Month: December 2009

Late Night Reading

by digby

If you missed Krugman’s column this morning, you need to read it.

He makes the case for the fed to step up and start taking its mandate to ensure full employment seriously. And a big part of his reasoning is that the congress and the president have probably reached the end of any feasible political solution. We are dealing with a Senate run by fiscal conservatives and it’s almost impossible to imagine, short of 20% unemployment, that they will allow any additional stimulus.

Krugman knew from the beginning that they would not likely get another bite of that apple and so did I. And reading this made me go back and look at what was being said during the last stimulus battle and I found this (from post of mine from January 26th):

Chuck Todd’s First Read … makes me laugh, it makes me cry, it makes me wonder what it must be like to live in a world filled with unicorns and rainbows and stand-up guys who love God, Mom and apple pie:

Looking For Bipartisanship Down The Road: Why does bipartisanship support for the stimulus matter? Let’s get one thing straight: Obama’s stimulus plan is going to pass Congress, and the vote won’t be that close. But this isn’t the goal this week — or next. For Team Obama, it’s about winning over Republicans. And for some on the left, this doesn’t compute. After all, some might ask, “Who cares? The election just happened and voters overwhelmingly chose Democrats to run the government, both in the White House and in Congress.”

But what Obama needs is a Republican Party that isn’t consistently confrontational, because he’s going to be asking for some trickier bills, including more money for the financial industry, potentially support for nationalizing some parts of the banking industry, and a bunch of money to shore up the housing crisis. So while Obama doesn’t need GOP support for stimulus, he wants the opposition to be against him in a way that he can win them over for more favors and — most importantly — prevent potential filibusters.

How’d that work out for us?

Krugman’s right. The congress is hitting a wall and unless we see a serious rise in unemployment, the fiscal hawks will be content to let the economy plod along in its moribund state while they rail against spending like it’s 1993 and hoping the bond market will make everything hunky dory. But lightning isn’t going to strike twice. The Fed needs to act.

And if Bernanke won’t do it, they need to find someone who will.

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Helping Hand

by digby

C&L is holding a fundraiser. If you have a few dollars to spare to help out John “Blogfather of the Video Blog” Amato’s great blog, I’m sure he and his crew would appreciate it.

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Good News

by digby

The Court makes the only possible decision:

A judge in New York ordered that ACORN’s federal funding be restored, rolling back a slew of Congressional actions that sought to stop taxpayer money from flowing to the community group on the heels of a fall full of embarrassments for it.

Nina Gershon, a district judge in New York, issued a preliminary injunction directing the department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and the Treasury department to disregard a bill signed into law by President Obama that prohibited federal funding of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

“The question here is only whether the Constitution allows Congress to declare that a single, named organization is barred from all federal funding in the absence of a trial,” Gershon wrote in her opinion. “Because it does not, and because the plaintiffs have shown the likelihood of irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction, I grant the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction.”

Gershon said that “none of the government’s justifications stand up to scrutiny” and that “no non-punitive rational” is obvious.

ACORN was the subject of bipartisan disdain in September, after undercover videos were released that seemed to show the organization’s employees offering advice on how to break the law. Republicans and Democrats voted to stop federal funding of the group – a measure signed into law by the president on the back of an appropriations bill.

Even a layperson could see that this was obviously a bill of attainder and it was incredibly disingenuous for the government to pursue it.

And I guess the press is just determined to ignore this finding from the former Massachusetts Attorney General who conducted a recent investigation into the scandal:

The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms. Giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

The congress and the press went nuclear based on these tapes and it turns out they were doctored. Shouldn’t that count for something?

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Owning It

by digby

On Hardball today:

Republican strategist John Feehery: He’ll sign anything that the congress comes up with on health care. Anything. He’s never used the veto word.

Matthews: Anything?

Feehery: Anything.

Matthews: Why would he do that?

Feehery: Because he wants any kind of accomplishment on health care. On that he has absolutely no ideological bearing whatsoever. He’ll sign anything.

The problem is the Democratic Congress can’t get anything done because they’re incompetent.

That’s harsh. And it may not be true because the congress actually seems to be getting something done, although it’s one step forward two steps back, so “incompetent” may be an accurate description. I would say the jury’s still out.

But that dynamic he describes, of the president just wanting to get this “accomplishment” under his belt regardless of what it means, is correct in my view. If the final bill is good and people see it as good (not necessarily the same thing) there will be big benefits for him for 2012 and he will have accomplished something huge and historic. If the bill is initially received badly and then in later years is improved upon, he will be seen in the eyes of history as having done something huge and historic, but it won’t help him — or the Democrats — in the short term. If it comes out badly and results in a political upheaval and the reforms are repealed he’ll be seen as a terrible failure. The stakes are very, very high for him. To tie yourself to such a massive overhaul and not care about the substance just strikes me as odd. Do they think they can finesse everything?

Maybe they can. But I’d be very, very afraid of signing any bill that doesn’t result in some immediate and obvious positive improvements. Obama isn’t FDR, who had some years as president under his belt and the deep loyalty of a large majority before he passed social security. People had already adjusted to the idea that the “market” wasn’t their savior and saw government as an answer not an obstacle. Americans today aren’t there yet by a long shot.

I would have thought any president would want to make sure that his signature legislation was something he could be sure would work and would result in many political benefits. But maybe he has so much faith in Reid, Pelosi and the industry devils to whom he sold his soul that he believes it will all come out just fine in the end. I hope he’s right.

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Proof Positive

by digby

Michael Bérubé has the scoop on that scary Indonesian statue:

Local kid makes good. Apparently that’s the inscription at the base of the new “young Barack Obama” statue recently unveiled in Jakarta—on a site that was once an athletic field used by Obama’s elementary school. In what appears to be a deliberate provocation to the American right, the young Obama holds in his left hand a crumpled copy of his Kenyan birth certificate, which according to the laws of Othercountriestan entitles him to Indonesian citizenship.

Rumors that the base of the statue contains hidden “death panels” are as yet unsubstantiated.

you must read on …

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Ration Pageant

by digby

This is lovely:

So here’s the plan. On Tuesday, December 15 at 8:45 AM thousands of us will meet in Washington, DC at the fountain in Upper Senate Park. From there we will march to the Senate offices, go inside, and demonstrate our opposition to the government takeover of health care. We call this plan “Government Waiting Rooms”. The intention is to go inside the Senate offices and hallways, and play out the role of patients waiting for treatment in government controlled medical facilities. As the day goes on some of us will pretend to die from our untreated illnesses and collapse on the floor. Many of us plan to stay there until they force us to leave. A backup location for this demonstration will be announced if they block us from entering the offices.

We need as many of you as possible to be there to make our point loudly and clearly. Please make plans to attend. We know it’s a sacrifice to do this right before Christmas. But throughout history American Patriots have made far greater sacrifices than this to protect our liberty. Now the burden (and the honor) falls on us.

Of course, they don’t actually have to stage some demonstration of the horrors of health care rationing. We have examples of exactly that happening in real life right this minute. Here’s one in Kansas City:

More than 1,600 volunteers are helping with the Kansas City clinic, including more than 100 doctors and nurse practitioners. People seeking free health care waited in a lobby and then moved in groups up an escalator to the main hall. After checking in, they sat in a waiting area until their numbers were called:

• A 24-year-old college student who had been dropped by her mother’s insurance.

• A factory worker laid off in August, worried about his blood pressure and the lingering effects of an injury.

• A part-time bartender with a history of health problems and no health insurance.

The bartender, Kelly Barnhart, 37, of Kansas City, Kan., had strokes in 1991 and 2003 and has been diagnosed with osteoporosis. She hasn’t been to a doctor’s office in six years; she usually goes to hospital emergency rooms for care. She should be taking medications but says she can’t afford them. “I want to get checked because I haven’t for so long,” said Barnhart, who walked in without an appointment. “I’m worried about a stroke coming back. I don’t want another one.”

Think Progress reports:

Last night, Olbermann interviewed NAFC executive director Nicole Lamoureux, who pointed out that 83 percent of her patients are employed. She encouraged “every member of Congress to come to our free clinics” to witness the health care crisis first hand. Watch it:

As ThinkProgress has covered before, these free clinics have appeared all over the country. Last month, 1,500 Arkansans lined up in a single day for free care at a clinic in Little Rock, and thousands of Texans attended a free clinic in Texas last September.

They aren’t the only ones doing this work. Here’s a post of mine from last summer:

See, it’s all good:

Hundreds of people were already lining up to receive free health care checks at the the Forum in Inglewood.

Volunteer doctors, dentists and optometrists will conduct free health clinic for uninsured and under-insured individuals.

The eight-day healthcare event will run from 5:30 a.m to 6 p.m. and is sponsored by Remote Area Medical, a charity that in the past has staged clinics in rural sections of the United States.

People started arriving before 3. Many said they didn’t have health insurance and saw this as an opportunity to be checked out. Organizers placed them in stadium seats outside the Forum, and some said they waited for hours to get medical treatment.

This is the same group that does the rural health care program that radicalized former insurance flack Wendell Potter. They work in major urban areas as well. If things don’t change, in a couple of years they’ll be needed in the suburbs as well.

If the uninsured want health care they can (probably) get it by staying up all night and waiting in the street outside a sports stadium once a year. What’s the problem

Maybe these teabaggers think that those people don’t count and that somehow they’ll personally all be spared from these circumstances if they lose their jobs or get sick. I hope for their sake it’s true. But the truth is that among those who are staging this little stunt, it’s extremely likely that a percentage of them are going to be participating in this rationing in real life at some point. And there is no way of predicting which ones it will happen to. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face…

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Going Broke And Breaking Promises

by digby

Insurance companies will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or lifetime, and we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses – because no one in America should go broke just because they get sick. Barack Obama August 14, 2009.

I thought that one was long settled. Everyone agreed that no matter what happened with the public option, premium costs and subsidies etc, the insurance reforms concerning things like rescission, denial of coverage and caps were going to happen come what may. But apparently not:

A loophole in the Senate health care bill would let insurers place annual dollar limits on medical care for people struggling with costly illnesses such as cancer, prompting a rebuke from patient advocates.

The legislation that originally passed the Senate health committee last summer would have banned such limits, but a tweak to that provision weakened it in the bill now moving toward a Senate vote.

As currently written, the Senate Democratic health care bill would permit insurance companies to place annual limits on the dollar value of medical care, as long as those limits are not “unreasonable.” The bill does not define what level of limits would be allowable, delegating that task to administration officials.

Adding to the puzzle, the new language was quietly tucked away in a clause in the bill still captioned “No lifetime or annual limits.”

This is one of the reasons why people go bankrupt even though they have health insurance. Some illnesses last for years and are very expensive.

And guess what happens when sick people finally lose their insurance, lose their houses, basically lose everything they have? They go on Medicaid.

Here’s a study done by Price Waterhouse on the impact of the lifetime caps:

The findings are based on public data, surveys of major insurers, and PwC actuarial modeling. Key findings from the report include:

* Approximately 55% of individuals with employer provided health insurance are subject to lifetime limits; the most common of which are $1 million and $2 million.
* It is estimated that approximately 20,000 to 25,000 people have exceeded limits with their current health insurance plans.
* Premiums would increase by less than one-half of one percent if limits were increased to $10 million.
* Removing limits would reduce Medicaid costs by $1 billion per year.

I wonder if anyone’s told the CBO to add that extra billion a year back into the plan’s costs?

President Obama has not really done much of anything to advance this health care bill except to tell everyone they ned to get along. But two specific goals that he personally promised were that nobody should lose what they have and that nobody should ever have to go broke just because they got sick. He should at least care about those two principles enough to insist that this is fixed before he signs the bill. It’s really not too much to ask.

Update: Ezra Klein elaborates:

Hill sources explain that this was inserted because CBO said premiums would “go through the roof” if insurers couldn’t cap benefits. The official quote from Jim Manley, Harry Reid’s spokesperson, says much the same thing. “We are concerned that banning all annual limits, regardless of whether services are voluntary, could lead to higher premiums,” he explained. “We continue to work with experts on how best to accomplish our goals of preventing insurance companies from imposing arbitrary coverage limits while providing the premium relief American families need and deserve.” This, however, obscures the choice that’s being made. The tradeoff here is slightly higher premiums for everyone versus total financial ruin for the people who absolutely need help the most. Politically, choosing “everyone” rather than “people with cancer” makes sense, because the first group has more votes than the second. But on a policy level, it’s nuts. Health-care insurance literally exists to protect us from the worst-case scenarios. This provision says that the Senate bill will protect everyone but the truly worst-case scenarios. If you assume that people support the basic concept of health-care insurance, then they don’t, or shouldn’t, support this. But the American people are much more likely to hear that premiums are going up than they are to get a detailed explanation of what they’re getting in return for higher premiums, and so the Senate bill is watching its back.

So perhaps the CBO didn’t factor in the additional costs to Medicaid? Or somehow, it was going to cost more if insurance companies spent the money? Unless they are saying that these people just need to go die, the money for their care will be spent by someone.

The problem is that insurance companies must make huge profits, so putting all these very ill people on the government program makes a lot more sense for them. Unfortunately, in order to do that, these poor sick people have to lose everything they have first.

This is reform?

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Good Little Servants

by digby

The DLC corporate lackeys and their friends in the GOP earned their bribes last night:

A bipartisan coalition in the House voted late Thursday to make it easier for corporations to engage in complex derivatives trades without government restrictions, eroding the reach of proposed regulations to govern Wall Street.
Democratic attempts to toughen the legislation failed.

Though not major setbacks, the votes illustrated the difficulties facing House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank and the Obama administration as they seek to pass legislation aimed at preventing a recurrence of last year’s Wall Street crisis.

Yeah, corruption and fealty to the malefactors of great wealth makes it difficult to pass financial regulation all right. And anyway, why should the instruments that nearly brought down the entire global economy be regulated? Stifles free enterprise, dontcha know.

Today is the day they will vote on what I consider to be the most politically important piece of reform in the legislation, the new independent Consumer Finance Protection Agency. Naturally, it’s also threatened by the same forces for money who really believe that protecting corporations from their customers is still the path to prosperity:

Key votes loomed ahead, with a final vote on the sweeping legislation scheduled Friday.

Democrats hoped to fend off an amendment Friday that would eliminate the creation of an independent Consumer Finance Protection Agency. The agency is a central element of the Democrats’ legislation and the Obama administration’s proposed regulatory changes.

The amendment was offered by Rep. Walt Minnick, a conservative Democrat from Idaho, and seven other centrist Democrats. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been running national television ads against the creation of a consumer agency, said it would base its support for lawmakers in next year’s elections, in part, on how they voted on the amendment.

“I think we’re going to beat the Minnick amendment, but it’s a real test,” Frank, D-Mass., said Thursday. Creating a consumer agency is a top priority for consumer groups and for labor organizations such as the AFL-CIO.

Watch that one. Those votes will tell you which people are working for the people and which ones are working for their corporate masters. It will be very clarifying.

Update: The Minnick Amendment was defeated. Whew.

But 33 Democrats voted for it. All 33 of them have proven that that they aren’t “fiscal hawks” or even cultural conservatives. This new agency has nothing to do with any of that. They are, ultimately, servants of corporate power. And if I were a Republican challenger I’d go full on populist and nail them with this vote.

Of course, if I were a Democratic challenger I’d do the same thing. Every Republican voted for it.

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Liars on Notice

by digby

This is very impressive. Color of Change got libeled, they fought back and the lying wingnuts backed down. Good for them.

After ColorOfChange.org took on Glenn Beck for his race-baiting and fear-mongering, Beck’s supporters fought back using lies, distortions, and more race-baiting to defend him. DefendGlenn.com was the worst, mounting a campaign to scare advertisers into staying on his show. After we threatened them with a lawsuit, DefendGlenn.com has backpedalled. It should make clear to advertisers who have pulled their support that they’ve done the right thing. From the press release we issued today:

DefendGlenn.com, the website created and dedicated to supporting controversial Fox News personality Glenn Beck, today issued a public retraction of several erroneous statements it made regarding civil rights organization ColorOfChange.org. The site has posted the retraction on its home page – www.DefendGlenn.com – and, per an agreement, must keep it there for seven full weeks. “We understood that by taking a stand against someone as divisive as Glenn Beck, we were going to encounter some very public opposition,” said James Rucker, executive director of ColorOfChange.org. “It’s not surprising that Beck’s chief defenders are as reckless with the truth as he is. Since our campaign began, Beck has avoided mentioning our organization publicly, but DefendGlenn.com has repeatedly attacked us with false accusations designed to tarnish our reputation. We are heartened that DefendGlenn.com and its creators have finally apologized for their actions and taken responsibility for the false information they published as fact. We hope that this is the last time they will have to issue such a retraction.”

Click over to Jack and Jill to read the the retraction.

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Look Closely

by digby

Before the press runs wild with this latest “scoop” from the wingnut documentarians, I sure hope they ask to see all the footage. They forgot to look closely at the ACORN videos or they would have seen that the “pimp and ho’s” dialog had been dubbed, so nobody knows what they were really saying. This latest bombshell was so heavily edited it’s impossible to take it seriously.

These little gotcha vids are fun and all, but they are also bullshit. The right is now reduced to relying on all manner of hoaxes, denialism and Big Lies and while it’s entertaining, the media really does have an obligation to get the story straight.

I’m not holding my breath.

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