Month: August 2009

I Know You Are But What Am I?

by digby

This just gets better and better:

On today’s call with reporters, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele took credit for the RNC’s response to a new Democratic National Committee ad asking voters to call Republicans and tell them to stop ginning up town hall heckling. The RNC redirected these calls from its main switchboard over to the DNC’s switchboard — a response, said Steele, to the White House arrogantly blaming regular Americans “like my mother, like my sister” for the health care impasse.

“I thought it was a good idea,” Steele said. “Don’t sit there and think you’re going to direct a bunch of angry liberals to call the RNC when I know full well what that’s all about. I get the joke. My response was, talk to your own party, because they’re the ones ginning this up.”

These junior high school delinquents have proven once again that they have no place in deciding important issues for the American people. They are great political theatre and masterful pranksters, but it’s irresponsible for anyone to let them near policy that affects people’s lives. They are circus clowns.

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Thug Life

by dday

For all the conservatives trying to make some equivalence between Code Pink ralliers and lobbyist-supported teabagger groups on their side, please let me know the instances of left-wing protesters physically assaulting politicians:

As lobbyist-run groups encourage conservative activists to “rattle” members of Congress at local town hall events, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), the president of the freshman Democratic class has revealed that “at least one freshman Democrat” has already been “physically assaulted at a local event” by right-wing activists. Connolly warned that conservative groups had taken things to a “dangerous level“:

“When you look at the fervor of some of these people who are all being whipped up by the right-wing talking heads on Fox, to me, you’re crossing a line,’ Connolly said. ‘They’re inciting people to riot with just total distortions of facts. They think we’re going to euthanize Grandma and the government is going to take over.”

I think Harold Meyerson has this right. We’ve become a Filibuster Nation, with the minority reduced to shouting down the majority, using procedural tricks and rage and in some cases violence to veto the popular will.

Health Care for America Now has a memo on how to counteract the right at these rallies. There are probably a range of options. Invoking the Larouchies would be a start. Just getting the teabaggers on camera spouting their inanities is probably enough for them to embarrass themselves. But shutting up a mob that has shown a propensity for physical assault is probably not going to be handled with reasonable techniques. I’m thinking back to my days as a comic, when I was heckled. I actually enjoyed hecklers, it meant people were paying attention, for one thing. And I found two techniques to be successful:

1) Go meta – you cannot just plow ahead with your presentation. You have to comment on what’s happening in the room. And making clear what’s happening, essentially speaking for those in the room who aren’t shouting, gets that segment of the room on your side. Saying things like “this is a coordinated effort by people funded and directed by Washington lobbyists to deny 47 million people health care” is a start. “Where are you from?” is another.

2) You have a microphone and they don’t: use it – people on the fence generally go with the side that they feel has the upper hand. A microphone can be a powerful tool to talk over, above, and through a heckler. It can also be wielded for shaming them, although a politician probably has to do this tactfully. In other words, don’t do this. I’m thinking more in the Arj Barker mold.

There probably aren’t a lot of former comics among the Congress outside of Al Franken, but they should maybe take some advice from him. I mean, these people at the town halls aren’t even belligerent drunks! They will, however, try to beat you up after the show, just like regular hecklers.

…TPM has a live news wire of events happening on the ground, which may be useful.

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Getting Their Backs

by digby

CNN can run programming claiming that Obama is an illegal alien and employ “consultants” who call Hillary Clinton a bitch and call it “analysis.” They can defame any politician, celebrity or ordinary citizen with total impunity under the first amendment.

But don’t even think of taking on a wealthy CEO. That’s where they draw the line:

What on earth is going on at CNN?

The network — already taking criticism for declining to run an ad criticizing Lou Dobbs — is now refusing to run an ad nationally criticizing the insurance industry, the group that tried to place the ad tells me.

CNN’s reason: The ad “unnecessarily” singles out a top insurance industry executive by name for criticism.

The labor-backed Americans United for Change, a top White House ally in the health care wars, tried to book time on CNN and MSNBC for the ad, which hits the insurance industry for wanting to preserve the status quo and levels harsh criticism at insurance giant Cigna’s CEO, Ed Hanway.

“Why do insurance companies and Republicans want to kill health insurance reform? Because they like things the way they are now,” the ad says, and then slams Hanway’s annual salary of over $12 million and golden parachute retirement package of over $70 million.

Americans United for Change’s spokesman, Jeremy Funk, tells me that CNN refused to run the ad nationally. He says CNN emailed the following reason for rejection:

“This ad does not comply with our clearance guidelines because it unnecessarily singles out an individual company and person.”

They are refusing to run the ad because it unnecessarily singles out an individual company and (Very Important) person. Meanwhile, they typically run political ads that portray candidates and government officials as outright criminals. And people wonder why citizens hate government but have no knowledge of the criminal, exploitative avarice of the leaders of the private sector?

When the networks aren’t making sweet little deals among themselves over canapes at Charlie Rose’s house they are protecting their wealthy pals from truthful criticism. It’s a dirty job keeping the pitchforks at bay, but the masters of the media empires are happy to do it for their fellow corporate overlords. If they don’t look out for each other, who will?

Update: CNN’s batting a thousand these days. Check this out by Davide Sirota.

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Sir Taxalot

by digby

Last night Jon Stewart gave us a much needed insight into the thinking of the top Senate Republican negotiator for health care reform:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Chuck Grassley’s Debt and Deficit Dragon
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

It’s a miracle the human species has survived as long as it has.. If this is the leadership of the most powerful country in the world we’re clearly living on borrowed time.

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In Defense Of Food (Network)

by tristero

Thank you, Jill Richardson! I thought I was the only one! For the past few days, I’ve been accumulating ideas to respond to Michael Pollan’s characteristically brilliant article in the Times because I really had some problems with some of it. Of course, I share many of his attitudes: after all, we inhabit roughly the same cultural/intellectual milieu – in fact, a relative of my wife was married to one of his best friends, a famous food movement figure – but like Jill, I learned to cook, to the extent that I can, from Food Network, while recovering from a serious operation last year.

I’ll go further. Two days ago, I was at a benefit for a group that encourages restaurants in upstate New York to obtain most of their ingredients from within the same county. I can honestly say that I would never have thought to attend had it not been for Food Network. Pollan, and the food movement, had nothing to do with it. By the time I read Pollan’s wonderful “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, I had already grasped the basic issues, simply from watching the FN shows, cooking my own food and thinking about it: The most delicious food, and the best, is the food you prepare yourself from the freshest, most basic ingredients. Furthermore, I grokked that cooking from scratch is a political, perhaps even radical, act in 21st Century America. Pollan’s book simply filled in a lot of truly amazing details.

While Pollan is well aware that this country is food illiterate, and dangerously so, even he doesn’t quite grasp exactly what that means. The way I see it, it means that nearly everyone, including the poor, the middle class, and even the most highly educated members of the upper classes, don’t know squat about what they put in their mouths at least three times a day, let alone how to prepare any of it. Yes, indeed, even Ivy League graduates need to be taught how to hold a knife or how to boil an egg. Making delicious asparagus, as ridiculously simple as that is, came as a shocking revelation to me: So that’s how it’s done and that’s how it’s supposed to taste! As for dear Saint Julia, trust me, Michael: to you she demystified cooking, but she was incredibly daunting to this modern American kitchen illiterate, and in fact still is.

I echo Jill’s appreciation of Alton Brown’s science-spiced Good Eats (which also has the added advantage of thoroughly annoying my 13 year old whenever I watch it). But I want to defend Guy Fieri, of all people, who Pollan singles out as egregiously ludicrous. Pollan seems to be unaware that Fieri has a “how to” cooking show (in addition to Triple D, which, sorry Michael, I love) in which he takes Sports Bar food (apparently, Guy is a spokesperson for TGIF: hey, no one’s perfect ) to a level of truly impressive complexity. I’ve made a few of his vegetarian dishes and they taste fantastic and are a blast to fix. But, of course, no one in their right mind should cook like that at home, at least not with any regularity. That’s not the point. The real point is that Guy loves cooking food and eating food (he is far more articulate about food than Pollan realizes) and he imparts that love with unadulterated pleasure.

Enjoying the food we eat, really enjoying the food we eat and knowing what that means: Pollan has written eloquently about exactly that, that Americans are consumed with “nutritionism” and forget that eating should be pleasurable and celebratory. One would think he would be at least a partial Guy fan (hell, Fieri even promotes his local Sonoma County wines given half a chance). But no. And the reason why Pollan can’t understand Guy well enough even to loathe him properly (his criticism of Triple D is so off-base as to make me seriously question whether he actually watched more than one episode) is quite simple: class. Michael’s one classy guy; Guy, on the other hand, is … a guy.

The food movement is, at present, an elitist movement. Nothing wrong with that, imo: abolition was an elitist movement in the early nineteenth century, as was women’s suffrage, etc, etc. But if you are serious about helping Americans create a truly joyful relationship with real food (the starting point for any genuinely healthy cuisine), then understanding both the myriad problems with Food Network AND its strengths is vitally important. Of course, the commercials are disgraceful; of course, many of the recipes are preposterous (watching Ina Garten say to add a “quarter cup of whole milk” to a recipe when actually she dumps in, unmeasured, what surely is two cups of a suspiciously thick milk is rather… distressing), and the competitions (to me, I admit) profoundly stupid, but when you know absolutely nothing, and I really knew exactly that, Food Network is a place to start.

Can FN be better? Well, duh. But I’m not alone in finding it incredibly useful. Just ask Jill. And I suspect that there are so many of us who started cooking after watching FN that the larger cultural observations Michael makes in his piece really aren’t terribly useful. I hasten to add that most of the time Pollan is spot on. I simply don’t think he truly grasps how complex the cultural meaning of Food Network is. The way I see it, much as he would be horrified to think so, Pollan and FN are sometimes on the same side. Even Guy Fieri.

Freedom Riders

by dday

Turns out that the teabaggers at one town hall meeting in Texas weren’t from the area:

Last night, Rep. Gene Green (D-TX) hosted a rowdy town hall meeting to discuss health care reform. Fox’s local Houston affiliate reporter, Duarte Geraldino, reported that he talked to the participants and found that “some attendees admit they don’t live in the district.” How did they get there? Geraldino noted “an internet campaign” by far right activists urging their allies to attend and heckle Democratic Representatives. Geraldino then aired a clip showing one participant acting disrespectfully towards Rep. Green. “Pay close attention to the man behind the congressman,” Geraldino says in this clip, “he seems to have forgotten the part about respect.” Watch it:

Here’s my favorite part:

During the town hall, one conservative activist turns to his fellow attendees and asks them to raise their hands if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Almost all the hands shot up. Rep Green quickly turned the question on the audience and asked, “How many of you have Medicare?” Nearly half the attendees raised their hands, failing to note the irony.

Decades of conservative message dominance has convinced a healthy portion of the public that a government-run program isn’t run by the government. Failure to counteract that message 30 years ago is deeply affecting this debate today. Paul Waldman writes:

After decades of being told that the federal government is a sinister, rapacious beast with nothing but evil intents, the idea that a complex bill might contain a Soylent Green provision isn’t too far a stretch. Nonetheless, it remains entirely possible that before long, health reform will no longer be a debate but will become an actual policy, one that will succeed or fail on its own merits. As both sides have understood (the Republicans more so than the Democrats, however), this battle is so critical because the stakes go to the heart of each party’s approach to the role of government.

Both parties hope that the successful implementation of their favored policies will lead to a broader acceptance of their ideology. Republicans want to privatize government services not only as an end in itself but to show people that the private sector works better than government. In the same way, Democrats advocate for effective government services not only to solve an immediate problem but to demonstrate that government can in fact do some things very well.

Unfortunately, the successful implementation of a government program doesn’t necessarily convince people that government can successfully implement programs. Antipathy toward government even among many who receive both Medicare and Social Security — two of the most successful government programs in history — is remarkably strong. In fact, by some measures, the elderly have the most skeptical views of government. For instance, in the latest version of the Pew values survey, 64 percent of those over 65 — who are either on Medicare and Social Security or know that they will be soon — said that “when something is run by the government, it is usually inefficient and wasteful” (see page 34 here). That compares to only 43 percent of those age 18 to 29.

Part of that is just the tribal identity with conservatism (which is stronger in those over 65, based on most surveys) trumping the shared knowledge of government programs like Medicare and Social Security. Because these same people generally really like those programs; they’ve just convinced themselves, in a supreme case of cognitive dissonance, that government doesn’t work well (except for whatever it is they’re getting). And mainly, that’s because they’ve heard this repeated from the conservative noise machine for thirty years, virtually unchallenged and sometimes enthusiastically endorsed by Democrats.

Or perhaps there’s another answer. The polls are showing that people under 50 support health care reform at much higher levels than people over 50. It’s no accident that the strongest smears against the plan have to do with killing grandma or taking things away from Medicare. They like what they have and are wary of extending it to the rest of the population, mainly because of how it might impact them.

But this is a funny type of skepticism. Seniors don’t oppose government-run health insurance. They like it too much. Americans over 65 live in a welfare state that most Europeans could only dream about. They have single-payer health care and government-run pensions. Most of their political activity is either an effort to expand those programs or a defense against anything that could in any way harm them. That includes not only direct changes, like cuts to Medicare, but indirect changes, like health-care reform that would focus new resources on the uninsured.

This is a reversal of the normal politics of opposition. Generally speaking, people who oppose health-care reform are worried we’re going to end up with something like what Canada has. Not seniors. They have something like what Canada has (Canada, in fact, also calls their health insurance program “Medicare”). And they like it. They report higher rates of satisfaction with their health care than do people in employer-sponsored insurance. They’re worried, rather, that they might end up with something like what the rest of America has. And having spent time in both Medicare and private health insurance, they don’t want that. They don’t want that at all.

The fight to get successful government recognized is an ideological fight. To those who already have evidence of successful government, the fight is somewhat different. They still echo the conservative line of “government is teh suck,” but they don’t want their government programs tampered with. Thoughts on threading that needle?

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Go To The Source

by digby

I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries about where people might find a list of town hall meetings where pro-health care reform people might go to counteract the tea baggers. I don’t know of any progressive sites that are specifically doing this, but I may be uniformed. If you know something, please leave it in the comments.

But one easy way to know where they are going to be is to go to the main teabagger site itself: Tea Party Patriots. There are probably others as well.

You might check in at Kos and FDL and other sites that are tracking this stuff to see if there are some more specific places where people are gathering or for hints at what works in those situations. That’s all I’ve got.

Update: There are a number of good sources listed in the comments.

And FDL has prepared a helpful field guide.

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Breaking The Dam

by dday

I’m going to have to pretty much agree with Thers’ take:

Like I said over at the Cerulean Cherub’s place, getting a health care bill passed through reconciliation would be great fun even if it were a crap bill […]

From a democratic (small d) perspective, the Senate has been asking for it for a long time now. The filibuster is not a constitutional tradition, and as we’ve seen, amply, is a safeguard of made-up Senatorial principles, not democratic principles, and the public good be damned.

Yes, we need sane healthcare, but we need lots of sane things that we’re not getting because of the absurdities that the Senate enables — Max Baucus directly represents fewer than a million people, and has extensive power over the healthcare of over 300 million Americans. Why? Because he’s a fucking healthcare maven genius! Or not! It’s all amazingly silly.

A case could be made that whatever the content of any specific bill, a punch to the solar plexus of the pudgy, complacent Senate would be good for the nation. The nation’s health literally rests at the whim of a very small number of individuals who are only directly accountable to a very, very small percentage of the nation’s voters. Whatever this is, it’s not democracy.

The Senate has basically gotten completely out of control. It was conceived as a saucer to “cool the cup” of the passions of the House, but there’s a fine line between that and freezing the cup and throwing it into a meat locker. If the Senate were instituted after passage of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court would likely have found it unconstitutionally in violation of the equal protection clause. California has 69 times as many citizens as Wyoming, and yet their citizens get the same amount of Senate representation. The Senate was a bad compromise put in by the Blue Dogs of the 18th century.

What’s more, it’s gotten worse, as runaway egos and peculiar Senate rules have completely paralyzed the legislative process. The filibuster has only recently been transformed from an occasionally used temper tantrum to a de facto 60-vote supermajority requirement. This recent development is a significant intrusion to the ability of the country to govern itself.

The filibuster, however, has undergone little-noticed changes. Even as successive generations have weakened it by creating the option of cloture, the filibuster itself has become more present in everyday legislative maneuvering. The political scientist David Mayhew argues that we’ve misremembered our own past on this matter. He’s written that Senate has never faced “any anti-majoritarian barrier as concrete, as decisive, or as consequential as today’s rule of 60.”

That seems strange, of course. After all, the filibuster was stronger back in the day. But it wasn’t used to create a de facto 60-vote majority. It used to be more akin to a temper tantrum. Mayhew looked at FDR’s court-packing scheme as one of his examples. The filibuster hardly figured into the discussion. “General opinion is that the [bill] will pass,” wrote the conservative Portland Herald Press, “and sooner than expected, since votes to pass it seem apparent, and the opposition cannot filibuster forever.”

Its elevation to the decisive rule in the U.S. Senate is a recent development, and one that has taken a countermajoritarian institution (both in its structure and representation) and saddled it with a supermajority requirement. The product is an almost impossibly obstructed legislative body. We tend to assume this will work out fine, as we’ve had the filibuster forever, and we’re still around. But the evidence is that the filibuster did not really exist in this form before, and so it’s very hard to say whether it will work out fine. And those who think that the political system will always respond to emergency, and that countermajoritarian rules don’t matter, should really take a look at what’s going on right now in California.

Hear hear on that last point.

Reconciliation may or may not be able to produce a bill worth a darn; YMMV. But if the fallout from using it produces a demystification of “Senate process” as some kind of holy writ, the effects would be profound. Process changes have often preceded substantive policy changes. Unless you want health care reform and financial regulatory reform and climate change and energy and all the rest in the tender hands of President Ben Nelson in perpetuity, it may be worth breaking the dam that’s holding back the country.

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Prince Of A Fellow

by digby

I can’t say I’m shocked, but it’s pretty explosive anyway:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting “illegal” or “unlawful” weapons into the country on Prince’s private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct. Susan Burke, a private attorney working in conjunction with the Center for Constitutional Rights, is suing Blackwater in five separate civil cases filed in the Washington, DC, area. They were recently consolidated before Judge T.S. Ellis III of the Eastern District of Virginia for pretrial motions. Burke filed the August 3 motion in response to Blackwater’s motion to dismiss the case. Blackwater asserts that Prince and the company are innocent of any wrongdoing and that they were professionally performing their duties on behalf of their employer, the US State Department.

I eagerly await the pooh-poohing of this as something “out of the movies” by the erstwhile Jack Bauer fanboys.

The sad truth is that whatever we think we know about how the white house ordered the CIA to torture terrorist suspects or the military special forces to assassinate civilians, what these people did completely off the books is likely to be even worse. These military contractors are all heavily connected to the CIA and to the conservative movement. I’m sure they understood their orders very well and were extremely well compensated for carrying them out.

This may end up being one of the few paths open to finding out what really happened. These guys are civilians. But then, both the Bush and Obama administrations have used the state secrets rationale to shut down lawsuits against civilians, so it will be very interesting to see if they do the same thing here. Anybody taking bets?

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Post’d!

by digby

Inadvertently revealing the dark heart of their dying industry two minutes at a time:

Trenchant as hell.

via Americablog

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