Month: January 2010

Giving Himself Away

by digby

It would appear that Rahm finally said something so obvious that even the Cheeto-hating New Republic has had enough. Jonathan Cohn writes:

Rahm Emanuel thinks health care reform can wait. In an interview with the New York Times, Emanuel suggested that Congress would deal first with jobs, then banking regulation, and then circle back around to health care reform. As Ezra Klein observes:

The timetable Emanuel is laying out makes little sense. The jobs bill will take some time. Financial regulation will take much longer. Let’s be conservative and give all this four months. Is Emanuel really suggesting that he expects Congress to return to health-care reform in the summer before the election? Forgetting whether there’s political will at that point, there’s no personnel: Everyone is home campaigning.

Moreover, there’s a time limit on health-care reform. The open reconciliation instructions the Senate could use to modify the bill expire when the next budget is (there’s disagreement over the precise rule on this) considered or passed. That is to say, the open reconciliation instructions expire soon. Democrats could build new reconciliation instructions into the next budget, but that’s going to be a heavy lift. The longer this takes, the less likely it is to happen. And Emanuel just said that the administration’s preference is to let it take longer. If I were a doctor, I’d downgrade health care’s prognosis considerably atop this evidence.

My colleague Jonathan Chait agrees, and offers this helpful analogy:

Let’s call this the “My boyfriend is going to do a world tour with his rock band, then have a totally platonic weekend in Vegas with his ex-girlfriend, then join the Army, and then we’ll get married” plan. Anybody see any potential problems here?

The most generous reading I can give is that he’s trying to derail any efforts to pass a public option or medicare buy-in through reconciliation and ensure that none of the deals he struck will be harmed in the process.

Which leads me to ask if they still don’t ask the right question: did Rahm ever want to pass real health care reform? And if he did, can there be any excuse for his having mangled the legislative strategy so badly?

From the absurd strategy to try to call health care reform “deficit reduction”, to backroom deals after the president ran explicitly on transparency, to allowing the hostage taking by the Gang of Six for months to a dozen other inexplicable tactics — it all makes the most sense if you already assume that he wasn’t fully committed to its passage.

Maybe not. I’m not one to mythologize single actors, and I do believe that the buck always stops with the president. But either Rahm is a brilliant legislative strategist, in which case he didn’t bother to use his great powers to pass health care reform for reasons we can only speculate about, given the stakes — or his reputation for brilliance is extremely overrated. But Rahm’s culpability, whether intentional or not, has long been obvious and there’s nothing surprising in these recent statements.

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What She Left Out

by digby

This week Sally Quinn famously wrote an already notorious column about how all the presidents hav dissed the Village in recent years by refusing to socialize. She even gave George W. Bush a little slap for going to bed at 9:30.

But Bush wasn’t really the president, was he?

The Cheneys have created one of the city’s only salons, a voluntary activity you wouldn’t expect from a man whose idea of heaven is fly-fishing in silence. About every six weeks, the Cheneys invite 16 scholars, artists and authors for dinner. Lynne kicks off the discussion but is aware the group doesn’t need much help, since there are few shrinking violets. “Smart people are naturally funny and clever.” The Cheneys spend some nights at official events, like the Kennedy Center Honors, other nights eating off trays in the den and a surprising number of nights casually out and about. The Cheneys have even dined at the mecca of Georgetown limousine liberals, chez Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. The Cheneys are the most social of the Bushies, asserts Quinn, which she feels accounts for the relatively friendly press coverage the Vice President gets. “It’s harder to trash someone you’ve had pasta with the night before.”

That’s an article from 2002 about Lynne Cheney, by the way. If you want to revisit just how sycophantic and servile the press was during that period, give it a gander.

And then ask yourself if they’ve learned anything.

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What Works

by digby

Here’s how CNN is characterizing Obama’s trek inside the lion’s den so far:

Rick Sanchez: the tweets I’ve seen so far seem to indicate, and frankly one of them was from Virginia Fox, uh, but the tweets I’ve read seem to characterize this meeting as not so good, almost as — they hate this guy.

Jessica Yellin: There is enormous frustration toward the president from Republicans in that room. One of the members stood up and said, “Mr President, you also have broken your promises. You said you’d hold health care negotiations on CSPAN, they were held behind closed doors. You promised that there would be no lobbyists in top positions, they’re there.” So enormous frustrations on both sides.

Look, the parties are at this critical pivotal moment. Do they want, does the Republican party want to make some bipartisan deals with Democrats, so that they avoid being called the Party of No going into the 2010 election, and let the Democrats have a win on bipartisanship? Or do they decide not to go along with President Obama on anything and risk being called the Party of No.

On the other hand, the Democrats are in the very awkward position of trying to compromise but how much are they willing to give up?

So, it’s a very difficult dance. And Rick, I go back to that focus group I talked to you about during the state of the union. It’s much more imperative right now for independents, that President Obama achieve bipartisanship. Independents blame President Obama more for the lack of bipartisanship because they say he promised to change things, the other side didn’t promise to change it so it’s up to him.

I think his performance was quite good. But I also think that his appearance there, as if he’d been summoned to explain himself, looks like weakness, especailly in a week in which he already gave a major address. The optics look very dicey to me.

Be that as it may (and I could be wrong) everyone surely must realize that if what Yellin just said is correct and the vaunted Soccer Independent Dads believe that it is 100% up to Obama to be bipartisan, then the Republicans have absolutely no real incentive to meet him halfway. Their base is fired up. If they can convince enough of these illogical SIDs that Obama has failed because he didn’t magically deliver kumbaaya as promised, then they win by default.

This is a terribly important game they are playing and I don’t think they are getting it right. On the optics, the President should have summoned them to him, not gone to them. As much as I wish it were different, we have no tradition of the Prime Minister question hour in America and the average voter will see his being put on the spot in that setting as a weakness.

And while his answers were all very convincing to me and, I assume, most Democrats, it’s not likely to result in any movement among Independents because they don’t understand these gestures and only see the bickering and lack of results — which the Republicans will continue to deliver and blame on the Democrats.

On the other hand, if they only saw the chyron running on the bottom of that CNN story, they might think differently. It said:

“President Obama Joins GOP”

Update: Interestingly, the story immediately following was Tony Blair on the hot seat, under oath, answering for his Iraq decisions. I only wish that the American corollary today was Bush being grilled instead of Obama.

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Stubbornly Clinging To Our Myths

by digby

This doesn’t surprise me, but it’s still a little bit deflating:

In the latest installment of the Pew Research Center’s News IQ Quiz, just 32% know that the Senate passed its version of the legislation without a single Republican vote. And, in what proved to be the most difficult question on the quiz, only about a quarter (26%) knows that it takes 60 votes to break a filibuster1 in the Senate and force a vote on a bill.

This is the problem with political obsessives — we vastly over estimate the engagement of the busy American people and convince ourselves that we are representative of the average Joe. And then when a hunky centerfold who drives a truck wins a race, we over-interpret his victory.

Most people do not know the details of politics. All they see is that the country is screwed up, they are more insecure than ever and the people they entrust to fix things aren’t doing it. When they demand bipartisanship it’s because they assume that politicians are not acting in good faith and if they would only stop all the posturing they could get something done. To the extent they believe in ideology, it’s mostly conservative, because it has been drilled into the body politic by non-stop repetition for the last quarter century: the solution to all problems is to cut taxes, deregulate everything, support the military.

I’ve told the story before about a young woman I knew at work a few years back, a Democrat, a liberal, more engaged in politics than most. She came running into my office one morning to excitedly tell me that she had heard someone on the previous nights PBS News hour who finally made sense to her on economics. It was Milton Friedman. She wasn’t a stupid person or unusually uninformed. She just felt comfortable with everything Milton Friedman had said because it was what she had been hearing her whole life and it just “sounded right.”

Our problem as activists and engaged political junkies is that we tend to think that everyone, especially the base, sees politics the same way that we do. In fact, we are not even the base. We are, at best, the vanguard of the base. And sometimes we are so far out ahead that we miss what’s happening before our eyes.

And the Democratic Party is actually behind the curve. They fail to grasp that because the media are married to the he said/she said storyline, which always requires that both sides be seen as equally culpable, the people don’t know about Republican obstructionism. And now they are inexplicably assuming that bipartisanship is of vast importance and they must make the case that the Republicans are preventing them from passing their program. But I don’t think it’s very likely that anyone wants to hear about how they can’t get anything done because they only have an 18 vote majority in the Senate. And talking about why you can’t do something is rarely a winning political message in any case.

They need to recognize that nobody really cares about bipartisanship per se. Voters just think that the reason that nothing gets done is because bipartisanship is required. If the Democrats can get something done without it there is absolutely no reason for them not to do it. Results are what matters, not process.

Unfortunately, I suspect the only reason the Democrats are so insistent on perpetuating the bipartisanship trope is because they lack the courage of their convictions and want to be able to share the blame if their plan doesn’t work. And I would guess that weakness is something that average people just sense in their bones.

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Terrorist Tried, Convicted In US Court

by tristero

Good.

Memo to New York City: If Wichita can hold a trial for a terrorist, so can we.

Obama Reaching Out

by digby

Watching that unctuous, cloying, precious, smarmy reptile Mike Pence with his trademarked furrowed brow and patented fake sincerity ask the president if he’s open to across the board tax cuts is enough to make me puke. But then, Obama appearing at the Republican retreat explaining himself, insisting that he isn’t an ideologue, listening calmly to their lies and phony posturing, is enough to make me puke.

I guess he wants to be seen as reaching out, and maybe it’s a form of kabuki that the folks will find appealing. But it makes no difference in terms of what is actually passed by this congress and, as they did with Clinton, they will chop his hand off the first chance they get.

But hey, if they can get him to agree to enact huge portions of the Republican agenda — and Ross Perot and Bob Dole agree to run in 2012, this whole thing might just work out for everyone.

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Bring On The Pirates

by digby

Right but wrong:

The James Madison Institute is a libertarian think tank in Florida, and the cover of its latest Journal is a mock Central Intelligence Agency report on “the world’s top 10 failed states.”

It lists Somalia as the No. 1 failed state and adds eight other Third World nations before it gets to No. 10 – the Golden State of California – and asks “Will Florida join the list of failed states?”

It’s the latest in a recent string of out-of-state publications riffing on California’s social, political economic and budgetary woes and warning that its civic disease could spread.

J. Robert McClure, the institute’s president, writes that “the jury is still out as to whether Florida – at the end of the decade ahead – will be prospering like Texas or foundering like California, Wisconsin, New York, and other states where government evidently exists primarily for the benefit of the governing, and onerous taxes and regulations consistently drive away the most productive citizens, harming the economy and eroding the quality of life.”

I don’t disagree that California is a failed state, I just disagree a teensy bit about the causes. It’s the anti-tax conservative and libertarian zealots who have made this state ungovernable by lying to the people about the costs of their cynical experiment in defunding government. The question is whether or not other states will continue to fall for it, and with Colorado’s repeal of its restrictive tax referendum last year and Oregon’s vote this week, it’s just possible that the rest of the country has wised up.

But if they don’t, they may indeed catch our “disease.” In fact, since we all live so cozily in our Union, the rest of the country tends to get sick whenever California does anyway, so I would probably go easy on the schadenfreude.

But hey, if Florida doesn’t mind tripling its poverty rate, then it too can be a big success like Texas. But then right wing libertarians don’t give a damn about poverty, do they?

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The Original Modo

by digby

I thought I knew the whole Sally Quinn story from the home wrecking affair with the married Ben Bradlee to her ascendancy to the throne of Queen Village Tabby. But I must confess that until I read this great piece by Jamison Foser on her recent foray into Noonanland, I didn’t know about this:

Monday, Dec. 31, 1979
Press: Brzezinski’s Zipper Was Up

And the Washington Post is caught with its facts down

As the reporter was leaving, he began to joke around and flirt with her. Suddenly he unzipped his fly. —Washington Post, Dec. 19

In yesterday’s story about Zbigniew Brzezinski, it was stated that at the end of an interview with a reporter from a national magazine—as a joke—Brzezinski committed an offensive act, and that a photographer took a picture “of this unusual expression of playfulness.” Brzezinski did not commit such an act, and there is no picture of him doing so. —Washington Post, Dec. 20

The Iranian crisis was in its seventh week and OPEC was propelling oil prices to historic heights. But in that cosmopolitan capital on the Potomac, the best and the brightest were preoccupied with a more delicate matter: the open or shut case of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s fly. As it turned out, President Carter’s National Security Adviser had kept his zipper up, and the Washington Post was caught with its trousers down.

The brouhaha resulted from a free-form and free-floating three-part series by Post Staff Writer Sally Quinn, who is known in Washington for her withering (some would say bitchy) profiles of prominent personalities. She outdid herself with the Brzezinski series, which contains a few blatantly smirky and sophomoric passages. She began the first installment with an account of how he had used sexual innuendo to rebuff her requests for an interview. “You’ll just have to come out here and live with me,” he is quoted as saying. “That’s the only way I’ll do it.”

Quinn never did interview Brzezinski. Instead, she pieced her story together from talks with some 50 of his friends and associates. He was depicted as a publicity hound consumed by his ambition to become Secretary of State—and more. “He likes to talk of himself as a sex symbol, to speak of the ‘aphrodisiac of power,’ ” Quinn wrote. In one vignette, Brzezinski is described as boogeying lustily at a Washington disco, looking faintly ridiculous and “flirting with 16-year-olds.” Quinn elsewhere describes him as a man “constantly torn between the thrill of making headlines and the risk of making a fool of himself.”

It was a possibly believable, if unflattering, picture of the National Security Adviser—until the final paragraphs of the first installment, when Quinn related the zipper incident. She first heard of that encounter a year ago from Clare Crawford, a former Post staffer who is now a PEOPLE Magazine Washington correspondent. Crawford had just received from Brzezinski an autographed picture taken after she interviewed him for PEOPLE. At Crawford’s office, says Quinn, she thought she saw a photo that showed Brzezinski unzipping his pants. Though hazy on details, Quinn now says that she heard someone say that this was indeed what Brzezinski had done. Before Quinn’s series went to press, the Post tried unsuccessfully to get the wording of Brzezinski’s inscription on the picture, but the paper evidently made no further attempt to verify the episode. read on …

I didn’t realize until now that Maureen Dowd learned everything she knows from Sally Quin. It’s as if all the pieces of the puzzle have come together.

And I don’t think we need to look any further to figure out why every White House since Carter has actively ignored her, do you?

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Imagine

by digby

… if the US did something like this:

Tony Blair is more of a 6am man than a 3am one, says an aide in response to claims that he has been burning the midnight oil in preparation for his grilling by the Chilcot inquiry tomorrow.

He has not been abandoning all other business to prepare for the inquiry. He was in Paris on Tuesday for a meeting of the quartet on the future of the Middle East, and it was announced this week that he would take up a lucrative post on the board of a hedge fund, Lansdowne Partners.

But Blair has been working hard to prepare himself for his six-hour session, refamiliarising himself with the documents and reading digests of the evidence given by previous witnesses.

He knows that even though he has been asked many of the questions likely to be posed today innumerable times, this represents his last chance to justify the war. He made a long speech in his Sedgefield constituency in March 2004 defending the invasion once it was clear no weapons of mass destruction would be found. But he feels tomorrow’s hearing, probably more than the report’s ultimate findings, will shape the judgment of history.

Our former president, his partner in perfidy, has no such worries. The Republicans are busily working on their airbrushing of history and there will be no official inquiries here. That would be looking in the rear view mirror. His biggest worry this month was whether or not to wear a blue tie for his speech to the Safari Club International Annual Hunters’ Convention. The invitation actually says: “His intellect and humor will make this a night to remember and share for years and years.”

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Kicking Them When They’re Down

by digby

She’s baaack:

In a report on TODAY Thursday, NBC investigative reporter Lisa Myers called Young’s book “salacious, full of tawdry details, betrayal and countless lies. And as brutal as it is about John Edwards, it’s also tough on Elizabeth, who, the book says, became intoxicated by power, and sometimes looked the other way.”

And then she licked her chops and declared it “delicious” and went on to spent a half an hour detailing every salacious, tawdry allegation in technicolor detail on MSNBC.

Myers is a tabloid journalist who specializes in sex scandals, although they keep pretending on NBC that she is a political reporter. But I really think that allowing her to use the details in this trashy revenge book (which sounds about as credible as Dick Cheney insisting that waterboarding isn’t torture)as a source for a “news” story is a bit much.

The Edwardses are a tragic couple, nearly Shakespearean in their weaknesses and human errors. But they are not currently in politics and the sordid details of their marital problems have not been political news since everyone found out months ago that the country dodged a bullet. This is gratuitous.

I noticed earlier today that one of the nasty Gore reporters from the 2000 campaign, Sandra Soberaj, appeared on NBC dishing on Edwards as well. At least she has finally found the appropriate employer — People Magazine. Myers should join TMZ or E!. Or maybe she should just become a paparazzi peeping Tom. It’s where her talent really lies.

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