Month: January 2010

And here are the Democrats, working overtime to help Coakley not only lose, but lose really fucking badly. This is completely inexcusable political malpractice. But I’ll bet there are a few commenters who will find a way to excuse this, or dismiss it as a trivial error, or place the fault with Coakley.

This refusal to pin the blame for spectacular Democratic crash-and-burns on the leadership – meaning the people who set the overall strategy to fund, market, and sell candidates – is, quite frankly, weird. There is far too much evidence and history to ignore or dismiss. Should Coakley have started campaigning earlier? Duh. And you think the decision not to – and the economic decisions related to it – were simply hers to make unilaterally? Please, people. Her strategy, or lack of one, was a collective decision, coordinated with the national party, I suspect. (And if, by some odd happenstance, the party is NOT coordinating Senate races, that should be cause for heads to roll at the top of the party.) Likewise, no: It’s not that she didn’t have the “character” to stand up to the party bosses. It’s that, for whatever the reason, they simply weren’t gonna do a good job for her, period, no matter what she did. Or put it another way if you prefer: they’re too inept to even know what a good job is.

I repeat: It is hardly any fault of Coakley that the race is so close. She could be the least charismatic person since Zelig and the most uncooperative since Bartleby and she’d still be trouncing a rightwing lunatic like her opponent if Democratic leaders had really wanted to focus on retaining Kennedy’s seat for a progressive voice.

Or, for that matter, cared very much to pass a healthcare reform bill.

It’s A Reflex

by digby

He just can’t stop himself:

“The U.S. military is now Meals on Wheels. It always is with Democrat presidents”

Comments

by digby

I had a bit of glitch with comments, but I think they’re back on now. I’m trying to see if I can make this systm work. I don’t know if I can and if not, I’ll seek something else. If you know of one that works better, let me know.

For all of you who wrote emails to excoriate me for my earlier post about the endless whining over the broken system, I really, really need for you all to read Noam Chomsky and then come back and we’ll talk. This critique about American oligarchy wasn’t created yesterday on a blog somewhere. He’s been saying it for decades, it’s always been true, and people have treated him like some kind of nut. And even he wasn’t the first guy to say it. There are many, many thinkers who have contemplated oligarchy and aristocracy before the netroots “discovered” it when Barack Obama turned out to be a politician after all.

The question isn’t whether the system is broken. Of course it is. Has it ever not been to one extent or another? Short of a catastrophe that sets the wealthy temporarily on their heels, has there ever been a time when the common man was running things? No. The best we’ve ever done is mitigate their excessess and make incremental progress in the lives of everyday citizens over time.

If you want to make it better, the question is whether or not you’re going to hold your breath until you turn blue (or hang around in blog comments patting yourself on the back for your world weary cynicism, which is the same thing) or whether you actually give a damn. Some people work within the party, some people work on electoral politics, others work on grassroots organizing or on specific issues. Some people observe what’s happening and try to explain it to others. Some people do it all.

But if it’s a broken system that really disturbs you, Chris Hayes offered a whole list of initiatives that could change the process, from filibuster reform, EFCA, campaign finance to media consolidation and net neutrality. There actually are avenues to fundamental change besides complaining about politicians, who are just cogs in this machine not the builders of it. But if you go that route, be aware that it’s going to be frustrating. The forces that are arrayed against it are very powerful.

And if you don’t like reform, which is very tedious, there’s always revolution. Go out and start a third party, create a movement, invent a better system, whatever — “Pick up a musket.” The point of the Hayes piece is that there are paths to change and that there is value in democratic involvement for its own sake even if the immediate results are frustrating and unsatisfying. It tills the soil of democracy. Unless you are a total nihilist, that’s really the least you can do.

I’m open to any methods (except actual violence) that will fix this system and if people have bright ideas, I’m all ears. What precipitated my post is an intense impatience with this endless, cynical posturing about how everything’s rigged and there’s no point in anything. That’s fine if you think that, plenty of people do, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why you aren’t watching a sporting event or playing a video game instead of commenting on a political blog. The only thing I can assume is that you want to bully people who still give a damn and that’s just jackass behavior.

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Odds And Ends

by tristero

If there’s one single thing that Democrats are good at doing – and when I read stories like this, I suspect it is the only thing Democratic leaders are truly good at doing – it’s stupidly underestimating the persistence, the determination, the impact, and the resources of the power- hungry thugs who make up the modern Republican party.

(And please. people, this is NOT Coakley’s fault. She may be the most tongue-tied public speaker since Harpo Marx, but so what? A rightwing extremist leading in a race against a competent, experienced progressive? In Massachusetts?? For Ted Kennedy’s seat????

Somerby rightly howls at Gail Collins’ snottiness towards the most irrelevant issue of the Coakely race who, believe it or not, sneers at the grammatical struggles of Coakley’s challenger’s daughter. Somerby is absolutely right: That is one helluva prescription for liberals to lose, but, as he also says, it wasn’t decisive in making the race so close, far from it. Democrats have a wide range of well-honed, battle-tested techniques to snatch defeat even from the hands of certain triumph.
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Shorter Caitlin Flanagan:

Alice Waters, you uppity bitch! Shut your ignorant piehole, go back to the kitchen where women like you belong, and get me my grub!

Hell On Earth

by digby

A man surveys hundreds of bodies of earthquake victims at the morgue in Port-au-Prince, Thursday, Jan. 14, 2010. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull) #

More pictures here at The Boston Globe.

They’re estimating now that 50,000 people are dead, although I don’t know how they can know.  In fact, we will probably never know. 

The New York Times reports:

[N]othing approached the misery in front of the morgue, which is almost adjacent to the general hospital. Outside the hospital, the wounded waited patiently for treatment. Those who died during the wait were simply dragged next door to the morgue.

In the waiting area for those about to die, one woman moaned, her leg severed at the knee. An elderly woman gargled blood. Several people, hardened already to such suffering, walked by.

Among the bodies that had been moved a few feet over to the morgue, it was rare to find any that were identified. Someone wrote the name “Evise Melus” on a piece of paper and tied it with a rubber band to one woman’s right toe.

No one working on the corpse detail could say where, or how, Ms. Melus would be buried. One morgue worker was pouring a concoction that looked like blue laundry detergent on the smelliest bodies.

“I will not go near that morgue,” said Georges Michel, 55, a historian who spent part of Thursday driving around the city taking in the scenes of destruction and despair. “The lucky ones are those buried in their own yard,” he said. “For those less fortunate, they will join the other corpses in forming mountains of the dead.”

God.

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The Treasure

by digby

I somehow missed this classic post from Tbogg from two years ago. I wish I hadn’t. It would have gotten me through some very annoying moments in recent times.

For the less pithily inclined, I must recommend this wonderful piece by Chris Hayes, which I will discuss in greater depth over the next few days. I will just excerpt this little bit right now for those of you who are inclined to spend hours in my comment section throwing around snotty remarks drenched in puerile cynicism about how it is silly to even bother, when everything and everyone is hopelessly corrupt:

[T]he corporatism on display in Washington is itself a symptom of a broader social illness that I noted above, a democracy that is pitched precariously on the tipping point of oligarchy. In an oligarchy, the only way to get change is to convince the oligarchs that it is in their interest–and increasingly, that’s the only kind of change we can get.

In 1911 the German democratic socialist Robert Michels faced a similar problem, and it was the impetus for his classic book Political Parties. He was motivated by a simple question: why were parties of the left, those most ideologically committed to democracy and participation, as oligarchical in their functioning as the self-consciously elitist and aristocratic parties of the right?

Michels’s answer was what he called “The Iron Law of Oligarchy.” In order for any kind of party or, indeed, any institution with a democratic base to exist, it must have an organization that delegates tasks. As this bureaucratic structure develops, it invests a small group of people with enough power that they can then subvert the very mechanisms by which they can be held to account: the party press, party conventions and delegate votes. “It is organization which gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors,” he wrote, “of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy.”

Michels recognized the challenge his work presented to his comrades on the left and viewed the task of democratic socialists as a kind of noble, endless, Sisyphean endeavor, which he described by invoking a German fable. In it, a dying peasant tells his sons that he has buried a treasure in their fields. “After the old man’s death the sons dig everywhere in order to discover the treasure. They do not find it. But their indefatigable labor improves the soil and secures for them a comparative well-being.”

“The treasure in the fable may well symbolize democracy,” Michels wrote. “Democracy is a treasure which no one will ever discover by deliberate search. But in continuing our search, in laboring indefatigably to discover the undiscoverable, we shall perform a work which will have fertile results in the democratic sense.”

It’s indisputably true that the political system is run by wealthy plutocrats and much of what passes for democracy is kabuki. Same as it ever was, I’m afraid. But that’s not exactly the point. It’s still worth participating, doing what you can, containing the damage, stopping the bleeding, fighting the fight — for its own sake. After all, history shows that humans have managed, somehow, to actually make progress over time. You just can’t know what will make the difference.

If you don’t think that’s worth anything, however, you do have a choice. The obvious alternative, as PinNC wrote in TBOGG’s comments, is this:

If you really think that the political system is broken beyond repair, you have a blueprint from the 1770s to help you out.

Pick up your muskets, kids, or STFU.

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The Next Generation

by digby

No, this isn’t The Onion:

As hard as they tried, fans of NBC correspondent Luke Russert never really had a chance of getting him installed as the host of Meet the Press after his dad, Tim Russert, died in June 2008. The job went to David Gregory.

But now as ABC struggles to find a replacement for George Stephanopoulos, who left as host of This Week to cohost Good Morning America, young Luke’s fans are starting to suggest again that he might make a good host or cohost, especially as the Sunday shows drive for a younger audience.

A prominent ABC political pundit said grabbing Russert would be a major play to shake up the Sunday shows. Speaking on background, the pundit told Whispers: “It’s a great time to buck the tide and throw caution to the wind.”

Sunday show insiders also like the idea. Paul Schur, a former CNN and Fox spokesman, said, “Luke Russert has his youth, as well as the name, contacts, pedigree, and potential.” Schur, who handled This Week competitor Fox News Sunday while with the network, added, “If ABC tapped into NBC’s deep bench of talent, they could turn a future NBC News star into the fresh young face of Sunday morning talk.”

 […]

[S]aid a third fan of Russert’s: “The kid’s proven himself since he hit the scene. What the heck—I’d go for it.”

Here’s a little sample of the professional journalism that so impresses all these people:

Lil’ Luke Russert: Well you have to remember David, that one of the main issues that the centrists have up here, both in the Senate and in the House is, “do we have the infrastructure available here in the Unites States to take on more types of folks on Medicaid and Medicare”. A lot of folks in the House, the Blue Dogs in rural areas said we do not have the infrastructure being able to take in all these people.

That is what the progressives right now are using as their bargaining chip. Will we go back on the public option, perhaps allow you get Medicare recipients down at 55, but my guess is they’re going to have to have a serious look at the CBO as to how much that would cost and how that would affect the deficit. It’s not cheap to put 55 year olds on Medicare by any means, David.

More of that would certainly “buck the tide and throw caution to the wind.” In fact it would shake the foundation, knock it out of the park and win one for the gipper.

h/t to Mike Stark

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Imagine This

by digby

Here’s a video of the earthquake. Watch the building across the street:

I have been through a bunch of earthquakes in my life, a couple of pretty big ones, including the Northridge quake. This is way beyond anything I’ve ever seen.

The pictures they’re showing on CNN are heartbreaking and terrible. They are walking the streets coming upon horror after horror, bodies lying in the streets by the hundreds, people still trapped in buildings, begging for help, their voices muffled and indistinct, people screaming in the streets, desperate, hungry and thirsty.

Among the horror are amazing stories of bravery, generosity and luck, as people are rescued in extremely dangerous situations by average citizens and rescue workers alike.

I don’t know how much more I can take, but I suppose that bearing witness is the only thing we can do besides sending money. If you can do that, here is one list of various agencies.

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Pat Robertson Is Far More Important Than You Will Ever Be

by tristero

I’m sure everyone’s heard about this already. I have only one thing to add, and this is addressed directly to all my fellow liberals.

Dear Friends,

You can sneer all you want at Pat Robertson. You can condemn him all you want. And I’ll join right in. He deserves everything you care to say about him, and much, much more. He is a seriously disturbed man.

But you dismiss and ignore him at your peril. Remember: this man used to call up the fucking president of the United States. And he got through. And the president listened to him.

You ever had that kind of access to power? Got it now? Thought not. Me, neither. You got his hundreds of millions of dollars? Got millions of fans giving you hard-earned- bucks? Nope, I don’t have them either.

Sure, go ahead: Repeat the obvious: Of course, it’s a sad state of affairs when an ignorant, moral degenerate like Pat Robertson is so influential to the most powerful men – and yeah, it’s basically men – in the world.So what? Don’t ever forget he had that access, and still has access, to far more powerful men (and the occasional woman) than you can even imagine. So…

Until that changes, you should never, ever, underestimate him, or his unbelievable power – not only in the public discourse, but in the direction of American governance, jurisprudence, and culture.

Don’t like it? Neither do I. But there it is, and it’s not gonna change if you merely dismiss him.

You want to start to see genuine change in this country? Take Pat Robertson very, very seriously. For example, I doubt there are more than two major universities in this country that bother to teach a course on Pat Robertson and his influence. Until he is given the genuine attention he deserves – and I mean, until Robertson is really held up to intense, withering, and sustained scrutiny by people who seriously care about this country’s liberal traditions – he and his ilk will continue to have a disproportionate input into our national dialogue.

End of rant.

Much Love,

t

The Only Problem

by digby

In the plutocrat campaign to make the deficit the most important issue in the whole wide world, you rarely hear from economists who have a different view. But yesterday, NPR actually featured Dean Baker:

DEBORAH AMOS, host:

As the federal deficit grows, so does the talk about creating a Congressional commission to deal with it. We heard yesterday from Senators Kent Conrad and Judd Gregg, the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. They’re proposing this commission to make the hard decisions necessary to slash the national debt. But the idea isn’t popular with everyone. Dean Baker is an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., and he joins us in our studios. Good morning.

Mr. DEAN BAKER (Economist; Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research): Thanks for having me on.

AMOS: What are your concerns about the creation of a Congressional commission?

Mr. BAKER: Well, this seems to be an effort to railroad cuts in social security and Medicare, cuts that would – are extremely unpopular, would never be passed by Congress in ordinary circumstances. It creates this unusual procedure without really any precedent when there’s really no call for it.

The fact of the matter is we do have serious budget issues, but they’re not caused by a reckless Congress. What they’re caused by, on the one hand, was a war that, for whatever reason we’ve opted not to pay for – I should say wars – and more importantly, an economic collapse caused by a housing bubble. And it wasn’t reckless spending by Congress.

AMOS: In your opinion, do you think the deficit is bad and must be addressed?

Mr. BAKER: Well, the deficit in 2010 is actually good. We would have higher unemployment rates. So if I could snap my finger and get rid of the deficit tomorrow without raising anyone’s taxes, I wouldn’t do it, ’cause we would have a more serious downturn than we currently have. In fact, I would actually say, at the moment, we would like to see a larger deficit. That would help get the unemployment rate down, and that’s really a scandal, in my view.

Now over the longer term, we absolutely do have a deficit problem, but that comes from exploding health care costs. Our health care system is way more expensive than anyone else’s in the world, and that translates into a deficit problem because we pay for roughly half of our health care through the public sector.

AMOS: We heard from members of the Senate Budget Committee yesterday and the chairman of that committee, Senator Conrad. This is what he had to say about cutting entitlements.

Senator KENT CONRAD (Democrat, North Dakota; Chairman, Senate Budget Committee): Some have been criticizing us, saying, well, we just want to go out and cut Social Security and Medicare. I would say if they’re saying the answer is do nothing, they’re the ones that threaten Social Security and Medicare.

AMOS: And are you suggesting to do nothing or to do some of the trends, but not just as much?

Mr. BAKER: Well, I’d say we have a normal Congressional process, and there’s really no evidence here that it’s failed. We could say that we’ve had failed regulation in allowing the housing bubble to grow and create this collapse, but there really is no evidence that the normal Congressional process has failed.

Now, should we raise more revenue? I’d like to see us raise more revenue. One of the things I’ve done some work on is a financial transactions tax, taxing speculation on Wall Street. I think that would be a really good idea. There are places we can look to cut spending. It’s not urgent. I wouldn’t really recommend it for 2010, 2011 when the economy is very weak, but further out, absolutely.

And again, I would highlight military spending. And then again, over the longer term, as I said, we have to fix health care. Hopefully, President Obama’s plan will be a first step in that direction, but there’s clearly a lot more that we have to do.

Keep in mind that the main reason for the new deficit push is less about the current projections than opportunism. Even Conrad and Gregg understand the deficit is unusually high due to the economic crisis, which necessarily shrinks government revenues at the same time the government must spend to try to stimulate spending and create jobs. But they want to bang the drums about the deficit now to ensure that people continue to believe that government spending is the cause of their problems — and then use the political pressure that builds from that to weaken the (already weak) safety net.

Republicans talk the talk, but know better than to actually do anything. (“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”) Democrats, good little soldiers that they are, will take on the burden and the political risk, and then turn around and watch as the conservatives in their midst help Republicans vote tax cuts for millionaires and start wars to build up the debt all over again. The only question is whether they’ll misjudge the dismount and destroy the economy in the process. We just saw it happen and there’s almost zero chance that something like it won’t happen again.

And as far as health care costs are concerned, I’d just remind everyone how David Walker of the Peterson Institute sees it:

News flash. The government has no money. The government is running huge deficits it’s tens of trillions of dollars in the hole in real accounting on an accrual basis and if there’s one thing that can bankrupt America it’s health care, and we’re going to have to make choices and one of the choices we have to make is how do we ration.

We have always rationed — by ability to pay. If that was the solution, we wouldn’t have a fiscal problem.

The irony, of course, is that a properly designed public option was designed as a cost control measure, but that was not acceptable to the business community which is supporting Pete Peterson. (Perhaps that’s not ironic at all …) Walker’s comment was in 2008, before the debate over health care happened — a debate in which the deficit hawks were surprisingly low-key. Indeed, it’s only now that they are really weighing in with a push to put the new health care reforms under the rubric of “entitlements” and subject it to the same cuts the fiscal scolds plan to apply to to social security and medicare.

Here’s an op-ed from David Walker just two days ago:

Rather than just paying for itself, fiscally responsible health care reform should meet a four-pronged test based on realistic assumptions. First, it should pay for itself over 10 years. Second, it should not add to federal deficits beyond 10 years. Third, it should result in a significant reduction in the tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded health care promises the federal government already has. Fourth, it should result in total health care costs as a percentage of the economy lower than what would occur absent reform.

Based on independent analyses performed by various government and private-sector organizations, the current bills pending in the Congress do not meet this four-pronged test. In addition, to the extent they allegedly meet any of the tests, they do so by relying on very optimistic assumptions relating to provider reimbursements and other factors.

In addition to meeting these four tests, any health care reform bill should contain mechanisms to ensure that its projected cost-related outcomes become a reality. Namely, it should have automatic adjustment mechanisms in place if the predetermined cost-related targets are not met. It should also provide for a capable, credible and truly independent group that can help pursue adoption of evidence-based practice and other approaches designed to reduce costs and the rate of increase in such costs.

In addition, we need a bipartisan Fiscal Future Commission to engage the American people and make recommendations on a range of tough health care, tax, Social Security and other choices that Washington has been punting on for far too long.

Health care will never be left alone from the fiscal scolds any more than social security and medicare are. They will be attacking it forever, no matter how ineffectual it is, if only to keep the government from ever trying to improve it for the benefit of the citizens.

And you’ll notice that military spending is nowhere on the list. Obviously,they should have put health care reform under the Pentagon. Then they could ask for an emergency supplemental every year and that would be that.

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