Month: December 2009

Finally

by digby

Like me, I’m sure you’ve been wondering why in the world we haven’t heard from this fellow in the health care debate:

Former Sen. and Gov. George Allen doesn’t see much to like in the proposed health-care overhaul, even without a Medicare buy-in provision.

“Why in the heck should we spend another trillion dollars that we don’t have on this government run health-care experiment?” Allen asked today in a conference call with reporters.

Can you believe that nobody’s asked his opinion before now? My god. Thank God, he’s planning a political comeback.

If there’s one thing guys like Alan really hate about the idea of health care reform it’s that it might benefit some in the macaca community. Can’t have that.

Speaking of which, you almost have to admire the fact that the right wing press still has absolutely no scruples about being racist asses:

Democratic video producer S.R. Sidarth, the target of former Virginia Republican Sen. George Allen’s “Macaca” attack during his 2006 campaign, was spotted Monday night on “Jeopardy!” There was no mention of Sidarth’s YouTube fame through the video that cost Allen his campaign by framing him as a racist, but Alex Trebek did describe Sidarth as a law student and shared an anecdote about his pilgrimage to Tibet.

Yeah, it “framed” him. The guy who had a noose and a confederate flag in his office.

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The Manly Deniers

by digby

In spite of Sarah Palin’s recent high profile on the subject, studies show that vast majorities of climate science skeptics are men, which I did not know. This article ponders why that might be and references a pretty amazing poll that delves deeper into people’s attitudes on the subject and their demographic makeup:

The genders were roughly equally represented in the middle groupings, but at the margins the divide was absolutely stark: “Almost two-thirds of the Dismissive are men (63%), the largest gender split among the six segments,” the report concluded. What else did the survey reveal about the “dismissive” group?

“More likely than average to be high income, well-educated, white men… much more likely to be very conservative Republicans… strongly endorse individualistic values, opposing any form of government intervention, anti-egalitarian, and almost universally prefer economic growth over environmental protection… have a specialized media diet, with a higher than average preference for media sources that reflect their own political point of view.”

That actually surprises me. Unless it turns out that these guys are all lying about how much education and income they have (which is always possible) this is not a group I would have expected to be deniers. Highly educated, wealthy, Randian Fox viewers? Maybe …

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Good Faith

by digby

MSNBC reports that Susan Collins said today that she would be offering amendments to “improve” the health care bill even though she would be voting against it. When asked why she would bother, she replied:

Because I think something is going to pass and I would like to make that bill as good as possible even if ultimately it’s not a bill I can support.

This is what I was talking about last night when I wrote “this bill probably isn’t bad enough for Lieberman and his cronies to allow Democrats to commit political suicide with it.”

Nobody who has announced that they will not vote for this bill should be allowed to “improve” it at this point. Unless, of course, the point is to take out every remaining piece that could even slightly offset the mandate. Which it might be. After all, Republicans are really messed up these days and need something clean and simple to run on. The least the Democrats can do is help them out.

Update:

I’m hearing a lot about the moral argument as articulated in this Ezra Klein post I approvingly linked to by Ezra the other night. (Apparently Villagers all have their tighty whities in a wad over his outrageously imporper evocation of morality when writing about health care in the pages of the venerable Washington Post. How unseemly of him. We speak of “bending the cost curve” not killing people.

Anyway, this argument will be heard a lot in the coming days. Jesse Jackson just made it. I would expect that Barack Obama will make it too, along with a political argument that says failure on health care reform dooms a whole lot of them next November. More importantly, he also pretty much said that if it fails he won’t try it again. (It’s now or never…)

For a variety of reasons which I’ve written about before, I have always thought that this vote was going to end up being a very, very hard gut check for progressives and have believed that most of them would hold their noses and vote for whatever the president agreed to. It’s health care. However, recent events, particularly the arrogant interference from Lieberman and the long held dream of a Medicare buy-in being tantalizingly dangled out there then rudely pulled back, has made that calculation a little bit harder. If they counted on progressive capitulation, Reid and Obama would have been better off just killing the public option a couple of months ago rather than letting it come to this humiliating end. It’s no longer just a gut check. They really forced progressives to grovel — over and over again.

I would still guess that they will wind up passing the final bill, but the vote will be razor thin in the House —- Pelosi will have to pull out all the stops to get it done. And whenever that happens there’s always a chance that it won’t work. So maybe a call to “kill the bill” will actually result in doing it. But I’m still skeptical.

And frankly I don’t see how activists can affect their decision even if we want to. If Joe Lieberman publicly forcing them to eat shit doesn’t stiffen their resolve, nothing will.

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The Moral Of The Story

by tristero

There’s a coupla new books about vegetarianism out there which Chicago Jack reviews over at La Vida Locavore. One of ’em, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, has gotten a lot of attention; the other, Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability has received virtually none.

Foer says don’t eat meat, it’s morally wrong, every animal is an individual. Keith, a former vegan who claims the diet made her very ill, says vegetarianism is naive; it fails to take into account the importance of topsoil cultivation, the number of microscopic critters slaughtered in growing plants, and the fact that culling the herd is important for keeping the topsoil sustainable. Both authors have nothing positive to say about American industrial food practices.

Got no argument with that last bit; industrial food sucks, it can make you very unhealthy, and we can’t continue making food the way we’re doing without fucking serious consequences. The rest of it, well…

I don’t have any strong sense of a tuna’s individuality: I suppose – sure, why not? – that some tuna are nice and some are jerks, but I think one would have to think a lot harder than I’m prepared to about such issues to make a good case one way or the other. As for Keith, I’m pretty sure that a properly balanced vegan diet won’t harm you, although it could easily bore you to tears. (Cue the flame comments: just kidding, people! Geez…) And her off-the-gridism sounds not terribly convincing, although if it makes her happy, I say go for it.

Me, I’ve been vegetarian since about 1982 or so. For reasons I don’t quite understand, many people find the fact I vastly prefer veggies, grains, fruits, eggs and cheese to meat very interesting (my father was deeply offended) and it’s one of the first questions I get when sitting down to a meal, So, when people ask me why, I’ve got two stock responses:

1. I’d never eat a Republican. How could I consume a higher life form, like a snail or a chicken?

OR…

2. It’s not that I hate meat. It’s that I really hate vegetables.

Full disclosure: The first is original. I truly wish I had come up with the second, but I stole it from something I read somewhere.

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Special note to conservatives and others slow on the uptake: This is NOT a post about food preferences.

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Special note #2: Still don’t get it? Okay, let’s spell it out.

Short version: Not everything we do has a reason. And not everything we do that has a reason has a moral reason. Sometimes a carrot is just a…

Long version: The notion that all human behavior has a moral valence is part and parcel of Puritanism. Cotton Mather:

I was once emptying the Cistern of Nature, and making Water at the Wall. At the same Time, there came a Dog, who did so too, before me. Thought I; “What mean and vile Things are the Children of Men, in this mortal State! How much do our natural Necessities abase us and place us in some regard, on the Level with the very Dogs!”…Accordingly, I resolved, that it should be my ordinary Practice, whenever I step to answer the one or other Necessity of Nature, to make it an Opportunity of shaping in my Mind some noble, divine Thought.

Granted, this is funny as hell. But it’s also very creepy in its holier-than-thou piousness and blatant self-loathing. This stuff has created an enormous amount of mischief. There is nothing particularly “mean and vile” about urinating. Nor is there anything particularly ennobling about vegetarianism. OTOH, there is a lot that is very, very wrong with condemning humans for having a body; likewise there is a lot that is very, very wrong with assuming moral superiority because you will or won’t eat something.

Much human activity simply has little or no moral content. Knowing when it does, and when it doesn’t – ah, there lies wisdom.

But assuming we are always moral agents: there lieth foul Monsters.

Dear Al Franken

by tristero

You’re a funny guy. Don’t you understand that in the US Senate you are entitled to your own facts if you’re a Republican?

The Best We Can Do

by digby

Jim VanDehei was on Mitchell this morning talking about his new article which evidently reports that Obama is going to twist arms today to make sure health care reform passes before Christmas. Mitchell asked him if (as Chuck Todd absurdly posited) Lieberman actually pulled back from the brink and decided not to blow up the Democratic party or if he is sitting pretty because he actually got exactly what he wanted:

VanDeHei I don’t think there’s any question that he got what he wanted. He’s been able to kill, or help kill, the public option and now he’s single handedly killed this Medicare expansion for people over the age of 55.

And so now what the president is doing is calling in Democrats in the Senate and saying “listen this is the last chance we have to get health care reform and if I fail, like Clinton failed, we’re talking about generations before another Democratic president with this big of a majority can actually tackle health care reform”. His case is going to be that if we don’t do this in the next two weeks it’s never going to be done.

The big question is, will that message pacify liberals? Liberal Democrats on the hill are saying “listen we wanted a single payer system or at least we wanted the public option or at least we wanted the medicare buy-in. Now we’re getting squat on that end so what are we actually getting?”

Obama will say, you’re actually getting a lot. You’re getting coverage for everybody. You’re getting insurance reform. And he’s going to have to convince them that that is sufficient.

That doesn’t make sense and if Obama is able to persuade liberals with that incoherent line of reasoning then he really is good and they really are stupid.

If this is the only chance for reform in generations, wouldn’t it have made more sense to fight for a truly comprehensive bill that actually solved the problem? If you’ve only got one bite of the apple every couple of decades, it seems remarkably foolish not to really go for broke. To end up with a bill like this as your once in a generation liberal accomplishment is about as inspiring as a Bobby Jindal speech.

And Obama can say that you’re getting a lot, but also saying that it “covers everyone,” as if there’s a big new benefit is a big stretch. Nothing will have changed on that count except changing the law to force people to buy private insurance if they don’t get it from their employer. I guess you can call that progressive, but that doesn’t make it so. In fact, mandating that all people pay money to a private interest isn’t even conservative, free market or otherwise. It’s some kind of weird corporatism that’s very hard to square with the common good philosophy that Democrats supposedly espouse.

Nobody’s “getting covered” here. After all, people are already “free” to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won’t make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn’t or didn’t want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people’s money against their will, saying it’s for their own good. — and doing it without even the cover that FDR wisely insisted upon with social security, by having it withdrawn from paychecks. People don’t miss the money as much when they never see it.

And as for the idea that insurance reforms are a huge progressive victory that can only be accomplished once in a generation, well that’s a pretty sad comment on our country — and progressivism.

What this huge electoral mandate and congressional majority have gotten us, then, is basically a deal with the insurance industry to accept 30 million coerced customers in exchange for ending their practice of failing to cover their customers when they get sick — unless they go beyond a “reasonable cap,” of course. (And profits go up!) If that’s the best we can expect of progressivism for the next generation then I’m afraid we are in deep trouble.

*I realize that the subsidies and the medicaid expansion are meaningful. But they are also going to be subject to ongoing funding battles in an age of deficit hysteria. I don’t hold out much hope for any improvement on that count. Indeed, I fully expect they will be assailed as welfare and eliminated as soon as Republicans gain power. They have learned from their mistakes — don’t let any liberal “entitlement programs ” become entrenched. That’s why a big comprehensive program would have been better. It’s much harder to disassemble.

Update: I think it’s really cool being lectured to by Obama about not getting everything you want. I would imagine that Joe Liberman laughed and laughed and laughed at that one.

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Feel The Magic

by digby

Guess what business Chairman Joe Liebermann’s Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee takes up this week?

As concern grows about our nation’s fiscal sustainability and fear of a spiraling deficit intensifies, The Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress (CSPC) will be presenting recommendations to the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee to help resolve our troubling fiscal future. The hearing will address why the creation of an independent Fiscal Future Commission is necessary to achieving our nation’s economic recovery and maintaining its long-range freedom of action.

The first panel will feature Senators Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Judd Gregg (R-NH), the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, who will provide analysis about their bipartisan Congressional initiative, “The Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action Act of 2009.” They will be followed by an expert panel featuring Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Peter G. Peterson Foundation CEO and former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, who will express their concern for our current fiscal situation and why the creation of such a Fiscal Future Commission is the best solution.

When: December 17, 2009 at 10:00AM

Where: Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 342

Panelists:

Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND)
Chairman, Senate Budget Committee

Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH)
Ranking Member, Senate Budget Committee

The Honorable Alan Greenspan
President, Greenspan Associates, LLC, Former Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board

The Honorable David Walker
President and CEO, Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Former U. S. Comptroller General and Head of Government Accountability Office

I don’t think there’s even the slightest doubt where our newly anointed King of all America stands on this issue. And I feel very confident that he will garner the kind of attention this issue requires.

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Something’s Not Working

by digby

This poll may overstate the problem, but even if it does, the fact that it even happening is extremely depressing:

As the United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen heads into its final week, nearly half of Americans — 49% — say they are only slightly or not at all concerned about climate change, while 35% are somewhat or highly concerned, a new Zogby Interactive survey shows. Zogby’s latest polling shows an increase in those who hold this view compared with 2007, when 39% said they were slightly or not at all concerned about climate change and 48% said they were somewhat or highly concerned.

Intensity of concern about global climate change has shifted over the past three years in favor of those who are not at all concerned – 27% held this view in 2007, compared to 37% who say the same now. Fewer now say they are highly concerned – 20% today compared to 30% in 2007. This latest survey shows more than two-thirds of Republicans (68%) and 46% of political independents say they are “not at all concerned” about global climate change and global warming, compared to just 7% of Democrats. Thirty-eight percent of Democrats are highly concerned, compared to 4% of Republicans and 14% or independents.

I guess that putting your head in the sand is probably quite comforting at times, kind of like being in the womb. And it prepares you for the Dark Ages, so that’s good. But it will kill you.

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Forseeable Consequence

by digby

The hits just keep on coming. From the Center For Constitutional Rights:

Today, the United States Supreme Court refused to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former detainees against Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse at Guantánamo. The British detainees spent more than two years in Guantanamo and were repatriated to the U.K. in 2004.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By refusing to hear the case, the Court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all “persons” did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law. The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” Finally, the circuit court found that, even if torture and religious abuse were illegal, defendants were immune under the Constitution because they could not have reasonably known that detainees at Guantanamo had any Constitutional rights.

So torture is a forseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants. I guess it’s official.

Everyone in the world should be advised that if they don’t want to be tortured, they shouldn’t let themselves be suspected of being an enemy combatant. And if they foolishly allow themselves to be suspected enemy combatants, they should realize, regardless of any laws or treaties to the contrary, that they’ll be tortured. After all, nobody can be expected to know ahead of time which people are legally “persons” or which prisoners are allowed constitutional rights. It’s up to innocent people not to allow themselves to be caught in this Catch 22 in the first place. Good to know.

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That Was Easy

by digby

No biggie. For me the whole Medicare buy-in argument was kind of like purchasing a lottery ticket and dreaming about what you’d do with the money. I never expected to actually win. It wasn’t exactly rational to think that something that liberals had been agitating for since the 1970s would pass. Seriously, that’s just not allowed:

Senate Democrats signaled their intention Monday to back away from a plan to expand Medicare, in a bid to break a deepening impasse on sweeping health legislation.

The move came at an evening caucus convened just off the Senate floor, where Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) and other party leaders made clear they wanted to head off a widening dispute — pitting centrists against liberals — over a proposal that would open Medicare to people below the age of 65.

There you have it. Everyone knows that liberals must lose, so down goes the public option and the Medicare Buy-in. The question remains whether King Joseph will allow the government to help older people with long term care needs or any of the other things that anyone could possibly construe as liberal policies.

I think we have a way to go before this bill is bad enough for him and his cronies to allow the Democrats to commit political suicide with it.

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