Month: February 2010

Fan Maintenance

by digby

So Palin appeared today at a motivational seminar in Houston after her Rick Perry rally. Evidently, a lot of her fans were disappointed. Not only was the event oversold, they scheduled Palin for 8am, while a huge number of people were still waiting in line outside to get in.

C&L has an exclusive report:

C&L had one of its friends at the seminar: Josef Jarod is a reporter in Houston, Texas with a background that includes work for Fox and CBS News. He presently is on a “mystery” assignment in the Bayou City.

Here’s Jarod’s report:

“I wasn’t motivated” one man said to me in the elevator as I left the speech, “she sounded un-prepared and erratic and focused an awful lot on her script.”

It was 9:30 AM, and Just half an hour earlier Sarah Palin had wrapped up a “motivational” speech about “achievement” at the Toyota Center in downtown Houston. Though Palin was to be the headliner of the all day business seminar which featured a dozen other speakers like General Colin Powell and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. She was the first to perform.

“I was also kind of amazed that they let her go first, I mean, we weren’t even all seated yet when she started.” Palin started her speech at 8:00 AM sharp, she was the first person out of the gates – there wasn’t even a Master of Ceremonies. And given the fact that morning rush hour in Houston was exceptionally bad today, it meant there were going to be a lot of unhappy ticket holders(particularly as some paid as much as two hundred dollars.)

“She already gave her speech?!” One man exclaimed in the lobby after arriving minutes too late, “What the hell, I was stuck in traffic… why wouldn’t they save the best for last?!” Several elderly women with Palin lapel pins who were trying desperately to hurry through security were also distraught when they heard the news, “Ohhh Noooooo! Nooooo!”

Read on to hear the details about the speech itself. It’s fascinating.

I think it’s clear that one of Palin’s problems is that she doesn’t have much of a work ethic or a commitment to deliver for her fans. Again and again we hear stories like this and it’s eventually going to take its toll, even among the faithful, if she doesn’t get her act together.

As I noted before, many of these people are country music fans and there is a ritual of fan worship and respect that must be adhered to.

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Presidential Rehab

by digby

A billboard featuring a picture of former U.S. president George W. Bush and the tagline ‘Miss me yet?’ left residents of Minnesota wondering what it meant and who paid to have it erected.

A billboard featuring a picture of former President George W. Bush and the tagline ‘Miss me yet?’ left residents of Minnesota wondering what it meant and who paid to have it erected.

Speculation was rife on blogs on Monday and Tuesday as to whether the roadside sign was an indictment of President Obama’s performance so far or a reminder of Bush’s unpopularity.

Nobody has claimed the billboard, located on Interstate 35 near Wyoming, Minn., but the media flurry surrounding it is likely to dig up the purchaser sooner rather than later.

The picture of the billboard was widely circulated via e-mail forwards, and many dismissed it as a Photoshop job.

But, according to an eyewitness interviewed on National Public Radio, the billboard really exists and questions of its origin abound.

And so it begins.

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Hostage Demands

by digby

This is fun:

February 8, 2010
The Honorable Rahm Emanuel
Chief of Staff
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. Emanuel:

We welcome President Obama’s announcement of forthcoming bipartisan health care talks.  In fact, you may remember that last May, Republicans asked President Obama to hold bipartisan discussions on health care in an attempt to find common ground, but he declined and instead chose to work with only Democrats.

Since then, the President has given dozens of speeches on health care reform, operating under the premise that the more the American people learn about his plan, the more they will come to like it.  Just the opposite has occurred: a majority of Americans oppose the House and Senate health care bills and want them scrapped so we can start over with a step-by-step approach focused on lowering costs for families and small businesses.  Just as important, scrapping the House and Senate health care bills would help end the uncertainty they are creating for workers and businesses and thus strengthen our shared commitment to focusing on creating jobs.

Assuming the President is sincere about moving forward on health care in a bipartisan way, does that mean he will agree to start over so that we can develop a bill that is truly worthy of the support and confidence of the American people?  Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said today that the President is “absolutely not” resetting the legislative process for health care.  If the starting point for this meeting is the job-killing bills the American people have already soundly rejected, Republicans would rightly be reluctant to participate.

Assuming the President is sincere about moving forward in a bipartisan way, does that mean he has taken off the table the idea of relying solely on Democratic votes and jamming through health care reform by way of reconciliation?  As the President has noted recently, Democrats continue to hold large majorities in the House and Senate, which means they can attempt to pass a health care bill at any time through the reconciliation process.  Eliminating the possibility of reconciliation would represent an important show of good faith to Republicans and the American people.

If the President intends to present any kind of legislative proposal at this discussion, will he make it available to members of Congress and the American people at least 72 hours beforehand?  Our ability to move forward in a bipartisan way through this discussion rests on openness and transparency.

Will the President include in this discussion congressional Democrats who have opposed the House and Senate health care bills?  This bipartisan discussion should reflect the bipartisan opposition to both the House bill and the kickbacks and sweetheart deals in the Senate bill.

Will the President be inviting officials and lawmakers from the states to participate in this discussion?  As you may know, legislation has been introduced in at least 36 state legislatures, similar to the proposal just passed by the Democratic-controlled Virginia State Senate, providing that no individual may be compelled to purchase health insurance.  Additionally, governors of both parties have raised concerns about the additional costs that will be passed along to states under both the House and Senate bills.

The President has also mentioned his commitment to have “experts” participate in health care discussions.  Will the Feb. 25 discussion involve such “experts?”  Will those experts include the actuaries at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), who have determined that the both the House and Senate health care bill raise costs – just the opposite of their intended effect – and jeopardize seniors’ access to high-quality care by imposing massive Medicare cuts? Will those experts include the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which has stated that the GOP alternative would reduce premiums by up to 10 percent?  Also, will Republicans be permitted to invite health care experts to participate?

Finally, as you know, this is the first televised White House health care meeting involving the President since last March.  Many health care meetings of the closed-door variety have been held at the White House since then, including one last month where a sweetheart deal was worked out with union leaders.  Will the special interest groups that the Obama Administration has cut deals with be included in this televised discussion?

Of course, Americans have been dismayed by the fact that the President has broken his own pledge to hold televised health care talks.  We can only hope this televised discussion is the beginning, not the end, of attempting to correct that mistake.  Will the President require that any and all future health care discussions, including those held on Capitol Hill, meet this common-sense standard of openness and transparency?

Your answers to these critical questions will help determine whether this will be a truly open, bipartisan discussion or merely an intramural exercise before Democrats attempt to jam through a job-killing health care bill that the American people can’t afford and don’t support.  ‘Bipartisanship’ is not writing proposals of your own behind closed doors, then unveiling them and demanding Republican support.  Bipartisan ends require bipartisan means.

These questions are also designed to try and make sense of the widening gap between the President’s rhetoric on bipartisanship and the reality.  We cannot help but notice that each of the President’s recent bipartisan overtures has been coupled with harsh, misleading partisan attacks.

For instance, the President decries Republican ‘obstruction’ when it was Republicans who first proposed bipartisan health care talks last May.  The President says Republicans are ‘sitting on the sidelines’ just days after holding up our health care alternative and reading from it word for word.  The President has every right to use his bully pulpit as he sees fit, but this is the kind of credibility gap that has the American people so fed up with business as usual in Washington.

We look forward to receiving your answers and continuing to discuss ways we can move forward in a bipartisan manner to address the challenges facing the American people.

Sincerely,

House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH)
House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA)

Below is the statement from Robert Gibbs in response to the letter.

“The President is adamant that we seize this historic moment to pass meaningful health insurance reform legislation. He began this process by inviting Republican and Democratic leaders to the White House on March 5 of last year, and he’s continued to work with both parties in crafting the best possible bill. He’s been very clear about his support for the House and Senate bills because of what they achieve for the American people: putting a stop to insurance company abuses, extending coverage to millions of hardworking Americans, getting control of rising premiums and out-of-pocket costs, and reducing the deficit.

“The President looks forward to reviewing Republican proposals that meet the goals he laid out at the beginning of this process, and as recently as the State of the Union Address. He’s open to including any good ideas that stand up to objective scrutiny. What he will not do, however, is walk away from reform and the millions of American families and small business counting on it. The recent news that a major insurer plans to raise premiums for some customers by as much as 39 percent is a stark reminder of the consequences of doing nothing.

I guess this is going to be a game of chicken isn’t it?

I’ll be interested to see how this is perceived in the country. I suspect that those who are engaged will assume their side is right and everyone else will see it as “partisan bickering.” But we’ll see.

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Losing It

by digby

This is so awful on so many levels that it’s painful to read.  It’s clear that the father has PTSD, but it’s also clear that waterboarding is too often seen as harmless. And it’s largely because of idiocy like this.

The PTSD of returning soldiers is always a problem in war.  But you have to wonder if the ongoing “debate” about torture isn’t going to bring an extra dimension to the problem. And that’s just for your average soldier — I can only imagine what’s happening to the people who performed the deed. (That’s something I’ve been  wondering about for a long time.)

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Alien Abduction?

by digby
 
Jamison Foser reports that the author of the WaPo article scolding all of us liberals for being condescending, was actually commissioned by the paper to write it. How lovely.

But this really takes the cake:

Alexander spent the bulk of today’s Washington Post online Q&A acknowledging that some conservatives are plenty condescending to liberals, but claiming that it just isn’t very common.  Or something.  Alexander, for example, contends that “conservative magazines, elected officials, etc” don’t accuse coastal liberals of being out of touch with heartland values — and that if they did so, they’d be “run out of town.”

In reality, of course, such accusations are not limited to conservatives; they are pervasive in the media.  And those making such accusations are not “run out of town,” they are given television shows on CNN.

I honestly don’t know what to say.  The idea that conservatives don’t accuse liberals of being out oftouch with heartland values is so absurd that I have to assume that Alexander has been living in another country for the past 30 years. It’s insane.

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Over “Weaning” Ignorance

by digby

More Republican “ideas”:

Speaking to a small group of conference attendees and ThinkProgress during lunch on Saturday, Bachmann outlined how the Republican Party and its 2012 nominee must address the national debt. Bachmann referenced Glenn Beck, who falsely warned about a $107 trillion in supposed “unfunded liabilities” from Social Security and Medicare. She then called for a “reorganization” of entitlements where people “already in the system” would continue to receive benefits, but “everybody else” would be weaned off:

BACHMANN: Is the country too big to fail? No, the country can fail. We can, we’re not invincible. And we’re so close now to being at that point because the thing is, as Glenn Beck said last night, it is true. The $107 trillion that he put on the board. We’re $14 trillion in debt, but that doesn’t include the unfunded massive liabilities. That’s $107 trillion, and that’s for Social Security and Medicare and all the rest. You add up all those unfunded net liabilities, and all the traps that could go wrong we’re on the hook for, and what it means is what we have to do is a reorganization of all of that, Social Security and all. We have to do it simply because we can’t let the contract remain as they are because the older people are going to lose. So, what you have to do, is keep faith with the people that are already in the system, that don’t have any other options, we have to keep faith with them. But basically what we have to do is wean everybody else off. And wean everybody off because we have to take those unfunded net liabilities off our bank sheet, we can’t do it. So we just have to be straight with people. So basically, whoever our nominee is, is going to have to have a Glenn Beck chalkboard and explain to everybody this is the way it is.

Bachmann is echoing a growing chorus in the GOP caucus. Recently, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) introduced an alternative budget plan which would privatize both Medicare and Social Security. As the Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo has noted, the type of private Social Security accounts Ryan proposes would have cost seniors tens of thousands of dollars in the 2008-2009 market plunge. But Bachmann takes Ryan’s effort a step farther and seems to be suggesting a full repeal of the retirement safety net.

What she fails to note is that unless we can arrange for all the old people to die much younger (and without Medicare that’s fairly likely, since nobody who isn’t Donald Trump would be able to afford health care when they’re 80) all the young people had better set aside some of their tax savings for training in incontinence management because mom and dad are moving in. 

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Good Faith Bipartisanship

by digby

Greg Sargent writes:

Eric Cantor’s office responds to Obama’s announcement of a bipartisan summit on health care with the most explicit and direct assertion I’ve seen yet that the only way Dems can win bipartisan cooperation is to fully embrace the GOP health care plan and nothing more:

After going it alone on health care reform for nearly a year, President Obama has decided he wants to bring Republicans into the conversation. Here’s the problem: unless the President and Speaker Pelosi are willing to scrap their government take over and hit the reset button, there’s not much to talk about.

Republicans believe the status quo is unacceptable, but so is any health reform package that spends money we don’t have or raises taxes on small businesses and working families in a recession. To that point, House Republicans have offered the only plan , that will lower health care costs, which is what the President said was the goal at the start of this debate.

I don’t think anyone’s harboring any illusions about the Republicans’ willingness to sign on to any form of health care reform. (If they are, I have some condos in Florida that are going at 2007 prices to sell them.) So this is supposed to illustrate the argument that Republicans are being uncooperative.  I’m not sure it works with health care after a year of wrangling.

Greg adds:

Multiple polls have shown that majorities think the GOP is more interested in obstructing than in engaging constructively with the majority. And yet, paradoxically, multiple polls also show that majorities want Dems to keep trying to find common ground with Republicans rather than pass their own plan.

As I’ve noted here before, this is largely because Dems haven’t convinced the public that compromising with the GOP would have actual policy consequences that people might not like — that compromise will of necessity produce a bill that the public wants less than the one Dems would produce alone. The question is whether the summit can shift this dynamic.

I think the health care legislation is so muddy that the Republicans can probably say anything and it won’t matter.  This is an issue on which the Dems can’t make much of an ideological point because the bill itself isn’t particularly liberal and it hasn’t exactly been a beacon of principle. So, it’s kabuki for kabuki’s sake. In the end, I would guess that the best case is that this summit will change no one’s mind but certain useless villagers’ who really, really love bipartisanship — and who will briefly give the administration some love for trying and then blame Obama for failing to get even one Republican vote in the end.

It could only be more satisfying for the GOP if they managed to sabotage the best parts of the bill, like the Medicaid expansion, thus pissing off the base even more before the Dems fail to pass it. Sweet.

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Murtha

by digby

Democratic Rep. John P. Murtha, who represented Pennsylvania’s 12th district for 36 years, died today at the age of 77. He died in an Arlington, Va. hospital with his family at his side after suffering complications from gallbladder surgery.

He was a complicated political figure, but he will be remembered for something very brave: it’s impossible to overestimate how important it was to have this conservative, ex-marine, super patriot Democrat step up on Iraq at a time when the country needed him. He led the way for the Democrats to finally find the courage to oppose Bush and I’m not sure it would have happened without him.

RIP

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Cui Bono?

by digby

Boy, this sure would have been useful information for the Democrats to use if they’d ever really tried to sell health care reform instead of assuming that Obama’s election made it self-evident that anything the administration decided to do was inevitable:

Who Supports Health Reform?

David W. Brady, Stanford University
Daniel P. Kessler, Stanford University

ABSTRACT
In this article, we report results from a new study that surveyed a large, national sample of American adults about their willingness to pay for health reform. As in previous work, we find that self-identified Republicans, older Americans, and high-income Americans are less supportive of reform. However, these basic findings mask three important features of public opinion. First, income has a substantial effect on support for reform, even holding political affiliation constant. Indeed, income is the most important determinant of support for reform. Second, the negative effects of income on support for reform begin early in the income distribution, at annual family income levels of $25,000 to $50,000. Third, although older Americans have a less favorable view of reform than the young, much of their opposition is due to dislike of large policy changes than to reform per se.

This bears out the pervasive “conservative” American ethos of “I’ve got mine, so screw you,” so the problem is much bigger than health care reform. The idea that anyone could fall victim to negative circumstance or make a bad decision or just find themselves on the losing side of something is attributed to their own bad character — or, perversely, to the government which has taken from you, the deserving citizen, and given it to someone else, thus unfairly placing you at a disadvantage. It’s old style Calvinism mixed with adolescent Randism and it’s a very serious problem for people who believe that social stability and economic justice are important.

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This Time With Feeliing

by digby

Dday points out that Begala’s plan to force the Republicans to vote on their budget isn’t exactly new. They did it last year and it split the GOP caucus, but nobody noticed, not even Paul Begala, which doesn’t speak well for its usefulness again this year.

I actually disagree a little bit. It’s a campaign year, the political landscape is substantially different and the Democrats seem to be at least tepidly interested in creating contrasts rather than papering over differences now. It’s an unlikely strategy for them, but the signs are that they will work harder to expose the Republicans’ plans than they did during the era of faith healing when the last budget was passed.

I agree with Dday that they aren’t good at this sort of thing, so it remains to be seen if they can actually pull it off without being punk’d themselves (it would be a first) but I think it’s worth trying. It’s election season and they have to run on something — running against conservative ideology would be my choice in any year, but especially this one.

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