senate, who have raised the most concerns about the climate bill’s proposed cap-and-trade emissions program, and a proposal to create a public health insurance option in the health package.

The White House and congressional Democrats must find a way to climb back off the end of the limb. They need to scale back their health care and climate change ambitions, and find middle-ground proposals that will do some good. They must get the ball rolling in the right direction on both fronts with proposals that neither cost as much, nor raise the hackles of swing state members who simply can’t go for anything like what is being contemplated today.

The failure to do that will result in the president and Congress coming up empty-handed on either or both, failing in their top two signature issues. One can almost see the buzzards circling if they decide not to do this. The risk is that the special aura that has surrounded Obama since his Iowa caucus win will be stripped away. The potential of his presidency will be stunted, and talk resurrected of another crippled president or failed presidency, just a few months into the new administration.

The White House and Democratic congressional leaders need to figure out how to actually deliver solid packages on health care and climate change that do some good, can get passed, and that the public will perceive as down payments in trying to address these twin gargantuan problems.

Fixing our health care system, reversing climate change and achieving some measure of energy self-sufficiency are long-term journeys, not immediately achievable destinations. Expectations among Democrats on the left were great. Now they have to find exit strategies that are not interpreted as failures. This is one of those situations when the perfect becomes the enemy of the good, and some friends of the president and Democratic leaders can become, in effect, their worst enemies. They can guarantee that a fall-back strategy will be interpreted as failure.

Utter, fucking bullshit. But I’m quite sure that Mrs Greenspan got very, very overheated and excited when she read it. Cokie’s down at the beauty parlor telling all the gals that it’s all over and they are breathing a sigh of relief over their mani-pedis.

But let’s not kids ourselves. People do not care about government deficits more than they care about whether or not they will go bankrupt if they are unlucky enough to get cancer. They just don’t. “Deficit” is a term that has no real meaning to people. It’s an empty vessel that carries whatever fears people have, which is then used as a weapon by the protectors of the status quo to stop any kind of progress for actual human beings. People are scared of a lot of things right now and rightfully so, but a future government debt 20 years from now that may or may not actually happen would be far down the list if they had the whole picture. It’s demagogic gibberish.

If the ruling class gets away with using some abstract nonsense term to convince people that it’s better to stay in the car as it goes over the cliff than risk jumping out of it, then I suppose we get what we deserve.

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A Small Victory

by dday

The F-22 fighter is built in 44 states. The military contractors who build it and provide supplies spend many millions in lobby costs. Armed Services Committee appropriators in particular get slathered in special interest money and reward their contributors with as many contracts as possible. The overall trajectory of military spending since World War II is that the military part of the budget is magic and we can spend whatever we want on it. As a result, we spend more on the weapons and tools of war than every other country on Earth, combined.

So it’s not every day that a major weapons program gets phased out through the appropriations process. It happened today, as 58 Senators voted to cancel additional spending on the F-22 fighter, a plane which the Pentagon doesn’t want, which the Air Force doesn’t want, which hasn’t flown a single mission in Iraq and Afghanistan, and which has been found in tests to be vulnerable to rain.

It was a parochial vote that had more to do with whether a Senator’s state builds major portions of the F-22 than anything else. And it will not signal any kind of near-term sea change in the military budget, which will increase this year. A lot of the F-22 money will just re-route into other fighters like the F-35 and unmanned aerial drones. But there’s a symbolic significance here. The President and the Secretary of Defense took on the military-industrial complex by threatening to veto the entire defense bill if this funding stayed intact, and in this case they won. If we’re ever going to break their stranglehold on the process, we have to win this kind of vote. Over time, we may even have a President that says “hey, it’s kind of insane to spend more on the military than every other country combined” – don’t laugh, it could happen – and by showing the ability to cancel weapons projects like this, it will be easier for that future President to maneuver. And I particularly like some of the language Obama used in his comments about this, saying that our budget is a zero-sum game and our “citizens lose” if more money goes to unnecessary weapons systems. With all the talk from the fiscal scolds, there is an opportunity to channel that toward a military budget full of bloat and waste.

It’s a good first step, nothing more. But showing we can get by without weapons systems designed for the Cold War is important.

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Who Us?

by digby

Today’s Milbank/Cilizza Mouthpiece Theatre offering is called Pay To Play. Seriously. Here’s the synopsis:

Dodd oils up with lobbyists,a congressman wants Americans to pay for unprotected sex, and Michael Steele competes with Ed Rendell for mouthpiece of the week.

Apparently, they didn’t have enough time to mention the juicy, inside the beltway story about their own bosses pimping them like two dollar hookers to health industry lobbyists. It’s a short program after all. You can’t include everything.

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Into The Ocean

by dday

As you know, I write at Calitics, the progressive site covering California politics. This is often a punishing experience. Since 1978, Proposition 13 has tilted the very structure of government in an unassailably conservative direction – 2/3 votes are needed to raise taxes, but only a simple majority to cut. As a result, politicians invariably take the path of least resistance, and as the Norquistian right rose to prominence in the state GOP, they learned that they could simply hijack the budget process for their own ends. State leaders compensated with borrowing and various gimmicks to put off the costs until after they left office. Servicing the debt became a bigger and bigger slice of the budget pie. Stakeholders who couldn’t rely on the state used the ridiculously easy initiative process to pass unfunded spending mandates for themselves and all sorts of ballot-box budgeting. In good times, this uneasy balance worked… sort of. In even the most mild recessions, it would collapse.

That sets the stage for yesterday’s horrendous budget deal, which closes a $26 billion dollar deficit with almost no new revenue, making steep cuts that amount to a reinvention of government’s promises to its people, along with the usual gimmickry and a harsh, counter-productive set of raids on local government resources.

A local government official made a comment Monday afternoon, a few hours before the $25 billion deficit deal was reached, that seems to encapsulate everyone’s feelings.

“As this budget hits the street today and people look at it,” said San Mateo County Supervisor Rich Gordon, “I think Californians are going to say, ‘How did we get in this mess?'” […]

It relies on about $15.5 billion in cuts and $11 billion in, well, other stuff (more on that in a moment).

Almost two-thirds of the cuts are in K-12 education, colleges, and universities (though it also includes a one-time supplemental payment to K-12 and community colleges of $11.2 billion). Other sizeable cuts are in corrections ($1.2 billion), state worker salaries ($1.3 billion in the current furloughs) and Medi-Cal services ($1.3 billion). Welfare assistance, health care for low-income kids, and in-home support services (IHSS) would also see cuts.

Also cut: funding for state parks, though nowhere near the level Governor Schwarzenegger proposed in May. Legislative staffers say a few parks would close, and the ones in question will be picked by the administration.

In addition, the state will steal borrow $4.3 billion from already strapped local governments, leading to probable bankruptcies and in all likelihood more expenses for the state to pick up. California workers will see an extra 10% of their state withholding taxes taken as an interest-free loan. The state will delay paychecks to state workers by one day, from June 30 to July 1, to push $1.3 billion into the next fiscal year. Governor Robot added non-budget related items like anti-fraud prevention measures to IHSS, so that when you try to access social services, you get fingerprinted like a common criminal. And one of the only revenue producers? A $100 million annual lease for offshore drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara, the first new drilling on the California coast since a massive oil spill in that area 40 years ago.

Some of this stuff is illegal; almost all of it is immoral. And yet the system is designed to produce bad outcomes. The 2/3 requirement enforces the structural revenue gap, led by the comically low property taxes, in particular for commercial properties (many paying the same rate since 1978). State Democrats have shown no leadership to change the system for 31 years, leading to policies that kick the can down the road, at a higher eventual cost. And Republicans get their wish of drowning government in the bathtub. California is dead last in state spending in almost every meaningful category, and this profoundly damages the state’s future.

I have become convinced that the only way out of this is through a Constitutional convention, the enactment of which has been suggested by some who are trying to build a movement for it. This is not a problem of personality but process. We could elect Gavin Newsom, Meg Whitman, Noam Chomsky or John Birch governor, and the structural problems will still be with us. They are so vast, so widespread, that only dealing with them completely, and returning the state to responsible governance, has any hope of succeeding. It’s going to take a long slog, but ultimately, we have to Repair California or else we will continue on a long march to nowhere.

I agree with Digby about the collective lack of perspective in state politics. (side note – I actually almost worked on the actual “Who Wants To Be Governor Of California” TV show produced at the time by Game Show Network). And yes, “we are going to have to reform more than the state constitution to fix things. We need to reform politics itself somehow, convince people that it isn’t American Idol or the World Series, or the ruling class will always be able to afford to put on a show whenever they need to manipulate the folks and the folks will probably fall for it.” But I’m enough of a goo-goo to believe that people can actually become energized by taking back their government. That’s why I believe sweeping constitutional reform is in the end the only option – because a status quo system will only empower the types of shenanigans that brought us both the Governator and hundreds of thousands if not millions of residents left with no help and no hope. I think the process of a new Constitution itself would become a sideshow on the outside, but on the inside fairly rigorous. Somehow most jury trials, even in high-profile cases, can manage this balance. To get the circus out of town, we must offer an alternative to the sideshow that is our government. If enough of us wish to be a laughingstock no more, it can be done.

California’s problem, by the way, is by no means unique. In the US Senate we have a smaller undemocratic threshold, but only slightly so. The minority Republicans are fanatical here, but not so much more than the rump conservatives in Congress. We have almost no state political media, what does exist pushes meaningless bipartisanship masquerading as a solution, and the electorate pays little attention to politics anyway, unless a sideshow like the recall election takes place; not all that different at the national level. California has throughout its history been seen as a bellweather for national economic and social change. As Paul Krugman said in a column several months ago, “This could be America next.”

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Mad Max

by digby

Meet the winner:

Progressive groups are launching a new round of advertising against Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, (D-Mont.), in an effort to persuade him to support a public option.

The Montana Democrat was the (unfortunate) winner of a contest sponsored by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America, in which the groups allowed members to choose which senator to target in an ad campaign. Baucus has, at times, indicated he supports a government run plan but it is not certain if the proposal will make it into the final version of his committee’s bill.

For this, 15,000 progressive voters determined that he should get an additional bit of political pressure. The ads being run against the senator, which will air in three media markets in Montana — Billings, Butte-Bozeman, and Helena – are duplicates of an old PCCC spot. Only it is customized for Baucus, pointing to the $3.9 million he has taken from “health and insurance interests.”

Poor Max. I’m sure he’s not going to like having his constituents know that he’s one of the insurance industry’s very special friends. But it’s important they know that so that if his committee doesn’t manage to get that bill out before before the August recess they can have some nice long visits with him about it while he’s back home. Somehow I doubt Montanans are any more fond of health insurance companies than are the rest of us.

Go here to see the ad and contribute to giving Max heartburn.

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