Month: February 2010

Quake

by digby

I have friends who went through the 9.2 great Alaska quake of 1964, which was the second biggest quake ever recorded. It was one of those where the earth opened up and swallowed cars. Whole towns on the coast disappeared. Luckily, there aren’t very many people in Alaska so the carnage was limited. But one of the things most people forget about that quake is that the tsunami it created killed a bunch of people in Oregon and Northern California.

This Chilean quake is also a great quake and the carnage is likely to be quite severe considering the population. Let’s hope it isn’t as bad as we might fear.

And I certainly hope we don’t see any people in the pacific rim running to beaches to watch the waves. It would be very, very foolish..

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Can They Ever Stop Whining?

by digby

Waaaaaah:

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, says he believes Washington has become increasingly erratic and unfair in its treatment of the banks over the last few months, and he now has some regrets about participating in the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program.

“F.D.I.C. is going to cost us a lot of money. TARP cost us a lot of money. This bank tax, my first reaction was, ‘That will cost us a lot of money,’” Mr. Dimon said Thursday at the bank’s annual Investor Day conference in New York. “I think we are getting into the capricious, arbitrary and punitive behavior.”

Oh boo fucking hoo. For the first time in my life I’m really beginning to understand why the French went so nuts with the Guillotine. They were just sick to death of having to watch spoiled aristocrats behave as if a bunch of hungry, armed, very pissed off peasants presented absolutely no threat to them whatsoever. At some point you want to kick their privileged asses just to shut them up.

Update: Oh sorry, I forgot that Jamie Dimon only got a 17 million dollar bonus this year. No wonder he’s so upset. Never mind.

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Wolves In Sheep’s Clothing

by digby

Ron Paul made a compelling case against corporatism in the health care system today on Rick Sanchez’s show, rightly pointing out that the insurance companies are getting a good deal from the government with this mandate in exchange for some regulations. He claimed that it is government managed care that has ratcheted up costs:

SANCHEZ: Congressman Paul, you’re a big free market guy. And — and I think a lot of folks respect you for that. But do you not believe that some of these big insurance companies have gotten too powerful in what they can do?

PAUL: Well, yes.This is a consequence of government-managed care. The corporations get involved. The managed health care gets involved. The insurance companies get involved, the drug companies.

Who do you think pushed through prescription drug programs? It was the — it was the drug companies. So, I agree that corporations are out of control. But it’s — it’s not because it’s a market function. There’s been no market function. It’s been a government-mandated function. The government controls this.

So, right now, do you think this administration is going to take on the drug companies and insurance companies? That’s not going to happen.

We have a type of corporatism that runs in this world and in this country, and it moves toward a fascist system, because government and big business go — get in bed together. And it’s not free markets at all. The free market that I know about existed a long time ago, and things weren’t nearly as bad as they are today, let me tell you.

SANCHEZ: That’s — that’s interesting, because you’re — it’s a double whammy that you’re proposing. You’re saying, look, the corporations are screwed up because they have gotten too greedy, and the people who have helped them get screwed up is the government, who have really been their allies in this.

PAUL: That’s absolutely right. And they still are. They still are.

Provocative, interesting stuff, right? Unfortunately they ran out of time before Paul could really talk about what he thought should be done aside from the usual opening up insurance across state lines and tort reform. The good news is that last Tuesday both he and his son Rand (also a physician, who is running for the Senate in Kentucky) were on The Situation Room discussing their views on health care reform and they delved a little bit deeper:

RAND PAUL (R), KENTUCKY SENATE CANDIDATE: …I think that if you talk to voters in Kentucky, they’ll ask, how are we going to spend a trillion dollars on health care and yet it’s not going to add anything to the debt?

Nobody here believes that. I don’t think many people in the country believe that…

BLITZER: But that’s what the Congressional Budget Office…

RAND PAUL: — a trillion dollar program…

BLITZER: — the Congressional Budget Office came up with that assessment, that they — there are certain ways you can cut some of the growth, in Medicare, for example, among other things, and that way you’ll have basically no increase in the debt.

You don’t believe in the CBO…

RAND PAUL: Well, the argument is…

BLITZER: You don’t believe in the CBO numbers?

RAND PAUL: Well, the argument is that they’re going to get a lot of money out of waste and fraud.

But my question to them is show me the government program that’s ever come in under budget. Look at the Medicare prescription drug plan. CBO predicted that it would cost $400 billion. Within a year, they revised their estimates to say it was going to cost a trillion.

So I think notoriously, government underestimates the cost of programs. And when something is free, people tend to over use it and it costs a lot more than they projected.

BLITZER: Congressman, do you trust the CBO?

RON PAUL: Well, I trust them that they’re trying to do their best. But I don’t think anybody can project the future, because you don’t know what the revenues will be, you don’t know what the interest rates are going to be, you don’t know how much abuse there’s going to be and who — who lines up at the trough.

So, no, nobody is — nobody can do that. And that’s why government always fails once they get involved in doing these things and the market works, because the market irons these things out. The people who are inefficient get shoved aside or they have to declare their bankruptcy or they have to revamp. But when government does it, they have nobody to report to and all they do is go back and tax the people even more and that’s why it fails.

BLITZER: So if you were in the Senate right now — and you want to be the Republican candidate from Kentucky, Rand Paul, in the United States Senate. You want to get that Republican nomination.

You would reject the president’s effort to come up with some sort of health care solution, is that what you’re saying?

RAND PAUL: Well, what I would say is I would reject what the president is proposing. But I would also say that we, as Republicans, need to articulate a vision for what we would do. I personally am worried about the expense. And people come up to me everyday and are worried about the expense. I’m worried about pre-existing conditions. I’m worried about if Wolf Blitzer grills me on these questions and I have a heart attack today but I survive that my rates could triple.

So I’m concerned about the price. But my question is, is it that we need more government involvement or less?

Over half of what I do as a physician is already paid for by government. And the problem is, is that when government sets the price for health care, the patient quits caring about the price and there is no price competition.

BLITZER: All right.

RAND PAUL: You need to have price competition to make health care work.

When they talk about competition, they believe the problem is that patients aren’t forced to comparison shop for heart bypasses, which raises costs. The government needs to stay completely out of it and let the market between patients and doctors work. If a few parasites people have to be sacrificed to make things more efficient,so be it. Otherwise we will have fascism.

The two Pauls are very slick characters. They have an appealing way of speaking about the ruling elites, which I’m sure gets a lot of young socially liberal populists at hello. But it’s very important to understand what their philosophy really is and where it leads. Unsurprisingly, it leads to “every man for himself” — and consequently enables the “corporate” side of the corporatist program to operate unfettered by pesky regulations or taxes. Of course if you want to put all your faith in the invisible hand to manage those wealthy interests on your behalf, then this sounds good. It sounds like useful idiocy to me.

There is no doubt that we have a corporatist system at work in Washington. Thirty years of conservative rule takes its toll — this is, after all, how they planned it. But let’s not allow ourselves to get confused by shills like Paul — or allow young people who are already prone to see the fun side of libertarianism miss the other side of the coin. Little Randian Paulites almost always turn into Big Business Wingnuts once they start making a paycheck, at which point their concerns about “corporatism” tend to morph into concerns about government spending money on people who aren’t wonderful producers like they are.

Update: Here’s a nice succinct essay by Ron Paul on health care reform, which proves that he is a con artist. An excerpt:

“Universal Healthcare never quite works out the way the people are led to believe before implementing it. Citizens in countries with nationalized healthcare never would have accepted this system had they known upfront about the rationing of care and the long lines.

… Having to subject our health to this bureaucratic insanity and mismanagement is possibly the biggest danger we face. The great irony is that in turning the good of healthcare into a right, your life and liberty are put in jeopardy.

Instead of further removing healthcare from the market, we should return to a true free market in healthcare, one that empowers individuals, not bureaucrats, with control of healthcare dollars. My bill HR 1495 the Comprehensive Healthcare Reform Act provides tax credits and medical savings accounts designed to do just that.”

Paul is obviously a fairly typical Republican liar but even on the merits, this argument comes down to the fundamental difference between modern American liberalism and right wing libertarianism. Liberalism seeks to protect civil liberties and pursue social justice while libertarianism seeks to protect civil liberties and preserve individual wealth. There is some common ground, to be sure. But the differences lead to starkly different beliefs about the role of government.

Update II:You can see the difference between right and left libertarianism as well by comparing the differences between Paul (who is also, incidentally, a fake libertarian) and left libertarian Chomsky. Their critiques of the problems are the same, but their solution is exactly opposite: Paul wants to leave health care entirely to the market and Chomsky is for a single payer system.

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Preparing For The Other

by digby

TPM reports:

A 2003 handbook for the U.S. 1st Infantry Division in Iraq exhorts soldiers to “Do your best to prevent war crimes” and warns that “when an Arab is confronted by criticism, you can expect him to react by interpreting the facts to suit himself or flatly denying the facts.”

The document, obtained and posted by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, runs nearly 100 pages outlining on the history of Iraq, the customs of Arabs, and the rules of war.

[…]

Some of the sections of the handbook describing Arabs are, to put it lightly, reductive.

Concerning criticism, the handbook advises: “The Arab must, above all else, protect himself and his honor from this critical onslaught. Therefore, when an Arab is confronted by criticism, you can expect him to react by interpreting the facts to suit himself or flatly denying the facts.”

And it says the Arab world view is “based upon six concepts: atomism, faith, wish versus reality, justice and equality, paranoia and the importance of family over self.”

Under wish versus reality, the handbook says: “Their desire for modernity is contradicted by a desire for tradition (especially Islamic tradition, since Islam is the one area free of Western identification and influence). Desiring democracy and modernization immediately is a good example of what a Westerner might view as an Arabs ‘wish vs. reality.'”

It warns that Arabs in Iraq might be suspicious of U.S. objectives, categorizing this concern as “paranoia”: “Arabs may seem to be paranoid by Western standards. Suspicion of US intent in their land and a cautious approach to American forces are a primary example. Some Arabs view all Westerners as agents of the government that may be ‘spies.’ “

This isn’t surprising, but it isn’t the worst of it. But there is more to this reductive view of “Arabs” than just this. Back in 2004, Seymour Hersh revealed that the Pentagon was distributing a discredited book called The Arab Mind to officers, which very likely influenced the torture regime. I wrote this at the time:

We know that big tough American guys like Trent Lott would never urinate all over themselves if they were tied up naked as a 150 lb snarling German Shepard was allowed to back them into a corner and take a piece out of their flesh. They don’t have “a problem with dogs” like those arabs do.

This is but another example of the crude, stereotypical approach we seem to have taken toward the Iraqis (and undoubtedly the Afghans, as well.) And it is likely because the “intellectuals” who planned and implemented the war don’t have a clue.

Sy Hersh mentioned in his May 24th article in the New Yorker one of the many possible reasons why:

“The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was ‘The Arab Mind,’ a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai … The book includes a 25-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression … The Patai book, an academic told me, was ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.'”

You might as well read a ZOG comic on mudpeople as read this for any true understanding. The passages on sex could have been written during Queen Victoria’s reign which is, indeed, the period from which many silly, crude stereotypes about arabs and sex really got off the ground. (The funny thing is that Patai’s book portrays arabs as being rigidly sexually repressed when during Victoria’s time they were reviled for being scandalously oversexed. It seems that no matter what, westerners believe that arabs are just all fucked up when it comes to sex.)

So, a bunch of second rate minds read a third rate book about people they know nothing about except what they’ve seen at parties where Ahmad Chalabi is holding court, and they fashion a torture regime based upon a ridiculous thesis that Arabs (as opposed to Western he-men apparently, which is interesting in itself) are unusually uncomfortable with being herded around naked, forced to pretend to masturbate in front of women and piling themselves up in naked pyramids, among other sexually charged, homoerotic acts.

It’s always interesting to see people’s innermost fears and insecurities projected on to another isn’t it? These neocons have some serious issues.

They certainly do. And as we’ve found out since then, these issues ran all the way up to the White House, where members of the cabinet watched as torture techniques were simulated and top Justice Department lawyers conjured up secret memos indemnifying the torturers.

All of this seemed to stem from a primitive belief that they were dealing with a threat so unique and unprecedented that all civilized rules of behavior had to be eliminated. And most of that sprang from plain old vanilla racism. How that continues to happen in the most multicultural country in the world is a mystery for ages. It’s not like they couldn’t have asked some actual Arabs and Muslims about this stuff. America is full of them.

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Too Much Trouble

by digby

Here’s a video mash-up of the Republicans’ inexplicable decision to obstruct the extension of unemployment benefits. (And it is the Republicans, not just Jim Bunning, because he had Bob Corker waiting in the wings to take over in case he needed to leave the room. They could have stopped it.)

I also don’t understand why the Democrats didn’t make Bunning and Corker put their bladders where their mouths are and force them to keep running this stunt all week-end if they had to. Here you have the Republicans using parliamentary tricks to withhold unemployment benefits in the middle of a vicious recession. Would that not be worth highlighting just a bit to illustrate that the Republicans are so ideologically rigid that they would compromise average citizens’ actual survival just to make a point?

I guess not. They caved and adjourned. They are allowing the benefits to expire, which will require the states to go through all kinds of hoops to reinstate them if they end up voting for it next Tuesday.

The Democrats were evidently afraid of making the Senate look like it couldn’t get anything done and Bunning is a nut so why fight it? And that’s the problem. They had an opportunity to demagogue the living hell out of uncaring Republican parsimony in this time of great financial need and they didn’t do it. I guess they figure it’s better to let the other side continue convince the people that long term deficit projections are what’s causing them to lose everything. It’s less trouble. Plus they were tired.

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Up And Down Simultaneously

by digby

Oh the irony. The day after Sally Quinn gets demoted to mere cheeto-muncher, it’s revealed that Desiree Rogers is stepping down from her job as White house Social Secretary. How sweet it would have been for the Queen Bee if she’d only held back from commenting in print on her family’s dirty laundry for one short week.

Here’s how Mike Viqueira on MSNBC characterized the resignation:

We are confirming that Desire Rogers is stepping down. Of course she had been a controversial figure ever since that first state dinner the week of Thanksgiving, you remember it was the Indian prime minister who was here and it was crashed by not only the Salahis but a third uninvited guest. There were congressional hearings called, the White House refused to send Ms Rogers up to Capitol Hill to testify, claiming that she was simply a White House adviser, not a White house official who was eligible to testify before congress.

She received considerable criticism in the press. There was unfavorable talk about what was termed her “Hollywood image” that she was too high powered to have this role, that she could perhaps overshadow the first lady.

In case you missed the story about Rogers being above herself, here’s a pretty good rundown. As far as I can tell, the only one in the press who raised questions about her “Hollywood image” was Quinn. How fitting it is that the day Quinn’s power is proven to all the world comes on the day after she was ignominiously demoted by her own paper for being a shallow twit.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to feel too sorry for Rogers who said that after a year in the White House she now feels she can “take advantage” of opportunities in the corporate world. I’ll just bet.

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The Big Rift

by digby

The leader of the Republican Party and the leader of the Tea Party disagree about Louise Slaughter’s comments at the health care summit yesterday.

Limbaugh:

“If you don’t have any teeth, so what? What’s applesauce for?”

Beck:

“I’ve read the Constitution … I didn’t see that you had a right to teeth”

There you see the big split between the two factions. Limbaugh is making the GOP conservative argument that one should be self-sufficient and eat soft food if they can’t afford to get your teeth fixed. Beck is making the teabag constitutional argument that if something wasn’t specifically written into the constitution then no government official is allowed to even discuss it.

Will they ever be able to find common ground?

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A Draw?

by digby

Politico dutifully passes on the village CW:

Seven thick hours of substantive policy discussion, preening and low-grade political clashes had Hill staffers nodding at their desks, policy mavens buzzing — and participants declaring the marathon C-SPAN-broadcast session a draw.

But in this case, the tie goes to Republicans, according to operatives on both sides of the aisle — because the stakes were so much higher for Democrats trying to build their case for ramming reform through using a 51-vote reconciliation tactic.

“I think it was a draw, which was a Republican win,” said Democratic political consultant Dan Gerstein. “The Republican tone was just right: a respectful, substantive disagreement, very disciplined and consistent in their message.”

The White House and Hill Democrats had hoped congressional Republicans would prove themselves to be unruly, unreasonable and incapable of a serious policy discussion — “the face of gridlock,” as one Democrat put it hours before the summit.

That didn’t happen Thursday. In the 72 hours leading up to the encounter, Republicans drove a hard bargain with the White House over the seating arrangement — securing a massive square table that put them on a visual par with the president — to underscore their parity and seriousness. The move, ridiculed by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs at the time, paid off.

Obama wasn’t able to dominate them like he did last month during an encounter with House Republicans in Baltimore, when he delivered zingers high above the GOP from a conference room podium.

All of this makes it tougher — though not impossible — for Democrats to make the case that they need to abandon talks with the GOP and immediately proceed with a plan to ram health reform through the Senate using a 50-vote reconciliation tactic.

That’s a shame. Many of the Republicans were disingenuous and mendacious throughout the meeting, and even when they were being sincere they were espousing ridiculous policy fantasies. But as usual optics rule all.

Unfortunately, the Democrats failed to use the optics to their advantage by playing against type as the other side did. Republicans needed to appear to be cooperative technocrats yesterday in order to counter their image as the party of crazy and the party of no. The technocratic Democrats needed to connect as human beings and make an impassioned moral case (which some, including the president, did sporadically but without consistency.) In the end both parties ended up sounding like technocrats with some competing ideas of equal value. That’s not good.

Democrats have been far too reliant on our president’s intelligence and speaking skills to magically transform the political dynamic. His mastery of the details of the job is impressive and after our last goofball it’s a relief. But Obama’s best moments yesterday were when he challenged Republicans on their lofty assumptions about what people can afford — he repeatedly asked these Representatives and senators to imagine what it’s like to met these expenses if you make 40k a year. It was a nice populist moment for the president, speaking on behalf of the average folks and it put the Republicans off balance.

Certainly debating is part of the job, and he’s good at it. But I suspect that what people need from the president and the Democrats right now is a sense that they understand the urgency of their problems, not the details of how they’re going to fix them. I recall Clinton relating a story during his “laser beam” interview right after he was elected that I always thought was clever. He said he’d understood that he had to act quickly when he saw a man standing beside the road with a sign that said “For god’s sake just do something.” That’s effective stuff.

I hope that this summit is soon forgotten and they move to the next phase quickly. And I also hope the Democrats let go of the idea that this is a good way to deal with the Republicans. They are a lot slicker than the White House gives them credit for and it’s never a good idea to give them a forum in which to appear as if they are operating in good faith. They are not, and it does the country no good to help them pretend otherwise.

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Word

by digby

Atrios wonders the same thing I did this morning when I read that the unemployment numbers still suck hard:

I generally hate that kind of thinking, and certainly don’t wish for things to get worse, but I do wonder just what level of job losses and unemployment might cause the powers that be to decide that maybe they should do something.

Probably it would take a stock market crash. That’s the important thing

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It’s pretty clear to me that they think this will eventually iron itself out and that they don’t need to do much of anything. ut some point Unemployment will start to come down, however slowly, and then just as it was with St Ronnie, it will be morning in America. It’s faith-based. And it ignores the very real suffering and lost opportunities that a long period of unemployment or underemployment causes as well as vastly underestimating the political and social upheaval such long periods of economic stress can cause. They’re playing with fire.

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Hoo-boy

by digby

Across the street from the White House, there is bipartisan agreement.

Unfortunately for President Obama, the bipartisan agreement is outside Blair House where today’s health care summit is taking place, and the agreement is among liberal and conservative protestors arguing for different reason that the Democrats’ current health care reform proposal isn’t the correct prescription. Conservatives argue that it’s too much government intrusion and socialism. Liberals argue that the various leading Democratic proposals don’t go far enough.

Most of the roughly one hundred protestors standing at the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania Ave, NW, are conservative.

Among some of the signs, from the Right: “This Summit Is a Sham,” “No! No! No More Secret Deals That Steal! No Obamacare No Unconstitutional Takeover Health Trap!.” “Slowbama Down,” and “No No No Hell No.”

Many chanted: “Kill the bill! Kill the bill! Kill the bill!”

From the Left: “Medicare for All” and “Support HR 676 National Health Care Act.”

A group advocating single payer has unfurled a large poster claiming to be the “Private Health Insurers’ Quilt of Shame,” with stories of various individuals who have struggled with insurance companies.

“Medicare for all! Medicare for all!” chanted one dark-haired woman, standing with another woman holding a sign advocating health insurance for immigrants.

“Why don’t you shut up!” yelled Susan Winton of Wykoff, NJ, a retired importer who said she’s part of the tea party movement.

“Medicare for all!” continued the woman.

“Are you a citizen?” Wykoff asked the woman.

“Medicare for all!” she continued, ignoring Wykoff.

“She knows three words of English,” Wykoff said to a fellow tea partier, Donald Woodbridge, a laid-off mechanical engineer from Amenia, NY.

Woodbridge, in Spanish, asked the woman if she speaks Spanish.

The Medicare-for-all protestor, Dr. Zunaira Khalid, continued to ignore them. She speaks plenty of English and isn’t Latina, it turns out. She’s an anesthesiologist and US citizen from Fairfax County, VA, the daughter of an Afghani mother and a Pakistani father. She told ABC News she’s with the group HealthCare Now, which advocates for a single-payer system.

Wykoff said she opposes President Obama’s bill because it’s “too much government. Medicare is broken. Medicaid is broken. Social Security is broken.”

“It’s unconstitutional,” said Woodbridge.

Roughly two dozen antiabortion protestors, with red tape saying “LIFE” on their mouths, staged a silent protest as close to the Blair House doors as they could get.

On the other side of the scrum, Joan Stallard, an activist with Code Pink, stood on the corner with a hospital gown over her winter clothes, holding a sign reading “Don’t Leave Us Uncovered.”

The sad thing is that I think that is a fairly decent cross section except for those who just want everyone to shut up and pass the damn thing so they don’t have to hear about it anymore. And I suspect that group represents about 80% of the public.

Update: Please note that the above article wasn’t written by me, but is rather a wire report. I excerpted it not because I was making the point that single payer advocates are equivalent to the teabaggers — indeed, I thought the article made it very clear that the single payer advocate was a decent,normal person and the teabaggers were racist kooks. My only additional point was that there are very few people of any ilk who are invested enough to demonstrate at this point, beyond wishing it were over.

For the record, I don’t consider single payer people to be teabaggers. I can’t imagine why anyone would.

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