Month: September 2009

Don’t Fuck With Fox

by digby

So Van Jones resigned and a great sigh of relief is felt all over the village. The dangerous radicalism we’ve recently been seeing in our political discourse has been eradicated with his departure and the administration can pursue its agenda without any other distractions from the kooky fringe. Thank God for that.

I would hope that these leftist extremists like Color of Change will think twice before they go after an upstanding company like FOX News because the lesson here is that somebody is going to pay a big price for doing it. In fact, it probably would pay to keep a close eye on the FOX gasbags from now on to get an idea of which groups or individuals have offended the network and get rid of them before anyone has a chance to make a public stink. It would save everyone a lot of time and trouble.

Update:

Politico sez:

Beck repeatedly called attention to Jones’s past comments and affiliations without mentioning that he was also the co-founder of ColorOfChange, the African-American activist group leading a boycott against the Fox host. Even before the boycott, Beck mentioned Jones twice on his radio show and twice on television, but his criticism intensified considerably as dozens of companies agreed to cease running ads on his Fox show. (The boycott started after Beck called Obama “a racist” on Fox & Friends). It was a wise strategy in making the story less about Beck vs. ColorOfChange, and instead focusing the attention — with the help of fans online — to Jones (and his role in the Obama White House). Beck mentioned Jones on 14 episodes, according to the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel, while also railing against him on “The O’Reilly Factor.”

Very “wise” yes.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Electric Kool-Aid acid reflux: Taking Woodstock

By Dennis Hartley

Bob & Carol & Ted & …uh, has anyone seen Alice?

“If you can remember anything about the sixties, you weren’t really there”. Don’t you hate it when some lazy-ass critic/wannabe socio-political commentator trots out that tired old chestnut to preface some pompous “think piece” about the Woodstock Generation?

God, I hate that.

But I think it was Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane who once said: “If you remember anything about the sixties, you weren’t really there.” Or it could have been Robin Williams, or Timothy Leary. Of course, the irony is that whoever did say it originally, probably can’t really remember if they were in fact the person who said it first.

You see, memory is a funny thing. Let’s take the summer of 1969, for example. Here’s how Bryan Adams remembers it:

That summer seemed to last forever
and if I had the choice
Yeah – I’d always wanna be there
Those were the best days of my life

Best days of his life. OK, cool. Of course, he wrote that song in 1984. He’d had a little time to sentimentalize events. Now, here’s how Iggy Stooge describes that magic time:

Well it’s 1969 okay.
We’ve got a war across the USA.
There’s nothing here for me and you.
We’re just sitting here with nothing to do.

Iggy wrote that in 1969. So which of these two gentlemen were really there, so to speak?

“Well Dennis,” you may be thinking (while glancing at your watch) “…that’s all fine and dandy, but doesn’t the title of this review indicate that the subject at hand is Ang Lee’s new film, Taking Woodstock? Shouldn’t you be quoting Joni Mitchell instead (duh!)?”

Patience, Grasshopper. Here’s how Joni Mitchell “remembers” Woodstock:

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration

She wrote that in 1969. But here’s the rub (drum roll please): she wasn’t really there.

There was a point in there, somewhere. Somehow it made sense when I was peaking on the ‘shrooms about an hour ago. Oh, I’m supposed to be writing a movie review. Far out.

I guess my point is, there’s always been a bit of a disconnect between the “Woodstock” that has morphed over the last 40 years into a highly romanticized representation of the ideals of a specific generation and the actual “Woodstock Music and Art Fair” event that took place near Bethel, New York in August of 1969. In other words, can anyone who was of a certain age and shared mindset in 1969 rightfully claim (like Joni) that they were “there”, in spirit, and that it was a beautiful thing? Or, did you have to physically attend the event, parking miles away, slogging through a muddy sea of humanity, with only a slim chance of getting close enough to the stage to identify who was playing? And in spite of the impression given by Michael Wadleigh in his brilliant rock doc, Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (which was carefully whittled down from over 300 hours of footage into the 4-hour distillation we all know and love), the sound system reportedly left much to be desired, and many of the bands (by their own admission) did not give career best performances (the ingestion of certain substances may have, er, played a role).

No main characters in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock get that close to the stage either (although some do ingest certain substances, play in the mud and take a figurative wallow in the countercultural zeitgeist of 1969). For the most part, Lee doesn’t set out to just reenact the grand canvas of the event as has already been depicted in Wadleigh’s iconic documentary (what would be the point?) Instead, he has opted for a far more intimate approach, based on a memoir by Elliot Tiber, who helped broker the deal between the producers of the music festival and the Bethel Town Board to hold the event there after the permits were refused for the originally intended location in nearby Wallkill, N.Y.

Elliot is played by stand-up comic/first time leading man Demetri Martin (a former writer for Conan O’Brien who you will most likely recognize from his sporadic appearances on The Daily Show). In 1969, he is living in the Village in N.Y.C., eking out a living as an interior designer. When it becomes clear to him that his aging parents (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) are overextending themselves trying to singlehandedly keep their flagging Catskills motel business afloat as the bank threatens foreclosure, Elliot heads back home upstate to ostensibly become their Man Friday. Serendipity eventually puts Elliot face-to-face with concert producer Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff, who captures his real-life counterpart’s shrewdly manipulative charm and angelic inscrutability to a tee). Seeing little more than an opportunity to perhaps sell out the motel for a few weeks and give the business some much-needed cash flow, Elliot (having no idea of course that he is playing a pivotal role in enabling what is destined to become forever known as the high-water mark event of the sixties counterculture movement) introduces Lang to an open-minded local farmer, Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy), who has some spacious fields that might fit the bill. Oh, there is some resistance to overcome from grumpy neighboring farmers, as well as consternation from a few local Town Board members about the idea of their sleepy hamlet being overrun by a bunch of (the original!) Dirty Fucking Hippies (this part of the story takes on a bit of a Footloose vibe). The rest, as they say, is History.

“Dramedies” can be a tricky business. Too much drama can curdle the comedy. Too much comedy can sabotage any dramatic tension in the piece. Unfortunately, Lee’s film takes a fair stab at both but doesn’t fully succeed at either, leaving you with the cinematic equivalent of tepid dishwater. That being said, there are a couple decent sequences; particularly a protracted scene in which Elliot, wandering the outskirts of the massive crowd and trying to work his way closer toward the distant stage, gets waylaid by a mellow couple who are camped out in their (wait for it) VW van. The couple (played with requisite doe-eyed blissfulness by Paul Dano and Kelli Garner) invite Elliot aboard for a nice little trip (which doesn’t involve any actual driving- nudge nudge wink wink). It’s a well staged, very sweet little interlude, beautifully played by all three young actors.

However, one well-executed vignette doth not a great two hour film make (is that proper English, or am I still high?). There are some good supporting performances; Liev Schreiber does an admirable turn in an underwritten role as a cross-dressing ex-Marine (don’t ask-just think John Lithgow in The World According to Garp) and Levy is so wonderfully engaging as Max Yasgur that I wish they had given him a few more scenes to play with. One notable misfire is the casting of the usually dependable Emile Hirsch, whose cliché (and ill-advised) portrayal of a Vietnam vet resurrects the pre-Coming Home movie stereotype of the shell-shocked loon screaming “Incoming!” and hitting the dirt every time a car backfires. There are also a few intriguing dramatic avenues that are entered, only to veer off on a side road where they ultimately get lost. For example, Lee (and screenwriter James Schamus) take great pains to telegraph to the audience that Elliot is on the verge of reaching some sort of epiphany about his sexuality, and his own sense of liberation and growing feelings of empowerment as a (gay? bisexual?) man, but then underplay it to the point where you’re left asking questions. Is he about to come out to his parents? Or is he is still struggling with coming out to himself? Elliot is a gay man, living in Greenwich Village in 1969. Surely he was at least cognizant of the Stonewall riots that very summer (not to mention the subsequent burgeoning gay lib movement)? Is it even intended that we concern ourselves with this, or is it just incidental to the story? If you are really hell-bent to skinny-dip in 40th anniversary nostalgia, you needn’t bother scratching your head over Taking Woodstock. Dim all the lights, plug in the lava lamp, light up the bong, then “take Woodstock” (the original documentary) off the DVD shelf (I KNOW you own a copy, you DFH liberal pinko!). All together now: “Gimme an ‘F’…”

I was there, maaan: Monterey Pop, Gimme Shelter, Celebration at Big Sur, Festival Express, Last Days of the Fillmore, The Last Waltz, The Rolling Stones – Rock and Roll Circus, Jimi Hendrix, Janis: A Film , Brian Wilson – I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, The Kids Are Alright, Mayor of the Sunset StripThe Language of Music, Groupies: The Movie, Plaster Caster, My Dinner with Jimi, The Doors , Stoned , I’m Not There

Previous posts with related themes:

Across the Universe

Factory Girl

The Mayor of the Sunset Strip

Top Ten Rock Musicals

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Better Health Care Through Advertising

by digby

In case you were wondering what the Republicans plan to do about the health care crisis, their most creative idea is to make every American comparison shop. (We do love shopping…) Apparently, they are under the impression that the thing that upsets people about the health care in this country is the fact that they don’t “own” their own policy, their employer does.

But that’s not all. They have other ideas too. Like their suggestion that health insurance companies should spend lots of money to advertise their services on TV. I’m not kidding:

Every night on television there are dozens of commercials from Geico, Progressive, Allstate and other companies offering us better auto insurance at lower costs. But there are virtually no commercials for health insurance. This is because the federal government protects health insurance companies from real competition. Insurers don’t have to market to consumers. They only have to satisfy employers.

The insurance companies aren’t spending enough on administration costs, they need to be spending billions on advertising too. Because that’s what happens in a “free market” (which is something like a church only without the singing.)

Read the whole article to see how they’ve taken the rhetoric developed by the reformers to sell their incoherent plan as an obvious fix that shouldn’t require more than a couple of minor tax breaks. They admit that it’s probably wrong to discriminate against sick people, and they acknowledge that the insurance companies are reaping unfair benefits from the status quo. But their answer is for everyone to give even more money to the insurance industry, at least partially so they can afford the necessary huge new expense of television advertising. Then just a few tweaks with some expensive high risk pools and federal deregulation et voila, everyone gets to own their own unaffordable, low coverage health insurance policy without either the government or their employer standing between the patient and his insurance company bureaucrat.

See how easy that was?

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The Chicago Way

by digby

It looks like the hissy purges have begun:

White House officials offered tepid support Friday for Van Jones, the administration’s embattled energy efficiency guru, who has issued two public apologies this week, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”

Earlier, Jones said he was “clearly inappropriate” in using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.

The apologies did little to quell objections from Republicans, several of whom demanded Friday further action against Jones. Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.) called on the adviser to resign or be fired, saying in a statement, “His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.”

Wow. “Extremist views and coarse rhetoric” have no place in the public debate? Some people don’t seem to have gotten the memo.

I certainly hope this makes it quite clear that consistency is not something Obama should count upon from his enemies. Indeed, I fully expect that the next time the Republicans take office they will launch several investigations of the previous Democratic administration (assuming they haven’t already taken over congress, in which case they will begin while he’s still in office.) They do not observe the self-imposed rules the Democrats put upon themselves. That should be obvious by now.

As for Jones, he says he signed that Truther petition without really reading it and thought he was signing something that merely requested further investigation. Who cares? We have people in the congress right now who assert that the president is an illegal alien and that the Democrats are going to euthanize old people. it’s hard for me to give a damn about some stupid petition from a few years ago.

As for him calling the Republicans assholes, well … they are assholes. I’m sorry if that’s “coarse” but maybe somebody should have a little chat with former Vice President Cheney to see what the proper protocol is for telling Jones to go fuck himself. Then we can call it even.

This is a witch hunt and it’s quite depressing because Jones is a truly inspirational, exciting thinker and speaker and it looks like they are going to get his scalp and marginalize him — with the help of the timorous Democrats who know less about loyalty and solidarity than your average cat in heat.

But there’s more to this story than just the usual Lani Guanier human sacrifice ritual:

Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck all but declared war on Jones after a group the adviser founded in 2005, ColorofChange.org, led an advertising boycott against Beck’s show to protest his claim that Obama is a racist.

This is yet another example of Fox News annihilation strategy against anyone who criticizes them. And it works.

It’s kind of ironic that they constantly accuse Obama of being a “Chicago” politician when it Roger Ailes who adheres to the classic dictum from The Untouchables:

Malone:You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That’s* the *Chicago* way!

Murdoch and Ailes have made it quite clear that if you mess with Fox they will unleash the crazies. They’re taking Van Jones’ scalp to send that message. He won’t be the last. It’s not a coincidence that the Washington Post put this surprisingly insightful paragraph far down in the story. In fact, I’m a bit surprised they let it slip through at all.

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Justice And Accountability By Inches

by dday

After 9/11, among the many deprivations of civil liberties and violations of federal and international law, Attorney General of the United States John Ashcroft gave the FBI the power to detain and interrogate thousands of Muslim-Americans across the country as “material witnesses” without charges. We know little about the number of people detained, the nature of the interrogations and the extent of the abuse heaped on the prisoners. We do know, based on Ashcroft’s own words, that this policy sought to pre-emptively detain Muslim-Americans suspected by the Bush Administration of future acts of terrorism or extremism, despite not having any evidence required to charge the suspects.

Yesterday, a federal appeals court panel, composed of two Bush 43 appointees and a Reagan appointee, allowed a case to go forward that would hold John Ashcroft liable for violating one detainee’s Constitutional rights under the 4th and 5th Amendments.

The court found that a man who was detained as a witness in a federal terrorism case can sue Ashcroft for allegedly violating his constitutional rights. Abdullah al-Kidd, a U.S. citizen and former University of Idaho student, filed the lawsuit against Ashcroft and other officials in 2005, claiming his civil rights were violated when he was detained as a material witness for two weeks in 2003.

He said the investigation and detention not only caused him to lose a scholarship to study in Saudi Arabia, but cost him employment opportunities and caused his marriage to fall apart.

He argued that his detention exemplified an illegal government policy created by Ashcroft to arrest and detain people — particularly Muslim men and those of Arab decent — as material witnesses if the government suspected them of a crime but had no evidence to charge them […]

”Sadly, however, even now, more than 217 years after the ratification of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, some confidently assert that the government has the power to arrest and detain or restrict American citizens for months on end, in sometimes primitive conditions, not because there is evidence that they have committed a crime, but merely because the government wishes to investigate them for possible wrongdoing, or to prevent them from having contact with others in the outside world,” Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. wrote. ”We find this to be repugnant to the Constitution and a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters of our national history.”

You can read the 9th Circuit’s opinion in the case, including the circumstances Abdullah al-Kidd found himself in back in 2003. Al-Kidd, a Muslim convert of African-American descent, planned a flight to Saudi Arabia to study on a law scholarship at a Saudi university. He was arrested at the airport under the material witness statute on a separate case, held for 16 days in detention centers in Virginia and Idaho, strip-searched on multiple occasions, and after several interrogations, eventually released. He was never called as a witness in the case on which he was arrested (a case where the individual was acquitted), nor has he been charged with any crime or called in on any other proceeding.

The ruling basically states that Ashcroft is liable for an unconstitutional policy that purposely violated the rights of al-Kidd, and by association thousands of other potential defendants, using the material witness statute just to hold anyone he fancied. If it survives appeal, the government will have to release all documents pertaining to the material witness policy under Ashcroft.

Glennzilla says the impact of this is to show the illegality and immorality of a preventive detention policy – one which this Administration might assert later this year. I agree with that, but I think its impact is slightly different. What it shows is that there are so many people whose lives have been touched – in some cases irreparably – by the terror practices of the Bush regime that there will be no limit to the actions to seek justice and accountability. The suits will continue, one by one, and the rulings made, over and over, and out of the thousands, at least one will find a crack. A legal hole in the framework of official secrecy and efforts by the executive branch to shut down the judiciary. And that hole will beget more holes. The groups and defendants striving for accountability will not stop because they rest on the principle of equal justice under the law, and to give up would signal the effective end of the American system.

Under the Bush Administration, officials in the highest levels of government committed heinous crimes, crimes to which they are only beginning to be held to account. The effort by the Obama Administration to indemnify those officials for those crimes just won’t work. Little by little, good men and women with the law on their side will probe and appeal and file suit, and we will see justice. It’s only a matter of time.

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Bill Moyers: Watch This

by tristero

When you’re done, read this and marvel at grown men and women so ignorant of one of art’s most basic moral insights that they constructed elaborate, mathematically sophisticated models of economic behavior to “prove” an obvious fallacy – that human beings are rational actors – and drove the world economy off a cliff.

Have a happy, lazy, Labor Day, people, and while you do so, remember that without the Labor Movement, nor only would there be no Labor Day, there wouldn’t be any weekends at all.

Strength And Leadership

by digby

According to TPM, Charlie Cook is predicting a potential loss of the majority in the mid-terms. That seems a bit of a stretch to me, although losses do seem likely. But this part of his analysis is most interesting:

Before long, his strategy of letting Congress take the lead in formulating legislative proposals and thus prodding lawmakers to take ownership in their outcome caused his poll numbers on “strength” and “leadership” to plummet.

I expect that’s at the bottom of their impulse to scrap the public option. Democrats Believe that the best way to show strength and leadership is to punch hippies. They’ve believed this for decades now, and the result has been to discredit liberalism and validate Republicans. (But hey, that seems to be the ultimate goal of the ruling class, so you can’t say it isn’t one of the things that “works.”)

The villagers agree, of course. They believe America is the mythical conservative small town of the movies of the mid-20th century and they are all Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. (Liberals are Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider ruining everything with their loud music and their pot and their hair.)

But here in America 2009, the country is a little bit more complicated. It would be interesting to see what would happen if Democrats tried a different tack and punched somebody else instead. Like greedy CEOs. Or Freepers. Or … Republicans. I wonder if maybe they might just get the strength and leadership numbers up if they unapologetically passed the agenda on which they ran and then went to the people in the next elections and stood behind it.

It’s experimental, I know. And risky. Punching hippies will always at least get you some big love from the village and the wealthy donor class even if it doesn’t help you win elections. But if they ever do want to behave like winners and demonstrate real strength and leadership, it might be worth trying one of these days.

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Scrap The Kindle

by tristero

Totally, thoroughly inadequate. There simply are no conditions under which the Kindle model of book delivery is acceptable. No delivery system that permits a corporation or government to alter – never mind delete! – a purchased text can ever be anything than a civil libertarian’s worst nightmare. I don’t care if it’s 1984, the latest Harry Potter, or recipes. I don’t want a license to read the text. I need to own a copy of the text, just as I do with a printed book. Software that permits the alteration of purchased texts must be banned, with stiff penalties for infractions. End of story.

Don’t purchase the Kindle and all similar licensing devices. These things suck, big time, and always will.

The Ballad Of Patrick Gilbert

by dday

This remarkable viral campaign on Facebook has a very simple message. It happens to be the one that Harris Wofford rode to a Senate victory over a well-funded Republican opponent prior to the 1992 elections. It’s what Bill Clinton pretty much ran on during those 1992 elections. It’s an appeal to basic American fairness, and it’s worked over and over again.

No one should die because they cannot afford healthcare. No one should go broke because they get sick, and no one should be tied to a job because of pre-existing condition. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.

Before the day was out yesterday, Barack Obama had posted this message on his Facebook page, along with tens of thousands of others. It distills the entire debate about health care into something simple. An individual’s health care should not be based on an individual’s available funds. It’s a winning message.

Except this message is exactly what’s being bargained away, if reports are correct, in the latest round of capitulations.

Patrick Gilbert, an uninsured lumber company worker in upstate New York, is in a predicament that President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats believe they can solve. Gilbert and his wife have two children, but he says that on his family’s $50,000 annual income, he can’t afford the $600 monthly premiums for his employer’s coverage.

“If I could find some reasonable insurance for about $100 a month, then I would do that,” says Gilbert, 38, a lymphoma survivor who lives near Lake Placid. “Something reasonable, not with high deductibles. Something fair.”

The House’s health overhaul proposal would allow Gilbert to obtain family coverage for $250 a month, with the government picking up the rest of the premium costs. While that subsidy would make insurance more affordable for Gilbert, he could still be stuck with huge medical bills if he or his family members got seriously ill. In the worst case scenario, Gilbert could end up paying $4,400 in co-insurance and deductibles on top of $3,000 in annual premiums — adding up to 15 percent of his family’s income.

Concern about the legislation’s cost has overshadowed a major worry among some policy experts: Whether the Democrats’ plans would protect low- and moderate-income earners from excess financial burdens, as backers have promised.

Under the House proposal, people receiving government subsidies could still end up spending 20 percent or more of their annual incomes on premiums, deductibles and co-insurance, according to estimates prepared by the House Committee on Ways and Means and obtained by Kaiser Health News. That financial load could grow substantially if the proposal’s financing — $1 trillion over a decade — is pared back as congressional leaders come under pressure to reduce the legislation’s costs.

The number now being put out there for the cost of the bill is $700 billion over 10 years. That may save rich people from a surtax, but it’s impossible to provide affordable health coverage to everyone with those numbers. It probably needs to be twice that much. And so people will still die because they cannot afford health care. And people will still go broke because they get sick.

The problem is completely a lack of political will. There are plenty of savings that could be gathered from inside the health care system. But the White House wanted to protect industry profits and make deals to keep them from running attack ads. And unions don’t want to go after the employer deduction, which keeps in place an inefficient system of employer-based health care that keeps costs high (because employers take them out of your wage increases, so they have little or no incentive to shop for good premium prices). By protecting most of the current system, the costs inside the system cannot possibly go down to the degree to make health care affordable. And as far as going outside the system, Democrats haven’t made an argument about tax fairness since 1933, I think, and couldn’t even pull off something as simple as lowering deductions for charitable donations back to where they were during the Reagan Administration.

A $700 billion dollar bill will have practically useless subsidies. And people just won’t be able to afford insurance. So they’ll remain out of compliance with the mandate. In fact, they’ll probably qualify for exemptions from the mandate because insurance will be too expensive for them. And then insurers will complain that people aren’t joining their system, making it unable for them to spread risk and lower costs. So they will raise premiums as a result, or maybe even go back to discriminating against people for medical history.

The subsidies and coverage expansion is crucial to the entire jury-rigged project here. You cannot take the subsidies away and expect the architecture to remain standing. Politically speaking, if the Congress accepts a $700 billion dollar spending bill and coverage remains unaffordable for those who need it, and prices continue to rise, it will be an unmitigated disaster just begging for repeal.

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Protecting The Coattails

by digby

CNN has learned that the White House is quietly working to draft health care legislation after allowing Congress to work on its own for months.

Multiple sources close to the process tell CNN that while the plan is uncertain, they are preparing for the possibility they could deliver their own legislation to Capitol Hill sometime after the President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress Wednesday.

Who knows if this is true,there’s so much garbage flying around. But if it is, the only reason to do it is to attach Obama’s name to the proposals so he can more easily personally strong arm the progressive Democrats into “supporting their president.”

According to Mike Viqueira on MSNBC, Obama told the progressives in congress on a conference call this morning that on health care, they need to worry about their fellow members in districts that voted with McCain in ’08. I guess he figures that those conservative districts are going to be appeased by some sort of “trigger” or a plan without the public option and that those guys in tough districts will be rewarded for making that happen.

I think that’s about as delusional as the teabaggers, frankly. If those McCain voters are upset about health care reform, the only thing that will appease them is total defeat. The right has got these people so worked up that talk of “triggers” is likely to result in people thinking Obama’s got gun control hidden in his plan for Death Panels. Defeating the public option will be totally forgotten once the right starts demagoguing the mandates and the “welfare subsidies” and the forced abortion and god know what else. They should know by now that they will always find something.

I frankly think some of those coat tail seats were always going to go away. 2002 was the only midterm exception in modern times where the sitting president’s party actually gained seats. But that’s because he didn’t actually win in 2000. In 2002 Bush “won” the seats that came in on Al Gore’s (and Ralph Nader’s) coattails. So, it’s highly likely that seats will be lost this time, it’s just a matter how many. Those seats that can be preserved are highly unlikely to be preserved because of some arcane policy compromise this fall that nobody understands. They’ll be preserved because the Democrats are seen as succeeding or failing in a global sense.

If they think that they have a real problem in those McCain districts and they believe that they cannot afford to lose them, then they should logically scrap Health Care reform altogether. Watering it down to nothing will gain them nothing in those districts and will create a huge amount of bad feeling on the left. Or they could pass real health care reform and let the chips fall where they are going to fall anyway and at least have a chance of having it actually work.

Setting up a system that will force people by law to give large amounts of money each month to private corporations they hate, while the Republicans run against them saying they’ve nationalized the health care sector just doesn’t seem like a good plan to me.

Of course, that’s assuming they want to pass comprehensive health care at all. It’s just as likely that they want to pass something that’s called health care reform that just tweaks around the edges and maintains the status quo, which isn’t the same thing at all. There is an awful lot of money at stake in all this.

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