Month: September 2009

Cheap Credentials

by digby

So, the fatuous gasbags have been all over the sexy tidbits in GQ about Taylor Branch’s new book about Bill Clinton, which contains the earth shattering revelation that Bill and Hillary Clinton don’t actually hate each other. It’s shocking stuff, for sure.

But I found this more interesting myself:

The Bill Clinton in this book is very different than the version we came to know in the press. You describe a guy who was steadfast and idealistic, very different from the wishy-washy, flip-flopping caricature who let Dick Morris tell him what to do.

It was almost like a credential for old liberals to look down on Clinton, because if you looked down on Clinton, you could say, “He’s betrayed liberalism,” but you didn’t have to uphold anything yourself. All you had to do was talk about what a shit he was or what a sellout he was and you could get this cheap credential.

Meanwhile, you’re seeing this guy whose face is red with allergies, he’s so tired that his eyes are rolling back in his head.… He’s the last fighting baby boomer.

Well, yeah. For example, I admire Obama greatly, but if you compare Clinton and Obama on the National Rifle Association, Obama said, “It’s not worth it.” Right from the get-go. “You can’t win.” And Clinton was going after the NRA and assault weapons and cop-killer bullets the whole time. And he paid for it, and maybe it was a mistake, because it certainly hurt him in the 1994 congressional elections. But he did stick to his guns, as it were. He took risks. On Haiti—restoring Aristide. I would hear him say it: “This is going to hurt my presidency.” Or, “I could go down the tubes for this.”

In all the Kennedy and Johnson tapes you’ve listened to, do you hear the same resolve?

In some ways, Kennedy was just the opposite. People would idealize him, but then on the tapes, you hear him trying to kill Castro and all this other stuff. It’s disillusioning. And Johnson does the Civil Rights bill, but then he does the Vietnam War—and you hear them saying essentially, “We know this is not going to work, but we’re going to do it anyway.” Then Nixon promises to end the war, and four years later the war is still going. Then you have Watergate. So it was kind of like we had this post–World War II optimism about politics that was yanked out of our generation by hard experience. In some ways, Hillary and I were more typical of our generation than Bill. We were bruised and disillusioned with politics. We had more in common with each other politically than either of us had with Bill. He seemed to be on automatic pilot: “I’m going to run for office!” At the time, I didn’t connect that to idealism. I connected it to ambition. The notion that it came from a sense of idealism didn’t rear up for me until I was able to watch him in the White House, seeing why he would do things.

How did you contain that for eight years, listening to people say the opposite about him?

I couldn’t communicate with people, because I felt like I was in a different galaxy. I just dropped out. I didn’t see a way of fighting it that didn’t endanger the project. I couldn’t challenge my friend [Washington Post critic] Jon Yardley, who would sit around and bitch and moan about Clinton: “He’s no good, he doesn’t care about anything, he doesn’t believe in anything.” I couldn’t say, “Jon, I know that’s not true.” I couldn’t start that conversation, because the only way I could combat it would be to say, “I’ve been around Clinton a lot, and my experience is totally different.” And then some story would come out that he had these tapes, and they would get subpoenaed. So I just basically had to be quiet and not talk to people.

I would be shocked if the village is able to process this at all. The image of Bill Clinton that was promulgated by the right wing and the mainstream media in the 90s was internalized by all sides in the political establishment. If it had been up to them he would have been convicted in the Senate and sent out of town on a rail. (It really was the people who saved him.)

It’s always been interesting to me why they hated him so, since even though he was from Arkansas (not that there’s anything wrong with that) he was also a product of all the right schools and had all the proper credentials and best connections. The class argument doesn’t really work perfectly with him. There was always something else at play.

This perhaps gives a hint of what was at the bottom of it. It’s just possible that they smelled a little earnest idealism, which is the most revolting stench imaginable to the cynical elites and those of both parties who make their living feeding on Democratic failure. It’s not surprising that they would project their own decadent, self-serving ambition on to him and then try to destroy him over it.

I’ll have to read the book, of course, and this may just be a tantalizing and ultimately irrelevant piece of revisionist history to whet our appetites. I’m hooked, that’s for sure.

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Coinkydink

by dday

Ryan Grim has been all over the story of Big Pharma’s deal with the White House and Max Baucus, and despite the denials from everyone, Grim notes that the language in Baucus’ draft matches the terms of the deal.

In August, the Huffington Post published a memo that outlined exactly what each side was going to do for the other. And Big Pharma was getting a lot more than they were giving up.

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America senior vice president Ken Johnson said that the outline “is simply not accurate.” White House spokesman Reid Cherlin concurred: “This memo isn’t accurate and does not reflect the agreement with the drug companies.”

But now that the bill is out, let’s fact check those denials.

1) The memo said that PhRMA would “[a]gree to increase of Medicaid rebate from 15.1 – 23.1%”.
The finance bill, on page 56, increases the Medicaid rebates for patented drugs from 15.1 to 23.1 percent.
Check.

2) The memo said that the parties had agreed “to get FOBs done.” FOBs refer to follow-on biologic drugs – vaccines and other drugs made from living cells that are the fastest growing field of pharmaceutical research.

PhRMA wants extended patent protections from generic biologic drug makers. A finance committee aide said that the Baucus bill doesn’t address biologics, leaving that to the Senate health committee’s bill. The health committee bill gives drug makers 12 years of market exclusivity — five more than the White House proposed — and allows a 12-year extension with a minor tweak to the drug. The protection is worth billions to drug makers and is entirely unnecessary to encourage research, according to the Federal Trade Commission, which recommended zero years of market exclusivity.

“Already biologics take up at least 30% of Medicare part B spending and this proposal has been rolled into the overall health care reform bill, which is meant create cost savings, which it will not do,” Jane Andrews, a medical student at the Johns Hopkins University and a member of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, wrote in an e-mail to HuffPost. “It’s simply a giveaway to BIO/PhRMA from Congress supported by the American Association of Universities.”

Check (more or less.)

There are more, just go read. Baucus actually doubled the fee on the industry, from $1.2 billion a year to $2.3 billion, but the rest pretty much matches up. No importation of drugs from Canada, no negotiating with drugmakers for cheaper prices on prescription drugs, no shift of drugs into Medicare Part D.

There’s no denying that this deal has been made, and the consequences are also clear. Right now, Democrats are worried about the coverage subsidies in the bill, believing they don’t make health care affordable enough. One reason for the constraint is that these deals artificially limit the amount of money that can be wrung from inside the system. Because it’s an article of faith that you cannot say the word “taxes” in Washington, as a result poor people who can’t afford health insurance may pay the price for deals with Big Pharma, a kind of tax on the lower classes.

I hope avoiding the Harry and Louise ads were worth it. Fortunately, no groups on the right managed to make any headway attacking the overall plan.

I’m sorry, “death panels”? Never heard of it.

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Keep An Eye On This

by dday

As much of the content of the traditional media rankles many of us, the editorial decisions should as well. Dozens of potentially game-changing stories go unreported while the Umbrage Brigade on cable talk about what Joe Wilson said about Jimmy Carter or whether Michelle Obama is overstepping her boundaries by talking about health care (I caught that one today). Meanwhile, the biggest financial crisis in 70 years just happened, and even people who consider themselves well-informed don’t understand the entire story. The Congress enacted the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (some are calling it the new Pecora Commission, given its similarity to the Depression-era commission of that name led by chief investigator Ferdinand Pecora), headed by former California Treasurer and gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, and they held their first public session yesterday. The meeting was introductory in nature, but Tim Fernholz came away with a few thoughts.

• Given the membership [PDF], I worried that the committee would be beset with partisan bickering and/or clashing ideologies, like the Congressional Oversight Panel. The COP, appointed by Congress to provide oversight of the bank rescues, is regularly undermined by dissents from Representative Jeb Hensarling, whose deeply conservative economic views preclude almost any reasonable discussion about regulation and finance. But though some tensions showed, I though the conservative New Pecora commissioners seemed open-minded; former Bush administration economic official Keith Hennessey and McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin made productive comments, though Peter Wallison, a more doctrinaire conservative than either of the other two, seemed to have his mind made up about the financial crisis, essentially blaming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac right from the outset. He may be the poison pill on this committee.

• Most surprising was Vice-Chairman Bill Thomas, a former Republican Congressman and Committee Chair. Thomas seemed to agree broadly with Chairman Phil Angelides goals of non-partisan fact-finding, and went out of his way to compliment the views of every member of the commission. He even singled out Commissioner Brooksley Born, who strongly advocated regulating derivatives during the Clinton administration, telling her that the crisis would have been much more manageable had her advice been acted on. Later, asked by a reporter if the issue of regulating markets would divide the committee, Thomas stepped forward to say that he thought regulatory reform was inevitable and that making it work correctly was critical. Though it is easy for him to say that now, Thomas’ early impressions are much less doctrinaire than had been anticipated.

• One concern: There is no liberal economist on the committee, while there are three conservative economic thinkers in Hennessey, Holtz-Eakin and Wallison. The Democratic appointees have regulatory, legal, political and private business experience, but no specific economic expertise.

• Early in the week, the New Pecora Commission announced the appointment of Thomas Greene as its Executive Director. Greene, a lawyer, has done complex investigatory work both in Washington, D.C. and in California, coordinating anti-trust and securities investigations in a variety of venues. The appointment is critical; recall that the Pecora Commission was named after it’s executive director, Ferdinand Pecora, not the members of congress who constituted the actual committee. And more talent is coming: As Greene hung around after the hearing, several different people, including several lawyers, approached him about working for the commission.

The FCIC will hold hearings and issue regular reports between now and December 2010. This needs to be watched. We all have a sense that the banksters turned Wall Street into their private gambling hall and took huge risks, secure in the knowledge that they could get the government to bail them out if things went awry. Currently there have been no prosecutions of the major players in the scandal, no accountability to any degree, and a year later, Wall Street appears to be going back to their same old ways, entirely at our expense. Michael Hirsh believes that this commission offers one last chance to make the record public, and use it as a lever to change the system. He’s not optimistic, however. The ideological shadings of the commission and Angelides’ wariness of using the subpoena power he’s been given worry him (I actually think Angelides can be a lot tougher than Hirsh or anyone gives him credit for). But he offers a glimmer of hope.

Still, Angelides and his team may yet surprise us. It’s happened before. The history of “blue ribbon” commissions like this one is rich and storied in Washington; one of them, in 1942, was led by an obscure senator from Missouri who was also seen as a political hack at the time. His name was Harry Truman, and he turned his commission on defense malfeasance into a ticket into the White House and the history books […]

What we do need, however, is a parade of witnesses who will provide what’s been missing so far in this crisis—a prominent outlet for public outrage. In the last nine months, the Obama administration and the grandees in Congress have been designing solutions without much input from the outside, often using experts from Wall Street (especially “Government Sachs”). It’s pretty much been a closed system. Even Paul Volcker, considered perhaps the greatest Federal Reserve chairman in history (now that the Alan Greenspan era looks much worse retrospectively), has been all but ignored by the president he is advising. Volcker has been making a series of speeches around the country calling for sensible changes to the structure of Wall Street that the administration and Congress are not yet considering. He wants federally guaranteed bank deposits to be cordoned off from heavy risk-taking and proprietary trading. Volcker wants banks, in other words, to be barred from behaving like hedge funds. “Extensive participation in the impersonal, transaction-oriented capital market does not seem to me an intrinsic part of commercial banking,” Volcker told a corporate group Wednesday in Los Angeles. He should be invited to Washington to say the same thing.

I can remember a time when commissions like these, from the Pecora Commission to the Truman Commission to Watergate to Iran-Contra to even the 9-11 Commission, were major public news, followed intensely by the media. You’d think that a similarly designed commission tasked with uncovering the greatest loss of wealth in world history would generated more than a few words on the cable news crawl. But we have to make this important, too. The FCIC may fall into partisan bickering, or it may create some powerful narratives about the criminal enterprise on Wall Street. But none of it will matter if nobody pays any attention.

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Influencers

by digby

This is interesting, if somewhat predictable (and slightly depressing:)

In conjunction with The Atlantic Wire, National Journal asked its panel of Congressional and Political Insiders to rank, one-through-five, those columnists, bloggers, and television or radio commentators who most help to shape their own opinion or worldview. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman received more points than anyone else, with support from both Democrats and Republicans. But it was rare that any media commentator boasted a significant audience from both sides of the partisan divide.

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I’m glad to see that Democrats read Krugman and Dionne, but the others they voted for — Friedman, Brooks and Broder — tell the tale. They are who the Democratic villagers are most influenced by. And golly, in the case of Friedman and Brooks, so are the Republicans. Long live bipartisanship! (And what’s a Dean got to do to get some Republican love in that town?)

They also did a poll of political bloggers to see who they read. The result is a little bit different.

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Pop-ups

by digby

As many of you have noticed, there are some pop-up ads appearing on this site. They are for major advertisers and I guarantee that I’m not receiving any money for them. I don’t yet know where they are coming from, but I do know that you should not click on them. I’m doing my best to figure out the problem. If anyone has any bright ideas, please email me.

d

Two Docs Sittin’ Around Talking

by digby

On her show this morning, Dr. Nancy Snyderman looked like she’d just been tasered when Howard Dean declared unequivocally that there would be a public plan in the final health care bill. She bet him a dinner that it wouldn’t happen.

Then she said this:

Snyderman: Everyone consistently says, “we’re going to give up on the public option. There may be triggers, there may be co-ops.” Why are you so sure that a public option will come to fruition?

Dean: Because it’s the only thing that works. I’m delighted that the trigger’s not in there because that was a total fraud. But nobody knows how co-ops will work. And they’re expensive. If controlling costs, which is part of the president’s agenda, is going to happen, you have to have a public option. If you want to get some people insured by 2010, which I think is essential for the future of the Democratic Party, you have to have a public option. It’s the only way to do it.

Snyderman: And the votes are there?

Dean: the votes are there. We count 51 votes in the Senate that will vote for a public option. Chris Dodd’s bill is a very good bill. The Waxman Miller Wrangel bill is a fine bill. I don’t agree with everything in them, but that’s real reform and this isn’t.

Snyderman: Well, listen if you really think that public option is going to happen, you’ve made me a happy person going into the week-end. I hope you’re right.

Dean’s argument is the right one: “there will be a public option because it’s the only thing that works.”

I seem to recall a certain youthful president who declared in an inaugural address delivered to delirious approbation just nine short months ago:

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, health care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.

He’s the one that put technical competence as the best measure of his success. And I have to say that the hope I’m clinging to at the moment is the hope that it’s one thing he truly believes in.

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The People’s House

by dday

One of the more persistent problems with our democracy is the distance between politicians and the people. This is exacerbated by the gradual increase of the constituency, since the House of Representatives has not been expanded in almost 100 years. In the Senate it’s far worse, as equal protection laws are violated on a daily basis, with my representation in California equaling the representation of Wyoming, despite this state having 74 times as many people in it. This problem of unequal representation exists in the House as well, and a group of lawyers have organized a challenge to the status quo, calling for an expansion of the House to address these inequities.

The most populous district in America right now, according to the latest Census data, is Nevada’s 3rd District, where 960,000 people are represented in the House by just one member. All of Montana’s 958,000 people likewise have just one vote in the House. By contrast, 523,000 in Wyoming get the same voting power, as do the 527,000 in one of Rhode Island’s two districts and the 531,000 in the other.

That 400,000-person disparity between top and bottom has generated a federal court challenge that is set to be filed Thursday in Mississippi, charging that the system effectively disenfranchises people in certain states. The lawsuit asks the courts to order the House to fix the problem by increasing its size from 435 seats to at least 932, or perhaps as many as 1,761. That way, the plaintiffs argue, every state can have districts that are close to parity.

“When you look at the data, those are pretty wide disparities,” said Scott Scharpen, a former health care financial consultant from California who has organized the court challenge. “As an American looking at it objectively, how can we continue with a system where certain voters’ voting power is substantially smaller than others’?”

No incumbent will really want to change a system that dilutes their own power. They won’t even sign off on giving DC voting rights in the House and expanding the body to 437 (there’s an extra member for Utah in that compromise measure). But for decades, this was standard practice, with the House expanding from 65 members to 435. Other countries have governing bodies of up to 600 members despite having smaller countries. Our Congressional districts hold 700,000 people on average, which is just incredibly unwieldy. This would also rejigger the Electoral College in Presidential elections, as each state gets electoral votes based on their number of Representatives. Adding seats to shrink Congressional districts would dilute the inequity of the Senate in those elections and move us closer to a one-person, one-vote standard there.

Really we should have a unicameral legislature and a national popular vote for President, but those are a way off. The Supreme Court has never weighed in on mandating additional House members, and given the current makeup, not much good may come of that either. But it’s time to build a political coalition for these changes. The bigger a Congressional district gets, the further removed that member of Congress gets from the people. It leads to Blue Dogs who don’t vote their districts but can fake it using campaign contributions from corporate interests. It makes it harder for challengers to raise their profile. If you want to spark something TRULY populist, contra the teabaggers, it would be to expand the House of Representatives.

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He Said/She Said Who Can Say?

by digby

Christ on a cracker. Is this for real?

Everybody’s racist, it seems.

Republican Rep. Joe Wilson? Racist, because he shouted “You lie!” at the first black president. Health care protesters, affirmative action supporters? Racist. And Barack Obama? He’s the “Racist in Chief,” wrote a leader of the recent conservative protest in Washington.

But if everybody’s racist, is anyone?

The word is being sprayed in all directions, creating a hall of mirrors that is draining the scarlet R of its meaning and its power, turning it into more of a spitball than a stigma.

And isn’t that stupid statement goddamned convenient for the actual racists?

This isn’t difficult to sort out at all, although the AP seems to be having a real problem with it, which means the villagers are feeling all funny about their own feelings.

Here’s something I wrote a couple of months ago when this came up during the Sotomayor hearings:

Not Your Grandfather’s Bigotry

Liberals who follow politics closely are no doubt disoriented to see someone as accomplished as Sonia Sotomayor attacked for being a bullying racist by a bunch of racist bullies, but I think we should probably get a grip and understand that this is what racism looks like in 2009. The assertion of white male privilege through whining victimization is one of the main ways it will be manifested going forward. And it’s quite effective — it appeals to people’s own hidden prejudices in a way that doesn’t socially embarrass them and allows them to use fairness as a weapon, which is a great relief to bigots who have been on the defensive for decades.

But it’s important to remind good people who are possible recruits to the reverse discrimination claims that the world is still overwhelmingly run by wealthy white men and any protestation that they need affirmative action is laughable

Rule of thumb: the people who are telling their millions of fervent followers that we need to go back to segregating buses and claiming that Obama hates white people? They’re the racists. Easy as pie.

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Catfight

by digby

Beck vs Limbaugh

Beck is on a huge roll. Over the last month, the right-wing Fox News talker has claimed the scalp of the president’s green jobs czar; motivated thousands of conservatives to turn out for town hall meetings and a Sept. 12 march on Washington; pummeled Democrats over ACORN and Obama’s czars; and landed himself a spot on the cover of Time magazine.

“Beck is the man of the moment,” says the Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb. “Everybody in town is watching him, waiting to see what he’ll do next, who he’ll take down next.”

But if Beck is the man of the moment, where does that leave Rush?

In an e-mail to POLITICO, Limbaugh said any attempt to compare him with Beck in terms of Washington influence rests on a “flawed premise.”

[…]

“I don’t rally people and haven’t since the first year of my radio show,” he wrote to POLITICO. “At that time, all local talk hosts were attempting to prove their worth by getting people to cut up gasoline credit cards, call Washington, etc. I thought it was cheap and disingenuous. The few times I did, early on, suggest people call Washington, the reaction to it from the media was that the response was not genuine (I shut down the House switchboard) because people only did what they did because ‘Limbaugh told them to.'”

Limbaugh hasn’t abandoned the call to action entirely; last year, he launched “Operation Chaos,” urging his listeners to register as Democrats and vote for Hillary Clinton in Democratic presidential primaries to prolong the nominating process and weaken Obama.

But now he suggests that conservatives don’t need any egging on – and he seemed to downplay Beck’s role in goosing the turnout for last weekend’s march.

“The rally Saturday was special and important precisely because there was not a single, charismatic leader behind it,” he said. “I never mentioned it, on purpose. People are rising up from genuine passion and concern, they are NOT being whipped into a frenzy. This is REAL and not inspired by anyone. This outpouring has been effervescing for years and Obama has brought it all to the boiling point. PEOPLE DO NOT NEED TO BE TOLD. They are living it.”

Meow.

Rushbo is being eclipsed by a barking madman. How perfect.

And speaking of madmen:

The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell.

In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck’s life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite “death panel” wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing “socialism.” In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck’s favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, “The 5,000 Year Leap.” A once-famous anti-communist “historian,” Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.

What has Beck been pushing on his legions? “Leap,” first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology.

[…]

As Beck knows, to focus solely on “The 5,000 Year Leap” is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck’s bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.

Here’s more on Beck’s pot luck radicalism from Neiwert. Plus this:

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Pre-Beck Beck

by dday

Uncanny.

(h/t MBH)

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