Month: January 2011

Choose Tea

by digby

There seems to be some surprise that the GOP congress is going after abortion rights right out of the box. I don’t know why. This was telegraphed right after the election and Katha Pollit brought it up immediately and I wrote about it. For some reason, people still don’t understand who the Tea Partiers really are:

Katha Pollitt draws attention to the startling fact that at least 53 of the new House members and five new Senators are hardcore anti-choice zealots and makes the important observation that all this blather about the GOP keeping the abortion issue roiling for cynical political purposes is just that: blather. The anti-choice zealots will be hard at work whittling away a woman’s right to own her own body at the state level, while the GOP Congress will do its part to roll back whatever they can. And at some point, the movement is going to demand that their efforts to pack the court with wingnuts are rewarded with a reversal of Roe. They will get their case.

And contrary to popular myth the Tea Party is made up of hardcore social conservatives who as Ed Kilgore noted after the shock of the O’Donnell primary victory, are largely motivated by their opposition to abortion rights:

For all the endless and interminable talk about “constitutionalism” on the right, it’s rarely acknowledged that lurking in the background is wrath about Roe v. Wade. The same is true with the rage about health care reform; if you read a lot of right-wing blogs, as I do, you’d note that fear about Obamacare producing a massive expansion of publicly-funded abortion was a major motivator of right-wing opposition. House Minority Leader John Boehner knew his constituency when he made this statement just prior to the House vote on health reform:

A ‘yes’ vote for this government takeover of health care is a ‘yes’ vote for sending hard-earned tax dollars to pay for abortions.

More generally, the anger associated with the entire Tea Party movement is, I suspect, traceable among many activists to endless frustration of its desire to end the “genocide” of legalized abortion, to which the GOP “establishment” has given little more than lip service.

In case you doubt Kilgore’s analysis or Pollitt’s contention that abortion politics are about to rise up again, here’s the Arctic Tea Queen herself on the subject this week:

During a speech in Dallas on Wednesday night Sarah Palin attacked President Obama for being the “most pro-abortion president to occupy the White House” and warned that health care reform would lead to more abortions in America.

“It is even worse than what we had thought. The ramifications of this legislation are horrendous,” Palin said at an event hosted by Heroic Media, a faith-based, non-profit group that is working to bring down the rate of abortions in the Dallas area.

The 2008 vice presidential nominee urged the newly elected Congress to repeal health care reform, which she called the “mother of all unfunded mandates.”

“The biggest advance of the abortion industry in America has been the passage of Obamacare,” Palin said.

Although President Obama signed an executive order prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortions, the former Alaska governor said it was nonbinding. Palin also noted that the administration later allowed federal funding for some “high risk” insurance pools in states that allow elective abortions.

She is, of course, lying through her teeth. In fact, the opposite is true because the administration tightened the rules for the sickest women far beyond even the Stupak compromise in the face of the forced pregnancy lobby’s indecent mendacity. These cruel fetus worshipers actually want women who are battling terrible diseases to go through impossible hoops rather than have their sacred tax dollars touch dollars that paid for a necessary abortion. It’s sick.

Pollitt gives a list of the likely anti-choice efforts from the GOP House:

§  Reinstate the global gag rule, lifted by President Obama on his first day in office, which bars recipients of US foreign aid from so much as mentioning abortion in their work, and make it permanent.

§ Pass the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, a k a Stupak on Steroids. This bill would make the Hyde Amendment permanent and reinterpret it to prevent any government department from funding any program that touches on abortion in any way, however notional. For example, if your insurance plan covered abortion, you could not get an income tax deduction for your premiums or co-pays—nor could your employer take deductions for an employer-based plan that included abortion care. (This would mean that employers would choose plans without abortion coverage, in order to get the tax advantage.) The bill would also make permanent current bans like the one on abortion coverage in insurance for federal workers.

§  Pass the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act, which would ban federal funds for any organization that performs abortions or funds organizations that do so. The aim is to defund Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest network of clinics for family planning and women’s health, and in many regions the only provider within reach. This is the brainchild of Representative Mike Pence, who clearly doesn’t accept the conventional wisdom that taking away reproductive healthcare for women is unwise for a would-be presidential candidate.

§ Beef up so-called conscience protections for healthcare personnel and hospitals.

§ Ban Washington, DC, from using its own money to pay for abortions for poor women.

§ Revisit healthcare reform to tighten provisions barring coverage for abortion care.

§ Preserve the ban on abortions in military hospitals.

Note that the official theme here is not the banning of abortion but freeing the taxpayer from having to pay for it, however tenuous the connection.

One would like to believe that our nominally Democratic majority in the Senate will not advance any of this legislation and if they do our allegedly pro-choice president will veto it. But I fully expect that abortion will be on the able as a bargaining chip when the Democrats try to fashion compromises on economic matters — women will be asked to give once again so that the Teabaggers can be appeased with something that isn’t vitally important to the people. (Well, except the women, but they hardly qualify.)

The only good thing about Boehner moving this right now is that it isn’t caught up in another bill. But there are plenty of other items left to bargain with.

Update: Read this piece by Meteor Blades at DKos for all the info on HR 3. It’s a real doozy.
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Secret Fashion Police

by digby

Limbaugh’s bad Charlie Chan impression was bad enough but today’s assault on Michelle Obama’s dress at the state dinner makes me want to start drinking. Can these people get any stupider?

“Michelle Obama’s Dress Slips Off At Commie Red China Obama State Dinner.” Gateway Pundit blogger Jim Hoft critized not only at the color the First Lady chose to wear–calling the event the “Commie Red China Obama State Dinner–but also the fit of the gown. Showing photos of the dress from all angles, Hoft declared that “It was just another one of her bizarre dress selections.” [Gateway Pundit, 1/19/11]

I hate to tell these bozos, but their icon Nancy Reagan was known for wearing Commie red and that was in the middle of the Cold War:

Nancy Reagan’s wardrobe consisted of dresses, gowns, and suits made by luxury designers, including James Galanos, Bill Blass, Adolfo, and Oscar de la Renta. Her white, hand-beaded, one shoulder Galanos 1981 inaugural gown was estimated to cost $10,000 while the overall price of her inaugural wardrobe was said to cost $25,000. She favored the color red, calling it “a picker-upper”, and wore it accordingly. Her wardrobe included red so often that the fire-engine shade became known as “Reagan red”.

Here she is in the White House’s “Red Room” wearing her Galanos gown:

According to the right wingers, that dress was wholly inappropriate as well, being off the shoulder and all.

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The Big Lie Lie

by digby

Last night Jon Stewart delivered a scathing rebuke to Representative Steve Cohen for his comment about ‘The Big Lie.” It was quite the lecture, serious, pointed and very aggressive. I know that I felt thoroughly chastised. After all, I’ve been writing about The Big Lie for years, as have many other writers. In fact, anyone with even the tiniest bit of historical knowledge knows that if you write or talk about The Big Lie, you are referencing Nazi propaganda.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry:

The Big Lie (German: Große Lüge) is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, for a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Hitler believed the technique was used by Jews to unfairly blame Germany’s loss in World War I on German Army officer Erich Ludendorff.Later, Joseph Goebbels put forth a slightly different theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the expression “big lie.” Goebbels wrote the following paragraph in an article dated 12 January 1941, 16 years after Hitler’s first use of the phrase “big lie,” titled “Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik” and translated “From Churchill‘s Lie Factory.” It was published in Die Zeit ohne Beispiel.

That is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not as a rule reveal one’s secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

(It’s quite revealing that both of them explained The Big Lie by attributing it to others. Projection seems to be in the DNA.)

Now some of us reckless liberals might have said, as Steve Cohen did, that the Republican talking point accusing the health care reform of featuring euthanasia was the perfect definition of a Big Lie, in exactly the way that Goebbels defined it:

The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama’s health care proposals would create government-sponsored “death panels” to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks. Advanced even this week by Republican stalwarts including the party’s last vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, and Charles E. Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator, the nature of the assertion nonetheless seemed reminiscent of the modern-day viral Internet campaigns that dogged Mr. Obama last year, falsely calling him a Muslim and questioning his nationality. But the rumor — which has come up at Congressional town-hall-style meetings this week in spite of an avalanche of reports laying out why it was false — was not born of anonymous e-mailers, partisan bloggers or stealthy cyberconspiracy theorists. Rather, it has a far more mainstream provenance, openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey, whose 1994 health care critique made her a star of the conservative movement (and ultimately, New York’s lieutenant governor). […]

The specter of government-sponsored, forced euthanasia was raised as early as Nov. 23 [2008], just weeks after the election and long before any legislation had been drafted, in an outlet with opinion pages decidedly opposed to Mr. Obama, The Washington Times. In an editorial, the newspaper reminded its readers of the Aktion T4 program of Nazi Germany in which “children and adults with disabilities, and anyone anywhere in the Third Reich was subject to execution who was blind, deaf, senile, retarded, or had any significant neurological condition.” Noting the “administrative predilections” of the new team at the White House, it urged “anyone who sees the current climate as a budding T4 program to win the hearts and minds of deniers.” The editorial captured broader concerns about Mr. Obama’s abortion rights philosophy held among socially conservative Americans who did not vote for him. But it did not directly tie forced euthanasia to health care plans of Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress. When the Democrats included money for family planning in a proposed version of the stimulus bill in January, the socially conservative George Neumayr wrote for the American Spectator: “Euthanasia is another shovel ready job for Pelosi to assign to the states. Reducing health care costs under Obama’s plan, after all, counts as economic stimulus, too — controlling life, controlling death, controlling costs.” Ms. McCaughey, whose 1994 critique of Mr. Clinton’s plan was hotly disputed after its publication in The New Republic, weighed in around the same time. She warned that a provision in the stimulus bill would create a bureaucracy to “monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost-effective,” was carried in a commentary she wrote for Bloomberg News that gained resonance throughout the conservative media, most notably with Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck. But Ms. McCaughey’s article provided another opportunity for others to raise the specter of forced euthanasia. “Sometimes for the common good, you just have to say, ‘Hey, Grandpa, you’ve had a good life,’ ” Mr. Beck said. The syndicated conservative columnist Cal Thomas wrote, “No one should be surprised at the coming embrace of euthanasia.” The Washington Times editorial page reprised its reference to the Nazis, quoting the Aktion T4 program: “It must be made clear to anyone suffering from an incurable disease that the useless dissipation of costly medications drawn from the public store cannot be justified.”

In August of 2009, polls showed that nearly half of all Americans believed the health care reforms included these Death Panels. A year later, nearly half of seniors still believed it or weren’t sure.

If that isn’t The Big Lie at work in our time, in living color, I don’t know what is. I’m sorry the term was coined by Nazis, but that’s an inconvenient fact for those who use the technique. It was coined by the Nazis, they did use it to convince the people that Jews were the reason for all their problems. These are just the facts. When you reference the Big Lie you reference the Nazis, whether or not you use the term or say the “H” word or bring up Goebbels. You can leave those out, but it doesn’t change the fact that this is a Nazi propaganda technique .

Now, you can instead draw comparisons, as Jon Stewart did, to advertisements, saying they are “Big lies” as well, but there is a slightly different character to saying on floor of the House of Representatives that Health Care Reform will cause seniors to be put to death by their government than there is to claiming that your sheets will smell better if you use a certain detergent.

Remember, this is The Big Lie:

a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

I don’t think your average advertising campaign really fits that bill. Lying about the threat of weapons of mass destruction does (“we can’t wait for a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud.”) Lying about the government planning to euthanize its citizens does. And there has to be a way to distinguish those kinds of lies from your average Viagra commercial. They are propaganda of a distinct sort, huge destructive lies that frighten people and whip them into a frenzy.

Now perhaps we can find new language to describe this phenomenon. But that won’t change the meaning and it won’t change the fact that Hitler and Goebbels were the ones who created the concept and used it to great effect. I suppose it will soothe all the well meaning liberals’ feelings and make them feel much better about the fact that they are willing to whip their own into line and publicly chastise them for using the obvious and meaningful comparison. There’s no reason that political correctness designed to protect those who have been marginalized and oppressed shouldn’t be extended to those who lie and seek to dominate. We’re nothing if not fair.

But let’s not kid ourselves about one thing. Policing of the left by our putative leaders against those who are calling out The Big Lie will only result in liberals saying nothing while the right carries on with its program.

Perlstein wrote about the consequences of this a couple of months ago:

We live in a mendocracy.

As in: rule by liars.

Political scientists are going crazy crunching the numbers to uncover the skeleton key to understanding the Republican victory last Tuesday.

But the only number that matters is the one demonstrating that by a two-to-one margin likely voters thought their taxes had gone up, when, for almost all of them, they had actually gone down. Republican politicians, and conservative commentators, told them Barack Obama was a tax-mad lunatic. They lied. The mainstream media did not do their job and correct them. The White House was too polite—”civil,” just like Obama promised—to say much. So people believed the lie. From this all else follows.

And it was all too predictable.

Consider February 24, 2009, when, after four glowing weeks in office, Obama delivered his first, triumphant, address to a joint session of Congress. Two weeks earlier, he had signed the $700 billion stimulus bill. This was his speech defending it.

That was the one in which Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, looking like a cross between a deer in the headlights and a 10-year-old delivering a prize school report, delivered the Republican response. You remember! He singled out for excoriation the $140 million in stimulus spending “for something called ‘volcano monitoring'”; this happened to be about a month before a volcano erupted, releasing a 60,000 foot cloud of ash near—dot dot dot—Wasilla, Alaska.

On CNN, David Brooks followed Jindal. He called the governor’s “stale, government-is-the problem” rhetoric “a disaster for the Republican Party,” and excoriated those who insisted on hugging tight to it as “insane.” The people appeared to agree. In a snap poll, 92 percent of those surveyed had a positive reaction to Obama’s speech—68 percent a very positive reaction. Only 8 percent had a negative reaction.

The next morning I tuned in to Rush Limbaugh. I was fascinated to see how the hell he might respond.

Like a deer in the headlights? Not quite. The first caller, though a self-professed ditto-head, took objection to Rush’s argument that Obama had revealed himself in the speech as a tax-and-spend liberal. The caller quoted Obama’s words: “Because of this plan, 95 percent of the working households in America will receive a tax cut—a tax cut that you will see in your paychecks beginning on April 1.” (Which was true: People did.)

Rush responded, fluidly and without a gram of doubt. “Pay no attention to what Obama says. He means the opposite in most cases. What he says is irrelevant.”

So the guy to whom all Republicans must kowtow on pain of political death had just laid down a marker that everything Obama said was a lie.

What if the White House had in those months in early 2009 put in the rhetorical forefront a story about Rush’s tens of millions of listeners, and all politicians who refused to denounce Rush, were effectively saying anything the Chief Constitutional Officer of the United States said was a priori a diabolical lie?

But Obama didn’t. That would be the “old politics of division.” Not Obama’s bag.

This would have been one of many opportunities to wedge the opposition between the authoritarian nihilists and the “constructive” Republicans who had America’s best interests at heart. Instead, the nihilists got to tell the story that endures in the day-after punditry from last Tuesday: that the electorate “rejected Obama’s agenda.”

The vector worked, and works, like this:

(a) A mountebank teaches his millions of followers that everything the president says is a priori a lie;

b) The mainstream media that acts as if anything his millions of followers believe is a priori deserving of respect as heartland folk wisdom (note the cover article lionizing Limbaugh in this week’s Newsweek);

(c) The president unilaterally renders himself constitutionally incapable of breaking the chain between (a) and (b), such that, (d), the assumption that Obama raised taxes when he really lowered them becomes hegemonic for a majority of the electorate, and even a large plurality of Democrats.

Q.E.D.: Governing has become impossible.

When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes “uncivil” to call out liars, lying becomes free.

So you find him at a press conference, the day after the midterm elections, saying with all apparent sincerity that he agreed the majority of Americans participated in a “fundamental rejection of his agenda”—who, that is, implicitly believe he raised their taxes.

When he really lowered them.

What Representative Steve Cohen did was point out that the Republicans had used The Big Lie on health care. This is indisputably true, as that article from the NY Times amply demonstrates. He attributed the concept to Goebbels and pointed out that the Nazis had used it to effect the holocaust, true as well. He didn’t say that Republicans were Nazis, he said they were using Nazi propaganda techniques — also true. But this is not allowed. You cannot say such things, and I’m sure that no liberal, not even a Jewish one, as Cohen is, will do so in the future. We have all been schooled: from now on, when they accuse us of trying to euthanize old people we’ll just say they are “spinning” and that their “PR” isn’t quite correct. That will change everything.

Now maybe someone would like to deal with this:

You’ll have to pardon me for being a bit skeptical that Glenn and the boys will be so impressed with Jon Stewart’s scolding and the acquiescence of good liberals everywhere that they will change their ways. But I live in hope.

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Pulp Faction

by digby

Not that it will change their view — or that of the Villager’s — that they speak for Real Americans everywhere, but the Tea Party isn’t very popular:

52 percent of Americans now hold unfavorable views of the tea party, a new high. Nearly three-quarters of Democrats – including as many moderate and conservative as liberal members of the party – have negative views of the political movement, as do half of all independents.

But as Blue Texan points out, they have never been all that popular. He also points out that they are as popular as Saudi Arabia, so that’s something:

Kinda figures. Both love to drill for oil, hate gays, and believe in theocracy.

Just because they are unpopular doesn’t mean they aren’t important, however. The billionaires and the right wing media empire have created a powerful faction within one of the two American political parties and it will be very interesting to see how they use it over the next two years.

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Rollback To Hell

by digby

All over TV today, I’m hearing the gasbags fret about the fact that Obama hasn’t brought up gun control. It’s a good question, but they know the answer to it very well: the Democrats have given up that issue, the only problem is that the Republicans refuse to accept their surrender. They have nothing more to say about it.

I’m more curious about why they aren’t all over this:

Gov. Jan Brewer’s plan to roll back state Medicaid coverage would leave thousands of Arizona’s most mentally fragile without health care. An estimated 5,200 people diagnosed with a serious mental illness and thousands more who qualify for other behavioral-health services would be among 280,000 childless adults losing health-care coverage under the governor’s plan. To mitigate the hit on the seriously mentally ill, Brewer wants to spend $10.3 million to prevent gaps in their psychiatric medication. They would lose coverage for all other medical care, including prescription drugs for physical ailments, as well as case management, transportation and housing they receive through the state’s behavioral-health-care program. Mental-health advocates say losing case management and other connections to the community, along with their general health-care coverage, would be a devastating blow to an already vulnerable population. And it will put a greater burden on hospitals and the criminal-justice system. “The reality is cutting services does not cut demand,” said Ted Williams, CEO of the Arizona Foundation for Behavioral Health and a former state health director. “Individuals who can no longer get services through the state will wind up getting services through emergency departments . . . or they’ll get those services through the Maricopa County jail.”

Uhm. Yeah.

The state of America’s mental health services is horrific as it is. Mentally ill people aren’t likely to be well cared for in a system that requires you to be working for a big company to get decent insurance. Any cutbacks at all will exacerbate the problem. Of course, it’s hard to see how it could get worse than what happened in Tucson, so maybe they figured they’ve already been to the heart of darkness and it’s all uphill from there.

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Bland Ambition Tour

by digby

I don’t know if I can make it through this if this happens:

David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network believes that Pence’s energetic support from both the Religious Right and pro-corporate conservatives may turn him “into the ‘Madonna’ of 2012” and predicts that “Evangelicals who don’t know about him may soon fall in love.”

Mike Pence could become the “Madonna” of 2012. Remember the 1980s movie “Desperately Seeking Susan?” starring the pop icon? (Oy, I may be dating myself.) Well, there is a political movement out there that we might want to start calling, “Desperately Seeking Pence” … [W]e should know in the next couple of weeks what Pence plans to do. If he runs, he becomes a legitimate dark horse with a huge upside to surprise a lot of people. He may be the Mike Huckabee of 2012. Evangelicals who know Pence love him. Evangelicals who don’t know about him may soon fall in love.

One South Carolina legislator claimed that Pence could “lead this nation back from the precipice of socialism where we find ourselves today.”

Mike Pence has long been one of my bete noirs. My skin literally crawls when he comes on TV — he combines the unctuous pretense of a used car salesman with the lugubrious sanctimony of a bankrupt mortician. The idea of having to stare at his oh-so-concerned countenance and listen to his “more-in-sorrow-than-anger” phoniness over the next two years is enough to make me lurch..

Holy Joe is an ass Part XXVII

by digby

Steve Benen:

As part of the same MSNBC segment, Arianna Huffington asked Lieberman to substantiate his claim about Saddam Hussein was working on weapons of mass destruction, a claim even George W. Bush abandoned. The senator replied, “I’m basing it on the so-called Duelfer Report. Charles D-U-E-L-F-E-R conducted the most comprehensive report on behalf of our government.”

When Huffington said there’s nothing in the Duelfer Report to bolster Lieberman’s conclusions, the senator replied, “I don’t think you’ve read it, sweetheart.

He’s an ass for spelling out the name and he’s a sexist ass for calling her sweetheart. But he’s a super-ass for assuming that she hadn’t read the report when he’s the one who obviously hadn’t read it.

It’s not just that he’s an arrogant prick. It’s that he’s completely wrong. As Benen says:

Charles Duelfer found that Iraq did not possess — or have concrete plans to develop — nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. It’s the same thing David Kay concluded, which is the same thing that the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded, which is the same thing the Pentagon concluded. The case is closed, and has been for many years.

All day long I’m hearing about the fact that the liberals ruined everything for poor old Joe and now he can’t win in Connecticut. Really? The fact that he spent 2008 running around the country as John McCain’s houseboy is meaningless?

Good riddance. I’m sure he’ll find a nice sinecure somewhere. Let’s just hope it isn’t in Obama’s cabinet.

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Being Healthy Is An Act Of Terrorism

by digby

TPM has the stupidest story of the day (so far):

First, the Daily Caller’s headline read: “First Lady’s anti-obesity campaign could be causing more pedestrian deaths.” Then, later, they hedged a little:

“Highway safety spokesperson blames pedestrian deaths on first lady’s obesity campaign.”

This, as you might imagine, piqued our interest. Here’s what happened:

This morning, the Governors Highway Safety Association released a report noting that the number of pedestrian deaths has slightly increased. The group, which looked at the first six months of 2010, made two hypotheses as to why: One, that pedestrians and drivers are more distracted by cell phones and the like; and two, that there are simply more pedestrians these days.

“A focus on liveable communities, or ‘get moving’ health and fitness programs may
increase walking and pedestrian-vehicle conflicts,” the report reads.

The Daily Caller and the Washington Examiner jumped on that part of the report, claiming it was an attack on First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign.

It was complete bullshit, but that’s par for the course for the Daily Caller and the Examiner.

I have to say that this jihad against Michelle Obama for trying to fight childhood obesity really shocks me. If it weren’t for the fact that their snotty and juvenile Grizzly Mama was leading the charge against healthy eating I’d think accusing the campaign of killing people because more people are walking was beneath even the GOP.

As far as I’m concerned, agitating against exercise and nutrition has to be the most nihilistic thing they’ve done and that’s saying something. It’s bad enough that they want to launch wars at the drop of a hat or that they don’t care if the food supply is poisoned. But to not give a damn that American kids are sick and getting sicker due to this obesity crisis is just beyond my ken.

But hey — as I wrote the other day, it will certainly solve any niggling problems with social security funding. This generation of Americans (who won’t have decent health care either, if these people have their way) won’t make it to 65, so I guess that’s good news.

Eating vegetables and talking a walk didn’t used to be a political act in this country, but I guess it is now.

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Repeal This

by digby

Everybody is undoubtedly aware of the chutzpah of new House Republicans complaining that they had to go without health insurance for a short period before they were sworn in. “Out of touch” doesn’t even begin to explain it.

But yesterday, they went even further. Every last Republican voted to repeal the Health Care Reforms — but you can count on one hand the number who have similarly rejected the Cadillac Federal health care plan that you and I pay for them to have. Of course, they are very special people and they deserve to be taken care of if they get sick. The rest of us need some “tough love” and have to learn to do with less.

Blue America, Daily Kos, Americans United For Change and Americans for America PAC have gotten together with a coalition of local and state bloggers to try to raise some money to let these wonderful guys and gals’ constituents know how they walk the walk and talk the talk. We think their voters deserve to know that their congressional Representatives think they’re just a little bit more deserving of health care than the nearly 50 million people in this country who are uninsured.

Here’s the radio ad we’ll be running in districts throughout the country.

If you would like to send this pithy little message to voters, you can contribute here.

Howie explains the method to our madness:

If you think this is a worthwhile approach, we’d very much appreciate a contribution to the effort.

It only costs $2,500 per district to run enough of these ads for local media to notice. We know this because Americans United went after Maryland GOP freshman Republican Andy Harris with a radio ad like this back in November. Local media picked up on the ad, and Harris took a big hit for his hypocrisy and cruelty.

Now, we are going to expand this ad buy into other Republican districts. We can easily change the name of the Republican in the ad to make it fit in any district– all we need is the money to run these ads.

Ed Potasnak, the Democrat running against Leonard Lance in NJ-07, and Nicholas Ruiz, the Democrat taking on freshman wingnut Sandy Adams in FL-24 are Blue America’s first two targets. If we can raise more than $5,000 to fund those two, we’ll look for other Republican hypocrites to spotlight.

Click here to contribute to the cause.

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Solidifying Our Losses

by digby

I and others have mentioned before that one of the great untold stories of the last election is the one in which Republicans rand against Democrats for “cutting Medicare.” Aside from “Obama’s socialism” it was their only real issue of the campaign.

(H/t to Dave Johnson at CAF)

After that assault (which was relentless here in California, and I assume every where else)is this any surprise?

President Barack Obama’s apparent willingness to consider cuts in Social Security benefits may be winning him points with Washington elites, but it’s killing him with voters, who see the program as inviolate and may start to wonder what the Democratic Party stands for, if not for Social Security.

That’s the conclusion of three top progressive pollsters who spoke to reporters Wednesday at a briefing sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, the Century Foundation and Demos.

“For the public, cutting benefits is the problem, not the solution,” said Guy Molyneux, a partner at Hart Research Associates.

As a result, the pollsters said that any Democrat seeking elected office in 2012 should be begging Obama not to say anything about Social Security cuts in his State of the Union address later this month.

A post-election poll by Celinda Lake’s Lake Research Partners found that, by a margin of 3 percentage points, Americans now trust Republicans in Congress more than Democrats when it comes to Social Security — surely the first time since the program became a signature issue for the Democratic Party in the 1930s.

The poll found confidence in Democrats on the issue dropping 14 points just since January 2007, accompanied by a 13-point increase for Republicans.

The public favors congressional Republicans over Obama on Social Security by an even larger 6-point margin. Obama’s 26-percent rating is not only less than half Bill Clinton’s (53 percent), it’s even lower than that of George W. Bush (37 percent), whose proposal to privatize the program went down in flames.

It’s hard to overstate how shocking this new dynamic is. In the two previous low points for Democrats — June 1995 and April 2002 — Democrats still had a 10-point advantage on Social Security.

That the public would trust Republicans more on this issue was, until recently, inconceivable.

The pollsters had no doubt that the turnaround stems from statements by Obama and other Democratic leaders expressing their openness to cuts in Social Security. “It’s the rhetoric that says things like, ‘Everything is on the table,'” said Lake. “That’s not how the public feels. This isn’t a policy debate in the public’s mind, this is a core value.”

When Democrats say they’re open to cuts in Social Security, some voters are less drawn to the party, said Stan Greenberg of Democracy Corps.

“This is central to what Democrats do,” he said. “Once you pull back on that, what is it that Democrats believe in, that you want them in office at a time like this?”

And it takes away one of the most potent Democratic arguments against Republicans. Historical GOP hostility to Social Security, Greenberg said, “is a critical part of their vulnerability.”

Greenberg said his surveys show that even in the context of deficit reduction, cutting Social Security benefits is hugely unpopular. “There is no stomach for bringing Social Security in any way into this debate, and it fundamentally damages progressives and Democrats if they bring Social Security into it,” he said.

“It’s a great way to really solidify our losses,” Lake said.

Any Democrats who think that the Republicans will not run “independent” expenditure ads against them for cutting social security are delusional. The senior vote is the GOP’s most reliable age demographic at the moment, what with that strange man in the White House slashing Medicare and all. They will seal the deal if he tries to “fix” social security. I suppose it will even out if Obama can recreate the 08 magic and get all those young people out to work and vote for him with equal enthusiasm. What are the odds of that happening?

Regardless of all that election unpleasantness, it will certainly make some Villagers and wealthy plutocrats happy though, so maybe it’s worth it.

Celinda Lake is correct. This is a core value of the Democratic Party. If they decide to throw this on the fire in the name of appeasing the imaginary bond vigilantes or to prove to the market gods that they really, truly are willing to sacrifice their own people in the name of Austerity, then the party will have pretty much talked itself out of its raison d’etre.

Update: these Third Way centrists can call themselves “progressive” all they want, but it won’t make it so. This “plan” is nothing more than a phase in of social security as a (very) old age welfare program with a side of privatization for young people. If you’re a 55 year old who liked losing all your money in the stock market and real estate crashes, you’ll love this plan.

Read more about why this plan should be dead on arrival.

Update II: Oh, here’s a surprise:

In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday to mark the second anniversary of Obama’s inauguration, 45 percent of voters under 50 say he’s been a failure and 47 percent believe he’s succeeded, compared with a majority — 51 percent — of adults over 50 who think he’s failed and 45 percent saying he’s done well.

“The generation gap that surfaced in the 2008 election persists two years later,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

“Most people who are 50 or older say that Obama has been a failure in office; a plurality of younger Americans think his administration has been a success.”

That’s a funny way to describe those numbers, but whatever. The fact is that people over 50 are the ones who have been financially destroyed in the this economy and don’t have time to make it back again. You get older, you get a little concerned about things like Social Security and Medicare and worry when the whole damned government seems on a crusade to get rid of it.

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