Month: August 2009

Poor Lil’ Benji

by digby

As you know, the PCCC has been running ads in Nebraska pointing out that Ben Nelson has a little problem with being an insurance company lackey. He doesn’t like it.

Following is a statement released today by Jake Thompson, Senator Ben Nelson’s spokesman, in response to an ad running in the Nebraska media concerning Senator Nelson and health care.

“Nebraskans don’t need outside special interest groups telling them what to think. Senator Nelson has nothing but praise for Nebraska groups working toward health care reform. Unfortunately, he says, these outside groups undermine the sincere and dedicated efforts of people in our state.

“Recently, similar ads have run in Nebraska. Those ads by other special interests prompted hundreds of Nebraskans to call our offices, with 9 to 1 urging Senator Nelson to do exactly the opposite of what the special interest group wanted. In short, the ads backfired.

“If the impact is the same this time, Howard Dean’s Democracy for America will be sorely disappointed. Further, these scare tactics are certain to further divide the public on health care reform, make it less likely Congress will pass real reform and call into question the motives of those who say they want reform, but use the issue to raise money to try to buy influence inside the Beltway.

“Senator Nelson believes that while most Nebraskans want health care reform, they don’t want it rushed; they want it done right. He has said he will consider a “public plan” as long as it doesn’t undermine the health coverage 200 million Americans have now. He supports Medicare, TRICARE and S-CHIP, and each is a public plan. He also helped establish Kids Connection, Nebraska’s public-plan health insurance for children.

“In the Washington debate, various ‘public plans’ are still being considered, but no single plan has emerged. So, it’s ridiculous to suggest that Senator Nelson is “leading the charge” –as the ad says–against something that doesn’t exist.

“Nebraskans know Ben Nelson is an independent thinker. He also has a long record in the governor’s office and the U.S. Senate of bringing people together and working constructively so important legislation becomes law. Today, he’s looking to support bipartisan legislation that reduces health care costs, boosts the quality of care and expands coverage to people who can’t obtain it now.

“If this is an indication of the politics going into August, then health care reform may be dead by the end of August.”

Oh, boohoohoo!

The PCCC relies:

“Ben Nelson just called a Nebraska small businessman whose health insurance went up 42% an out-of-state special interest, while never disputing that he is bought and paid for by health and insurance interests who gave him millions to vote against his own constituents. If Ben Nelson stands behinds his spokesman’s words, he just proved himself a fundamentally corrupt and out-of-touch politician who feels perfectly comfortable lying to his constituents and going to bat for private insurers who fear competition and want to rip off the people of Nebraska.”

“We will be increasing our Nebraska ad buy on Monday morning.“

Sidenote: 83% of Nelson’s health and insurance industry contributions are from out of state.

If you care to contribute to this worthy effort, you can go here.

Ben Nelson is threatening to stamp his little feet and hold his breath until he turns blue unless these awful people stop pointing out that he’s a corporate lackey and an egomaniacal jackass — thus proving that he is a corporate lackey, an egomaniacal jackass and a silly, silly man.

Let’s give Ben Nelson something to cry about.

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Dull Week-end Palin Rumor Mongering

by digby

According to this report, Sarah and Todd are splittsville, which isn’t exactly surprising. It often happens when an otherwise pretty average family (if being a governor is average) gets thrust into the national spotlight. Look at that “Jon and Kate Plus Eight Is Enough To Make Your Eyes Glaze Over” show.

But if it’s true (and who the hell knows if it is) it will be yet another test of conservative Christian family values, which would surely say that Sarah and Todd should stay together no matter how miserable they are.

On the other hand, from a commercial standpoint, Sarah Palin being a single mom would be a goldmine, so there is an upside. Her “everywoman” persona would be complete and I think that’s probably far more compelling — and marketable — than anything else about her.

Even Christian conservatives are gay or have affairs or get divorced and are single parents. In fact, they are exactly like all the liberal elites who are destroying the fabric of society. They just live in a hypocritical, patriarchal universe that is run by the credo “do as I say not as I do.” It works out well for them. But the rest of us really don’t have to listen.

And hey, more power to Sarah and Todd if they can’t work it out and decide to move on. It’s not the end of the world. There are Christian conservative hypocrites doing the same thing every day all over America.

Update: Palin denies it.

But there’s this too:

The Ventura County Star reports:

Just days after officially stepping down as governor of Alaska, former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is dropping out of an advertised speaking engagement in Simi Valley …. It was on Thursday that Palin’s spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton made public the news of the decision not to attend the event via Palin’s Facebook page. Up to 900 people were expected to attend the event at $100 a ticket for members and $150 for non-members, but media had been barred from the occasion.

Evidently she said she had too much work to do.

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Polar Regions

by digby

Steve Benen:

It’s worth noting, from time to time, the practical and ideological problems with this approach to problem solving. The parties disagree — as they should; it’s why they exist — and are more polarized now than at any point in modern political history. Ezra has posted this chart from Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal before, but I’m glad he ran it again yesterday. It shows current political polarization is at its highest point since the 19th century:

This political environment obviously makes compromises and “bipartisan” solutions very difficult, since the parties, more so than at any recent point, simply see matters of state in fundamentally different ways. But the polarization among lawmakers in both chambers also, as Ezra noted yesterday, “makes it virtually impossible to govern in a system that is designed to foil majorities and require a constant three-fifths consensus. It’s not good if the country is virtually impossible to govern. Problems don’t stop mounting while we try and figure things out.” There’s been some talk lately about the effort to convince at least some Republicans to support health care reform, the way plenty of Republicans support Social Security and Medicare in previous generations. In those eras, the parties were closer together, and there were center-left GOP lawmakers from across the country who were amenable to outreach.

The thing is that we’ve always been polarized in various ways, just not politically — city/country, north/south, rich/poor, native born/immigrant, white/black. It’s just that there are times when our two party system doesn’t break down along those neat lines and basically represents two big tents comprising bits of each side of each divide. Indeed, we have that right now on some very important issues such as the high finance and national security. So the polarization is not really complete even in polarized times like these.

But we are polarized politically on much of our domestic policy, even as much as industry spends to buy off members of both parties. This is where the ideological/culture wars are played out in this country, even to the extent that we had a real live civil war over the most thorny polarizing issue in American history.
I think we actually have two different countries in many ways and when it breaks neatly into the two parties, as it would naturally tend to do at times, it creates gridlock if politicians fail to recognize the state of play and use it to their advantage instead of clinging to outmoded coalitions that no longer reflect anything meaningful.

The Republicans actually did that during the Bush years and had they not fallen prey to hubris and gross mismanagement, they could have lasted a bit longer. (Maybe that’s inevitable with a party that is based upon the idea that government is just another profit center, I don’t know.) But they did master the institutions and ran them in a partisan fashion and I’m not convinced that if they had had a president who had a genuine mandate (as opposed to a very dubious ascension to the office) and an administration that was not obsessed with fighting old wars and avenging old slights, they could have had a much more successful run. They understood power in ways that the Democrats don’t.

FDR did(and he sometimes overreached too, as we well know) but he did use the power of his mandate and his institutions completely and thoroughly and didn’t follow some irrelevant social models of propriety over effective governance. And the interesting thing about that graph is that during the depression, there was much less polarization.

Even more interesting is that this is the kind of thing the president was saying to the American people at the time:

For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me‹and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

The American people know from a four-year record that today there is only one entrance to the White House by the front door. Since March 4, 1933, there has been only one pass-key to the White House. I have carried that key in my pocket. It is there tonight. So long as I am President, it will remain in my pocket.

You can’t help but wonder if people today heard a little more of that and little less bipartisan kumbaaya over high taxes for rich people and industry being “too big to fail,” if the polarization might just drop a bit. In fact, when you read that, you have to wonder the problem isn’t polarization at all, but whether the country just isn’t polarized in the right way.

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Teach The Controversy

by dday

Ceci Connolly, well-known around these parts, has a “teach the controversy” article out today about the utter B.S. flung about on talk radio and promoted by serial liar Betsy McCaughey that the Democratic health care plan surreptitiously seeks to send roving verbal hit squads out to the sticks to talk the elderly into suicide. Connolly, in her role as a stenographer, dutifully transcribes the claims from all sides of the “debate”. In the second paragraph she gets close to actually explaining the language in the bill:

The controversy stems from a proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical interventions they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills. Under the plan, Medicare would reimburse doctors for one session every five years to confer with a patient about his or her wishes and how to ensure those preferences are followed. The counseling sessions would be voluntary.

That’s not even totally correct, I wouldn’t call Medicare covering end of life counseling a proposal to “pay physicians.” Unless you want to call Medicare covering hip surgery as a proposal to pay physicians to take out people’s hips.

You can read the provision right here. And the story could have ended there. But Connolly and her editors find it more exciting to give lots of space to those distorting the bill, without really coming down on one side or the other. The heading over Connolly’s articles on this subject say “Tracking the Health Care Debate.” I guess it’s someone else’s job to track the truth.

You know what would have been an interesting wrinkle in the article? Besides actually saying who’s right and who’s wrong, I mean. The tidbit that Sen. Susan Collins actually introduced this language back in the spring.

On May 22nd, Senators Collins and Jay Rockefeller introduced the “Advance Planning and Compassionate Care Act,” according to a press release sent over by a source. The measure provides Medicare funding “for advance care planning so that patients can routinely talk to their physicians about their wishes for end-of-life care,” the release says.

Collins praised the measure, which may be included in the Senate health care bill, in the release. “Our legislation will improve the way our health care system care for patients at the end of their lives,” she said, “and it will also facilitate appropriate discussions and individual autonomy in making decisions about end-of-life care.”

Maybe someone should ask Senator Collins whether she’s concerned that Federal funding for end of life consultations could result in “government-encouraged euthanasia,” as we keep hearing. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll ask her.

What a reporter like this would say is that they have a fact-check department, and they write articles about their fact-checking, and the point of this article is to highlight the “debate”. I don’t really understand how that illuminates much of anything. An article with the opening line “A campaign on late-night radio promoting theories that the Earth is flat and sailors fall off the side of the world just past the horizon have sparked fear among seafaring families” wouldn’t be particularly helpful to anyone. I do think Democrats have shown a basic unwillingness to decide whether to ignore B.S. like this and let it fester or attack it and give it more attention, but a journalist writing about it should probably make pretty clear that only one side is telling the truth. There is actually no convention of balance in journalism, that’s a recently invented altar upon which the modern press corps bends and prays.

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The Comforting Violence Of Jack Bauer

by digby

Batocchio has posted another in his series of trenchant essays on the torture issue that is well worth reading if you are still struggling with understanding how we came to this place. Here’s just a short excerpt:

Movement conservatives’ public support for torture has contradicted even their own cherished mythology. The only constant has been their unyielding conviction in their own righteousness. Consider – they love to invoke WWII, if simplistically and inaccurately, yelling that every new threat is a new Hitler and anything less than belligerence is “appeasement.” Yet they ignore that during WWII, we prosecuted the same torture and abuses they’ve defended under Bush. The Cult of Saint Ronnie still worships the poor policy and cartoonish morality of Reagan denouncing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” (In his recent Reagan book, Will Bunch relates that Reagan himself regretted using the phrase, and later the far right accused Reagan of being Chamberlain for dealing with the Soviets.) Yet the torture program instituted under Bush borrowed directly from the hated Soviets. The key reason given for invading Iraq was that it had WMD and was an imminent threat, but Saddam Hussein was also depicted (fantastically) as the next Hitler and (accurately) as a dictator and torturer. The Hussein regime’s victims were invoked more often after the invasion as a way to browbeat Iraq critics. So how is it that what made Hussein evil became good when done by the United States? When Iraqi Muntadar al-Zaidi threw a show at Bush, several far-right conservatives approved of the broken hand and ribs he received in prison. As Roy Edroso quipped, “I always suspected that when they were denouncing Saddam’s torture chambers, they were just angry that they didn’t get to say who got tortured.”

I think that’s right. But I have to say that it’s purported Christians for whom I’ve lost the most respect in all this:

The disconnect from professed Christians on the torture “debate” is particularly astounding. Given how central the crucifixion story is to Christianity, and that it depicts Jesus tortured and then executed in one of the most cruel methods ever devised, it’s mind-boggling to see anyone claim that supporting torture and Christianity are compatible – or that Jesus would support waterboarding. According to Christian doctrine, Jesus’ suffering redeemed him and the world – but it’s not the Romans who Christians are supposed to emulate in the story! “Turn the other cheek,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “As you have done to the least of my brethren, so have you done unto me” are hardly pro-torture slogans. But in the hearts and minds of movement conservatives, not even Churchill, Saint Ronnie or Jesus himself can compete with the comforting violence of Jack Bauer.

Read the whole thing. It’s great.

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Going Too Far

by digby

Howie Sez:

Do you know who pays for the racist campaign against Obama? GEICO, NutriSystems, Proctor & Gamble, and… United Postal Service. Yep, those are the advertisers who pay for the TV time so that deranged sociopath Glenn Beck can get up and spout his divisive hatred and racism. And today the top online civil rights group Color of Change urged its 600,000-plus members to petition companies who advertise on Glenn Beck’s radio and television shows to urge them to cut off their advertising on Beck’s programs. The mobilization comes after Beck called President Obama a “racist” who “has a deep-seated hatred for white people” during an appearance Tuesday on Fox and Friends.

Color of Change has also been urging CNN to fire their own racist shill, Lou Dobbs for his gratuitous birther campaign, which CNN irresponsibly uses to pump up lagging viewership.

“What Beck is doing is race-baiting at its worst, it’s dangerous and it’s hard to imagine any company wanting their brand associated with it,” said James Rucker of ColorOfChange.org. “Beck has now shown that his extreme views are more appropriate for a street corner than a major media program. He no longer deserves the backing of mainstream advertisers.”

I don’t even think they are appropriate for a street corner, but he does have a right to spout them. And likewise, people have a right to withhold their money from those who profit from such views.

Klein and Ailes needs to rein in these asses before they kill the golden gooses. Advertisers do have limits.

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