Month: October 2009

Nobody Like Her

by digby

This post by Michelle Goldberg gives tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, something that isn’t done enough, and should be. There has never been a Justice like her, and there never will be again. She’s a true feminist hero, and as much as people believe that those battles are long over, and perhaps now even believe that the victories were inevitable, they’re not and they weren’t.

In the long sweep of history, Ginsburg was at the front lines of a major civil rights movement and spent her whole life protecting the gains that were made. And she’s needed now, more than ever.

Though Obama is in many ways more liberal than Clinton, it’s hard to imagine him nominating someone like Ginsburg. Unlike Sotomayor, who has no real paper trail on abortion or other contentious gender issues, Ginsburg had a long, public record as an advocate for sexual equality. It’s amazing to remember that in 1993, only three Republicans voted against her confirmation—as polarized as the Clinton years were, things are far worse today. A record as a feminist champion is far more likely to hinder than to help future Supreme Court candidates. Not, of course, that Ginsburg is remotely radical. She’s usually been a quiet presence who prizes collegiality. One of the oddest and most charming things about her is her close friendship with Antonin Scalia—apparently she and her husband spend every New Years Eve with him and his wife. But in recent years, as an increasingly conservative court has chipped away at the rights closest to her heart, she’s been a lucid and indignant voice of opposition. In 2007, the Supreme Court upheld a ban on late-term abortions that made no provision for exceptions when a woman’s health is threatened. Clearly outraged, Ginsburg took the unusual step of reading her dissent from the bench. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy made the maddeningly condescending claim that women needed to be protected from a procedure they might later regret. “This way of protecting women recalls ancient notions about women’s place in society and under the Constitution—ideas that have long since been discredited,” she wrote. Later that year, the court voted to limit sex discrimination lawsuits in the Lily Ledbetter case. Once again, there was a cold fury in her dissent, which she again read from the bench: “In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.” “[T]his year we are witnessing—what shall we call it?—the radicalization of Ruth Bader Ginsburg?” the columnist Ellen Goodman wrote at the time. “The transformation of the 74-year-old justice who is watching a court undo her life’s work?” Even with Sotomayor to back her up, that undoing will likely continue in the Roberts court. It’s a sad way to wind up a career, seeing one’s legacy eroded. Still, given how public she’s been about her loneliness as the only woman on the bench, at least now she’ll have some company. Hopefully she’ll be able to enjoy it for years to come.

Hopefully.

.

Wingnut 3.0

by digby

Howie’s favorite ‘lil up and coming Republican leader is quite a piece of work. And some of his constituents aren’t happy about it:

After barnstorming through southeastern Wisconsin talking about health care reform before returning to Washington D.C., Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Janesville, is now at the center of the immigration debate back home. His appearance last month, along with several other members of Congress, at an event in Washington, D.C. has angered members of a local immigrant rights group. The Milwaukee-based group Voces de la Frontera is organizing local high school students to march outside Ryan’s Racine office Tuesday to protest his appearance at the “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” event in September sponsored by the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Organizers said the event was intended “to remind Congress and the new administration that rampant illegal immigration, efforts to grant amnesty, and taxpayer-subsidized health care benefits to millions of law-breakers are hot button issues for the American public. FAIR has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its position on immigration issues and its founder’s views on a wide variety of issues. Dr. John Tanton, M.D., FAIR’s founder and now a member of its board of directors, is the organization’s intellectual leader, according to Heidi Beirich, research director for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “He’s a central player in the organization. He’s not some ancillary guy. He’s got this terrible legacy,” Beirich said of Tanton, who ran the organization for a few decades and now serves on its board. “Frankly he’s an extremist. He’s funded white supremacist groups. He’s hung out with white supremacists.

Keep in mind that Paul Ryan was going after ACORN long before any videos showed up, for “voter fraud” — and you know what that means: the felons and the illegal aliens are trying to take everything you worked for by voting illegally. That he appears at a FAIR event, which is tantamount to appearing at a KKK rally, is pretty unsurprising.
But I doubt that everyone in Wisconsin knows that their fresh faced young congressman is consorting with flat out racists. (Some do, I’m sure, and approve.) But this guy is being groomed for national office. And like so many of his brethren, he’s caught in this trap made by his crazed conservative base.

Indeed, you have to read this excellent piece in Salon, complete with timeline, about how Glenn beck has become the master strategist of the GOP:

Something strange has happened to rank-and-file Republicans since President Obama took office. These past few months, standard-issue gray lawmakers have sounded like fire-and-brimstone demagogues. Conspiracy theories and over-the-top legislation to fix imaginary wrongs are flying wildly around formerly mainstream GOP circles.It turns out that like so much of what ails the world today, this can be traced back to Glenn Beck. Some fifth-term Iowa senator might be railing against death panels, but it’s really Beck’s voice you’re hearing. With his show on Fox News, Beck has successfully positioned himself as the weirdo right’s ambassador-at-large to the rest of the world. When the patron saint of the Tea Parties lets his freak flag fly, seemingly normal right-wing functionaries have been known to line up and salute. Republicans parrot Beck’s crackpot notions and pet issues routinely — sometimes running with his manias the morning after he first airs them.

If there was no history of lunatics ever ascending to great heights of national power I would be inclined to ignore this stuff. But after the 20th century, I think that would be foolish.

.

Gag

by digby

When the Chamber of Commerce starts calling them heroes, you know they are servile industry lackeys. It’s a good shorthand:

Last time out, the chamber took a little while to get on board with the Party of No and Philip Morris (which was spearheading the anti-health care drive in order to head off tobacco taxes to pay for parts of the initiative ) had to apply lots of pressure:

[R]ather than mount a major campaign in its own name, Philip Morris Washington Relations Office (WRO), PM’s lobbying, Office, sought to mobilise conservative groups that it funded to defend the company’s interests. “The WRO is working behind the scenes with Citizens For A Sound Economy and other anti-tax groups to oppose the Clinton package. Specifically, through funding PM is providing, these groups are engaged in grassroots and/or public education efforts against the Clinton plan in districts of ‘wing Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee“.[…]
However, PM wasn’t having it all its own way as it had to develop a strategy to persuade the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that they should spring to the defense of the tobacco industry. Another internal PM document revealed the magnitude of the tensions with the peak industry groups. “As we all know, the Chamber has been all over the map, including on the wrong side, of this debate. However, we have been intensely lobbying them behind the scenes to “bring them in line” consistent with other major business organisations, especially on FET, but also on employer mandates”. [3] PM was impatient that the Chamber of Commerce was awaiting the results of a survey of members before deciding their position on the issue. … We should coalesce with other large corporate members of the chamber (who comprise just 10 of the membership but full 90% of the dues) to ensure not only that Chamber waffling be discontinued, but that the positions it takes be representative of its members interests. We are presently working on a strategy to accomplish this,” the memo stated.

That Lincoln ad shows that they are fully in the game this time. But they are starting to have some problems on another issue:

Last Monday, Apple announced that it would be quitting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the Chamber’s opposition to global-warming legislation. And that was just the latest in a series of defections: in the past few weeks, the public-utility companies Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources, and Exelon all announced that they’d be leaving the Chamber, while Nike quit the organization’s board of directors. Historically speaking, this is a positive exodus. The Chamber of Commerce won’t be going out of business anytime soon, of course: it still has three million members, mostly small businesses, and a gargantuan lobbying budget. Still, the decidedly public nature of these corporate departures—the companies made statements attacking the Chamber for obstructionism—complicates its claim to be representing the collective interests of American business. One of the great strengths of business lobbies in recent decades has been their ability to maintain a united front. Global warming has revealed fractures in that façade.

The story of the Chamber’s evolution from mainline business organization to Randian fundamentalist church is an interesting one. But their wingnut dogma may finally be costing them. I guess some of these big companies don’t think being a flat earther is in their best interests.

By the way, Blanche Lincoln’s constituents aren’t only hearing from the Chamber of Commerce right now. Blue America’s ads are running all over Arkansas as we speak. Thanks to you.

.

AHIPpie Shake

by digby

Jonathan Cohn writes that the White House is pushing back on the AHIP “study” with a study of their own:

For the last twenty-four hours or so, analysts and experts have been poking holes in the new study, commissioned by and for the insurance industry, purporting to show that health care reform would raise insurance premiums. But now one of the experts everybody (myself included) has quoted has put together a quick memo showing that, at least for people trying to buy coverage through the new exchanges, premiums would actually come down. Way down. The expert is MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. He hasn’t formally modeled the impacts of the reforms on premiums; for this analysis, he has relied simply on available data from the Congressional Budget Office. But the gist of what he says makes sense intuitively. (As you can imagine, I’m not exactly qualified to pass judgment on the figures.) And while Gruber has advised both the administration and its allies on reform–the White House is circulating this paper–he’s also worked with Republicans and has credibility on both sides of the aisle. His work, in other words, a wee bit more reliable than what the insurance industry put out over the weekend.

Personally, I think that a report put out by my cat would be more reliable than one that was put out by the insurance companies. (And he’s not even an economist.) I find it hard to believe that the press is taking this seriously at all, particularly when there is ample evidence already out there refuting it.

It’s a failure of the news media to put this into the proper perspective, which would entail burying it in paragraph 23 of a story about how the health care exchanges are supposed to work. The report has no credibility — and AHIP should have been told to take out an ad if they wanted to make a big splash. It’s ridiculous that it’s gotten this kind of exposure and discussion.

.

Useful Subversion

by digby

The only problem with that scenario is that is that the Republicans aren’t the only ones who find the teabaggers useful. Otherwise, it would be a very useful idea.

.

Big Of Him

by digby

After all the sturm and drang leading to a train wreck of a legislative session over the week-end, Schwarzenneger ended up not pulling the nuclear trigger, and instead scheduled a special session to settle the water issue.

But some good did come of it:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed two gay rights bills, one honoring late activist Harvey Milk and another recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states.

[…]
Leno’s SB 54, meanwhile, requires California to recognize marriages performed in other states where same sex marriage is legal.In a signing message, Schwarzenegger said California will not recognize the couples as married but will “provide the same legal protections that would otherwise be available to couples that enter into civil unions or domestic partnerships out-of-state. In short, this measure honors the will of the People in enacting Proposition 8 while providing important protections to those unions legally entered into in other states.”

This whole thing is just stupid. But this is especially stupid … and disgusting:

SaveCalifornia.com, a leading West Coast pro-family, pro-child organization, is appalled that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed SB 572, “Harvey Milk Day,” into law. “Harvey Milk* was a sexual predator of teens, an advocate of polygamous relationships, a public liar, and is in no way a good role model for impressionable schoolchildren,” said Randy Thomasson, president of SaveCalifornia.com. “Sadly, children in public schools will now have even more in-your-face, homosexual-bisexual-transsexual indoctrination. This provides the strongest impetus yet for loving parents to remove their children from anti-family public schools.” “’Harvey Milk Day’ teaches children as young as five years old to admire the life and values and the notorious homosexual activist Harvey Milk” said Thomasson. “The ‘suitable commemorative exercises’ that are part of ‘Harvey Milk Day’ can easily result in cross-dressing exercises, ‘LGBT pride’ parades and mock gay weddings on school campuses — everything Harvey Milk supported.” Schwarzenegger vetoed ‘Harvey Milk Day” last year; he signed it this year. The Governor also previously claimed to oppose same-sex “marriage,” but now supports destroying the definition of marriage as only between a man and a woman, in court, and by his signing of SB 54, to recognize out-of-state homosexual “marriages” in violation of Proposition 8.

These haters will always be with us. Let’s hope their numbers continue to go down.

.

Just Saying No

by digby

I made a snarky comment about Texas last night which caused me some grief. I don’t regret it too much since I live in a place that’s routinely described as full of perverts and communists, but it’s still unfair to paint with such a broad brush. After all, there are plenty of people everywhere who are sane and thoughtful. Here’s one of them:

Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson appears to be the lone holdout among the state’s largest metropolitan law enforcement agencies in refusing to issue Tasers to his deputies.

[…]
But as Tasers continue to gain acceptance in the law enforcement community, questions about their safety persist — especially when a Taser-related death makes headlines.Anderson said the risk-reward factor was key in his decision not to use them.”My concern has always been that someday there would be an officer who might cause the death of someone with one of the Tasers,” he said. “If you have a less-than-lethal option in your hand and you end up causing the death of someone, I felt that it would put the deputy in a tough spot.”Before making his decision, Anderson conducted his own research, studied the stun guns and followed local cases where they were used. In cases where people who have health issues or who have used alcohol or drugs, Anderson found that the electric shock could be deadly. In the end, he decided against seeking funding for them.The sheriff also turned to Tarrant County Medical Examiner Dr. Nizam Peerwani for advice.”He voiced those very same concerns,” Anderson said. “He thought if the Taser was used on a perfectly healthy individual, that it was probably safe. He said he feared someone under the influence of alcohol or drugs or [who] had some physical impairment in some way . . . that there could be further damage done, up to causing the death of a person. It gave me great pause.”

That medical examiner must not have been taken in by the gilt laden junkets to which Taser International treats coroners to “educate” them about “excited delirium” the new disease that only strikes people in police custody.

In fact, he sounds like someone who has fully grasped what’s going on here:

Peerwani has declined to comment on Taser incidents, citing the investigation into the death of Michael Patrick Jacobs Jr., 24, who died April 18 after he was shocked Show allwith a Taser fired by a Fort Worth police officer.In his autopsy report on Jacobs, Peerwani noted that the officer’s first shot lasted 49 seconds. The second shot, about one second later, lasted five seconds. Peerwani found no drugs in Jacobs’ system and ruled the death a homicide.

I’m sorry to say that a lot more people are probably going to have to die before law enforcement is forced to stop using these instruments of torture and social control. And it won’t happen because of conscience or reason, as seems to be the case with this sheriff and medical examiner. It will happen because there’s too much financial liability. Is this a great country, or what?

.

Anonymous Sources

by digby

There is a lot of justifiably angry talk today about John Harwoods’s report on last night’s NBC Nightly News about the march for gay rights, in which he was asked if the White House was worried about “the left as a whole” and concerns they have that the White House isn’t doing the things the left expected them to do. He replied:

Barack Obama is doing well with 90% or more of Democrats so the White House views this opposition as really part of the Internet left fringe.

For a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn’t take this opposition, one adviser told me those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed, and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.

Glenn Greenwald documents all the cases of administration and Democratic officials saying similar things about LGBT concerns. And Harwood has now clarified that the official wasn’t speaking specifically about gay issues, but rather about the left in general.The White House has vociferously disavowed any knowledge of this quote or the sentiment behind it.

Obviously, I have no way of knowing if any of this is true and nobody else does either. That’s the beauty of anonymous sourcing, right? And that leads me to believe that while it’s certainly possible that an administration official said this to him about the left, it’s also entirely possible that Harwood made it up. After all, he has a habit of saying exactly the same thing in his own voice all the time. I’ve been documenting it for years. Here’s an example:

SCARBOROUGH: John Harwood, our second question of the day, is it possible that the left could fall out of love with Obama if he fades on FISA, if he fades on interrogating, and if he seems siding with Cheney-Bush and the NSA on wiretapping?…

HARWOOD: No, it is not a problem for Barack Obama. This is one of those things that sounds like a problem, but if you really look at it, getting attacked from the left on national security issues is good news for Barack Obama, because it tells mainstream voters that he‘s not out on the far extreme and helps him counteract the attacks he‘s getting from John McCain and the Republicans.

Here’s another one:

Harwood: Elizabeth, this is going to be a huge problem when he tries to site these prisoners. Does that mean that the president didn’t make progress yesterday, politically speaking, in terms of laying out this case? Is it simply too early to judge that?

Bumiller: I think he’s getting a lot of push back, from, not only from, well he’s getting hit from both sides, from the left and from the right. He’s getting hit from the right, of course, from people like Cheney and from the congressional districts, and from the left because he’s now saying that there are some of these detainees who cannot be tried because of lack of evidence or because of tainted evidence.

Harwood: I suspect he doesn’t mind getting hit from the left as much as he does from the right.

Harwood spouts this line on a regular basis as a pundit. In fact he’s so predictable that I know to look for it every time I see him on one of the gasbag shows.

It’s possible that a White House official did say it; I certainly wouldn’t put it past them. But I would guess that there’s an equal chance that if he or she did, it’s because the official watches Harwood saying it on TV every other week and was currying favor with him. After all, there is no villager more contemptuous of the left than John Harwood.

.

Windfall Profits

by digby

Following up on the post below, I see that Ezra points out another possible response from the Democrats to this AHIP salvo:

The short-term impact of this seems to be that Nancy Pelosi’s windfall profits tax on the insurance industry just got a whole lot more likely, as Democrats just got a whole lot angrier at a group they never liked in the first place.

I certainly hope so. It was a good idea anyway, and now it seems like a necessity.

Meanwhile, I just heard Andrea Mitchel characterize the report as “devastating” — but she also called it dirty pool, because the industry released it on a three day week-end when DC is empty of lawmakers. And this is very interesting:

TPMDC’s Christina Bellantoni asked Kurt Bardella, spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), about the insurance industry’s attack on health-care reform. After making pretty clear that he basically agreed with the report, Bardella cautioned that “any Republican that uses the report should double-check to see how much money they’ve received from the industry, as that’ll be a very easy rebuttal for Dems to hit back.”

Ya think? The problem, of course, is that the same thing can be said about Democrats. Presumably, they will distance themselves from the report, but they should not be then allowed to portray the Finance Committee bill as “the compromise.” That looks more and more like the real danger here.

.

Broken AHIP

by digby

I guess the insurance industry finally decided they weren’t going to get the kind of sweetheart deals that PHarma and the Hospitals got, so they’ve gone on the warpath by holding a gun to … er … releasing a “cost projection” report about the effects of health care reform. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that it says they will raise premiums sky high if reforms are passed.

Frankly, I wouldn’t expect any less of them. They will raise premiums sky high even if reforms don’t pass. They always have before. Indeed, the only thing that kept them in check at all over the past 20 years was a roaring stock market, which allowed them to make huge profits while only gouging their customers at about 15% inflation. Lately, they’ve had no choice but to jack that up and gouge the sick customers even more. They are, after all, profit driven corporations .

This report today, however, signals that the industry is ready to go to war to stop health care reform. Ezra characterizes it properly:

In the hallowed tradition of the tobacco and energy industries, the health insurance industry has commissioned a report (pdf) projecting doom and despair for those who seek to reform its business practices. The report was farmed out to the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has something of a history with this sort of thing: In the early-’90s, the tobacco industry commissioned PWC to estimate the economic devastation that would result from a tax on tobacco. The report was later analyzed by the Arthur Andersen Economic Consulting group, which concluded that “the cumulative effect of PW’s methods … is to produce patently unreliable results.” It’s perhaps no surprise that the patently unreliable results were all in the tobacco industry’s favor. He who pays the piper names the tune, and all that. All that makes it a bit hard to respond to this analysis. Seriously engaging with its methodology probably gives it more credit than it deserves, making this seem like an argument between two opposing sides as opposed to a predictable industry hit job. But totally ignoring its claims means some of them might live unchallenged. So rather than a full tour through the “analysis,” here are a couple of its more representative moments.

Read on.

So why now? Well, this may be a clue:

The U.S. Senate Finance Committee has voted to add an amendment to its version of health care reform legislation that would halve the amount health insurance providers can claim in business tax deductions for executives’ salaries, from $1 million annually to $500,000.The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., was approved by a vote of 14-8 on Thursday, as the Finance Committee wrapped up weeks of work hammering out its take…

Nobody puts CEOs in the corner. Since Lincoln is a joint subsidiary of Walmart and Blue Cross, you can imagine that she’s getting the message loud and clear.

The report only shows the rise in premiums and doesn’t include the subsidies. But it still means that premiums will be higher than anticipated under reforms — and much more costly to the government, which is the point of releasing this report, after all. They are playing to the deficit scolds in a last ditch attempt to keep them from getting to 60 votes in the senate and preventing an up or down vote, which they will lose.

There has never been a better argument for the public plan than the one the insurance company just handed the Democrats in congress. They have produced a shoddy, self-serving report as a blatant threat to raise premiums higher than they already plan to raise them. If there has ever been a more obvious case of bad faith than this, I haven’t seen it. The only thing that will keep these corporate criminals in line is either price controls or stiff competition and if they can’t keep their companies solvent without giving their executives outrageous pay packages, charging ridiculous prices while denying care to sick people, then maybe their financial model just doesn’t work.

If these insurance companies can’t see the gift horse they’ve been given with this Rube Goldberg mess that’s been created then they are too incompetent to stay in business.

Oh, an by the way, since when does a leading paper run a front page story with blaring headlines featuring a bogus report commissioned by the industry that’s featured in the report? Did they discuss this at a bought and paid for “salon” or did they promise to just buy a full page ad next time?

Update: Reader sleon makes a good point:

… the real intention is to give Baucus and his fellow shills cover to get his version of the bill passed. By seeming to attack the very plan they literally wrote themselves with a bogus last-minute scare report, they’re simply trying to give him some distance from those (correctly) calling him a wholly-owned corporate subsidiary. It’s an obvious straw man outlier, but expect to see lots of press about how this proves Baucus’s give away to the industry is actually a brave reclamation of the bi-partisan center.

If that’s true, look for the GOP elders to come out against the report.

.