Month: August 2009

The Newest Village Gasbag

by digby

I feel so much more informed having watched the Stephanopoulos round table with Liz Cheney, who was referred to as a “Republican Strategist.” (I guess “Bipolar Strategist” Glenn Beck wasn’t available.) Luckily, we had “Democratic Strategists” George Will, Gwen Ifill, Sam Donaldson and EJ Dionne on there to balance out the discussion. Not that it was necessary since she is such a reasonable, dispassionate member of the political scene, especially when it comes to the issue of torture. Let’s just say she had a few things to say. At a very high decibel level.

The only one who felt comfortable arguing with her on a subject with which she was so obviously personally invested, being as she’s the spawn of Torquemada and all, was Sam Donaldson who valiantly tried, but sadly, didn’t have the facts at hand. The others simply grinned like jack-o-lanterns (except “village strategist” George Will who helpfully supplied some misleading facts from an anonymously sourced, self-serving article in the Washington Post. See: Greenwald)

She also argued against health care, although it was hard to understand since she apparently believes that the Democrats’ proposals included torture, which she oddly seemed to be arguing was a bad thing.

Meanwhile, on John King, Orrin Hatch reiterated that the CIA is going to be too timid or too angry to stop a terrorist attack if any of them are held accountable for their actions. And once again, I have to say how much this worries me. If this is the character of the people we have working in the CIA then they all need to be fired immediately and we need to find some patriots who won’t sell out their own countrymen out of fear or pique. It’s a tough job and criminals, wimps and traitors don’t qualify.

All in all, I learned a lot this morning — mostly that I will never get those two hours of my life back.

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It’s Bork, Stupid, Part Deux

by tristero

Tobin Harshaw, writing in the NY Times Opinionator blog about Kennedy’s role in the defeat of Bork’s SCOTUS nomination back during Reagan, takes a swipe at this post of mine:

Tristero at Hullaballoo knows that it can be proved that Kennedy relied totally on the facts, if only somebody else would actually go and find them.

Typically, in the blogosphere, this would set off entertaining backnforth nastiness, generate mutual accusations of illiteracy, and conclude with pretzelled suggestions as to what should be put, and exactly where, to various family members related to the combatants. Instead, I’ll travel the road rarely taken and simply concede, without any excuses, Harshaw’s point: he’s right. I should have done more studying and written a well-researched defense of Kennedy’s denunciation of Bork.

More importantly, at the very least someone should have written such a post. But nobody has, at least no one with enough visibility to get on Mr. Harshaw’s radar (or mine; please feel free to send links).

Kennedy’s speech against Bork was one of the Senator’s shining moments. It was also one of the last times that a major liberal voice swiftly and directly confronted – without retreating! – a blatant attempt to place extreme right activists in positions of power where they could wreak havoc on the country.* So… instead of celebrating Kennedy’s effort, or even treating it as a he said/she said dustup, Harshaw juxtaposed two video clips – one of Kennedy, the other of the Army/McCarthy hearings.

That’s right: a staff writer at the New York Times directly compared Teddy Kennedy’s yeoman efforts to prevent a well-documented rightwing lunatic from becoming a Supreme Court justice to McCarthy’s fact-free witchhunt against non-existent communists. Fox News didn’t do this. The New York Times did.

This comparison – Ted Kennedy to Joseph McCarthy – is, to be very, very kind, utterly outrageous, but it is not entirely Harshaw’s fault. Or, if you prefer, there is nothing we can do to entirely prevent such fatuous nonsense, but we can certainly make it more difficult to pull off with a straight face. So how about it progressives?**

Even more important than Kennedy/Bork, the extreme right is about to roll out many “new products” for the fall (those who remember September 2002 know what I’m talking about); some, like the “Tea Party Express,” have already started and are timed to climax in September. The bestseller lists are swamped with rightwing screeds, the airwaves filled with nothing but their hateful spokesmen or expressions of sorrow, deliberately emptied of all progressive content, on Kennedy’s death.

And so, whaddawegot for September?

Uh, huh. That’s what I was afraid of.

*Of course. there were other liberals who’ve done fantastic things, eg, Wellstone. But neither he nor any other liberal has since had the national name recognition of a Kennedy or his iconic, legendary, stature. At the very least, Kennedy’s derailing of Bork should not be ignored by progressives, as it has been, almost universally, during the eulogies of the past few days. He saved the country.

**Oh, you bet your bippy I’ll posting the details on Bork, but I shouldn’t be the only one.

Feel The Magic

by digby

If you feel like making yourself stupid, read this:

With polls showing that President Obama is losing ground, The Post asked political experts what he could do to regain the initiative. Below are contributions from Scott Keeter, Michael S. Berman, Newt Gingrich, Donna Brazile, Robert J. Blendon, Christine Todd Whitman, Dan Schnur, Ed Rogers, Harold Ford Jr. and Ed Gillespie.

It’s as bad as you imagine it would be.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Torah! Torah! Torah!

By Dennis Hartley

Care to repeat that anti-Semitic remark?

World War II movies can generally be divided into four distinct categories. There’s the no-nonsense, historically accurate docu-drama (The Longest Day, Battle of the Bulge, Tora! Tora! Tora!). There’s the character-driven, grunt’s-eye-view yarn that is either “based on a true story” or endeavors to retain historical feasibility (Saving Private Ryan, The Big Red One, Hell Is For Heroes). There’s the Alistair MacLean-style action-adventure fantasy; not so believable but maybe keeping at least one toe grounded in reality (Where Eagles Dare, The Dirty Dozen, The Eagle Has Landed). And finally, there’s the “alternate reality” version of Dubya Dubya Two (Castle Keep, The Mysterious Doctor, and, um, The Keep ). Quentin Tarantino’s new war epic, Inglourious Basterds, vacillates somewhere in between action-adventure fantasy and alternate reality.

Sharing scant more than a title with the, erm, more correctly spelled 1978 original (which was itself a bit of a knockoff of The Dirty Dozen) Inglourious Basterds is ultimately less concerned with WW2 than it is with giving the audience a Chuck Workman on acid montage of 20th century cinema, “101”. It’s not like we haven’t come to expect the cinematic mash-up/movie geek parlor game shtick in Tarantino’s films, but he may well have outdone himself in this outing, referencing everything from the Arnold Fanck/Leni Riefenstahl mountain movies (!) to Al Pacino’s final stand in Brian DePalma’s Scarface .

Tarantino wastes no time reminding us of his particular obsession with Sergio Leone right out of the starting gate (aka “Chapter 1” in Tarantinospeak), with a prelude cut straight out of Once Upon a Time in the Westand pasted into “Nazi-occupied France”. Remember Henry Fonda’s memorably execrable villain in that film? He appears to have a soul mate in SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a disarmingly erudite sociopath who has been assigned the task of methodically combing France to round up and eliminate Jews who might be hiding out in the countryside. Landa is very good at his “job”, which has earned him the nickname of “The Jew Hunter” (charming, no?). After setting you up with an antagonist that you know you are going to love to hate (especially after his introductory scene) Tarantino serves up some heroes that you are going to hate to love (I’m starting to think that boy just lives to make his audiences squirm…okaaay?).

A scenery-chewing Brad Pitt stars as Lieutenant Aldo Raine (whose name, I am assuming, is a clever-clever homage to the late actor Aldo Ray, who was a staple player for many years in war films like Battle Cry, The Naked and the Dead, Men in War and The Green Berets). Lt. Raine has been charged with assembling a Geneva Convention-challenged terror squad comprised of a hand-picked group of Jewish-American G.I.s. Their special assignment: Kill Nazis. Oh, I know what you might be thinking-“Wasn’t that the general goal of the Allied forces in Europe in WW II?” Yes (if I may retort), but as far as I recall, the mission orders normally didn’t include a directive to also (literally) take scalps. And forget about taking prisoners; although they usually purposely leave a lone survivor (not before they etch out a Charlie Manson-esque souvenir in his forehead).

At any rate, the self-anointed “Basterds” have managed to “carve out” quite a name for themselves, and have become the bane of evil Nazis (or as Raine refers to them in his Huckleberry Hound drawl, “GNAT-sees”) everywhere (these are some bad-ass Jews). Even the Fuhrer (Martin Wuttke) fears them; he is particularly chagrined whenever the name of the dreaded “Bear Jew” (Eli Roth) is mentioned. This particular team member (known to fellow Basterds as Sgt. Donny Donowitz) has earned his nickname from his swarthy, hulking appearance and a preference for dispatching Nazis utilizing a baseball bat (move over, Sandy Koufax). These happy Jews, this band of bubelehs have even enlisted a Nazi-hating German defector (Til Schweiger) who fits right in (he’s a psycho!).

Now, don’t despair-this outing is not strictly a Braunschweiger fest. No Tarantino film (at least from Jackie Brown onward) would be complete without an ass-kicking heroine. Shosanna Dreyfus (played with smoldering intensity by Melanie Laurent) is a French Jew with a personal score to settle with one of the main characters (yes, it does bring The Bride in Kill Bill to mind). She’s a clandestine resistance fighter (a la Melville’s Army of Shadows) who has covered up her Jewish heritage by changing her name and “hiding in plain sight” as the proprietress of a popular movie house (which of course conveniently affords Tarantino the opportunity to REALLY pile on the movie homage-and create the ultimate dream girl for film geeks like me). Her story eventually converges with the Basterds (and her quarry), which culminates in an audacious, grand guignol-fueled finale.

Love him or hate him, there are two aspects of filmmaking that Tarantino has inarguably proven to have a golden ear and an eagle eye for: crackling dialogue and spot-on casting. As usual, every actor seems to have been born to play his or her respective part in this film, especially Waltz (is there a more appropriate name for an Austrian actor?). Repellent as his character is, there is a twinkling, pure joy of performance bursting just beneath the grease paint that is exhilarating to watch. Pitt, who actually doesn’t get as much screen time as the pre-release hype and movie trailers may have led you to believe, seems to be having the time of his life. Diane Kruger is excellent as a German movie star who is feeding intelligence to the Allies. A heavily made-up Mike Myers can be seen as a British general (the type of supporting character “back at HQ” that you could picture Anthony Quayle, Jack Hawkins or Trevor Howard playing back in the day). As you might expect, there are cameos a-plenty, including Rod Taylor (as Winston Churchill) and Bo Svenson (a veteran from the original film who you’ll miss if you blink). Don’t strain your eyes trying to spot the cameos by QT stalwarts Harvey Keitel and Samuel L. Jackson; they are heard, but not seen. Tarantino appears as a dead German soldier who is shown being scalped (which undoubtedly fulfills the fantasies of some of his detractors).

One aspect that makes this film an anomaly in the QT oeuvre is the fact that much of the dialogue is spoken in-language by the French and German actors. It’s quite a testament to the director’s formidable writing skills that after the first few scenes, you don’t really notice that some characters will frequently switch idioms (especially the amazing Waltz, who proves fluency in German, French, Italian and English). Even when subtitled, the words veritably sing and dance with Tarantino’s unmistakable, idiosyncratic pentameter.

In the context of purely visual storytelling, I think that Inglourious Basterds signals the director’s most assured, mature and resplendent work to date (beautifully lensed throughout by Robert Richardson, who was the DP on both Kill Bill films and previously a veteran of 11 Oliver Stone collaborations). This is particularly evident in the film’s opening scene, which immediately draws you in with an eye-filling, gorgeously expansive exterior shot of the French countryside. The prelude to the film’s finale is arguably THE visual highlight of any QT film to date. In a possible homage to Joan Crawford’s Vienna (whose name is derived from the French word for “life”) donning her rose red blouse for the final showdown with her black-clad nemesis in Nicholas Ray’s deliriously lurid revenge western Johnny Guitar, Shosanna (whose name derives from the Hebrew word for “rose”) dons her vividly Technicolor red dress as she prepares for the showdown with her black-clad nemesis, scored with David Bowie’s “Putting Out Fire” (originally used as the theme for Paul Schrader’s 1982 version of Cat People). It’s a ballsy move by Tarantino, but not unlike his similarly brash gamble of doing a wholesale lift of the theme song from Across 110th Street for Jackie Brown’s opening credits, I’ll be damned if it ain’t the perfect choice (maybe he figured it would have been pushing his luck to also “borrow” the “harmonica man” theme from Once Upon a Time in the West?).

Finally, I wanted to share a thought or two about the violence, which is de rigueur for any Tarantino film, and which invariably provides the catalyst for discord in any conversation between QT disciples and QT detractors. Yes, scalping is an abhorrent, gruesome thing to watch. There are stabbings, shootings, and deaths by strangulation and bludgeoning. This is not Pinocchio . Yet, if you were to add up all of this simulated mayhem in actual screen time, I’m guesstimating that it wouldn’t be much more than 10 minutes (out of a 153 minute total running time). With the possible exception of Kill Bill – Volume One (an over-the-top affair in the bloodletting department by anyone’s standards) I think that the knee-jerk tendency is to perceive a higher ratio of violence in Tarantino’s films than actually exists. In fact, do you want to know which scene has the most white-knuckled, edge-of-your seat, heart-pounding suspense in this film? A fucking game of charades. Charades. I won’t spoil it for you; just know that wherever Alfred Hitchcock is, he’s probably looking down on QT with a nod and a wink…from one inglourious basterd to another.

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All The Way To The End

by digby

Ted Kennedy “politicized” his own funeral, in his own words, written in a letter to the Pope and read by Cardinal McCarrick at Arlington National Cemetery:

I want you to know, your Holiness, that in my nearly 50 years of elective office I have done my best to champion the rights of the poor and open doors of economic opportunity. I’ve worked to welcome the immigrant, to fight discrimination and expand access to health care and education. I’ve opposed the death penalty and fought to end war. Those are the issues that have motivated me and have been the focus of my work as a United States Senator.

I also want you to know that even though I am ill, I am committed to do everything I can to get access to health care for everyone in my country. This has been the political cause of my life. I believe in a conscience protection for Catholics in the health field and will continue to advocate for it as my colleagues in the Senate and I work to develop an overall national policy that guarantees health care for everyone.

Go ahead. Wellstone that, wingnuts.

Update: Ed Rollins just said that Senator Kennedy got the last word.

Let’s hope so.

RIP

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One Of Them

by digby

Just documenting the atrocities. It speaks for itself:

President Barack Obama is a fascist.

This and other assertions flew through an emotionally-charged town hall meeting conducted by Sen. Chuck Grassley Monday in Pocahontas.

“The president of the United States, that’s who you should be concerned about. Because he’s acting like a little Hitler,” said Tom Eisenhower, a World War II veteran. “I’d take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me.”

[…]

Grassley said the attendance at the town hall meetings has been six times what it was last year.

“It’s great that so many people are getting involved and want to participate in these meetings,” he said. “I want to hear what people have to say, and encourage every Iowan to participate in the democratic process by having dialogue with their elected representatives.”

[…]

Dwayne Hornor, of Varina, said he still was not satisfied that his concerns had been addressed, but that he was, however, satisfied with Sen. Grassley.

“Grassley is pretty much, how would you say, one of us,” he said. “If it had been Harkin this might have been a bit more vocal.”

He’s one of them alright. Borderline nuts.

Why is it that these people keep alluding to shooting Obama all the time? (And why doesn’t anyone give a damn?) Are they so far gone that they really believe that potential government spending requires them to start shooting? Seriously, nobody’s taxes have gone up. Nobody’s. The recession was already a year old when Obama took office and Bush spent a huge surplus on tax cuts for rich people which these fools all applauded like trained seals.

So they are not very convincing when they try to say that their violent rhetoric is based upon some abstract fear of deficits and socialism. Nothing that Obama has done so far can possibly justify the wild-eyed, slavering, full blown lunacy we are seeing at these town halls.

The simple truth is that they are all a bunch of self-centered, childish sore losermen who refuse to accept that a Democrat won the presidency. And for at least some of them, the fact that a black Democrat won the presidency has obviously sent them around the bend. They are in the grip of a powerful reckoning in which it turns out that most Americans don’t actually agree with their cramped worldview. Hence the crack-up.

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Does Satan Have Good Intentions?

by digby

As most of you know, I’m not a religious person, although I try to always be respectful of those who are believers. There is much I don’t know and in this realm I just try to maintain my secular equilibrium. But please, could someone who knows more about theology than I do please, please explain this to me?

Over at Townhall, horrible little shit Gary Bauer offers the Christian Case for Torture.

For Christians, intent is integral to determining whether and when certain techniques, including water-boarding, are morally permissible.

I guess the reason it was wrong to crucify Jesus was because the Romans had bad intentions, otherwise it would have been perfectly justified. It certainly explains why the Inquisition was fine and dandy. You learn something new every day.

And then there’s this:

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has been lobbying for three decades for the federal government to provide universal health insurance, especially for the poor. Now, as President Obama tries to rally Roman Catholics and other religious voters around his proposals to do just that, a growing number of bishops are speaking out against it. As recently as July, the bishops’ conference had largely embraced the president’s goals, although with the caveat that any health care overhaul avoid new federal financing of abortions. But in the last two weeks some leaders of the conference, like Cardinal Justin Rigali, have concluded that Democrats’ efforts to carve out abortion coverage are so inadequate that lawmakers should block the entire effort. Others, echoing the popular alarms about “rationing,” contend that the proposals could put a premium on efficacy that could penalize the chronically ill. “No health care reform is better than the wrong sort of health care reform,” Bishop R. Walker Nickless of Sioux City, Iowa, declared in a recent pastoral letter, urging the faithful to call their members of Congress. In a diocesan newspaper column this week, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver agreed, saying the proposal was “not only imprudent; it’s also dangerous.” The bishops’ opposition — published in diocesan newspapers, disseminated online by conservative activists, and reported in a Roman Catholic newspaper to be distributed this weekend at churches around the country — is another setback for Mr. Obama’s health care efforts. His administration has been counting on the support of Catholic leaders to help rally believers behind his health care plan. Just last week, he held a conference call with 140,000 religious voters to appeal to what he called their “moral convictions.”

I think this pretty clearly outlines what their “moral convictions” are and they don’t seem to apply to people who are already born.

I don’t mean to tar all Christians with these examples. But I do wonder about Christian Churches which accept this stuff. And I am more convinced than ever that trying to find “common ground” with people who agree with or fail to speak out against this myopic moral worldview out of common decency is a waste of time. Many churches are, as they ever were, political institutions with a political agenda and a thirst for power. Pretending otherwise is folly.

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LA Invitation

by digby

All of you folks who live here in “the Southland” (or anywhere else for that matter) are cordially invited to come meet our good friend and wonderful writer Dave Neiwert next Tuesday, September 1st at Brave New Studios to hear him speak about his new book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.

There times when a writer publishes a book at exactly the right moment and this is one of them. With violent mainstream rhetoric hitting peaks we haven’t seen in nearly 40 years, the village is struggling to comprehend where it’s all coming from and what it means. They haven’t been paying attention. And because of that there are many people out in the country who are shocked by it too.

Neiwert’s book explains the method by which this malignant discourse begins on the fringes and finds its way into the mainstream. It’s a primer that everyone, particularly journalists and politicians, should read in order to fully understand why the tea parties are anything but benign exercises in free speech.

So, if you can, come meet Dave at Brave New Studios to hear him talk with John Amato about this timely and important subject. It promises to be a very enlightening (and fun!) evening.

Here are the event details:

Date: Tuesday, September 1st

Time: There will be a reception at 6 pm. The program will begin promptly at 6:30 pm.

Note: Please be aware that they are filming this event so the studio door will be shut at 6:30 pm sharp.

Location: 10536 Culver Boulevard, Culver City, CA 90232
Please enter through the gate behind the building.

RSVP: Please RSVP by emailing ewagner-at -bravenewfoundation.org
Seating is very limited, so we will be taking a small number of RSVPs.

Parking: There is free parking on the streets on either side of our building.
Please do not park in the parking spots behind the building as they are reserved.

I hope to see you there.

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That’s It

by digby

For crying out loud. On the one hand we have the mainstream Republicans appropriating Kennedy as some sort of centrist compromiser, the fringe wingnuts are claiming that Ted is singly responsible for creating the poisonous partisan environment we find ourselves in today.

Here’s a little truth:

There’s poison and then there’s poison. That was a handbill circulated on November 21, 1963, in Dallas one day before the assassination.

Wingnuts have a long, long history of this ugly stuff. And we are seeing the same crazy stuff today. Don’t tell me that politics was all hearts and flowers until Teddy ruined everything. He, of all people, knew better.

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And That’s The Way It Is

by digby

Bill Moyers is a DFH. I’ll let Howie tell you about it:

Last night Bill Maher welcomed Bill Moyers to his show by calling him “the Conscience Of American Journalism.” Moyers explained the narrowly focused Republican strategy of obstructionism– defeating anything and everything that Obama tries to do so that they can defeat him electorally in 2012. The problems of American families are not a priority to the GOP; defeating Obama is their only goal. His regard for the Democrats isn’t much higher.

The first time I ever mentioned that Rahm Emanuel– then a sleazy rep from Chicago relatively new to Congress but already heading the DCCC/now Obama’s all-powerful chief of staff– was the Tom DeLay of the Democratic Party, a ton of Democratic bricks landed, metaphorically, on my head. I wasn’t the only one who had looked into this particular heart of darkness but there weren’t many who realized that Emanuel represented not Democrats, but the historically always-present forces that seek to maintain the status quo on behalf of wealthy elites. Normally this is accomplished on a bipartisan basis. Inside the Democratic Party, Emanuel is the tool, or, rather, one of the tools. Last night Maher called him out as the bane of progressive health care reform. No more White House Christmas cards for him.

Moyers pointed directly to Emanuel targeting the same progressives Blue America and a wide coalition of netroots activists are thanking for standing up for the public option with a very different message: “sit down and shut up.”

The Democratic Party has become like the Republican Party– deeply influenced by corporate money. I think Rahm Emanuel, who’s a clever politician, understands that the money for Obama’s re-election will come primarily from the health industry, the drug industry and Wall Street. He is a corporate Democrat who is determined that there won’t be something in this legislation– if we get it– that will turn off those powerful interests.

[…]

There’s this fear that Barack Obama will become the Grover Cleveland of this era – Grover Cleveland was a good man, but he became a conservative Democratic President because he didn’t fight the powerful interests – people say Obama should be FDR – I’d much rather see him be Theodore Roosevelt –– Teddy Roosevelt loved to fight – … I think if Obama fought instead of really finessed it so much . . . I think it would change the atmosphere.

I second that emotion.

And coming from a man who worked for LBJ during Vietnam, this is even more meaningful:

MAHER: What do you think of Obama’s policy in Afghanistan – you were around for the Vietnam debate and the escalation — it may have been why you left the White House?

MOYERS: I’d think it would be a tragedy beyond description for this young, bright, exciting President to be drawn into an endless war in the same way that the last young, bright, exciting President was drawn into – intervened in Vietnam. I was there when Kennedy chose to send advisers to Vietnam – and was there when LBJ escalated – they both acted from noble intentions – actually they did – they wanted to stop Communism in Asia and spread democracy – but the advisers soon became bombers and the bombers became grounds troops and pretty soon, it became a regional crusade – and 12 years later, billions of dollars, and millions of lives later, including 60,000 American troops – we lost – because the U.S. is not good at that sort of thing.

Here Obama has 68,000 troops over there and the Generals are asking for another 20,000 — maybe 30,000 more troops — saying it’s not enough. The military and the hawks will always say “not enough.” Obama has to say “enough” — or he’s going to be drawn into it.

(That’s not looking so promising at the moment.)

These comments left Maher uncharacteristically quiet. (I suspect he didn’t expect Moyers to be so candid.) And I have received a bunch of emails from people celebrating Moyers’ comments. They are worth celebrating:

It’s one thing for shrill bloggers like us to point out that DLC corporate politics are poisoning the Democratic agenda and that the national security hawks are once again taking a promising Democratic president down the garden path. It’s quite another for a mainstream liberal of impeccable credentials and strong moral authority like Bill Moyers to say it so plainly on national TV.

It’s the political equivalent of Walter Cronkite speaking out against Vietnam. If Obama doesn’t think his base is seriously unhappy, he’d better think again.

Update: Moyers’ own show last night was also great, concentrating on the problem with health care. At the end, he said this:

BILL MOYERS: MONEY-DRIVEN MEDICINE, a film produced by Alex Gibney, Peter Bull and Chris Matonti; directed by Andy Fredericks; and based on Maggie Mahar’s book of the same name.

Log on to pbs.org and click on BILL MOYERS JOURNAL – Maggie Mahar will be there to answer your questions online. We’ll link you to the Money-Driven Medicine website where there’s more info about the book and the film. We’ll also link you to some analysis of what advocates of reform are up against in taking on the health insurance industry, the drug lobby, and the Wall Street equity firms.

Take a look at this recent cover of BUSINESS WEEK. Reporters Chad Terhune and Keith Epstein write that the CEO’s of the giant insurance companies should be smiling – their lobbyists have already won. Quote: “no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable.”

And remember that television ad Barack Obama made as a candidate for president?

BARACK OBAMA: The pharmaceutical industry wrote into the prescription drug plan that Medicare could not negotiate with drug companies. And you know what, the chairman of the committee who pushed the law through went to work for the pharmaceutical industry making $2 million a year. Imagine that. That’s an example of the same old game-playing in Washington. I don’t want to learn how to play the game better. I want to put an end to the game-playing.

BILL MOYERS: Now look at this recent story in the LOS ANGELES TIMES. Lo and behold, since the election, the pharmaceutical industry’s $2 million dollars a year superstar lobbyist Billy Tauzin has morphed into President Obama’s pal. Tauzin says the President has promised not to pressure the drug companies to negotiate with the government for lower drug prices and has agreed not to allow cheaper drugs to be imported from Canada or Europe – contrary to the position taken by candidate Obama…

Each of these stories illuminates the scarlet thread that runs through Maggie Mahar’s book – the story of how today’s market-driven medical system gives Wall Street investors life and death control over our health care, turning medicine into a profit machine instead of a social service to meet human need. That’s the conflict at the heart of next month’s showdown in Washington.

h/t to TomJoad

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