Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Village Wisdom

by digby

MSNBC is flogging a new poll that hasn’t been released yet, with winks and nods and hints all day. Here’s how they are characterizing the Afghanistan question:

Norah O’Donnell: {The president} has a lot on his plate right now, of course, health care and Afghanistan. We have a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll out tonight, I kinow you’re going to be previewing it tonight on NBC news. but can you just bgenerally talk about the mood of the public when it comes to Afghanistan?

Todd: Well, I’ll just say this. Health care and the economy have ben very difficult topics. You ain’t seen nothing yet as far as the politics of dealing with Afghanistan for this president. Because it won’t be surprising, you’ve seen this on other surveys. Politically, this is going to be a tougher sell for the presidents most ardent supporters. What we found in our survey, I don’t want to give away the numbers, but democrats and Republicans are in their respective divides when it comes to issues like sending more troops or not sending more troops., to stay in there to stay and fight or to immediately start an orderly withdrawal. So, we’re seeing the same sort of democratic and Republican divides that we saw three or four years ago on iraq.

Basically it’s remarkable that a lot of these numbers that we are seeing on Afghanistan are very similar that we saw on the pre-surge Iraq days, remember Norah, when that was a very politically divisive time politically in this country on that issue, never mind the actual violent time that was taking place in Iraq.

chatter, chatter about nonsense

Tamryn: how will this change the conversation tomorrow when those numbers come out?

Chuck: Well, I’ll say this, I think there are bigger things that could change the public’s view on Afghanistan. It could be as simple as, the more we learn about this terror pliot, I mean, we don’t know…

Tamryn: …exactly …

Chuck: .. how connected is this terror plot, I mean we don’t know, how connected is this terror plot with, did there, or were there contacts with pakistan, and in Afghanistan, you know connecting all of those, the public pays very close attention and I think we don’t know what’s going to have an impact on public opinion here.

Another thing to remember, when a president makes a significant national security decision, the country rallies around that president, it doesn’t matter which party they are. So, don’t be surprised if these numbers are more fluid than they seem right now.

First of all, note all the assumptions here. The first is that there’s no doubt that Obama is going to escalate and that he’s going to disappoint his most ardent followers. Village CW 101. The president must do what the right and the military wants — always. It’s just a matter of managing the dirty hippies.

The second assumption is that the Republicans are all going to fall in line with whatever the president does decide and I am not convinced that will happen. I think it’s entirely possible that the Republicans are going to oppose the president on two fronts. One will be the McCain faction which will oppose Obama because he isn’t going far enough and the other will be the Beck faction which reflexively opposes everything Obama does. They could all rally around Obama and “help” him escalate the war, but I will be surprised. I have a feeling that a fair number of Republicans will find a good reason to oppose his Afghanistan policy. They have certainly had no problems opposing military action undertaken by Democratic presidents before.

Finally, while I have certainly observed the phenomenon of rallying around the president when the country goes to war, I’ve never understood it to mean that they will rally around any “significant national security decision.” Where does he come up with such nonsense?

If he’s speaking about he political establishment, well, that’s a different story. They pretty much always back any national security decision that results in more blood being shed and the United States being able to metaphorically strut around the world stage with a big, hard helmet. I don’t know for sure what their motives are, but my suspicion is that they vicariously enjoy the martial glory of battles they don’t personally have to fight. (And to them, the only things that are too expensive are those things that directly benefit the American people.) But that’s just a guess. Their motives are far too complicated for mere mortals to fully understand.

In any case, Todd is probably parroting the lazy narrative that’s about to emerge about Afghanistan and without any self-consciousness whatsoever, falsely attribute to the public the attitudes of the Village — as usual. Like all pundits and fatuous gasbags he believes that he is a reflection of public opinion, not a shaper of it. (And when you think about that, it’s a remarkable admission that they truly believe nobody cares what they say about anything.)

The problem is that Todd and his ilk do shape the way the straight news is presented and so his attitudes are quite influential. The public often goes its own way in spite of that, but it’s only because the attitudes of the villagers are so often ridiculously out of step with what Americans actually believe and so their “shaping” of the news doesn’t make sense to average consumers. But the media doesn’t make it easy for Americans to understand their world and make rational assessments about it because people like Chuck Todd are working so hard to push these lazy story lines.

The people are not rising up against Afghanistan out of the usual partisan rancor. Obviously. most of the poeple who are against the war are of the same party as the president who so far, supports it. And a fair number of others are at least ambivalent because of that. Todd’s analysis on every level is nonsensical.

Update: Chris Matthews seems to think that the war in Afghanistan is more immediately “life threatening” to average Americans than the inadequacy of their health security and they probably want the president to stop obsessing over this health care nonsense. I don’t know about you, but I know that I am far more likely to be killed by inadequate health care than I am by the off chance that the Taliban is plotting an attack in Santa Monica. I think there are quite a few of my fellow citizens who are a bit more concerned at the moment about such mundane (to the villagers) topics as the economy and medical coverage.

.

Dissecting The Lizard Brain

by dday

Two researchers have run the data on Jimmy Carter’s contention that race is playing a role in the anger over health care. It’s bookmark-worthy:

Our research favors Carter’s interpretation and adds some hard data to the debate. In fact, the partisan divide today is even more troubling than if it was driven by race alone.

Americans’ views of political issues and their partisan attachments are being increasingly shaped by gut-level worldviews. On one side of many issues are those who see the world in terms of hierarchy, think about problems in black and white terms, and struggle to tolerate difference. On the other are those who favor independence over hierarchy, shades of gray over black-white distinctions, and diversity over sameness.

We call this dividing line an authoritarian one, and we find that what side of the line people fall on explains their positions on a wide ranging set of issues, including race, immigration, gay rights, civil liberties, and terrorism. This is because what lies behind these preferences is a larger difference in worldview, where people understand reality in starkly different ways. This, in turn, leads to rancorous and irreconcilable-seeming political conflicts.

As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks.

Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.

Among whites with above average racial resentment, only 19 percent favored fundamental health care reforms and 57 percent favored the present system. Among those who have below average racial resentment, more than twice as many (45 percent) favored government run health care and less than half as many (25 percent) favored the status quo.

No such relationship between racial attitudes and opinions on health care existed in the mid-1990s during the Clinton effort.

I would say that in general, opposition to any social insurance program for the less fortunate meets head-on with racial animus. Whether the presumed leader of this policy shift is white or black, a substantial portion of those with racial resentment pictures that leader as delivering their tax dollars to the undeserving other, which can be pictured in their minds as a black family, a Hispanic immigrant family, or really anyone who doesn’t share the same features. It’s no accident that opposition to Obama is clustered in the South, given such a reading.

What these professors are really probing is the lizard brain, the tribal identifiers that often bubble to the surface, in unguarded moments, as racism. It’s almost too neat and simple to simply call it racial in intent. It goes much deeper to a visceral resentment, a put-upon persecution complex, this constant paranoia that someone else is getting a better deal, and that such inequity can form the basis of all the nation’s problems. It’s purely an emotional release to explain whatever personal failings or lack of compassion already exists. That this frequently codes racially is a symptom of the relationship between race and class, as well as the other longtime signifiers of identity that have been hard-wired into our brains for centuries.

I found this via DougJ last week, and it really summed up a lot of what I think animates modern conservatism, and it’s not particularly or singularly racial:

“Those who have known him [Cheney] over the years remain astounded by what they describe as his almost autistic indifference to the thoughts and feelings of others. ‘He has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met,’ says John Perry Barlow, his former supporter. Cheney’s freshman-year roommate, Steve Billings, agrees: ‘If I could ask Dick one question, I’d ask him how he could be so unempathetic.’”

There’s an almost studied uncaring. And of course, Randian teaching gave those predisposed to uncaring a way to order their lack of compassion intellectually, to create virtue in selfishness and convince themselves that the less privileged are better off receiving no help from them. This anecdote from Rand (nee Alissa Rosenbaum)’s early life is fascinating and instructive:

Anne C. Heller, in her skillful life of Rand, traces the roots of Rand’s philosophy to an even earlier age. (Heller paints a more detailed and engaging portrait of Rand’s interior life, while Burns more thoroughly analyzes her ideas.) Around the age of five, Alissa Rosenbaum’s mother instructed her to put away some of her toys for a year. She offered up her favorite possessions, thinking of the joy that she would feel when she got them back after a long wait. When the year had passed, she asked her mother for the toys, only to be told she had given them away to an orphanage. Heller remarks that “this may have been Rand’s first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call ‘altruism.’ ” (The anti-government activist Grover Norquist has told a similar story from childhood, in which his father would steal bites of his ice cream cone, labelling each bite “sales tax” or “income tax.” The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.)

These children grew up to want to maintain that state of retarded adolescence, of a belief only in their own self-interest and greed, and Rand built a philosophy around it so they could justify their inhumanity and relieve the burden of their own consciences. They flipped morality on its head and built statues to the virtuous capitalist, and a drive for permanent growth that benefits only himself which is seen in this inverted pyramid as a glory to all mankind. In short, they have no compassion because they are told they have no need for it. It is a philosophy that served masters. And if taken to extremes, it can become profoundly sociopathic, as the desires of the individual trump social norms or conventions.

Is that racial in nature? It’s certainly an argument that benefits the super-wealthy by relieving their guilt, makes it moral to hoard wealth and provides an element of superiority for anyone in the ruling class. That’s definitely tribal. And class and race have become profoundly mixed in this culture. The teabaggers eat up Randian thought because they can easily justify their selfishness and identify a group with which they can hold some level of superiority. There’s a comfort in a common enemy, in a tribal clustering against the other, armed with a philosophy that you can wield as armor to protect yourself from feeling any human emotion about that other’s suffering. They may be the dreaded “populists” who Rand and her ilk would bar the door to the mansion to keep out in the rain; but they can internalize both halves of this at once, especially when they share the same enemies.

These thoughts have taken decades if not hundreds of years to wind through the American lizard brain. It will take perhaps as much time to wind them out. If race is what makes wingers uncomfortable with their own beliefs, then perhaps that’s the proper line of attack. But it’s much deeper than that.

.

Hard Sell

by digby

Here’s a rather sobering article on the perils of using the reconciliation process by Brian Beutler. It’s a complicated undertaking that has some institutional road blocks which make it a difficult undertaking. Aside from the technical difficulties we’ve all discussed, he also reports that the Senate poohbahs are resistant because they will see their fiefdoms threatened. He writes:

Why is there such hesitancy in the Senate to go all the way in reconciliation? Because if the majority party begins passing whatever it wants in reconciliation bills, it would significantly undermine the power of Senate elders. Schmitt says, “If reconciliation became a free-for-all, it’s not just the minority party that would be cut out, the institutional prerogatives of most of the committees other than Budget and Finance would be drastically reduced, especially Appropriations. That’s why, political will or not, there are more than enough Dems who aren’t willing to blow open the process, for institutional reasons.”

What if the Democrats tried anyhow? Well Republicans could become even more obstructive than they already are. With appropriations bills coming up, Republican delays could all but shut down the government. And though the GOP would be taking a huge political risk by going that route, some Democrats aren’t willing to put the country through something that traumatic.

So, they don’t want to endanger their prerogatives and are afraid that it will be too traumatic for the country if the Republicans hold their breath and turn blue on the Senate floor. That’s some inspiring leadership there.

I guess I’m a little bit surprised then to see Beutler characterize liberals as being somehow mistaken in believing that failure to use reconciliation, if necessary, is a capitulation to Republican and industry pressure. It seems to me, by his own reporting, that the liberals are at least partially right in that assessment and now have an even greater reason to believe that these people are sell-outs than before: they are evidently willing to forgo serious health care reform in order to protect their political turf.

His report explains perfectly why liberals should be angry that the Senate is reconciliation to pass decent health care reform, so I wouldn’t be too hopeful about this:

[T]he task for Barack Obama and Harry Reid and the rest is to convince their already frustrated base that they’re not caving to GOP and industry pressure. They have a lot of material to work with, but so far, it’s proving to be a hard sell.

.

“If you spell something wrong, do you really deserve surgery?”

by dday

MoveOn enlists liberal Hollyweird for a good cause for once – defending insurance company CEOs from mean talk and angry comments.

Somewhat paradoxically, MoveOn is holding Sick of Big Insurance rallies in front of multiple insurance company HQs today. Maybe they want to show some solidarity with these poor, henpecked CEOs whose only sin is making a profit off of personal misery. Is that so wrong?

.

Transitioning The Fears

by digby

You have to hand it to the right. They are so varied in their crazy that when one faction wears itself out, there’s always another ready to step up and shift the debate into new wingnut territory (or back again.)

Adele Stan went to the Values Voter Summit this week-end and reports on Alternet about the changing of the guard:

Gathering at the Omni Shoreham in Washington, 1,800 activists and their leaders seemed resigned to being subsumed by the broader Tea Party movement, or rendered irrelevant by it. This year’s conference, sponsored by the political affiliate of the Family Research Council, emphasized matters important to Tea Party leaders: freedom was linked with free enterprise; ominous were warnings offered about a march to socialism; global warming was said to be a good thing; and taxes were deemed to be too high and largely misappropriated. But these messages did not receive nearly the degree of enthusiasm from attendees as the traditional religious right decrees against abortion and same-sex marriage. And despite efforts to tread carefully on issues of race, one of the biggest laugh lines of the conference was the racially charged parable told by Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., about the circumstances faced by Republicans in Congress, which he compared to having to play a ball thrown by a monkey. Yet religious right leaders, who have long played to racial resentment, seem alarmed at how the overt racism of some of the Tea Partiers could harm their own movement — decades in the making — of politicized Christian evangelicals and conservative Catholics.

It would guess that at the very least it would interfere with their moderately successful outreach between the white evangelical community and the black churches. But never fear, the Religious Right didn’t get to its place of prominence by not being politically adept:

“Unfortunately, the very fine people who are the leaders of the Christian right, are responding — they’re in a reactive mode … instead of laying out a long-term vision of victory based on a restoration of constitutional government and adherence to constitutional principles,” Howard Phillips, one of the founders of the religious right, said in an interview I conducted with him on the eve of the Values Voter Summit. So, what’s a religious right leader to do? Step One: Get with the Tea Party program. Step Two: Encourage followers to venerate the Constitution — or the religious right interpretation of it — as a document written by the hand of God, playing into the Tea Party movement’s promotion of certain constitutional amendments and its appropriation of the symbols of the American Revolution. Step Three: Damage-control the Tea Party movement by sending out a message to lay off the overt racism.

I wouldn’t think that last part would have much impact because the people who are using those symbols and language don’t think they are racist in the first place. But the other stuff is probably good advice.

Howard Phillips of the Constitution Party is finally having his day in the sun with the Beckian veneration of the wingnut cartoon constitution and he’s heavily quoted in the piece. He insists that there is no violence in the tea party movement, but that’s cracked. It is an angry movement with violent rhetoric that could break into real violence at any moment. He’s protesting way too much.

Stan goes on to discuss the ways in which the two movements differ:

To the progressive eye, the Tea Party movement and the religious right look much the same. Both movements find their fervor in the anxiety and anger of middle-class, conservative white people who fear their own disempowerment by the changes under way in our culture. The tipping points may vary between the various constituency groups within the two movements, but the operative force is fear of change. The religious right found its footing in opposition to feminism, civil rights and gay rights; the Tea Party movement builds on that list to include fear of the structural change taking place in the world (and there is much to fear): loss of American global hegemony, a struggling economy and the challenge to their idea of American identity as a nation epitomized by white men eager to light the torch of freedom throughout the world. But these two movements are not the same. At the the Washington Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill on the weekend of the Tea Party march, participants flooded the hotel bar, partying loudly and smoked with abandon on the sidewalk outside the hotel. At the Omni Shoreham this weekend, by contrast, the bar was empty, and only occasionally would one find a lone smoker hovering outside the hotel doors. The Tea Party movement is largely secular: when its members invoke the name of God, it is the generalized, civic-religion God of the slogan on our coins. When religious right adherents invoke the name of God, they have someone much more specific in mind: the personal savior who is the crucified Christ, through whom they were “born again.”

I would simplify that formula bu simply observing that the Religious Right operates out of fear of sex, while the Populist Right operates out of fear of race. And when it comes to race and sex there is a lot of overlap in the fevered imagination of the right winger, so I would expect that ultimately most of them will have little problem understanding each other.

Read the whole article. It’s a fascinating look at the current state of the conservative movement’s transition from sanctimony and psychological coercion to anger and violence, which is a rather predictable evolution when you realize that they are losing the argument. They are, after all, the abusive spouses of American society.

.

Playing With Matches

by digby

Dave Neiwert has an excellent piece up at Crooks and Liars tonight rebutting a critique of his book and various and sundry other other things pertaining to eliminationism. In the post he excerpts this speech:

In this country we cherish and guard the right of free speech. We know we love it when we put up with people saying things we absolutely deplore. And we must always be willing to defend their right to say things we deplore to the ultimate degree. But we hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable. You ought to see — I’m sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.

Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that their bitter words can have consequences and that freedom has endured in this country for more than two centuries because it was coupled with an enormous sense of responsibility on the part of the American people.

If we are to have freedom to speak, freedom to assemble, and, yes, the freedom to bear arms, we must have responsibility as well. And to those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, with the promoters of paranoia, I remind you that we have freedom of speech, too, and we have responsibilities, too. And some of us have not discharged our responsibilities. It is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.

If they insist on being irresponsible with our common liberties, then we must be all the more responsible with our liberties. When they talk of hatred, we must stand against them. When they talk of violence, we must stand against them. When they say things that are irresponsible, that may have egregious consequences, we must call them on it. The exercise of their freedom of speech makes our silence all the more unforgivable. So exercise yours, my fellow Americans. Our country, our future, our way of life is at stake.

That was President Bill Clinton after Oklahoma City. The right whines and drools about how that speech was some sort of call for government censorship, but it was no such thing. He was simply pointing out that decent people have a responsibility to call violent, hate filled rhetoric what it is.

He was right. This isn’t about civility. In fact, too many people are far too civil about this. We have a faction in American politics that is once again driving its followers into such hysteria that there is every likelihood that we will see this again:

That didn’t come out of nowhere.

.

Dangerous Amputee

by digby

This is appalling:

The Merced Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division is investigating whether an officer twice used a Taser on an unarmed, wheelchair-bound man with no legs.

The man who was Tasered, Gregory Williams, 40, a double-leg amputee, spent six days in jail on suspicion of domestic violence and resisting arrest, but the Merced County District Attorney’s office hasn’t filed any charges.

Clearly, he didn’t understand the new unspoken “common sense” federal law which says that when in the presence of a police officer, you stop in your tracks, hold your head down, answer every question with a quick “yes sir” and do not move until they give you instructions, lest you get electrocuted on the spot. It has nothing to do with whether or not you present a danger to anyone — it has to do with whether or not the police officer is satisfied with your response, so best be very, very very obsequious and docile whenever you are in the presence of authorities, no matter what the circumstances. Otherwise, this country won’t be free.

There is video at the link.

A handful of residents in Williams’ apartment complex said they witnessed the incident and supported Williams’ charges. A short video clip, shot by a neighbor and obtained by the Sun-Star, shows Williams sitting on the pavement with his pants down, his hands cuffed behind his back.

[…]

Between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, Williams said, he and his wife, 28-year-old Demetrice Shaunte Phifer, were arguing when a marked Merced Police Department patrol car arrived at the couple’s studio apartment.

While one officer spoke with his wife, Williams said, another officer arrived and ordered him, “Go back to your house!”

Williams, who had his 2-year-old daughter Ginni in his lap, said he rolled his wheelchair back to his apartment.

The officer, who’s identified in the police report as John Pinnegar, approached him in the doorway of his apartment. Pinnegar said that his wife had accused him of striking her, which Williams denied.

Shortly afterward, police Sgt. Rodney Court and a worker with Merced County Child Protective Services entered the room, Williams said. “I’m trying to tell him nothing happened. We were just having an argument,” he said.

Pinnegar grabbed William’s 2-year-old daughter from his lap, handing her to the CPS worker. “I said, ‘What are you doing? I haven’t done anything!’ ” Williams said.

Williams said Pinnegar unholstered his Taser, jammed it into his rib cage and shocked him twice. Williams said he fell from his chair onto his stomach on the ground outside his doorway.

While he was down, Williams said, Court put his knee on his neck, and one of the officers then cuffed both of his wrists. At some point after he fell out of his chair, Williams said, his shorts slid down his legs.

With his hands cuffed behind his back, Williams said, he was unable to pull his pants up. He said police left him for five to 10 minutes in that position on the pavement, with his private parts showing as neighbors and onlookers watched.

Williams, a lifelong Merced resident who’s married with three children, said that both his legs were amputated in 2004 after he was diagnosed with deep-vein thrombosis that led to gangrene in both legs.

Doctors amputated both his legs below the knees when he was 34. Now only withered stumps of skin hang where his lower legs once were. He lost his job as a truck driver and now supports himself and his family from a Social Security disability allotment of $1,004 a month.

Obviously they had no choice but to shoot the man full of electricity. Otherwise, he might have kept on showing disrespect for the officers by protesting his innocence and we can’t have that or the whole system will fall apart.

*Obviously, I have no idea if the man hit his wife and if so, it was obviously wrong. But two wrongs don’t make a right — and tasering an unarmed man in a wheelchair is completely unnecessary in order to take him into custody.

And, by the way, the man spent six days in jail before they released him without filing charges.

.

Health Care Update

by dday

Looks like lawmakers are gradually expanding the puny subsidies in the Baucus health care bill:

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, said Monday that he would modify his health care bill to provide more generous assistance to moderate-income Americans, to help them buy insurance.

In addition, Mr. Baucus said he would make changes to reduce the impact of a proposed tax on high-end health insurance policies.

Mr. Baucus, Democrat of Montana, disclosed his plans in an interview a day before the committee is to begin meeting to debate and vote on the sweeping legislation, which is intended to remake the nation’s health care system and guarantee insurance for millions of Americans.

Mr. Baucus said the changes showed that he had heard the criticism of his bill from colleagues, who asserted that many people would be required to buy insurance who could not afford it — even with federal subsidies to help defray the cost of premiums.

“Affordability — that, I think, is the primary concern,” Mr. Baucus said. “We want to make sure that if Americans have to buy insurance, it’s affordable.”

Affordability to Baucus means reducing the limit of policies from 13% of total income to 12% of total income, through subsidies up to 400% of the poverty level. That’s at least a start, though still short of what’s in the House bills.

As it says above, responding to changes Baucus will reduce the impact of taxing insurance companies, basically by raising the threshold when plans start to hit the tax. But this is paradoxical. Raising the subsidy levels costs money. Raising the tax threshold takes away money. Lawmakers want the bill to protect more people on affordability while taking away some of the money that would pay for those protections. There is a late and familiar entry here, however, and that’s Jay Rockefeller’s idea to add back in a variation of what the Obama Administration sought all along:

In fairness to Rockefeller, he’s got some ideas along those lines.

He’s said many times he would be perfectly happy with the sort of financing they have in the House–i.e., a straight-up tax on the rich. And while such a scheme might have trouble in the Senate, Rockefeller is trying gamely to intorduce a more scaled-down version.

Among the amendments he’s introduced for this week’s Finance Committee hearings is a proposal to cap the deductability of charitable contributions at 35 percent–which would, in effect, reduce the deductability of contributions that very, very wealthy people make to charities. It seems to be a version of what President Obama proposed at the beginning of this process, an idea that still has a lot of merit even though many Senators rejected it out of hand.

Would they reject it again? Maybe not in scaled-back form, which might be enough. In the end, the most likely solution to the funding problem is some sort of combination strategy–a tax that hits expensive health benefits, a tax that hits the wealthy, and, maybe, some sort of tax sugary drinks or tobacco. The new Rockefeller proposal, according to Capitol Hill sources familiar with it, will probably raise about $90 to $100 billion–which is a decent chunk of change and could pay for a lot of new subsidies.

The President wanted to roll the charitable deduction credit back to 28% – exactly where it was during the Reagan Administration, at a savings to the government that could easily top $300 billion over ten years, enough to make the subsidies big enough to make health care truly affordable for everyone. And it would only hit those who make enough money to take advantage of the charitable deduction to begin with. It’s really a no-brainer.

Of course, there are more areas of conflict in the bill beyond affordability and financing. There are various amendments in the Senate Finance Committee to add a public option, as well as Olympia Snowe’s amendment to add a trigger, and a weak trigger to boot. Obama went on the record saying “I absolutely do not believe that (the public option is) dead,” although his close colleague Dick Durbin said today that only a “variation” of it could make it through the Senate. Nancy Pelosi continued her public statements that the public option must be included to pass the House, though House liberals, wary of a bait and switch, asked the Speaker to stand with them when the bill reaches a conference committee. Jerry Nadler reiterated the seriousness of the threat from the progressive side:

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said Monday he is optimistic that any healthcare bill from the House will include a public (or “government-run”) option, and are undertaking a whip count to test lawmakers’ commitment to that measure.

“The public option is still very much alive only because the progressives have stood together and held our ground and said that, regardless of what the President or Leadership says, we won’t vote for any bill [without] a public option,” Nadler said in a chat online hosted by the liberal AMERICAblog.

Nadler told the blog that 60 lawmakers had pledged to vote against any healthcare bill lacking the public plan, and that liberal Democrats are “undertaking a whip count now to see how firm these pledges are.”

While affordability and financing may come to some compromise position that is at least passable, the statements above show that there’s no such middle ground for the public option. This may vex the White House, but they will eventually have to show their cards.

.

TMCP To The Rescue

by digby

Todd Gitlin muses on the current state of GOP lunacy and points out that their main hope is for Bush levels of Obama failure. But he sounds a cautionary alarm, noting that in spite of all the hoohah about progressive realignment, the margins remain frighteningly small:

Read this fine piece of 2008 campaign analysis by Andrew Gelman and John Sides; and also the various comments, and Gelman’s and Sides’ responses. Gelman and Sides on 2008:

[V]oting behavior did not change that much. Obama did win states that Democrats had not won in a while, and demographic trends suggest that Democrats have a chance to win those states in the future. But there were only small shifts in state-level vote margins. Two thousand-eight looked a lot like 2004 and did not signal any wholesale change in partisan loyalties or party coalitions. Moreover, it does not appear that Obama “realigned” specific groups of voters. The widespread fixation on carving the electorate into its constituent groups misses the crucial fact that Obama did better than Kerry in nearly every possible demographic: rich, poor, white, black, Protestant, Catholic, men, women….Voters of all stripes were displeased with the economy and President Bush and so voted for the opposing party’s nominee.

Then the Republican strategy is nothing more or less than this: to make sure that Obama fails. For the GOP to become a national party, Obama’s record must be littered with Waterloo moments. The years of the bloating financial bubble must be forgotten, and the jobless recovery pinned on Obama. The only health reform that passes must be one that seems to hurt more people than it helps. The under-30 voters who went for Obama by 2-1 must be scared witless.

This sounds right to me. It’s hard to know if the political zeitgeist will be that bad, but what’s most frightening about the possibility is that public opinion tends to lag quite a bit behind the reality. So even if things turn around pretty quickly now, and health care reform is actually beginning to work, it may not be in time for people to notice before they vote.

Gitlin goes on to note the one thing for which we can be grateful: the utter dearth of decent Republican candidates. Thank goodness for that, right? Well, I’m not so sure about that. In response to my post this morning on Afghanistan, reader Sleon writes in with an op-ed by The Man Called Petraeus. He adds this:

Were Obama to summon the courage and good sense to reply to the generals, “Bullshit, there is no winning Afghanistan” and order a withdrawal, the Right will make the flap over the Missile Defense cancellation seem like a storm in a teacup and we’ll be hearing a lot about abandoning Western Civilization. If he doesn’t, we’ll spend billions for years, and a lot more people will die. Either way look for a “Draft Petraeus” movement to surface within the Republican party for 2012 and this man is smarter than MacArthur and not so principled as Eisenhower.

Yup. Both dday and I have been tracking that possibility for a while and I would guess it’s getting more likely. (If he retires soon, I’m going to take out a bet.) The scenario is that a nation battered by long term economic woes and an expensive but low level war, blames both parties for their inability to fix their plight (all the while screaming about government interference!) and gratefully turns to a straight shooting military man who “knows how to get things done.” (In another era, it might have been a businessman, but they are out of fashion these days.) TMCP is the obvious guy. He’s very, very good.

.

The Three Faces Of Glenn

by dday

Mitt Romney went to the Values Voters Summit and slammed the bailouts this weekend, after offering them support not just at the time, but at the Conservative Political Action Conference back in February.

So what. Mitt Romney flip-flopped on an issue? Call the Guinness people, I think he’s actually set the record now.

No, the real interesting trip down memory lane today is that Glenn Beck favored the bailouts a year ago, when TARP was being debated in Congress:

But these are anything but normal times. I thought about it an awful lot this weekend, and while it takes everything in me to say this, I think the bailout is the right thing do.

The “REAL STORY” is the $700 billion that you’re hearing about now is not only, I believe, necessary, it is also not nearly enough, and all of the weasels in Washington know it.

Now THAT is an interesting reversal. Before popping up on Fox News and into every teabagger’s hearts, Beck basically ran a Morning Zoo-type radio show and had an unremarkable stint on CNN Headline News. He definitely had an affinity for right-wing radicals and some of their craziest beliefs, but it was scattershot, and at odds with his deep statist leanings and love for George Bush’s tactics in the war on terror. He repeatedly called Ron Paul “a crackpot on so many issues” and prefaced every discussion of him by saying “I don’t agree with Ron Paul on everything–not by a long shot.” Here’s Beck essentially calling Ron Paul supporters terrorists:

“It’s really not the way I would go, tying in my movement with a historical terrorist attack, especially in post-9/11 America.”

This is the guy who put together a rally on September the 12th.

Beck saw a movement stirring on the furthest reaches of the right and got out in front of it. Before that he was pretty firmly behind his beloved President in bailing out the top banks.

The difference is that now, the political energy on the right is with the teabaggers, and it makes sense to Beck to capitalize on that energy. But he has nothing approaching a coherent worldview. Whatever gets the most eyeballs.

I wonder if libertarians will take a closer look at the guy who has appointed himself the public face of their movement.

…Here’s a Paul supporter video that has the very clips of Beck supporting the bailout:

This look at the early life of Beck is also fascinating.

.