Month: November 2009

It’s Baaaack

by digby

Not that it ever went away. The catfood commission is the Zombie that has been clawing at the door since Obama was elected:

Senators from both parties on Tuesday put new pressure on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to turn the power to trim entitlement benefits over to an independent commission.

Seven members of the Senate Budget Committee threatened during a Tuesday hearing to withhold their support for critical legislation to raise the debt ceiling if the bill calling for the creation of a bipartisan fiscal reform commission were not attached. Six others had previously made such threats, bringing the total to 13 senators drawing a hard line on the committee legislation.

“You rarely do have the leverage to make a fundamental change,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who said he hasn’t ruled out offering the independent commission legislation as an amendment to the healthcare reform bill.

The panel, which has been championed by Conrad and ranking member Judd Gregg (R-N.H), would be tasked with stemming the unsustainable rise in debt.

Among its chief responsibilities would be closing the gap between tax revenue coming in and the larger cost of paying for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. The Government Accountability Office recently reported the gap is on pace to reach an “unsustainable” $63 trillion in 2083.

You’ll recall that during the transition period Obama was all for this commission (it was part of the Grand Bargain) and put it off until after health care reform was passed once people raised a fuss shortly after the inauguration:

McConnell said that when Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had previously spoken to Republicans, they struck a tone that indicated a willingness to work on Social Security. “That was the place that I hoped, based on what both he and the chief of staff had said earlier, we’d be able to move on a bipartisan basis. He kind of brushed over that issue” in his speech, said McConnell.

He said he has noticed a change in the administration’s rhetoric over the last few weeks. “They seem to be kind of back-pedaling some,” he said.

The back-pedaling McConnell sees comes after several weeks of intense lobbying from liberals concerned that Obama might be opening a door to weakening Social Security. And if the GOP isn’t happy, it means the lobbying campaign has had an impact.

But they never took it off the table. In fact, it has come up over and over again in the past year. This new gambit is very, very bad, however:

“You rarely do have the leverage to make a fundamental change,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who said he hasn’t ruled out offering the independent commission legislation as an amendment to the healthcare reform bill.

The panel, which has been championed by Conrad and ranking member Judd Gregg (R-N.H), would be tasked with stemming the unsustainable rise in debt.

Among its chief responsibilities would be closing the gap between tax revenue coming in and the larger cost of paying for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. The Government Accountability Office recently reported the gap is on pace to reach an “unsustainable” $63 trillion in 2083.

The panel would also have the power to craft legislation that would change the tax code and set limits on government spending.

The legislation would then be subject to an up-or-down vote; it could not be amended.

Taking health care hostage is just one possibility, however, if they don’t get assurances on this:

Raising the debt ceiling has become one of a handful of “must-pass” pieces of legislation Congress regularly considers without the usual partisan posturing, and often without much debate.

But before Tuesday’s hearing was over, Sens. Conrad, Gregg, Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) publicly vowed to vote against raising the debt ceiling if a budget reform commission bill doesn’t come along with it.

“There are rare moments in this institution when you can implement fundamental change,” Bayh said during Tuesday’s hearing. “This is one of them.”

Pelosi says no way, but there are some people inside and outside the House who may have something to say about that. Steny Hoyer indicated, as he did last winter, that he’s very interested. And he’s not the only one. This was from last February:

The president met with 44 fiscally conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats this week and gave a nod to legislation that would set up commissions to deal with long-term deficit strains. The commissions would then present plans to Congress for an up-or-down vote.

“We feel like we’ve found a partner in the White House,” said Rep. Charlie Melancon (D., La.), a Blue Dog co-chairman

I don’t know where the White House stands on this today. Somebody should ask them right away. After all this crisis is imminent:

Among its chief responsibilities would be closing the gap between tax revenue coming in and the larger cost of paying for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. The Government Accountability Office recently reported the gap is on pace to reach an “unsustainable” $63 trillion in 2083.

Most importantly, talk of cutting social security right now would be hugely popular, so all the incumbent Democrats should be intensely interested in getting that issue on the agenda in an election year. Lord knows, there aren’t enough current problems to keep them busy.

Seriously, this is Shock Doctrine lunacy of the most obvious kind. Conrad and Bayh are out there saying it right up front. The government has poured trillions into the economy to save the banks and run useless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the old people and the poor are going to have to pay the price. That’s the way it works.

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Armistice

by digby

Batocchio has written a lovely series of posts for Veterans Day which will soothe the heartburn you got from spending the evening watching fatuous gasbags pontificate about war like it’s a cartoon show.

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Catnip

by digby

As we see watch the unfolding Blackwater scandal taken on by the NY Times, lest we get too excited, recall this exchange:

The media has scoffed at the charges of Blackwater crimes from the beginning. I’m not sure what it will take to change this. They are obviously a criminal enterprise. We’ve known that for years. I just don’t think anyone cares. And even if they did, they believe pursuing the story would be too “distracting.”

Because you know how much the village hates distractions.

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Bad Branding

by digby

Huckleberry’s in the dog house:

Republican leaders in a South Carolina county have censured their own U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham for working with Democrats on a climate bill and other legislation.The Republican has often worked with Democrats in Congress, but Charleston County Chairwoman Lin Bennett says his work on climate legislation is the last straw.

Working with Democrats is clearly prohibited in the Bible. It’s somewhere in Genesis. You can look it up.

But this is really funny:

The party resolution passed Monday says Graham has weakened the Republican brand.

The Republican “brand” has much bigger problems than little old Huckleberry, I’m afraid.

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Premature Capitulation

by digby

Ezra Klein traces the origins of what he calls the “$900 billion mistake:”

Barack Obama has not given much in the way of specifics for health-care reform. Few policies have been nonnegotiable and virtually none have been dictated. The exception is a number that was neither nonnegotiable nor dictated, but was received on the Hill as if it was both, and has come to dominate the health-care reform process: $900 billion. The number sprang from Obama’s September speech laying out his own plan on health-care reform. “Add it all up,” he said before a joint session of Congress, “and the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years.” The plan he proposed, however, did not mention the price tag, and the president did not include any specifics about how that price tag was reached. Nor did the president’s language actually set a hard ceiling. “Around $900 billion,” when you’re talking about internal modeling for a plan that the Congressional Budget Office hasn’t seen, is not the same thing as a $900 billion limit. This was not like Bill Clinton waving his pen and promising to veto any bill that did not reach universal coverage. But that’s how it was understood on the Hill. “It made things complicated,” sighed Rep. George Miller. “We were working off of one track and then we had to switch.”

Ezra reports that this didn’t come out of the blue but was rather a reaction at the White House to the tumult during August when members of the administration wanted to radically roll back the scope of the health care plan.

I think that’s rather telling, don’t you? Indeed, it’s clear to me that if public opinion hadn’t hung in there and liberal groups hadn’t pressed, they would have ended up with a bill that only a Republican could call health care reform. And it still wouldn’t have gotten any Republican votes.

Ezra’s article discusses in depth the problems that were caused by this premature capitulation and it’s substantial. I always thought it was interesting that the number was the same one that Snowe and Collins demanded in the stimulus debate. I think they may have thought that was a magic number that everyone would see as “responsible.”

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An Immoderate Proposal

by digby

I have a moral objection to paying for any kind of erectile dysfunction medicine in the new health reform bill and I think men who want to use it should just pay for it out of pocket. After all, I won’t ever need such a pill. And anyway, it’s no biggie. Just because most of them can get it under their insurance today doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have it stripped from their coverage in the future because of my moral objections. (I don’t think there’s even been a Supreme Court ruling making wood a constitutional right. I might be wrong about that.)

Many of the men who are prescribed this medication are on Medicare, so I think it should be stripped out of that coverage as well. And unlike the payments for abortion, which actually lower overall medical costs (pregnancy obviously costs much, much more) banning tax dollars from covering any kind of Viagra would result in a substantial savings:

The price of Pfizer’s Viagra has doubledsince it was launched, according to a list of wholesale acquisition costs paid by pharmacies, obtained by BNET. In May 1999, a 100-count bottle of the blue diamonds cost $700. Today, that same bottle costs $1,457.61, a 108 percent increase, according to the list: (Click to enlarge.) The blog of online pharmacy AccessRx notes that Pfizer has also been extracting more frequent price rises in addition to higher price rises:

… we’re not sure if you’ve been tracking price increases recently, but Pfizer began to raise the cost of Viagra twice a year instead of once a year in 2007. Including the last six price increases since Jan. 1, 2007, the price of Viagra has gone up 45.5%.

The WAC list indicates that while Pfizer was initially content to take price increases of 3 percent per year, in 2003 it doubled that increase. In January 2009, Pfizer bumped it up to 11 percent. Then in August it took another 5 percent. It’s an astonishing example of pricing power, given that Viagra is in direct competition with Eli Lilly’s Cialis and Bayer’s Levitra. The heat from Cialis is particularly severe: Cialis sales in the U.S. were up 16 percent to $149.4 million in Q2; Pfizer’s Viagra was up only 4 percent at $207 million.

I don’t want my tax dollars touching even one milimeter of that overly engorged expense.

I realize that many people disagree with my moral objections to men getting erections which God clearly doesn’t want them to get, but my principles on this are more important to me than theirs are to them. So too bad. If you want a boner, pay for it yourself.

And I think those noxious advertisements for the drugs should be banned as well, if only for aesthetic reasons. Having to watch my baby boomer fellows wail “Viva Viagra” is offensive to anyone who has any taste in music.

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Terms Of The Term

by digby

Gary Wills has written a very thought provoking article about the Afghanistan question. It begins like this:

I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic—that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate. These are the arguments that have kept us in losing efforts before. They are the ones that made presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon pass on to their successors in the presidency the draining and self-lacerating Vietnam War. They are the arguments that made President George W. Bush pass on two wars to his successor. One of the strongest arguments for continued firing up of these wars is that none of these presidents wanted to serve only one term (even Lyndon Johnson, who chose not to run for a second full term). But what justification is there for buying a second presidential term with the lives of hundreds or thousands of young American men and women in the military?

Intriguing question, no?

I think there is no doubt that this is a concern. But I also think both Democratic candidates knew it was a concern during the election and made Afghanistan into “the good war” in order that they didn’t need to make that decision. (Clinton, after all, is now one of the hawks in the administration.) Therefore, the question now facing us is not whether they will withdraw but whether they will escalate. Our problem is that in making Afghanistan “the good war” they also made it a moral decision to “win” it, something that is as unlikely as it ever has been historically, particularly if these guys, who are insisting on a one from column A and one from column B approach, are the brain trusts.

There’s no way that Obama is going to withdraw from Afghanistan and it’s almost a sure thing that he’s going to escalate in some fashion. I suspect they are hoping they can master the PR enough to sell it like a successful “surge” and take it off the table for 2012. Maybe they can. But if Obama’s second term depends upon his staying in Afghanistan, I think it’s a 100% probability that he will do it.

Unless, of course, the political reality looks as it did to Johnson in 1968. I don’t see that happening, but you never know. Certainly one way to make that more likely would be to copy Johnson’s Vietnam escalation strategy.

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Principles

by digby

Yesterday, Democratic Representative Mike Capuano, who is running for Ted Kennedy’s seat seemed to have forgotten that he is running in a Democratic primary when he reacted this way to his rival Martha Coakley’s statement that she would vote against any health care bill that contains the Stupak Amendment:

Capuano, giddy over a discernible difference with the presumptive front-runner, called Coakley’s comment “manna from heaven.” “I find it interesting and amazing and she would have stood alone among all the pro-choice members of Congress, all the members of the Massachusetts delegation,” Capuano said in an interview. “She claims she wants to honor Ted Kennedy’s legacy on health care. It’s pretty clear that a major portion of this was his bill.” “If she’s not going to vote for any bill that’s not perfect, she wouldn’t vote for any bill in history,” Capuano added. “She would have voted against Medicare, the civil rights bill. Every advancement this country has made has been based on bills that had flaws in them … Realism is something you have to deal with in Washington.”

I wondered how that was going to go down among Democrats in Massachusetts and it seems they weren’t too impressed:

US Representative Michael E. Capuano, in a significant departure from his forceful arguments a day earlier, said today that he would vote against a final health care bill if it includes a provision restricting federal funding for abortion.

It seems that everyone in the media is knocking Coakley for failing to be “pragmatic” and making the perfect the enemy of the good for saying she would vote against the bill on principle. As Capuano indicated yesterday before he was brought back to reality The Globe editorial board also seems to think that even anything but a solemn promise to vote for any bill the congress finally throws out there is a betrayal of everything Ted Kennedy stood for. Except Kennedy had a very recent history of recanting his support for even his own health care bills, and for reasons less principled than civil rights:

When the Senate voted last summer to provide Medicare patients with prescription drug coverage, a fiery Senator Edward M. Kennedy hailed the bill as “the greatest action in a generation to mend the broken promise of Medicare.”

Now, it is Kennedy complaining about broken promises, after Republican leaders took the bill Kennedy painstakingly negotiated and morphed it into an industry-friendly “Medicare reform” package that opens the 38-year-old entitlement program to competition with private insurers. The senator, who had spent months cajoling Democrats to back his version of the legislation, was back on the floor this week with equal passion, pleading with his colleagues to stop the measure he charged had been “hijacked” by Republicans.

Seems even Teddy let the perfect be the enemy of the good at times. After all, it may have ended up hugely benefiting PHarma and costing the taxpayers many billions, but nobody can say that seniors didn’t get at least some help with their prescriptions, no matter what a boondoggle it ended up being. Under the current logic, it sounds almost quaint that he even quibbled with such a silly complaint.

It’s very telling that with all this talk about how pro-choice women can’t be stubborn about their little needs, there is nobody out there complaining that Stupak and his crowd are making the perfect the enemy of the good. He and the other “pro-life” Democrats are commonly and without criticism portrayed as voting for their principles, as if they have no choice in the matter. (Indeed, the whole argument over funding is defined by the fact that “pro-life” advocates apparently cannot be forced to pay taxes for something that goes against their principles.

Apparently some principles are just more important than others.

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Good For The Digestion

by digby

Mike Stark caught up with Blanche Lincoln yesterday and asked her about health care:

It sounds like she doesn’t quite know what to do. To help her decide, Blue America has arranged for her constituents to start seeing this all over the state today:

Perhaps Lincoln should start worrying just a bit about what will happen if her Democratic base stays home. The numbers aren’t looking all that good for her right now.

She’s between little rock and a hard place but it seems to me that’s easily solved at this point. She should vote for cloture, thus appeasing her base and then she can vote against the bill if she needs to appeal to neanderthals who want people to die quickly.

Believe me, none of her constituents will hold it against her. Most people think cloture is unpasteurized sour cream. And they like it.

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Precious Moments

by digby

This is just so special:

They’ve battled each other for years, but 22 Republican and Democratic pundits relaxed together for the Bipartisan Policy Center’s two-day conference in New Orleans. The goal — and the title of the conference — was lofty: “Tak[e] the Poison Out of Partisanship.” And as it turns out, it’s possible. The biggest surprise (aside from just how skinny Tony Blankley is, we’re told) was just how civil and polite it all was. “Everyone came to play,” Mary Matalin said. “It was like an All-Star game. All the best players on the field in their sweet spots. We may never be the poster children of post-partisanship, but it was the greatest coterie of committed political professionals ever assembled.” Matalin and James Carville, who live in New Orleans, helped headline the event. (Hey, if they can bridge the divide, anyone can.) Attendees included Tad Devine, Stan Greenberg, Larry Grisolano, Mandy Grunwald, Joe Lockhart, Hilary Rosen, Joe Trippi, Mary Matalin, Dan Bartlett, Charlie Black, Alex Castellanos, Steve Schmidt, Mark McKinnon and David Winston. Though many at the conference knew of each other from various campaigns and clients, it was the first time many had met face to face. Kiki McLean, a Democratic strategist (and former Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman) said she was just dying to meet John McCain campaign puppet master Steve Schmidt. “He’s absolutely great! He’s thoughtful, he’s smart, he’s engaging. And I’ve had a long history of respect for someone like Charlie Black,” she cooed. “It’s also great that we’re in a position to have a conversation that has our own point of view and not our clients’.” Sure, the conversation was heated at times, McLean says, but “I wouldn’t call them terse; there may have been some energetic disagreement on occasion.” Of course, there were moments of extreme entertainment, as when Cook opted to stand instead of sit as he moderated one session: “I’m going to moderate standing up because, as my wife says, it maximizes the distance between my head and my ass.” And on Monday night, everyone got together at Carville and Matalin’s house for dinner before stopping by a W Hotel after-party. Carville was spotted talking to Black for a long time, we hear, while other people “were talking about their kids and funny and not-so-funny things that happened in campaigns and how bad the Giants are,” the Bipartisan Policy Center’s president, Jason Grumet, said. One thing everyone did agree on was that Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R-S.C.) outburst during President Barack Obama’s speech was inappropriate. (Oh, Republicans do bring people together.) “I think the thing we all have in common is that we care about our country,” McLean says. “The interesting thing to me is there is a general agreement on what the priorities are — there’s a disagreement about what order they should be addressed” in.

So why can’t we all just get along? After all, if “we” all agree on everything, all we need to do is decide if we should we invade Iran before we enact immigration reform or after we outlaw abortion. Or should we ban unions after we pass public campaign financing or before we mandate prayer in schools? I’m thinking gay marriage should go before enacting the flat tax but after universal health care, but I’m not adamant about it. It’s so tough to know which things we should do first.

I have to tell you that if anyone ever comes up with some sort of blogger summit to rub shoulders with right wing bloggers, I ain’t going. I find it unpleasant to socialize with people who stand for everything I loathe and I have a hard time listening to pathological liars after a few minutes. It seems like a waste of time. But that’s just me.

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