Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Last Time

by digby

I have always considered myself a pretty good armchair historian of the 90s. I was paying close attention to politics during that era and I tend to recall the details fairly well. But Bob Somerby surprised me with this — I’d totally forgotten about it:

Last week, Scott Roeder killed Dr. George Tiller. Result: Some are wondering if the rise of Obama is creating stress in the minds of some unbalanced people, stress which has led them to act. This is a thoroughly worthwhile discussion. And it’s worth remembering that the same damn thing pretty much happened the last time. By “last time,” we mean the last time we had a Democrat president. As you may recall, that president was Bill Clinton—and crazy stories spread far and wide about his intolerable ways. The liberal world ran off and hid in the woods—and, to all intents and purposes, the “mainstream press corps” didn’t exist. And sure enough! By September 1994, a man name Frank Corder decided to act. This incident largely went down the memory hole, like most misconduct directed at Clinton. But in real time, Judy Keen reported the apparent attempt on the president’s life in USA Today. “Crash exposes risks,” the headline said. “How tough is it to protect a president?” Even after 9/11, this event remained largely deep-sixed:

KEEN (9/13/94): Frank Corder’s flight in his tiny red-and-white Cessna exposed one of the White House’s main vulnerabilities—an attack from the air.

“It finally happened,” says Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary to former presidents George Bush and Ronald Reagan. “Everybody has always speculated that someone could fly kamikaze-style into the White House. I don’t think there’s any way to prevent it.” If there is, Secret Service officials are hunting for it now. President Clinton and his family were asleep at Blair House, across the street from the White House, when Corder flew over Washington’s treetops under a sliver of moonlight, somehow evaded what’s supposed to be the world’s best security and crashed into an old magnolia tree two floors below the Clintons’ empty bedrooms. The worst damage: a cracked window. But the “what ifs” surrounding the incident reignited ominous questions around the capital—questions that get to the heart of how tough it is to protect a president. What if the plane had been carrying explosives? What if terrorists had been piloting it instead of the inexperienced Corder? The White House’s occupants made light of the dramatic crash. “This has been quite an unusual day here at the White House,” Hillary Rodham Clinton told guests. Still, one fact loomed large: Monday’s incident was the worst White House security breach in nearly two decades.

In fairness, the Clintons were murderers, drug-dealers, socialists. Perhaps for that reason (no one seemed to know), Corder had finally decided to act. He tried to crash his plane into the White House, hitting a large tree instead. Corder died in the incident. It was “the worst White House security breach in nearly two decades,” Keen reported. And a few weeks later, it happened again. “Target: White House,” said the headline on Keen’s report. “Did bullets also bring a wake-up call?”

KEEN (10/31/94): Two weeks ago, President Clinton stood at a podium outside the White House’s north entrance to welcome a U.S. delegation home from Haiti. Saturday, that same north entrance was sprayed with a gunman’s bullets. If the motives for the shooting spree at the White House were murky Sunday, one thing seems increasingly clear: This president—who loves to mingle with crowds and chafes at being trapped in the Secret Service’s protective bubble—is probably about to change his ways. That may mean no more meandering across Lafayette Park on his way home from church, as he did a few weekends ago, with tourists flocking just feet away. And no more north entrance appearances.

The shooting was the second frightening White House security breach in six weeks. Last month, a Maryland man crashed a stolen plane onto the lawn, killing himself. “These two incidents may save this president’s life at some point, because he’s had a wakeup call,” says terrorism expert Neil Livingstone.

In this incident, a man named Francisco Duran “pulled a rifle from his coat, stuck it through the fence and started spraying rounds,” Keen reported. “It took Duran 10 seconds, the Secret Service estimates, to squeeze off 20 to 30 rounds” before “two passersby subdued him.” Given the zeitgeist of the 1990s, memory of these incidents quickly disappeared. We recall them because, as a comedian, we did a few jokes about these events (and perhaps one other) for a brief time in early 1995. Our premise? The crazy attacks seemed to stop as soon as Newt Gingrich became House speaker. (In the wake of the November 1994 elections.) Our jokes got a few laughs in DC. (We were surprised.) We didn’t try them elsewhere. Were unbalanced people driven to act by all the crazy talk about Clinton? Are unbalanced people being so moved by Obama’s rise today? By crazy and semi-crazy talk about him? Von Brunn, who killed a decent person, apparently believed Obama isn’t a citizen. But then, Corder and Duran may well have thought that Clinton kept murdering people. Not to mention his drug-dealing ways! We think it’s worth remembering that this happened the last time too. Beyond that, we think it’s worth wondering why the attacks by Corder and Duran found their way down the memory hole to the extent that they did. Hint: This was very much the way of the 1990s. In its own more dignified manner, the mainstream press corps was also flying little planes into the White House at this time. (They have never tried to explain why.) Later, they spent two year flying planes into Campaign 2000. In that case, they finally got their way. Are we happy with how that turned out?

I was listening to right wing radio today and they were downright apoplectic about Paul Krugman’s column. (After all, Von Brunn was a liberal, which means it was Krugman who made him do it.) Anyone suggesting that right wing violence is on the rise is completely delusional. It’s left wing violence that is on the rise — al Qaeda and cop killers and anti-semites are all liberals. And according to this logic it was liberals who went after Clinton too.
I think they really believe it. And it makes them very angry and violent. Which means they’re liberals too. I guess that explains why the liberal media is protecting them.

Update: And anyone who isn’t convinced of Krugman’s thesis, read this.
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Fold-In Humor

by digby

If your biggest influence in life wasn’t MAD magazine, as it was mine, then perhaps you won’t find this as brilliant as I do.

And, by the way, if people aren’t following Sadly No religiously during this magnificently dramatic conservative meltdown, they’re simply missing thee full effect.

A doff of the hat to Batocchio

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Jill Richardson Reviews Squeezed

by tristero

Jill Richardson of the excellent food movement blog La Vida Locavore reviews the new book, Squeezed: What You Don’t Know about Orange Juice, by Alissa Hamilton. Jill’s conclusion is fascinating, a succinct expression of the complexity of the issues swirling around mass market food production and eating today.

There’s nothing in orange juice that would kill you or make you sick or even gross you out. And that’s precisely the question the book is getting at: does it matter if we are eating (or drinking) a highly processed food and that the processing is hidden from us while the marketing makes us believe that the product is “fresh from the grove”? And what’s funny is how our perceptions have changed over time! The 1960’s era housewife remembered a time when juice came only from fresh squeezed oranges, and she was upset that a processed product was being sold under the guise of freshness.

Today? My hunch is that few people really care. It’s orange juice. It came from oranges. Do we care if the oranges aren’t from Florida, but were actually brought here from Brazil? Or that even 100% Florida orange juice includes flavor packs derived from oranges grown all over the world? Or that the OJ might contain tangerines? Or that the “quality” we perceive is really just a highly engineered flavor pack? Most of us have never known an alternative, and orange juice (even with its processing) is one of the most natural and unadulterated foods sold in a grocery store (excluding the produce section). These are questions more than they are answers, but my hunch is that if we were not as far removed from our food as we are today, we’d be healthier and better off – even if processed orange juice specifically is far and away not the biggest food problem we’ve got.

On a related food note, the movie Food, Inc. is out today. I’m incredibly busy at the moment, getting ready for a recording session, but can’t wait to see it.

On Nuts ‘N Sluts

by digby

I wasn’t going to wade into the David Letterman thing because it seemed pretty trivial to me on the media sexism scale. But it’s obviously a growing brouhaha, so I might as well.

First of all, Sarah Palin does not look or act like a “slut” and it’s nothing more than a sexual fantasy to think of her that way. She married her high school sweetheart and has five kids. She’s a born again Christian. She does not dress provocatively, and she has said that she put her hair up and wore glasses specifically to take her looks off the table as much as possible. She’s an attractive 40 something politician, she’s not a Playboy model (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and it would be nice if she didn’t have to put up with that stuff. She’s not trying to “sex herself up” for the camera or anything else. There’s enough to criticize her for.

The daughter thing was in poor taste. Leave the kids out of the jokes. The fact that he meant her older daughter is obvious, but that doesn’t make it any better. She’s a young girl who didn’t ask for the limelight and doesn’t deserve to be mocked by middle aged men. It’s cruel and unnecessary.

I’ve never particularly liked the way Letterman treated certain women. He clearly has no tolerance for certain behaviors and over the years he’s pissed me off more than once by just being a superior jackass to women and girls who were obviously nervous or perhaps a little unpolished and unsophisticated. But then he’s always made fun of people who are a little dumb or a little bit crazy, which is something that never sat well with me. The weird thing is that since he had the kid I thought he’d mellowed substantially. He just seemed kinder and less judgmental. This seems a little bit out of character for him as he’s been in recent years.

Having said that, this ridiculous accusation that he was talking about raping the 14 year old is over the top and disingenuous, to say the least. That clearly was not his intention and claiming it was really cheapens the validity of the complaint.

And making Palin into a feminist hero because of this cheapens feminism. This woman is defending herself and her own daughter, but as Governor she never quite finds the voice to defend other women who have average real life problems, like workplace discrimination, rapes or unwanted pregnancies. Her complaints are not coming from feminist principle but rather political opportunism.

And these right wing monsters like Limbaugh who are suddenly concerned about the treatment of women in the media is laughable. This is the man who coined the term feminazis, and called Chelsea Clinton the white house dog. His record of rank, violent misogyny is clear. If Palin repudiated him as quickly as she goes on television to condemn Letterman, I might be able to take her a little bit more seriously as a feminist.

The media are fascinated by Sarah Palin, at least partially because of her camera friendly appearance and her colorful family life. That doesn’t mean they can call her a slut and use her teenage daughter as the butt of crude sexual jokes. But it also doesn’t mean that she and her politics aren’t reactionary and anti-feminist. Having some feminist principles are required for that and Sarah Palin only seems to develop them when it involves her.

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Underground Drama

by digby

For some reason, the mainstream media don’t seem to realize this is even happening:

The Obama administration and House Democratic leadership can’t seem to muscle the votes they need to pass a $108 billion appropriation for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The stakes are high for both the administration and the world.

The battle is taking place primarily under the radar, with the major media mostly ignoring it, and avoiding the substantive issues in the few reports that have surfaced. The details are very interesting for what they reveal about politics in the United States.

The cast of characters: the U.S. Treasury Department, an opaque institution that is kind of a permanent government; the anti-war movement, which has more clout and representation in Congress than you would know from reading the newspapers; groups concerned about global justice and the IMF’s abuses; the Republican congressional leadership, which hopes to score some political points in opposing the IMF funding; and the various Members of Congress and their personal beliefs and constituencies.

The plot: the Obama administration is trying to get $108 billion for the (IMF) as part of a commitment that President Obama made at the G-20 meeting in April, led by the G-7 (high-income) countries, to raise $500 billion for the IMF from member countries.

But, from the beginning, the administration has faced tremendous obstacles to getting a majority members of the House of Representatives to vote for the money in an up-or-down vote. This is because many members of both parties are afraid that it would be seen as another taxpayer bailout for the financial industry – and foreign banks at that.

Which it appears to be, actually. This unprecedented increase in the Fund’s resources, with a goal of $1 trillion, is vastly higher than anything the institution has ever seen. It happens to coincide with huge expected losses by Western European banks in Eastern Europe, where these banks have at least $1.4 trillion in exposure. To make the issue even more delicate, some of these banks, like France’s Societe Generale, have already received U.S. taxpayer dollars through AIG under the TARP program.

Some of these taxpayer handouts to domestic and foreign financial institutions have been difficult to justify, not least the billions that have ended up as dividends for shareholders or bonuses for executives who helped crash the economy. So it is easy to see why the Administration wanted to avoid an up or down House vote on the IMF money.

This was done by attaching the IMF money to a supplemental war spending bill in the Senate.

It goes on to discuss the recalcitrance among anti-war members in the House along with those Democrats who are properly skeptical of the IMF in general and who recognize that these bailouts have become politically toxic. Which brings us to the Republicans:

Now come the Republicans, who supplied 168 votes for the war spending in the House. If you attach the IMF money, they say, we will vote against it this time. “Against funding for the troops?” asks the Democratic leadership, daring them. That’s right, say the Republicans, unless you put the IMF money to a separate vote.

Interestingly, the Republicans are not trying very hard to get the IMF money removed. They are not saying anything on television or in the media. This indicates that they may want this money to pass with only Democratic votes, so that they can attack the Dems – especially those in conservative districts – when the money ends up bailing out the European banks in Eastern Europe.

So far, the Administration has failed to peel off enough anti-war or pro-social-justice Democrats to get a majority for a bill which includes IMF money.

This story is being ignored because I assume the mainstream media believes the administration will ultimately get its way and pass the supplemental with the IMF money attached. But it’s just possible that it won’t. And the Democrats who stand in the way will be doing the party a great favor politically. These continued giveaways to wealthy, elite institutions are political poison, which is why the Republicans are positioning themselves (completely disingenuously) on the other side of the big money boyz.

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Lizard Brains Exploding

by digby

The last time we heard from Andrew Breitbart, he was forced to admit that he was an utter jackass on the pages of the Washington Times:

Late last month, my wife, Susie, and I took a day trip to Shutters, an elegant, white-veneered hotel along the ritzy Santa Monica shoreline. It’s a special-occasion place, and we went there to take in a rare parental reprieve.

[…]

As they passed, the protesters stared sourly at the second story where we sat. Fellow patrons wondered aloud what this now massive conga line was all about. About 300 people into the procession, I spotted a sign that had “war” written in it. One T-shirt read, “Stop forcing our children to be your soldiers.”

It’s a voluntary army, you stupid kids!

A thousand marchers into the protest, the sour looks aimed at the hotel’s clientele began to wear on us. The marchers’ defiant smugness started to make an enemy of me.

“Oh, no,” I thought. The antiwar movement that I saw growing only days after Sept. 11, 2001, was at it again. I thought: Even with a new president – and one who mostly shares their point of view – the I-love-a-protest-parade political left couldn’t help itself. It likes ruining nice sunny days. Protesting is what these people do. Sneering at their fellow citizens is their chief skill. Projecting arrogance is their birthright.

[…]

As soon as my finger was raised, a phalanx of photographers began snapping away at the white middle-aged man wearing a white LaCoste shirt next to the old red, white and blue. Cognizant of the power of imagery, I owned the moment and refused to back down. The fist wielder immediately dropped his arm. I clearly had won and envisioned photos of the anti-antiwar protester making the front pages of the Los Angeles Times.

Satisfied by the small victory, I sat down to finish my cocktail…

The e-mail began like this:

“On 4/25/09 an event hosted by the Invisible Children called ‘The Rescue’ took place in Santa Monica. I shot the event. 4,000 youth marched in solidarity for the children abducted and forced to fight for the LRA in Northern Uganda and more recently in the Congo. I had felt a sense of hope in my generation’s methods of activism at the event.”

Oh, no. It only got worse.

“I believe most people in America are in agreement that human slavery, genocide and child soldiers are a terrible thing. This event was hardly controversial. The protest marched by ‘Shutters on the Beach.’ After reviewing the photographs I was taking for the event and confirming the facts (you were in Santa Monica at the date and time) I realized you were flipping the protesters off. I am curious to why this is the case.”

So, let’s just say that Breitbart isn’t the most discerning political observer and has an admittedly reflexive, negative reaction to certain people based purely upon his own prejudices. You would think after an embarrassment like that, he’d question his assumptions a little bit before he opens his gob, but no:

Former Drudge alter ego Andrew Breitbart thinks James von Brunn was a “multiculturalist just like the black studies and the lesbian studies majors on college campuses.” How do we know? He left us an enraged voicemail!

Go ahead, listen. Breitbart is angry that anyone would call a neo-Nazi a “right-wing extremist.” Here’s a sample:

It’s such a fucking slander on people like me. This guy’s political philosophy is more akin to the drivel that you hear on a college campuses that delineates us by group and not by individuality…. It’s deeply offensive that you would use this for political gain.

He’s not alone of course. Limbaugh also said, “this guy’s beliefs, this guy’s hate stems from influence that you find on the left, not on the right.” The history of right wing extremism has been airbrushed out.

Right wing commentators have obviously developed a serious delusion. It started a while back when they disingenuously tried to brainwash young people into believing that Hitler was a product of the left. It took on steam after 9/11 when they accused “the left” of being in sympathy with the misogynistic, repressive fundamentalist Islam and has now apparently evolved into a widespread belief that the left are white supremacists due to their multiculturalism.

The cognitive dissonance may finally be taking its toll.

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DIY Insurance

by digby

Ezra says:

Earlier today, Sen. Kent Conrad, the North Dakota Democrat who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, introduced a “potential compromise” on the public plan: A system of federally-chartered co-ops that could offer a non-profit alternative to the for-profit insurance industry. In this telling, the co-ops preserve the central feature of the public plan — they’re a competitor to the traditional insurance industry — but are free from the baggage of government control.

I spoke to the Senator this evening about the co-op model, and he said a few things that surprised me. First, his search for an alternative was on behalf of the G-11 — the key Senate powerbrokers on health care. Second, it proceeded from the premise that the public plan doesn’t have the votes. All Republicans are opposed and, according to Conrad, “at least three Democrats.” And third, he thinks reconciliation is basically out as a viable option for comprehensive health reform. A lightly edited transcript follows.

Good to know. Maybe we should just send the congress home and have Kent and the “G-1” decide what’s best for everyone. Actually that’s what’s happening.

Here’s the DIY part:

Who would charter these? What is the process? Do I go over to my local health insurance exchange and put in an application?

The way co-ops typically are formed, people who feel they’re not appropriately served, or not served at all, band together. They form an org, elect a board, hire people to do the work, pool their money, and the organization goes forward. These cooperative entities would provide their contracts through the exchange just like everyone else, be subject to the same rules as everyone else, in terms of reserve requirements, in terms of what kind of contracts they could offer. People would go to their exchange, they’d see the option, and if they liked it, they sign up, and then they become one of the members, because every member is an owner. And they have elections and that elected board chooses leadership.

Would there be regulations on how many of these there would have to be in each state?

We’ve not contemplated having that in the health care reform law, but there is clearly an economic requirement in order to have the leverage to negotiate with providers to get competitive rates, you need greater bulk. That’s were we believe we need 500,000 lives to be competitive.

That’s probably one of the two major items of discussion still remaining here. They’re various options for consideration if you will. I offered the G-11 group three models. One is state-based, so every state has one. I don’t think that works frankly. in states like mine, the pool wouldn’t be big enough. The second would be a national entity. That’s probably too limiting as well.

What you probably need is a national entity with state affiliates, and the further flexibility so those states can have regional pools. So in our part of the country, you might have North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming go together. Out east you might have Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire together. We’re consulting with experts tomorrow about that.

Where did this idea come from? I’ve done a fair amount of health care reporting, and this is the first I’ve heard of it.

I guess it came out of conversations in my office after we were asked to see if we couldn’t come up with some way of bridging this chasm. Part of it is that we’re so used to cooperative structures in my state. They were begun by progressives, they came out of the progressive era. And they’re so successful in our state. So I can’t really say we came up with some brand new idea. We just thought about our own experience.

It’s good to know they’ve thought this through.

One thing’s for sure — the insurance companies are happy. One only wonders if the G-11 had them in the room with them.

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Falling Into The Ocean

by digby

We’d all better start thinking about this because it’s a huge, huge problem. There has never been a scarier case of “as California goes, so goes the nation:”

Imagine a western country with a population of about 40 million people and an economy the size of Spain or Italy. After years of dysfunctional politics and amid a global recession, it teeters on the verge of bankruptcy—forced to choose between eliminating the most basic services for its citizens and defaulting on its massive debts. Such a country has a way out through the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But if the dysfunctional economy is not a country but, say, California, a way out suddenly seems less clear.

In 1978, California’s voters approved Proposition 13, which changed the state constitution to require a two-thirds majority vote of the state legislature to raise taxes. Meanwhile, the state’s progressive constitution allows voters to impose spending requirements on the legislature, borrow money or amend the constitution by a simple majority vote.

Voters everywhere want low taxes and generous government benefits. In most government systems, they elect legislators who try to balance these imperatives. But only in California can voters both give themselves tax cuts and require the state legislature to spend more money on their chosen programs. Well-meaning initiatives have taken large chunks of the budget out of the legislature’s control and have saddled the state with heavy interest payments on endless bonds used to pay for infrastructure such as new schools and earthquake retrofitting for public buildings. These sound nice when described in one sentence on a ballot, but funding them through debt is unnecessarily expensive and limits the legislature’s options, short-changing less sexy programs such as services for the poor.

Slightly more than a third of the seats in the legislature are firmly controlled by Republicans. Amid a constant threat of primary challenges from the right, these legislators refuse to support any tax increases under virtually any circumstances. The results are predictably disastrous: California faces massive debts, declining services and a budget that seems perpetually in crisis.

The Obama administration seems disinclined to help, even as it is seeking $100 billion in loans for the International Monetary Fund itself—an amount that could easily solve California’s problems.

The article goes on to point out all the reason why California asked for this problem, the dysfunction in its government and among its people. It does not let anyone off the hook. But the problem will end up being a problem for all Americans if something isn’t done. Unless California is expelled from the union, its problems are America’s problems and its huge failing economy will drag down the whole enchilada.

And the ramification for millions and millions of fellow Americans, many of them children who don’t have a vote, are chilling:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was out of the state the day of the ballot-box meltdown, has proposed slashing services for the poor with much more enthusiasm than he ever brought to defending the initiatives he backed. If his proposals are adopted, the California Budget Project estimates the state will stop providing medical coverage for 1.9 million people, including 900,000 children, and also stop providing home care for 400,000 disabled senior citizens.

The governor also proposes entirely eliminating CalWorks, the state’s welfare-to-work program which currently provides 1.1 million children and 300,000 adults from low-income families with cash grants. Dozens of other programs, from school buses to poison control, are being cut or eliminated altogether. California’s already beleaguered education system is seeing further cuts, the state government is raiding local governments, and the governor proposes borrowing $5 billion from next year’s tax revenues to balance this year’s budget. No state has ever declared bankruptcy—but there’s a first time for everything: The situation is so bad that the state is cutting funds that are matched 2-1 or even 3-to-1 by the federal government, multiplying the pain for California’s poor.

President Obama has said he doesn’t want to run car companies, but he also knows that letting giants like General Motors collapse would be far worse. Similarly, the president surely doesn’t want to run California, but letting it slash government to the point where it makes Alabama look like Sweden would cause vastly more suffering than a failed GM ever could.

This is a slow motion train wreck of epic proportions. And at some point soon the horror of it is going to become very, very acute.

It will be fun to blame the California fruits and nuts for their foolishness, and there’s a lot of truth in it. But what this is, is an actual real life demonstration of the Republican “Starve The Beast” strategy and it should be an object lesson to everyone. California is on the verge of becoming the Republican dream state right before your eyes: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

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50 Votes

by digby

So the AMA came out in oppositione to a public plan. Anyone who is surprised by that hasn’t been paying attention. They were always going to fight any effort to control costs because one of the main costs is them. (The AMA has always been mostly a bunch of rich conservatives. There are other, newer physician groups who are far less reflexively ideological.)

Meanwhile, we have the Dean with yet another onanistic paean to bipartisanship:

The goal of the Obama White House is to come up with a health-care plan that can attract bipartisan support. The president has told visitors that he would rather have 70 votes in the Senate for a bill that gives him 85 percent of what he wants rather than a 100 percent satisfactory bill that passes 52 to 48.
There is good reason for that preference. When you are changing the way one-sixth of the American economy is organized and altering life for patients, doctors, hospitals and insurers, you need that kind of a strong launch if the result is to survive the inevitable vagaries of the shakedown period.

Right-o. Hardly worth doing if it isn’t bipartisan. Except everything he says is total bs.

Here’s Howie Klein with a little reminder of how this actually works:

In 1932 when FDR and the New Dealers rolled up their sleeves and set about to rescue the country from a Great Depression caused by decades of unfettered corporate excesses and grotesque Republican misrule, the Republicans went on an orgy of obstructionism. When Social Security came up for a vote in the House, not a single Republican voted in favor– not one. Instead, it was seared into the minds of voters that the GOP was the Party of Sore Losers. While FDR was busy rescuing and rebuilding, the Republican Party decided to re-brand the Democrats… as socialists. And how did that work out for them? When Hoover won the presidency in 1928, on the eve of the Depression, 270 Republicans were elected to the House and the Senate had a 56-35 seat GOP majority. Republicans with a world view identical to that of John Boehner, Miss McConnell, Jim DeMint, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh put together their multi-cycle obstructionism/rebranding strategy which resulted in a loss of nearly 200 House seats by 1936. That’s right; the GOP sank from 270 seats to just 88 in the House. And their healthy majority in the Senate? After the 1936 election their 56 seats dwindled down to just 17 impotent, barking chihuahuas.

The Democrats only need 50 votes to pass health care reform and the country will be grateful for it for a long time to come. This idea that everyone has to sign on is just utter and complete nonsense — a foolish beltway truism born of some fantasy about ‘Ole Tip and Ronnie throwing down martinis after work. People do not care how many senators voted for something. They desperately need health security — this problem is metaphorically killing the economy and literally killing the citizens. Just pass the damn bill.

Correction: The voting numbers above are incorrect at least as pertains to the final passage, according to the Social Security web site, here. Republicans did vote for the final bill.

But their demagoguing of the bill was not forgotten by the American people and they did suffer a huge loss in the mid-terms.

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Nobody Puts Billionaire In The Corner

by digby

In case there are any remaining doubts about who runs the show in America, this should dispel them:

In early spring, Tom Golisano went to Albany from his home in Rochester to meet with Malcolm A. Smith, then the Senate majority leader.

Mr. Golisano, a billionaire business executive, had spent heavily to help Mr. Smith and other Democrats win control of the Senate in the November election, and was angry to hear they were now planning to raise taxes on the wealthy. He expected an audience befitting a major financial patron.

Instead, he said, Mr. Smith played with his BlackBerry and seemed to barely listen.

“I said, ‘I’m talking to the wall here,’ ” Mr. Golisano recalled in an interview on Tuesday.

That meeting led to the dramatic collapse Monday of the Democrats’ grip on the Senate majority as a frustrated Mr. Golisano secretly planned with Republicans to persuade two Democrats to join them in ousting Mr. Smith.

[…]

Along with Mr. Golisano, a key figure who helped pull off the plan to overthrow Mr. Smith was Steve Pigeon, who is not only Mr. Golisano’s top political adviser but also a longtime friend of Mr. Espada’s.

After Mr. Golisano’s fruitless meeting with Mr. Smith in March, Mr. Pigeon and Mr. Golisano returned to Albany to meet with Mr. Smith’s top aide, Angelo J. Aponte, the secretary of the Senate. Mr. Golisano insisted that there had to be a way to balance the state budget without raising taxes, and at one point snatched a pad from one of Mr. Aponte’s aides and began scrawling back-of-the-envelope calculations.

One of Mr. Golisano’s aides asked whether the state could issue billions of dollars worth of bonds. Mr. Aponte said it was unlikely the bonds would find buyers in the economic slump. (Mr. Pigeon disputed that account. “We were there to hear their presentation and they didn’t seem to have any good answers,” he said.)

Mr. Golisano gave up on the Democrats and Mr. Pigeon moved quickly to set up a meeting with three top Senate Republicans. Secrecy was imperative, so they decided to meet at a small Albany rock club, Red Square, an unlikely locale for lawmakers.

“You wouldn’t find anybody there that we knew,” recalled Senator George D. Maziarz, a Republican from western New York who attended. Within days, the trio — Mr. Maziarz, Mr. Skelos and Senator Tom Libous of Binghamton, went to Rochester to meet with Mr. Golisano. The meeting was a chance for Mr. Skelos to meet Mr. Golisano for the first time.

Mr. Pigeon soon set to wooing Mr. Espada, a Bronx Democrat who had once caucused with the Republicans. Mr. Pigeon and Mr. Espada had a long relationship, going back to Mr. Pigeon’s days as a counsel to the Senate Democrats. Mr. Espada drafted Mr. Monserrate, one of his close friends in the Senate, to join him in his defection.

Mr. Espada has said he joined the effort because he wanted to change how Albany does business.

Do read the whole thing. It only gets better, even including the nefarious Roger Stone. And keep in mind that this was a Democratic donor.

“Those who own the country ought to govern it.” John Jay

Update: Not that California’s any better, mind you. We’re so inept even our billionaires can’t get anything done…

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