With all that’s going on domestically and around the world it’s hard to keep up right now. And I’ve certainly not been keeping up properly with what the supreme court’s been up to. So when I read this by Scott Lemieux, I had one of those awful realizations that no matter how much we may able to politically pull ourselves out of the conservative era, the Roberts Court is going to pull us right back in. The culture war will continue to be fought in the Supreme Court and I will predict that within a very few years we liberals will be decrying the unelected judicial activists on the court while the conservatives will discover the majesty of the judicial system and the wisdom of our forbears in assuring that the Justices have the last word.
Are we really sure that the American system is the best we can do? Really?
The New York Timespublished a paean to Max Baucus as the great advocate and negotiator on health care reform today. It talks about how he likes to bring evryone to the table and work with both sides and seek bipartisan compromise, blah,blah,blah. And then it slips this in two thirds of the way through:
He conceded that it was a mistake to rule out a fully government-run health system, or a “single-payer plan,” not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama’s proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position.
And then it just picks right up and talks about what a terrific legislator he is:
In more than a year of preparation, Mr. Baucus largely developed a new model for writing complex legislation, bringing in an array of interest groups, lobbyists and other experts to lay out issues and options for senators and aides.
In fairness, Baucus wasn’t alone in taking single payer off the table. The presidential candidates all did that and without running on it or at least having it as an option there was very little chance it would be taken seriously as the liberal starting point anyway. It’s quite clear that the Democratic establishment decided a long time ago that we could not be completely rational about health care in this country, many of them because they are slaves to the insurance industry (Baucus among them) and many others because they fear anything that will rile up the Republicans.
But please, spare us the encomiums to the brilliant tactician who took single payer off the table and dealt himself a weakened hand. Clearly, we’ll be lucky at this point if we don’t end with a system that forces us to pay more and receive less. They’re that good.
Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsville-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media.
Sanford’s whereabouts had been unknown since Thursday, and the mystery surrounding his absence fueled speculation about where he had been and who’s in charge in his absence. His emergence Wednesday ended the mystery.
Sanford, in an exclusive interview with The State Media Company, said he decided at the last minute to go to the South American country to recharge after a difficult legislative session in which he battled with lawmakers over how to spend federal stimulus money.
The fact that he disappeared for six days made for an interesting — and somewhat odd — story. The fact that — whether willfully or accidentally — Sanford’s staff misled the public about his whereabouts is a major problem for a candidate considered almost certain to run for president in 2012.
Why in the world would anyone think that’s true? His staff lied, probably, to protect their boss. Bad. They may even have to quit over it or be fired. But isn’t the real problem here that this presidential hopeful is something of a weirdo?
I personally have nothing against weirdos. I consider myself to be one. But people with serious, governmental responsibilities can’t be this level of weird. The fact that his staff lied is actually not that big of a problem by comparison. I can’t imagine why anyone would think that’s the salient point about all this.
Following up on my post last week about the shall we say, friendliness between the business and national security elites, here’s a story from 2006 for the wtf files:
President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye.
Unbeknownst to almost all of Washington and the financial world, Bush and every other President since Jimmy Carter have had the authority to exempt companies working on certain top-secret defense projects from portions of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. Administration officials told BusinessWeek that they believe this is the first time a President has ever delegated the authority to someone outside the Oval Office. It couldn’t be immediately determined whether any company has received a waiver under this provision.
The timing of Bush’s move is intriguing. On the same day the President signed the memo, Porter Goss resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency amid criticism of ineffectiveness and poor morale at the agency. Only six days later, on May 11, USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had obtained millions of calling records of ordinary citizens provided by three major U.S. phone companies. Negroponte oversees both the CIA and NSA in his role as the administration’s top intelligence official.
[…]
Securities-law experts said they were unfamiliar with the May 5 memo and the underlying Presidential authority at issue. John C. Coffee, a securities-law professor at Columbia University, speculated that defense contractors might want to use such an exemption to mask secret assignments for the Pentagon or CIA. “What you might hide is investments: You’ve spent umpteen million dollars that comes out of your working capital to build a plant in Iraq,” which the government wants to keep secret. “That’s the kind of scenario that would be plausible,” Coffee said.
William McLucas, the Securities & Exchange Commission’s former enforcement chief, suggested that the ability to conceal financial information in the name of national security could lead some companies “to play fast and loose with their numbers.” McLucas, a partner at the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr in Washington, added: “It could be that you have a bunch of books and records out there that no one knows about.”
The memo Bush signed on May 5, which was published seven days later in the Federal Register, had the unrevealing title “Assignment of Function Relating to Granting of Authority for Issuance of Certain Directives: Memorandum for the Director of National Intelligence.” In the document, Bush addressed Negroponte, saying: “I hereby assign to you the function of the President under section 13(b)(3)(A) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended.”
A trip to the statute books showed that the amended version of the 1934 act states that “with respect to matters concerning the national security of the United States,” the President or the head of an Executive Branch agency may exempt companies from certain critical legal obligations. These obligations include keeping accurate “books, records, and accounts” and maintaining “a system of internal accounting controls sufficient” to ensure the propriety of financial transactions and the preparation of financial statements in compliance with “generally accepted accounting principles.”
Greenwald has a great post up today about NPRs continued refusal to use the word torture. Calling it Orwellian is actually kind. He quotes the NPR ombudsman and then comments:
This passage is the second time Shepard described waterboarding with the pleasant-sounding, clinical, minimizing phrase: “poured water down a detainee’s mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds.” Note the other nice-sounding descriptions for what the U.S. did (“forced to stand for hours along side a wall”; that almost sounds peaceful, like a yoga pose: “along side a wall”).
Aside from the obvious political bias, which Glenn explores at length, there is another dimension to the problem even if such bias doesn’t exist. It isn’t that I need the writers’ opinion on the facts. But I do need the facts to be clear. I wrote about this in an earlier post:
[T]here’s a reason why Billmon called it Pravda on the Hudson: we have to spend way too much time these days deciphering the news pages as if they are a bunch of ancient druid runes. I spend hours here and at other blogs trying to read between the lines and figure out what these reporters “really mean” because the conventions of modern journalism are so arcane that you have to be some sort of insider or psychic to know what the hell is actually going on.
I know it’s heresy to say that one of the reasons that newspapers are failing is because of the journalism they practice, but think it’s should at least be considered. The conventions of mainstream reporting have become so complicated that even a fairly sophisticated reader can’t really grasp what’s going on half the time.
All that ombudsman’s “show not tell” concept does is confuse the NPR listeners. Torture is well defined under the statutes and by plain old common sense. To refuse to use the word tells the listeners that what they are hearing is strange and makes them mistrust their own instincts. It obscures, it doesn’t reveal, which is the real point of journalism — at least I thought it was.
Reading Glenn’s piece you’d think the purpose of journalism was to make things so complicated that average people have no idea what’s going on. If that’s the case, they are very successful at what they do.
There is a lot of irrationality in our society, and it’s actually getting worse it seems to me. but one of the most irrational is the war on drugs, specifically the war on marijuana. I don’t think I need to go into the reasons why it’s stupid. Anyone who isn’t completely brainwashed can see that it is a huge waste of money and resources — and everyone knows it. here in California it’s now quasi-legal and there are many medical clinics where people can buy high quality pot if they have a prescription. In LA they are everywhere. In fact, they just opened up a clinic on Venice Beach called “Dr Kush.” Seriously.
But it’s all arbitrary and random, with certain neighborhoods and cities being tough while others are lax and the whole thing just creates a lack of respect for the law and reason. It’s stupid beyond belief.
So, three cheers to Barney Frank for offering up a little common sense on this issue:
A controversial law in Massachusetts could go national if Congressman Barney Frank gets his way.
Frank has filed a bill that would eliminate federal penalties for personal possession of less than 100 grams of marijuana.
It would also make the penalty for using marijuana in public just $100.
“I think John Stuart Mill had it right in the 1850s,” said Congressman Frank, “when he argued that individuals should have the right to do what they want in private, so long as they don’t hurt anyone else. It’s a matter of personal liberty. Moreover, our courts are already stressed and our prisons are over-crowded. We don’t need to spend our scarce resources prosecuting people who are doing no harm to others.”
It won’t pass, of course, because it’s one of those issues that gives every politician a chance to preen and prance about as a social conservative and pretend that they are a member of the Moral Majority standing up for family values. They love to bond with their wingnut brethren and nothing brings them all together like a good hippie punching. But,as with so much of the right wing agenda, it makes no rational sense. I suppose that’s at least partially the point.
Yesterday, when I wrote about Representative Tom Davis’ blithe “good luck” to the 62 year old woman who couldn’t get health insurance, I didn’t realize that he was an Obama administration favorite:
Tom Davis, a moderate Republican from Virginia, has emerged as a leading candidate for the Obama Administration’s newly created position of cybersecurity czar. Sources familiar with the White House’s deliberations on the subject say Obama officials feel a Washington power player would make a better candidate than a tech guru. “They want someone who understands technology issues, but more importantly, knows how to get things done in Washington,” says a cybersecurity expert who has been consulted by the White House. “There are very few people who have that combination of skills, and Davis is at the top of that short list.”
Perhaps he is a talented technology geek who knows how to “get things done.” But there must be at least one person in the country who qualifies for that job who also doesn’t think like a French aristocrat circa 1790. Maybe they could put up an ad on Craigslist or something.
I don’t think you can find a more perfect summation of the traditional media inside Washington than this – Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza dressed like fops in bowties and smoking jackets – or more likely, dressed like their own mental projection of themselves – smugly discoursing, with CHAMBER MUSIC in the background, about Beltway gossip. You would think they’d go ahead and use the British accents too.
Amazingly, this isn’t a product of two You Tubers engaging in a parody of the Village mindset, but a video produced by two of the top political reporters at the Washington Post. Two respected figures inside the Beltway, who get all kinds of face time on major media.
I think at this point, we can stop asking “If only the media would cover such-and-such story in THIS way…” For that to be successful, we would have to get such a story covered by someone like these two. That’s just not going to happen.
It’s a good thing we don’t have rationing like all those horrible European countries or people wouldn’t be able to get health care when they need it:
Americans are struggling to pay for healthcare in the ongoing economic recession, with a quarter saying they have had trouble in the past 12 months, according to a survey released on Monday.
Baby boomers — the generation born between 1946 and 1964 — had the most trouble and were the most likely to put off medical treatments or services, said researchers at Center for Healthcare Improvement, part of the Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters.
[…]
They found 40 percent of all households planned to postpone care in the coming three months, with about 15 percent planning to put off routine doctor visits.
People born before 1946 were the least likely to delay care, probably because most can take part in Medicare, the federal health insurance plan for the elderly, the researchers found.
Baby Boomers were four times more likely than seniors to have trouble paying for healthcare, according to the report.
People born after 1984 were also unlikely to put off care, probably because they are too young to need much medical attention, the researchers said.
Income was also a big factor — homes where people made less than $50,000 a year were three times as likely to say they had trouble paying for medical bills as homes with combined incomes of $100,000 or more.
“It is important for healthcare providers, employers and policymakers to consider how the economy and healthcare policies affect demographic segments differently,” Pickens said in a statement.
This is not good. Check out the demographic segments (add 9 years to each one) and consider what the political implications are:
I suppose it’s possible to put off health care reform for 15 more years or so and hope that all us whining boomers will go into medicare and shut the hell up. But the problem is that medicare really is going to go broke if the whole system isn’t reformed. Nobody wants to see the baby boomer cohort retire and decide to devote itself to politics do they? I didn’t think so.
The country cannot ignore the fact that this huge group is getting older and sicker and unless it’s decided to kill us all, health care costs are going to be a dominant discussion for a long time to come. There are too many of us to ignore. It’s got to be now.
Nothing could be more irrational than to not have decent health care for people who are still working but getting older and needing more access to a doctor. It’s insane to have that population at risk. The costs to the economy in the long run are going to be much, much higher if people my age can’t maintain their health.
Something fairly interesting happened today. It doesn’t mean we will get a public health insurance option to compete with the insurance industry, but it doesn’t exactly hurt. Apparently some Democrats thought that if they only watered down such a public option to nothing, they would get that vaunted bipartisan support, and everybody could go back to their districts and claim they did something when they in fact would have done nothing. But as those of us who have been observing this have known for some time, these aren’t your father’s Republicans, or your grandfather’s, or any other relative. They are the rump conservative party, openly hostile to using government for any means other than profit-taking, and preferring to tell their constituents “good luck” instead of making any tangible difference to their struggles. And somehow, Democrats just discovered this.
Some Senate Democrats have considered nixing the public option proposal in order to win Republican support for the bill.
Schumer’s role is important because he had been acting as an intermediary between liberal Democrats and moderates who are trying to strike a deal on the issue with Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee. Of the five House and Senate committees working on health care, Finance is the only one that appears to have a chance at reaching a bipartisan agreement.
Schumer said Finance Republicans had rejected several proposals designed to beef up the suggested nonprofit insurance co-ops. These included setting up a national structure for the co-ops, $10 billion in government seed money, power to negotiate payment rates to medical providers nationwide and creation of a presidentially appointed board of directors.
The Democrats tried to basically bury the public option as long as they could get any manner of support for the weak substitute. And the Republicans wouldn’t budge. Like in 1993, their mission is to kill health care reform, period. Why anyone would think that any alternative would be true is beyond me, but Senate Democrats obviously needed to play Tic-Tac-Toe with the computer endlessly until they realized what a strange game it all is, and that “the only winning move is not to play.”Ezra Klein comes to the same conclusion.
Republicans, (Schumer) suggests, are standing lockstep even against efforts to create a private co-op system that could offer an alternative to for-profit insurance. Their concern with the co-op plan is not that the government would be taking over the health-care system. It’s that the current insurance providers would face unexpectedly aggressive competition in the marketplace. Which raises an interesting, and potentially clarifying, question: Are Republicans in this to preserve the healthy functioning of a competitive private market or preserve the profits of the currently dominant insurance companies?
Further proof of that learning experience came today from Kent Conrad, the man who devised this health co-op plan by throwing a dart against a board, as he appeared to acknowledge its limitations.
The wheels looked to be coming off with health care reform last week. But a poll showing huge public support for a public health care option and a strong bill from the House of Representatives have changed the dynamic.
Schumer and other backers of a public option insist that any plan must be national in scope, have substantial funding at the beginning from the federal government, and include national purchasing power in order to negotiate lower prices.
Conrad ticked off the areas of agreement that were reached Monday.
“National structure: I believe to be effective there has to a national entity with state affiliates and those affiliates have to have the ability to regionalize. I think his concern there can be addressed,” said Conrad. “Second, he believes there needs to be national purchasing power. I think that’s a good point that the national entity would be able to do purchasing on behalf of the state and regional affiliates and on behalf of the national entity itself.”
Now, Schumer’s vision of a public plan is a compromise from the House vision of a public plan, which is a compromise from single-payer health insurance. But things are moving in a better direction today than yesterday, when DiFi flat-out said Democrats don’t have the votes to pass anything.
This teachable moment has a value for those outside the system who want to push for a real public option that can use bargaining power to force competition from insurers. Because now, as Matt Yglesias says, there’s no excuse for Democrats to water down their bills in order to “seek bipartisanship” and make them durable. Republicans have revealed themselves. And given budget reconciliation and the imminent fact of 60 votes in the US Senate, Democrats have nobody else to blame. They can talk about political realities but those have essentially been voted out of existence, with respect to Republicans. Whether it’s because of health industry campaign contributions or a desire to limit competition in small, rural states, a desire to get the glory for saving policy from the brink or just an ideological disinclination, individual Senate Democrats will have the collapse of any health care reform on their hands.
And yes, I mean Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogans — Government-run health care! Socialism! Europe! — hoping that someone still cares […]
The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by “centrist” Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements of reform. I use scare quotes around “centrist,” by the way, because if the center means the position held by most Americans, the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.
What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs.
It helps to have clarity on who is blocking what the public desires. The grassroots will redouble their efforts, doing to the rest of the wayward Democrats what Change Congress did to Ben Nelson. Blue America are lining up a similar pressure Campaign for Health Care Choice on Blanche Lincoln, and you can contribute to that cause at this link.
