Here’s an interesting article from a single payer advocate about the “bait and switch” on the public plan, which says that although the original idea of a public plan might have accomplished the cost savings and reform that it promised, what’s coming out of the HELP Committee and the House is a watered down version that won’t accomplish any of it.
I don’t disagree with a lot of this, although I do think that some of it is being willfully naive about the strategy. As TeddyKennedy says, the most important thing is to get a public plan by hook or crook and then expand it. But I would love to know why this fellow and others like him believe that, all things being equal (the same presidential campaign, the same economic conditions) single payer could have been sold more effectively than a public plan. If the medical industrial complex pulled out all the stops with this far less radical change — and managed to successfully erode support for reform already — is it reasonable to think they would have been stunned into paralysis if Obama had introduced a real government run program?
I don’t think there’s any question about that. Could the Democrats have put single payer on the table as an opening gambit and perhaps built more support for a public plan? Yes. They made a tactical decision not to. But that has no bearing on whether or not single payer was a feasible position in its own right.
I would certainly prefer single payer — just expand Medicare and the VA to everyone and call it a day — but I’m not married to the idea. (I’m married to universal health care and if there are other ways to attain that, then I’m open to it.) I just don’t understand why anyone thinks there was any kind of mandate for such a plan — or that there has been any kind of grassroots, bottom-up effort to build one over the past 16 years when the Clinton plan crashed on many of the same shoals the current one is heading toward. There was certainly no demand for this during the last presidential campaign, despite the fact that the crisis was well known and plans were discussed constantly.
This reform debate has been going on for 60 years now and every time an attempt to do it fails, liberals purse their lips and say the plan wasn’t sweeping enough. We say that no reform is better than reform that continues to allow insurance companies to exist anyway and comfort ourselves with the notion that single payer will be inevitable the next time. And then the politicians suffer from their political failure and get wary of tackling the issue again — and we go back to complaining among ourselves for another 20 years until another president gets an opening for reform and the same thing happens.
This person actually seems to believe that if the current legislation crashes and burns that all the politicians have to do is brush themselves off and go back to the drawing board and we’ll get a single payer plan in 2010. That is a fantasy. It does not work that way and anyone who has observed politics in this country for more than five minutes knows this. The politicians will learn their lesson about failed reform — again — and that will be that.
At this point the situation is so grave that taking another 20 years to build that single payer mandate is an untenable position. The economics as well as the moral necessity argue for doing whatever is possible. But, if you nonetheless believe that it’s better to have no reform at all then go ahead and agitate for this plan to fail. Maybe this time, in 20 years things will be so horrible that they won’t be able to avoid enacting single payer. Heck, maybe we can come back to it in only eight years this time — if Republicans don’t come back to power that is.
but if you take that position, I would certainly hope that at the very least, if this push fails, everyone who has been holding out for single payer will not sit around and congratulate themselves on their victory but instead immediately devote their lives with single minded focusfor as long as it takes to building that mandate for single payer because that’s what it’s going to take. Otherwise, it simply won’t happen.
Sometimes, you see a little kicker on the evening news that puts everything into perspective. Such was the discovery this past Monday that an “object” has recently bombarded the planet Jupiter. As of this writing, experts are not sure if it was a comet, an asteroid, or whatever-but it was a doozey. By initial accounts, the impact area is nearly the size of the Earth. I’m no astronomer, but that is one big-ass crater. It just makes our silly little concerns about religion, politics, war and commerce all seem so…silly, dunnit?
At any rate, the entertainment value of Armageddon (hey-there’s an upside to everything) has certainly not been lost on filmmakers over the years, whether it is precipitated by vengeful deities, comets, meteors, aliens, plagues or mankind’s curious propensity for continuing to seek new and improved ways of ensuring its own mass destruction. With that joyful thought in mind, I’ve assembled my Top 10 End of the World Movies, each with a suggested co-feature (make it a Theme Night!). As per usual, I am presenting the list alphabetically, in no particular preferential order. So enjoy, er…while you still can.
Hal Hartley’s visually stylish, post-modernist re-imagining of Armageddon as an existential boardroom soap opera may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but I find it oddly compelling. Set on New Year’s Eve, 1999, the story joins a Yuppified Jesus (Martin Donovan) as he jets in to New York with his personal assistant, Magdalena (British alt-rocker P.J. Harvey) in tow (they check in to their hotel as “Mr. and Mrs. DW Griffith”). This is anything but your typical business trip, as J.C. is in town to do Dad’s bidding re: the um, Day of Judgment. The kid has his doubts, however about all this “divine vengeance crap”. His corporate rival, Satan (Thomas Jay Ryan) is also on hand to do hostile takeovers of as many souls as he can during the world’s final few hours. Although it is ostensibly not designed as a “comedy”, I found the idea of Jesus carrying the Book of Life around on his laptop pretty goddam funny (“Do you want to open the 5th Seal? Yes or Cancel”). Clocking in at just 63 minutes, it may be more akin to a high concept one-act play than a fully fleshed out film narrative, but it’s a thought-provoking ride all the same.
Written and directed by Val Guest, this cerebral mix of conspiracy a-go-go and sci-fi from the Cold War era is a precursor to the X-Files, and has always been a personal favorite of mine. Nuclear testing by the U.S. and Soviets triggers a mysterious and alarming shift in the Earth’s climate. As London’s weather turns more weirdly tropical by the hour, a Daily Express reporter (Peter Stenning) begins to suspect that the British government is not being 100% forthcoming on the possible fate of the world. Along the way, Stenning enjoys some steamy scenes with his love interest (sexy Janet Munro). The film is more noteworthy for its smart, snappy patter than its run-of-the-mill f/x, but still makes for a compelling “end of the world” story. Co-starring the great Leo McKern!
“Mein fuhrer! I can walk!” Although we have yet (knock on wood) to experience the global thermonuclear annihilation that ensues following the wheelchair-bound Dr. Strangelove’s joyous (if short-lived) epiphany, so many other depictions in Stanley Kubrick’s seriocomic masterpiece about the propensity for men in power to eventually rise to their own level of incompetence have since come to pass, that you wonder why the filmmakers even bothered to make all this shit up. In case you are one of the three people reading this who have never seen the film, it’s about an American military base commander who goes a little funny in the head (you know…”funny”) and sort of launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Hilarity (and oblivion) ensues. You will never see a cast like this again: Peter Sellers (absolutely brilliant, playing three major characters), George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, James Earl Jones and Peter Bull (who can be seen breaking character as the Russian ambassador and cracking up during the scene where Strangelove’s prosthetic arm seems to take on a mind of its own). There are so many quotable lines, that you might as well bracket the entire screenplay (by Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George) with quotation marks. I never tire of this film.
The belated 2005 adaptation of satirist Douglas Adams’ classic sci-fi radio-to-book-to TV series made a lot of old school fans (like me) a little twitchy at first, but director Garth Jennings does an admirable job of condensing the story down to an entertaining feature length film. It’s the only “end of the world” scenario I know of where the human race buys it as the result of bureaucratic oversight (the Earth is to be “demolished” for construction of a hyperspace highway bypass; unfortunately, the requisite public notice is posted in an obscure basement-on a different planet). Adams (who died in 2001) was credited as co-screenwriter (with Karey Kirkpatrick); but I wonder if he had final approval, as the wry “Britishness” of some of the key one liners from the original series have been dumbed down. Still, it’s a quite watchable affair, thanks to the enthusiastic cast, the imaginative special effects and (mostly) faithful adherence to the original ethos.
A profoundly moving low-budget wonder from writer/director/star Don McKellar. The story intimately focuses on several Toronto residents and how they choose to spend (what they know to be) their final 6 hours. You may recognize McKellar from his work with director Atom Egoyan. He must have been taking notes, because as a director, McKellar has inherited Egoyan’s quiet, deliberate way of drawing you straight into the emotional core of his characters. Fantastic ensemble work from Sandra Oh, Genevieve Bujold, Callum Keith Rennie, Tracy Wright and a rare acting appearance by director David Cronenberg. Although generally somber in tone, there are some laugh-out-loud moments, funny in a wry, gallows-humor way. The powerful final scene packs an almost indescribably emotional wallop. You know you’re watching a Canadian version of the Apocalypse when the #4 song on the “Top 500 of All Time” is by… Burton Cummings!
Depending on your view of the “half-empty/half-full” paradox, this is either an “end of the world” film for romantics, or the Perfect Date Movie for fatalists. Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham both give winning performances as a musician and a waitress who Meet Cute at L.A.’s La Brea Tar Pits. But before they can hook up for their first hot date, the musician inadvertently stumbles onto a fairly reliable hot tip that Los Angeles is about to get hosed…in a major way. The resulting “ticking clock” scenario is a real nail-biter. This modestly budgeted, 90-minute sleeper offers more genuine heart-pounding excitement (and much more believable characters) than any bloated Hollywood disaster epic from the likes of a Michael Bay or a Roland Emmerich. Puzzlingly, writer-director Steve De Jarnatt stopped doing feature films after this 1988 gem (his only other film was the guilty pleasure Cherry 2000); opting instead for TV work (it probably pays better!).
Originally an “American Playhouse” presentation on PBS, the film was released to theatres and garnered a well-deserved Best Actress nomination for Jane Alexander (she lost to Shirley MacLaine). Director Lynne Littman takes a low key, deliberately paced approach, but pulls no punches. Alexander, her husband (William DeVane) and three kids live in sleepy Hamlin, California, where the afternoon cartoons are interrupted by a news flash that a number of nuclear explosions have occurred in New York. Then there is a flash of a whole different kind when nearby San Francisco (where DeVane has gone on a business trip) receives a direct strike. There is no exposition on the political climate that precipitates the attacks; a wise decision by the filmmakers because it helps us zero in on the essential humanistic message of the film. All of the post-nuke horrors ensue, but they are presented sans the histrionics and melodrama that informs many entries in the genre. The fact that the nightmarish scenario unfolds so deliberately, and amidst such everyday suburban banality, is what makes it all so believably horrifying and difficult to shake off.
This 1985 New Zealand import has built up a cult following over the years. This is one of those films that are difficult to synopsize without risking spoilers, so I will tread lightly for the uninitiated. Bruno Lawrence (Smash Palace) delivers a tour de force performance; particularly in the first third of the film (basically a one-man show). He plays a scientist who may have had a hand in a government research project mishap that has apparently wiped out everyone on Earth except him. The plot thickens when he discovers that there are at least two other survivors-a man and a woman. The three-character dynamic is reminiscent of a 1959 nuclear holocaust tale called The World, the Flesh and the Devil, but it’s safe to say that the similarities end there. By the time you reach the mind-blowing finale, you’ll find yourself closer to Andrei Tartovsky territory (Solaris, The Mirror). Director Geoff Murphy never topped this effort; although his 1992 film Freejack is worth a peek (featuring Mick Jagger as a time-traveling bounty hunter!).
What’s the scariest monster of them all? It’s the one you cannot see. I’ve always considered this 1971 Robert Wise film to be the most faithful Michael Crichton book-to-screen adaptation. A team of scientists race the clock to save the world from a deadly virus from outer space that reproduces itself at an alarming speed. With its atmosphere of claustrophobic urgency (all the scientists are ostensibly trapped in a sealed underground laboratory until they can find a way to destroy the microbial “intruder”) it could be seen as a precursor to Alien. It’s a nail-biter from start to finish. Nelson Gidding adapted the script from Crichton’s novel. The 2008 TV movie version was a real snoozer, IMHO.
There’s a brand new star in the sky, with its own orbiting planet! There’s good news and bad news regarding this exciting discovery. The good news: You don’t need a telescope in order to examine them in exquisite detail. The bad news: See “the good news”. That’s the premise of this involving 1951 sci-fi yarn about an imminent collision between said rogue sun and the Earth. The scientist who makes the discovery makes an earnest attempt to warn world leaders, but is ultimately dismissed as a Chicken Little. Undaunted, he undertakes a privately-funded project to build an escape craft that can only carry several dozen of the best and the brightest to safety. Recalling Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, the film examines the dichotomous conflict of human nature in extreme survival situations, which helps this one rise above the cheese of many other 1950s sci-fi flicks (with the possible exception of a clunky Noah’s Ark allusion). It sports pretty decent special effects for its time; especially depicting a flooded NYC (it was produced by the legendary George Pal).
One more example of the folly of allowing the deficit hawks to define the parameters of the debate:
On Saturday, the Congressional Budget Office said the proposal to give an independent panel the power to keep Medicare spending in check would only save about $2 billion over 10 years- a drop in the bucket compared to the bill’s $1 trillion price tag.
“In CBO’s judgment, the probability is high that no savings would be realized … but there is also a chance that substantial savings might be realized. Looking beyond the 10-year budget window, CBO expects that this proposal would generate larger but still modest savings on the same probabilistic basis,” CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf wrote in a letter to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on Saturday.
I have to blame the Democrats for this. They spent the last 25 years bowing and scraping to the Republicans over balanced budgets like a bunch of 50s era housewives answering to a domineering husband (and then stood by idly as their husbands blew the family savings on gambling and hookers.) They are also to blame for failing to properly explain that the “savings” from health care reform was going to be seen in the system as a whole, not necessarily the government portion of it, which would likely be realized later. It’s complicated, but at the very least they should not have paid obeisance to all these fiscal scolds and deficit hawks the way they did. It’s a little self-defeating when you are proposing a new program that was always going to cost money in the early years. I don’t know how they ever hoped to finesse this.
Having said that, there are reasons to be skeptical of the CBO’s assessment.
The administration is a strong proponent of these reforms, but the challenge lies in pleasing the CBO — which finds savings by following Potter Stewart rule life: “I know it when I see it.” However, since the MedPAC-like proposal is predicated on the President accepting its recommendations and Congress not voting them down, (and MedPAC is only required to not “increase in the aggregate level of net expenditures under the Medicare program,”) the CBO — which rarely defines the criteria of savings — is unlikely to “see” savings.
The Bush administration basically told the CBO to take a hike when it came out with numbers they didn’t like. If this were the area where Obama decided to follow in its footsteps instead of indefinite detention and state secrets, we’d all be better off.
Obviously the deficit is a concern. But it’s a far greater concern to bond traders and other masters of the universe than it is to average citizens. The savings realized over the years by the reforms put in place today, plus higher taxes (which are not, contrary to popular myth, a sign of Armageddon) and lower premiums and out of pocket costs, would allow the US to convert to a system that delivers the kind of health care at the kind of cost that other industrialized nations have. Which is to say a much better system for less money overall.
But Pete Peterson doesn’t want that and he and his friends have created a sacred shibboleth of the term “deficit” which is used to elicit the same kind of fearful pavlovian response as the word “terrorism.” And as with terrorism, all the Republicans have to do is breathe the word and the Democrats start sputtering and running for cover.
The Big Money Boyz (who, contrary to certain cheap shot artists’ little gibes, I have been on to for oh, a few decades now) geared up their deficit talk as the Bush administration came to an end and they are now back to working comfortably in tandem with the conservative movement (which they own outright as opposed to the Democratic Party in which they only hold a controlling interest) to destroy even the slightest movement toward health care reform. The village, like a bunch of squealing little pigs in a puddle of mud are happy to help them by being willfully obtuse about the whole thing.
The sad truth is that the Democratic majority still rests on conservative propaganda and until somebody seriously challenges their ideology, we are going to be battling these fiscal phantoms. As dday elegantly put it the other day, America is worth paying for . Maybe somebody ought to start asking these so-called patriots why they don’t agree with that.
Update: White House responds:
Peter R. Orszag, Director
This morning, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed proposals to shift more decision-making out of politics and toward a body like the Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC) put forward by the Administration. CBO noted that this type of approach could lead to significant long-term savings in federal spending on health care and that the available evidence implies that a substantial share of spending on health care contributes little, if anything, to the overall health of the nation. This supports what President Obama has said all along: we can reduce waste and unnecessary spending without reducing quality of care and benefits. In part because legislation under consideration already includes substantial savings in Medicare over the next decade, CBO found modest additional medium-term savings from this proposal — $2 billion over 10 years. The point of the proposal, however, was never to generate savings over the next decade. (Indeed, under the Administration’s approach, the IMAC system would not even begin to make recommendations until 2015.) Instead, the goal is to provide a mechanism for improving quality of care for beneficiaries and reducing costs over the long term. In other words, in the terminology of our belt-and-suspenders approach to a fiscally responsible health reform, the IMAC is a game changer not a scoreable offset.
With regard to the long-term impact, CBO suggested that the proposal, with several specific tweaks that would strengthen its operations, could generate significant savings. (The potential modifications included items such as providing mandatory funding for the council, rather than having the council rely on the annual appropriations cycle, and requiring independent verification of the expected reductions in program spending rather than relying only on the Medicare actuaries for such verification, along with other suggestions, such as including an across-the-board reduction in payments as a fallback mechanism if the council did not produce proposals that generated adequate savings.) And if you look back at recent history, one can see why an empowered advisory council would be useful. For example, for the better part of this decade, MedPAC has recommended reducing overpayments to insurance companies for Medicare Advantage plans – to equate those payments with the cost of covering the same beneficiary under traditional Medicare. Yet, nothing happened, costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. We can’t afford that type of inertia.
The bottom line is that it is very rare for CBO to conclude that a specific legislative proposal would generate significant long-term savings so it is noteworthy that, with some modifications, CBO reached such a conclusion with regard to the IMAC concept.
A final note is worth underscoring. As a former CBO director, I can attest that CBO is sometimes accused of a bias toward exaggerating costs and underestimating savings. Unfortunately, parts of today’s analysis from CBO could feed that perception. For example, and without specifying precisely how the various modifications would work, CBO somehow concluded that the council could “eventually achieve annual savings equal to several percent of Medicare spending…[which] would amount to tens of billions of dollars per year after 2019.” Such savings are welcome (and rare!), but it is also the case that (for good reason) CBO has restricted itself to qualitative, not quantitative, analyses of long-term effects from legislative proposals. In providing a quantitative estimate of long-term effects without any analytical basis for doing so, CBO seems to have overstepped.
They can’t ignore these headlines coming from places like Politico and try to just spin it out with verbiage. The Village doesn’t care about the details, they care about Chuck Todd’s “political reality” and they are getting very excited over the prospect of Obama’s Waterloo. The White House is going to have to fight that up front.
Reading this thing about the Tanks of Lackawanna, something has become clear to me that wasn’t before: the excesses of the Bush administration, the war, the torture, the wiretapping, were the result of compromises between the sociopathic Cheney faction and the merely dull and incompetent remainder of the administration, including the president.
“Ok, Dick, now don’t get crazy. We can’t send tanks into New York. Can you meet us halfway here? How about we just send tanks into Bagdad? Would that be good enough?”
It’s possible that Cheney did this on purpose, but I suspect he just went for it in all circumstances and got away with as much as he could. The president and his closest advisors, being boobs, thought they were being tough by denying Cheney his most outrageous proposals and only giving him “half a loaf.”
I think when the history is written, the most astonishing thing is that the Vice President of the United States, a man who chose himself for the job as second in command to a childlike fool installed by his father’s Supreme Court appointees, managed to get away with all he got away with. Perhaps even more astonishing is, as dday points out, the fact that president’s apologists are now trying to sell him as some kind of brave constitutional guardian for stopping Cheney from doing worse that what he did. Leadership, Republican style.
I think this proves that our vaunted system may have a few little holes in it, don’t you?
This is the second story in a week about how noble George W. Bush averted disaster. First he stuck to his principles about honesty and refused to pardon Scooter Libby (who he did already commute, incidentally, somehow that didn’t make it into the paean of an article). Today we learn he was all that stood between us and tanks rolling down the streets:
Top Bush administration officials in 2002 debated testing the Constitution by sending American troops into the suburbs of Buffalo to arrest a group of men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials.
Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.
Mr. Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force.
A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.
The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.
It’s not that I disagree that this was brought up as an option, it’s the positioning of Bush as the defender of the Constitution that kind of galls me. Cheney was the Constitution’s chief beta-tester (“testing the Constitution” is quite a turn of phrase, no?), and considering the wealth of other illegal actions, all justified like this one by at-the-ready memos from John Yoo, I just doubt that Bush really made these decisions, even if he felt like he did.
Frankly, all this dumping on Dick seems like part of the Bush Legacy Project to me. While Fourthbranch has been ready for his closeup throughout the Obama Administration – right up until the moment that Eric Holder started talking seriously about prosecutions that didn’t involve him, that is, then he slithered back into the undisclosed location – Bush has kept a low profile in Dallas, gave a couple speeches, told stories about walking his dog and being jus’ folks, and one by one all of these articles showing how he wasn’t SO bad – he didn’t want to use the military in American cities, after all! – keep popping up, using anonymous sources. It’s a nice kickoff for the library.
Meanwhile, there is an important component to all of this, namely, the stated reason why the authority to use military force was sought:
Former officials said the 2002 debate arose partly from Justice Department concerns that there might not be enough evidence to arrest and successfully prosecute the suspects in Lackawanna. Mr. Cheney, the officials said, had argued that the administration would need a lower threshold of evidence to declare them enemy combatants and keep them in military custody.
Earlier that summer, the administration designated Jose Padilla an enemy combatant and sent him to a military brig in South Carolina. Mr. Padilla was arrested by civilian agencies on suspicion of plotting an attack using a radioactive bomb.
(This shows once again how the construction of Bush as a savior of the Constitution is false – he USED the powers granted by Yoo to designate Padilla an enemy combatant.)
So because of concerns that the evidence was weak, Cheney wanted to use “a lower threshold of evidence,” and denote the Lackawanna Six enemy combatants to keep them outside the criminal justice system. We’ve gotten rid of the enemy combatants term, but not really the thinking of getting around the standards of evidence when dealing with terrorism suspects. While the report on detention policy and Guantanamo Bay has been delayed a number of months, in the preliminary report, we see the seeds of a three-tiered system of justice based on the amount of evidence gathered, altering the due process granted to ensure that the government can continue to confine anyone it captured relating to the so-called war on terror. As Glenn Greenwald writes today, in reaction to the NYT article:
All of this underscores why it is so important to vigorously oppose the efforts of the Obama administration (a) to continue many of the radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism programs and even to implement new ones (preventive detention, military commissions, extreme secrecy policies, warrantless surveillance, denial of habeas corpus) and (b) to endorse the core Orwellian premise that enables all of that (i.e., the “battlefield” is anywhere and everywhere; the battle against Terrorism is a “War” like the Civil War or World War II and justifies the same powers). By itself, the extreme injustice imposed by our Government on the individuals subjected to such tyrannical powers (i.e., those held in cages for years without charges or any prospect for release) should be sufficient to compel firm opposition. But the importance of these issues goes far beyond that. Even if the original intention is to use these powers in very limited circumstances and even for allegedly noble purposes (“only” for Guantanamo detainees who were tortured, “only” for people shipped to Bagram, “only” for the Most Dangerous Terrorists), it’s extremely dangerous to implement systems and vest the President with powers that depart from, and violently betray, our core precepts of justice […]
Those are the stakes when it comes to debates over Obama’s detention, surveillance and secrecy policies. To endorse the idea that Terrorism justifies extreme presidential powers in these areas is to ensure that we permanently embrace a radical departure from our core principles of justice. It should come as no surprise that once John Yoo did what he was meant to do — give his legal approval to a truly limitless presidency, one literally unconstrained even by the Bill of Rights, even as applied to American citizens on U.S. soil — then Dick Cheney and David Addington sought to use those powers (in the Buffalo case) and Bush did use them (in the case of Jose Padilla). That’s how extreme powers work: once implemented, they will be used, and used far beyond their original intent — whether by the well-intentioned implementing President or a subsequent one with less benign motives. That’s why it’s so vital that such policies be opposed before they take root.
Those Presidents who fail to show respect and deference for the system of justice that has held over two centuries and more, even if they do not use the powers granted to them, set in motion a process to devolve that system. The precedents set by the Bush Administration, and potentially the Obama Administration, will have a lasting impact. So pardon me if I don’t send a thank you note over to the 43rd President for not ordering an up-armored Humvee through a Buffalo suburb.
When Sen. Lindsey Graham announced his support for Sonia Sotomayor this week, right-wing radio talk show host Mark Levin said it was a sign that Graham is “unreliable … as a thinker and a leader.”
Wendy Long, counsel for the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network, called it proof that Graham “still lacks courage, statesmanship and an understanding of the Constitution and rule of law.”
“May his antics get the attention they richly deserve.”
The response from Graham: Enjoy life in the minority.
In an interview with POLITICO Thursday, the South Carolina Republican defended his decision to back Sotomayor by laying out a broad critique of conservative activists who push “ideological purity” and refuse to cooperate with a Democratic Congress and White House.
“If we chase this attitude … that you have to say ‘no’ to every Democratic proposal, you can’t help the president ever, you can’t ever reach across the aisle, then I don’t want to be part of the movement because it’s a dead-end movement,” Graham said.
“I have no desire to be up here in an irrelevant status. I’m smart enough to know that this country doesn’t have a problem with conservatives. It has a problem with blind ideology. And those who are ideological-driven to a fault are never going to be able to take this party back into relevancy.”
Uhm no. This country has a problem with conservatives Huck. Don’t kid yourself. And you are one of them.
And the country, especially the Hispanic community, isn’t going to see your lugubrious condescension toward this exceptionally accomplished woman — speaking to her as if she were a dizzy, Puerto Rican teenager you were hiring to be your nanny — and then voting for her as some sort of magnanimous post-partisan act. Indeed, they will remember you as one of the faces and voices of the new whining, conservative xenophobes, right up there with Rush and Sessions.
Huck, you consciously and deliberately dirtied this person’s reputation on national television. Voting for her now does not mean diddly — she always had the votes, after all. You’re an ass and you are well on your way to filling the large shoes of Snarlin’ Arlen, who is about to find out that nobody likes him on either side of the aisle, pretty much because he also specializes in doing the nasty kind of knife work you just did and then not standing behind it. It’s the role of a sleazy hit man.
I have been reluctant to really delve into the Gates story because well … it just seems so obvious. And it’s clear that it’s just taking the wingnut bait. But since I write often about police abuse of power, particularly with tasers, some readers seem to be interested in a larger discussion of this incident so here goes.
First, I think that there is obviously a racial component here, but I don’t see it as classic “profiling” at least in the traditional sense that someone is targeted for a police stop solely because of their race. The circumstance as I understand them are that the police responded to a call of a possible burglary with two black suspects. The idea that they wouldn’t have responded to that call if the description had been two white suspects is not believable. It’s what happened after that fits the racial narrative.
One racial component is the reflexive angry defensiveness that white people often feel at being called racist when they don’t believe (rightly or wrongly) that they are. This cop, a man who we are told teaches other cops how to avoid racial profiling, may have felt he was being unfairly targeted as a racist and he got angry. The “angry black man” syndrome, whereby blacks’ sensibilities in such situations are discounted as being a “chip on the shoulder” or somehow a function of an inherently angry temperament adds to the mix. Black people are assumed to be “dangerous” in situations where whites get the benefit of the doubt. I really don’t think that’s debatable.
Having said that, to me, this situation actually has far broader implications about all citizens’ relationship to the police and the way we are expected to respond to authority, regardless of race. I’ve watched too many taser videos over the past few years featuring people of all races and both genders being put to the ground screaming in pain, not because they were dangerous or threatening and not because they were so out of control there was no other way to deal with them, but because they were arguing with police and the officer perceived a lack of respect for the badge.
I have discovered that my hackles automatically going up at such authoritarian behavior is not necessarily the common reaction among my fellow Americans, not even my fellow liberals. The arguments are usually something along the lines of “that guy was an idiot to argue with the cops, he should know better,” which is very similar to what many are saying about Gates. He has even been criticized for being a “bad role model,” thus putting young black kids at risk if they do the same things.
Now, on a practical, day to day level, it’s hard to argue that being argumentative with a cop is a dangerous thing. They have guns. They can arrest you and can cost you your freedom if they want to do it badly enough. They can often get away with doing violence on you and suffer no consequences. You are taking a risk if you provoke someone with that kind of power, no doubt about it.
Indeed, it is very little different than exercising your right of free speech to tell a gang of armed thugs to go fuck themselves. It’s legal, but it’s not very smart. But that’s the problem isn’t it? We shouldn’t have to make the same calculations about how to behave with police as we would with armed criminals. The police are supposed to be the good guys who follow the rules and the law and don’t expect innocent citizens to bow to their brute power the same way that a street gang would do. The police are not supposed wield what is essentially brute force on the entire population.
And yet, that’s what we are told we are supposed to accept. Not only can they arrest us merely for being argumentative as they did with Gates, they are now allowed to shoot us full of electricity to make us comply with their demands to submit.
There is a philosophical underpinning to all this that I am only beginning to fully understand. It was discussed in this very interesting guest post over at Crooked Timber by a police officer and philosopher who went through the various elements of the case and offered his perspective. Much of what he wrote was very thought provoking and made me think a bit about my reflexive recoil against police behaviors in so many of these situations. But some of what he wrote reinforced my belief that something has gone wrong:
The judgments of policing are obviously difficult and subjective, and are often marred when they are made in the face of people issuing inflammatory comments even as the police are rendering routine services with an obvious cause. It is in the collective interest of citizens and police to promote an environment where the police can conduct an investigation calmly and with mutual respect. It cannot become commonplace for people to be allowed to scream at the police in public, threatening them with political phone calls, deriding their abilities, etc. Routine acts like rendering aid to lost children, taking accident reports and issuing traffic violations could be derailed at any time by any person who has a perceived grievance with the police. The police service environment is not the best venue for the airing of such grievances.
This is a form of blackmail similar to the CIA threatening to let terrorists kill us if they are held accountable for lawbreaking. It says that the police will not be willing to rescue lost children if they have to put up with yelling citizens. That is an abdication of their duties and the idea that they should then be given carte blanche to shut up all citizens by means of arrest, because it creates a social environment where someone might cause a distraction in the future, is Orwellian double talk.
And it makes a mockery of the first amendment. If police are to be shielded from public criticism when they are acting in their official capacity then we have an authoritarian state. If yelling at the authorities is a crime then we do not have free speech.
He goes on:
The police should not be cowed by threats of phone calls to people such as mayors, police chiefs and presidents of the United States, along with allegations that “you don’t know who you’re messing with.” It is traditionally whites who have had this type of crooked access and influence. These appeals to higher authorities are often meant to exempt the ruling castes from following the rules and laws that the rest of the community will be expected to follow. It happens, it is unfortunate, and it is not in the interests of justice for it to continue. Nobody trying to do their job fairly deserves to hear the equivalent of “My daddy donated fifty million to this university, and you’ll be getting calls from everywhere in the administration about raising my grade enough for this class to count as a distributive requirement.”
It is very rude of citizens to do that, to be sure. But it is not a crime. The idea that people should not get angry, should not pull rank, should be rude to others is an issue for sociologists and Miss Manners, not the cops. Humans often behave badly, but that doesn’t make it illegal. For people with such tremendous power as police officers to be coddled into thinking that these are behaviors that allow them to arrest people (or worse) seems to be to far more dangerous than allowing a foolish person or two to set a bad example in the public square.
He continues:
It is possible for a person to commit disorderly conduct by unabated screaming and verbal abuse in a public setting. Without drawing conclusions about the Gates case, there comes some point where a person is genuinely causing public alarm, and where he is acting with a rage that exceeds what we can expect from a reasonable person in a heated moment. The mere presence of the police conducting a legitimate investigation should not provoke continuous rage and epithets from such a person. One response is that the police should just leave if the investigation has been conducted successfully, and that this will calm the person down. In practice, this is indeed often the best thing to do. On the other hand, it should be noted that it is just as much the responsibility of the citizen to see that his actions are an inappropriate way to relate to police officers who have not, in the specific case at hand, acted unreasonably. This point may be hotly contested, but I believe it is true: there is no obligation for the police to hurry in their activities or to leave as soon as possible because they have incited the rage of a person who is acting unreasonably. There is a distinction between hanging around to show them who’s boss and working at a steady, professional pace, to be sure. But in the end the mere presence of the police cannot be seen as an acceptable reason for disorderly conduct, and should therefore not spur the police to leave a scene simply to de-escalate it. A police strategy of “winning by appearing to lose” emboldens citizens to attempt to get the police to lose in more and more serious matters, including walking away from situations where a person is genuinely guilty of a crime.
At this point we are seeing a tipping in the other direction. Police are emboldened when they repeatedly get away with using bullying, abusive tactics against average citizens who have not been convicted of any crimes. This is the kind of thing that results:
Police say they struggled to get inside the home to speak with the man. When police managed to get inside the home, the suspect was placed in handcuffs. The complainant alleged that he was Tased three times by police – once to his wrist, the second to the small of his back and the third to his buttocks.
The ombudsman’s report states that the suspect was tased only two times after an investigation. One of those tases, however, was in the buttocks.
The use of force “was after he was handcuffed,” said Ombudsman Pierce Murphy. “And it was in the most senstive, private areas, and accompanied by threats.”
The suspect can be heard pleading to the police several times that he couldn’t breathe when officers were on top of him.
“I can’t breathe – just let me up, I want to breathe,” he says.
The officer quickly replied, “If you’re talking – you’re breathing.”
The report also states that the officers used excessive language.
“If you move again, I’m going to stick this Taser up your (expletive) and pull the trigger,” the complaint said. “Now, do you feel this in your (expletive)? – I’m going to tase your (expletive) if you move again.”
It was determined that the cop had the taser literally pushed up against the man’s anus.
In an earlier portion of his essay on Crooked Timber, the officer talked about how we need to allow police to have discretion and explained that it works as often as not in the favor of the suspect as a matter of common sense. (Police often let people go with a warning, for instance, rather than adhere strictly to the letter of the law.) And that’s reasonable.
But when it comes to race we’ve got a terrible history of discretion not being extended in favor of blacks — and the increased use of tasers is turning this concept of discretion into a license to torture. A policeman using his discretion to arrest a man in his own home because he was not deferential enough is just one more incident along a long road of creeping authoritarianism.
I said the other night that I thought Gates was lucky he didn’t get tased and I really think he was. People all over this country are “subdued” by means of electricity every day, probably more blacks than whites, but it doesn’t seem to be particularly limited to race. We are accepting this kind of thing as if it’s just an inevitability because of the attitudes this police officer very thoughtfully lays out in his essay: we are told that we must defer to authority or risk all hell breaking loose.
And I would suggest that it is just that attitude that led to people in this country recently endorsing unilateral illegal invasions, torture of prisoners and the rest. You remember the line — “the constitution isn’t a suicide pact.” To which many of us replied with the old Benjamin Franklin quote: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
The principles here are the same. Sure, we should treat the cops with respect and society shouldn’t encourage people to be reflexively hostile to police. They have a tough job, and we should all be properly respectful of people who are doing a dangerous and necessary job for the community. But when a citizen doesn’t behave well, if not illegally, as will happen in a free society, it is incumbent upon the police, the ones with the tasers and the handcuffs and the guns, to exercise discretion wisely and professionally. And when they don’t, we shouldn’t make excuses for them. It’s far more corrosive to society to allow authority figures to abuse their power than the other way around.
Henry Louis Gates may have acted like a jackass in his house that day. But Sergeant Crowley arresting him for being “tumultuous” was an abuse of his discretion, a fact which is backed up by the fact that the District Attorney used his discretion to decline to prosecute. Racially motivated or not he behaved “stupidly” and the president was right to say so.
* And by the way, if anyone wants to see some real incoherence on this subject, consult the right wingers who are defending the policeman today, but who also believe that anyone has the right to shoot first and ask questions later if they “feel” threatened in their own home. By their lights, Gates should have been arrested for behaving “tumultuously” but would have been within his rights to shoot Sgt Crowley. This is why conservatives have no standing to discuss anything more complicated than Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.
I’ve been live-blogging the events in the state capitol today over at Calitics. Basically, most of the horrible measures in the California budget revision passed, with a couple notable exceptions. Cities get to keep their gas tax money, and the controversial offshore drilling plan was defeated. Which puts the budget $1 billion or so out of balance, but Schwarzenegger has a line-item veto so he will blue-pencil his way to finishing this up.
It’s a dark day for California, which suffers a radical transformation of how it provides services today, because a literally insane minority refuses to budge and can hijack the legislature. Importantly, the process is the culprit here. The current system is designed to produce bad outcomes and provide no accountability for them. So until we change that system, we’ll keep running into this brick wall. In all likelihood, we’ll be back filling a new budget gap this winter.
Man, is it ever rich to see M. Emmett Tyrell (“Bobby” to the insiders) chattering with Tweety about the kooky conspiracy nuts on the right. I don’t know if Matthews is brain damaged or what, but my God:
Like many political magazines of differing ideologies, in the 1980s and 1990s the conservative American Spectator received donations from like-minded benefactors who supported its mission. One of the Spectator’s larger donors over the years was Richard Mellon Scaife, a businessman who directed a number of foundations funded with his family’s wealth, through which he could support his causes. At first, donations from Scaife to the Spectator were unrestricted, but later, Scaife wanted to direct some of the spending for stories investigating the Clintons.
According to R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor in chief of the Spectator, the idea for investigating the Clintons was born on a fishing trip on the Chesapeake Bay in the fall of 1993. David Brock, who reported many of the Clinton scandals, described himself as a Republican “hitman” who “soon became a lead figure in the drive to” get Clinton. Writing for the American Spectator, he brought the stories of alleged sexual misbehavior by Bill and Hillary Clinton into the public notice in late 1993.[3] The Pacific Research Institute funded further attempts to discredit the Clintons. The “Arkansas Project” name that later became famous was conceived as a joke; the actual name within the Spectator and between the Spectator and Scaife foundations was the “Editorial Improvement Project.”
The Washington Post noted David Brock was “summoned” to a meeting with Rex Armistead in Miami, Florida at an airport hotel.[citation needed] Armistead laid out an elaborate “Vince Foster murder scenario”, Brock said – a scenario that he found implausible.”[4][5] David Brock, then of the American Spectator (and previously of the Heritage Foundation), explained Armistead was paid $350,000 to work with Arkansas Project reporters by the American Spectator.[6] Brock further noted Armistead was a “leader of white resistance to the civil rights movement” as he was working as a police officer.[7] Both Brock and Armistead were reporters who were funded by Scaife to investigate issues ranging from drug smuggling to Foster to discredit Clinton with the Arkansas Project.[8]
It’s impossible for me to believe that Matthews doesn’t know he’s dealing with one of the primary conspiracy kooks of the 1990s. He must. But there they sat, talking trash about the Birthers and the UFO people and the rest like Tyrell is a normal person.
Of course, Matthews himself is one to talk. He was one of the prime movers of the bogus Clinton scandals himself, frequently having Kathleen Willey and Gennifer Flowers on to share their sexual fantasies (and give him a thrill up his leg.)So, he may not realize that “Bobby” is a nutball. After all, when it came to those nutty conspiracy theories, Matthews was a true believer himself.
Henry Waxman is refusing to let the Blue Dogs make chicken salad out of the House health care bill. He’s talking about bypassing his committee entirely and bringing the bill already voted out of two other committees to the floor.
As it turns out, I was on NPR’s Tell Me More this morning talking about health care, and one of my co-guests was Henry Cuellar, a Blue Dog. 30 minutes goes fast with three guests, so I didn’t get to confront him and his arguments as much as I wanted. For instance, McAllen, TX, is in his district, and that was the subject of the widely touted Atul Gawande piece in The New Yorker about disparities in health care delivery and effectiveness. But Cuellar pretty much harped on costs, costs, costs as an impediment to getting something done. I countered that cost control and expanding access, in many cases, are complementary. This makes the Blue Dog argument incoherent. They want to cut costs, but they are reluctant to enact the reforms that actually would do it. Not to mention the fact that they talk of fiscal responsibility while trying to carve out funding for rural health care, for example, which is the exact opposite of cost-cutting. And Steven Pearlstein picked up on this today.
The challenge for the Blue Dogs is that they want an America where everyone has insurance but are reluctant to force workers to buy it or employers to help pay for it.
They understand that achieving universal coverage will require subsidies for low-income workers and small businesses, but they insist that none of those changes add to the federal deficit or raise anyone’s taxes.
They want to introduce more competition into the private insurance market, but not if it comes from a government-run insurance plan.
They complain constantly about the need to rein in runaway Medicare costs while at the same time demanding higher Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors and hospitals in rural areas.
You see what I mean about mushy centrism?
Yes. Yes I do.
The truth is that the Blue Dogs are slaves to entrenched power, serving the interests of powerful lobbies rather than the middle-income voters in their districts. Cutting subsidies to 300% of poverty level from 400% would make health care less affordable to working people – and it’s only being considered in the House because Blue Dogs want to protect those making half a million a year from a surtax.
Which is why Waxman is absolutely in the right to do this. The Blue Dogs, cheered on by Republicans, are simply standing in the way of progress. You can tell because their arguments lack logic and coherence. They apparently got the President’s MedPAC proposal in the bill, as part of a larger deal over reducing regional disparities in Medicare reimbursements, but other measures that reduce costs they resist. And measures that increase costs they favor. They exist at this point to be nothing more than sand in the gears.
At some point, I think you do have to pull the trigger. Matt Yglesias makes the moral case, that good legislation matters more than good process.
Something a lot of progressive legislative leaders seem to have forgotten until this Congress actually got under way is that historically congressional procedure is a challenge to be surmounted when you want big change to happen. It’s not actually a fixed feature of the landscape that people “have to” accommodate themselves to. For years you couldn’t get a decent Civil Rights bill because segregationists controlled the Judiciary Committee that had jurisdiction. This problem was “solved” by just deciding to bypass the Judiciary Committee. When you decide you want to get things done, you find a way to get them done. Even the allegedly sacrosanct filibuster rule has been changed repeatedly over the years. The law is the law and the constitution is the constitution, but the rules of congressional procedure are not law. They’re internally made rules, they’re subject to change, and the criteria for a good set of rules is that you want rules that produce good legislation and good governance.
If the internal rules are in place you should work to change them if they obstruct a change both the majority of Americans and the majority of the Congress clearly want.
…and now, the Blue Dogs are claiming that talks fell apart this afternoon. I don’t know how that squares with the “breakthrough” earlier in the day, but it looks like something’s amiss. Will Waxman just report out the bill anyway and move it to the floor?
…I have to say that Mike Ross, head Blue Dog negotiator in this case, appears to be full of it. He says that Waxman took things off the table that, an hour before, Waxman was hailing in public as part of a breakthrough agreement? Doesn’t pass the smell test. Someone’s lying.
, 
is worth a peek (featuring Mick Jagger as a time-traveling bounty hunter!).
, 
, the film examines the dichotomous conflict of human nature in extreme survival situations, which helps this one rise above the cheese of many other 1950s sci-fi flicks (with the possible exception of a clunky Noah’s Ark allusion). It sports pretty decent special effects for its time; especially depicting a flooded NYC (it was produced by the legendary George Pal).