The press seems to be taking this action to deny funding for the closing of Guantanamo at face value as a sign of congress flexing its muscle at the white house. That’s ridiculous. It seems obvious that they are giving cover to the administration, which simply doesn’t know how to handle this Gitmo hissy fit and want’s to kick the issue down the road. (I’m not sure why they think it will be any easier later, but perhaps they know they are going to punt and just want to keep the coalition from splintering before they get anything substantial done on health care.) Harry Reid’s confused comments from yesterday only underscore for me that he was following some script that he hadn’t fully memorized. The Democrats are not “breaking with” the president.
Obviously, this argument that we can’t allow suspected terrorists to come into our communities and kill us all in our beds is beyond stupid (unless you actually believes these prisoners have supernatural powers as the racist rightwing pantwetters seemed to believe.) America has no shortage of dangerous killers and psychopaths locked up in its prisons and we seem to be able to handle them just fine.
I recently heard one of the Republican strategists argue that we couldn’t allow these prisoners to be housed in America because it would provoke terrorists to try to break them out (kind of a Butch and Sundance thing, I guess.) But, if Americans can’t break their own gang members out of maximum security prisons, it’s hard to imagine that some roving jihadis could do any better.
Prisons are what we do. We have more people locked up that any other nation on earth. It’s one of our biggest industries. We may be bad at everything else, but locking people up we are really,really good at. The idea that we can’t keep a few broken, foreign, torture victims in jail is patently absurd. If you don’t believe that the government is capable of protecting a prison from attack by foreign terrorists, anyone who lives near a nuclear power plant should be completely petrified. Talk about a target.
Look, this is just one more example of the politics of national security trumping actual national security. Logic says that Guantanamo could be closed today and these prisoners could be brought tomorrow to military brigs around the country if not maximum security prisons we have by the dozens. The rest of the world would see Obama fulfilling his clear and unambiguous promise to close it (a promise he shared with his Republican rival, btw) and would gain tremendous credibility around the world for doing so. But the Republicans have the Democrats running scared on national security again and that’s the end of that.
Let’s not pretend there’s really a “debate” going on here. The Democrats are more scared of Republicans than they are of terrorists or anything else and that’s what’s driving this.
The biggest difference between 1993 and 2009 when it comes to health care is the coordinated message machine – on the left this time – pushing for reform. Under Clinton, the White House horded the policy and nobody could go out and sell it, or at least rebut the attacks from industry. This time, the Health Care for America Now structure allows activists a place both to attack back at industry and keep them occupied, while arguing for a consistent set of principles that must be part of any reform. Today, HCAN did something great, calling on the Justice Department to look at monopolies in the insurance market.
Activists backing President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul are asking the Justice Department to open a wide-ranging investigation of what they say is monopoly-like power in the hands of major insurers […]
“A lack of antitrust enforcement has enabled insurers to acquire dominant positions in almost every metropolitan market,” said the letter to the Justice Department, signed by Richard Kirsch, the group’s director. “The failure to attack anticompetitive practices has enhanced the dominant positions of these insurers. This must be reversed.” […]
In a report earlier this year, the American Medical Association found that insurance markets in most major metropolitan areas were dominated by two companies, and in many cases only one. In all, 94 percent of the metropolitan areas met the government’s definition of “highly concentrated” markets for health insurance.
Separately, a recent report by the congressional Government Accountability Office found that in most states, a single insurer dominates the market for small business health insurance, even though many companies offer coverage. The GAO found that the median, or midpoint, statewide market share of the largest insurer was about 47 percent, although the median number of licensed carriers was 27.
This is all the more important, considering that the health insurance industry’s “compromise” solution for reform is to EXPAND THEIR MONOPOLY by mandating that everyone in America buy health insurance from them, without the opportunity for a public plan alternative. With nobody to compete with and essentially a forced market, insurers would have every incentive to consolidate further, the very action which has driven up health care premium costs over the years, as an HCAN report later today will show. While insurers aren’t the only cause of rising health care costs – pharmaceuticals, medical device operators, hospitals, there’s plenty of blame to go around – this model of activism can be scaled to pressure both the industry and the political class.
Health care reform will rise or fall this year based on the success of these activist efforts, toward both the special interests and the politicians. Doesn’t mean it’ll succeed, but it gives it a fighting chance. Frank Luntz (who won’t say who paid him for the health care memo) isn’t the only game in town anymore.
Many of you know that I do double-duty over at Calitics, the California progressive political website. We had quite a couple of weeks here leading up to another election (our 13th in 7 years), which the voters defeated resoundingly. The Yes side outspent the No side 7:1 and still got crushed. Let me back up a bit and describe the problem.
There is no functional government in California. We might as well be Somalia. Because of the 2/3 requirement needed to pass a budget or raise taxes, because of the cap on property taxes at 1978 rates which make income tax revenue 53% of the overall general fund, because of the various past ballot measures and Constitutional amendments which mandate a healthy part of the budget into certain spending operations, because local governments are funded in the most absurd way possible, because of the utter lack of a political media to explain this jumble to people, we don’t have a government that works. Democrats hold a 63% majority in both houses of the legislature, and yet they cannot invoke the popular will because of hard-right Republican holdouts (we don’t grow any other kind out here).
Now, this would be true if John Birch or Noam Chomsky were Governor, because it’s a failure of process and not policy. But let’s offer a particular bit of scorn for the current Governor, who, despite what you hear in the national media, has been the biggest failure of any California executive in decades. He entered government because he labeled his predecessor Gray Davis a failure and said he had to be recalled. Six years later we have a bigger budget deficit and largely the same dysfunctional structure. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he would “blow up the boxes” in Sacramento, and the boxes remain untouched. He said he would be the “Collectinator” in DC, and yet California gives much more in income taxes to the Feds than they receive in services. Schwarzenegger has virtually no substantive accomplishments; he showed up in DC yesterday for that fuel economy announcement, which is based on California’s tailpipe emissions law, passed in 2002, when he was still making movies.
The man has absolutely no ability to persuade members of his own party, who actually give him lower approval ratings than Democrats. And his latest reinvention will be as a hard-right spending cutter. He’s in Washington today trying to get waivers to cut Medi-Cal and in-home supportive services and still qualify for stimulus money. In other words, he’s reacting to a terrible recession in the state by cutting more government spending and throwing 5,000 state employees out of work. This is more neo-Hooverist than any Mark Sanford or Rick Perry plan.
And yet the local media and the Village treat this guy like the movie star he is, with glossy magazine covers and puff-piece profiles. Imagine George Bush circa 2007 STILL being treated like the guy on the aircraft carrier in his codpiece suit and you get what I mean.
The Democratic leadership doesn’t exactly help matters by capitulating at the first opportunity, and refusing for 30 years to detail the root of the problem – a structural revenue deficit and an ungovernable system. They backed this special election nonsense, and like national Democrats, they view polls as immutable realities cast in stone, rather than a starting point for advocacy and persuasion.
It’s beyond clear what has to be done now. We need to repeal the 2/3 requirement and restore democracy in the state of California. As George Lakoff says, this is the lesson of the election, the voters demanding a functional government that doesn’t have to return to them every couple months to sort out their budget problems. It’s time for a majority vote.
And the new Democratic Party leader, John Burton (who was in Congress I think back in 1874), says he agrees. But I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that the Democrats like it this way – they may not be able to fix the budget from year to year, but at least they have something else to blame instead of themselves. The 2/3 rule works for BOTH parties – Republicans can hijack the process, Democrats can point at Republicans.
Enough. A growing movement at the grassroots wants to live in a democracy again, not a failed state. Expect initiatives on the 2010 ballot as wide-ranging as a simple repeal of the 2/3 rule, to a Constitutional convention (no state needs one more) to completely rewrite this absurd collection of contradictions. And you can see this as a test case for whether a progressive movement can really deliver the change they seek. If not, I don’t see how the country recovers with this massive sick patient on its West Coast.
(Oh, and we’ll know in a couple hours if the state Supreme Court decision on Prop. 8, the gay marriage law, is coming down tomorrow. Never a dull moment…)
…So no Prop. 8 announcement this week. Also, here is a very good video from a California Assemblywoman that explains the myths and falsehoods of the state budget process pretty darn well.
Uhm, everyone recognizes that this Pelosi flap is a manufactured hissy fit, right? The point is to make the whole discussion of torture politically radioactive for Democrats in the same way that questioning the surge became radioactive after Betrayus. It’s a classic political kabuki designed to twist the Democrats into pretzels.
Here’s a piece wrote for The Big Con sometime back on the subject. It’s a testimony to the continuing success of the tactic that even in their lowest moments, the Republicans can still work up a good hissy — and that the villagers and the Democrats still buy it. Even now:
The Art of the Hissy Fit
I first noticed the right’s successful use of phony sanctimony and faux outrage back in the 90’s when well-known conservative players like Gingrich and Livingston pretended to be offended at the president’s extramarital affair and were repeatedly and tiresomely “upset” about fund-raising practices they all practiced themselves. The idea of these powerful and corrupt adulterers being personally upset by White House coffees and naughty sexual behavior was laughable.But they did it, oh how they did it, and it often succeeded in changing the dialogue and titillating the media into a frenzy of breathless tabloid coverage.In fact, they became so good at the tactic that they now rely on it as their first choice to control the political dialogue when it becomes uncomfortable and put the Democrats on the defensive whenever they are winning the day. Perhaps the best example during the Bush years would be the completely cynical and over-the-top reaction to Senator Paul Wellstone’s memorial rally in 2002 in the last couple of weeks leading up to the election.With the exception of the bizarre Jesse Ventura, those in attendance, including the Republicans, were non-plussed by the nature of the event at the time. It was not, as the chatterers insisted, a funeral, but rather more like an Irish wake for Wellstone supporters — a celebration of Wellstone’s life, which included, naturally, politics. (He died campaigning, after all.) But Vin Weber, one of the Republican party’s most sophisticated operatives, immediately saw the opportunity for a faux outrage fest that was more successful than even he could have ever dreamed.By the time they were through, the Democrats were prostrating themselves at the feet of anyone who would listen, begging for forgiveness for something they didn’t do, just to stop the shrieking. The Republicans could barely keep the smirks off their faces as they sternly lectured the Democrats on how to properly honor the dead — the same Republicans who had relentlessly tortured poor Vince Foster’s family for years.It’s an excellent technique and one they continue to employ with great success, most recently with the entirely fake Move-On and Pete Stark “controversies.” (The Democrats try their own versions but rarely achieve the kind of full blown hissy fit the Republicans can conjure with a mere blast fax to Drudge and their talk radio minions.)But it’s about more than simple political distraction or savvy public relations. It’s actually a very well developed form of social control called Ritual Defamation (or Ritual Humiliation) as this well trafficked internet article defines it:
Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. For the purposes of this essay, the central element is defamation in retaliation for the real or imagined attitudes, opinions or beliefs of the victim, with the intention of silencing or neutralizing his or her influence, and/or making an example of them so as to discourage similar independence and “insensitivity” or non-observance of taboos. It is different in nature and degree from simple criticism or disagreement in that it is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by an organization or representative of a special interest group, and in that it consists of several characteristic elements.
The article goes on to lay out several defining characteristics of ritual defamation such as “the method of attack in a ritual defamation is to assail the character of the victim, and never to offer more than a perfunctory challenge to the particular attitudes, opinions or beliefs expressed or implied. Character assassination is its primary tool.” Perhaps its most intriguing insight is this:
The power of ritual defamation lies entirely in its capacity to intimidate and terrorize. It embraces some elements of primitive superstitious belief, as in a “curse” or “hex.” It plays into the subconscious fear most people have of being abandoned or rejected by the tribe or by society and being cut off from social and psychological support systems.
In a political context this translates to a fear by liberal politicians that they will be rejected by the American people — and a subconscious dulling of passion and inspiration in the mistaken belief that they can spare themselves further humiliation if only they control their rhetoric. The social order these fearsome conservative rituals pretend to “protect,” however, are not those of the nation at large, but rather the conservative political establishment which is perhaps best exemplified by this famous article about how Washington perceived the Lewinsky scandal. The “scandal” is moved into the national conversation through the political media which has its own uses for such entertaining spectacles and expends a great deal of energy promoting these shaming exercises for commercial purposes.The political cost to progressives and liberals for their inability to properly deal with this tactic is greater than they realize. Just as Newt Gingrich was not truly offended by Bill Clinton’s behavior (which mirrored his own) neither were conservative congressmen and Rush Limbaugh truly upset by the Move On ad — and everyone knew it, which was the point. It is a potent demonstration of pure power to force others to insincerely condemn or apologize for something, particularly when the person who is forcing it is also insincerely outraged. For a political party that suffers from a reputation for weakness, it is extremely damaging to be so publicly cowed over and over again. It separates them from their most ardent supporters and makes them appear guilty and unprincipled to the public at large.Ritual defamation and humiliation are designed to make the group feel contempt for the victim and over time it’s extremely hard to resist feeling it when the victims fail to stand up for themselves.There is the possibility that the Republicans will overplay this particular gambit. Their exposure over the past few years for incompetence, immorality and corruption, both personal and institutional, makes them extremely imperfect messengers for sanctimony, faux or otherwise. But they are still effectively wielding the flag, (or at least the Democratic congress is allowing them to) and until liberals and progressives find a way to thwart this successful tactic, it will continue. At this point the conservatives have little else.What do you suppose today’s enforcers of proper decorum would say to this?
Americans too often teach their children to despise those who hold unpopular opinions. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place – the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan. — Mark Twain
When Obama proposed to put back the charitable deduction for people who make over $250,000 a year to what it was during Ronald Reagan’s admnistration, it was universally accepted that this would spell the end of charity as we know it. Apparently, all these wealthy philanthropists will refuse to give money to their favored charities is their tax break is less than it is right now because it just isn’t worth it to them. These are people who everyone reveres as being the smartest and most productive, generous people in the world.
Fine. But can we at least stop talking about these people as if they are doing this because of their generous hearts? Here’s evidence that it just ain’t so:
America’s poor are its most generous givers
In fact, America’s poor donate more, in percentage terms, than higher-income groups do, surveys of charitable giving show. What’s more, their generosity declines less in hard times than the generosity of richer givers does.
“The lowest-income fifth (of the population) always give at more than their capacity,” said Virginia Hodgkinson, former vice president for research at Independent Sector, a Washington-based association of major nonprofit agencies. “The next two-fifths give at capacity, and those above that are capable of giving two or three times more than they give.”
Indeed, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest survey of consumer expenditure found that the poorest fifth of America’s households contributed an average of 4.3 percent of their incomes to charitable organizations in 2007. The richest fifth gave at less than half that rate, 2.1 percent.
The figures probably undercount remittances by legal and illegal immigrants to family and friends back home, a multibillion-dollar outlay to which the poor contribute disproportionally.
None of the middle fifths of America’s households, in contrast, gave away as much as 3 percent of their incomes.
President Obama said in his press conference last March when he announced the rollback of the charitable contribution tax break:
People are still going to be able to make charitable contributions. It just means if you give $100 and you’re in this tax bracket, at a certain point, instead of being able to write off 36 (percent) or 39 percent, you’re writing off 28 percent. Now, if it’s really a charitable contribution, I’m assuming that that shouldn’t be the determining factor as to whether you’re giving that hundred dollars to the homeless shelter down the street.
Sorry Mr President. That’s a nice idea, but you misunderstand. The only people who aren’t demanding a tax deduction for charitable giving are the poor. The middle class isn’t looking for a huge amount. But the people who have more money than God, and who only give a measly 2% of it to charity in the first place, would rather get no write off at all than give that hundred bucks and only get 28%. It wouldn’t even be worth their time to fill out the paperwork for such chump change.
Is there one right-wing hissy fit the Democrats can manage to ignore? I know, simple answers to stupid questions, the answer is no.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) declared in a press conference today, “We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.” In several tense back and forths with reporters, Reid said he opposes imprisoning detainees on U.S. soil, saying flatly, “We don’t want them around the United States”:
REID: I’m saying that the United States Senate, Democrats and Republicans, do not want terrorists to be released in the United States. That’s very clear.
QUESTION: No one’s talking about releasing them. We’re talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States.
REID: Can’t put them in prison unless you release them.
QUESTION: Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit? …
REID: I can’t make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.
Later, Reid repeated that he would not support Guantanamo detainees being transferred to U.S prisons:
QUESTION: But Senator, Senator, it’s not that you’re not being clear when you say you don’t want them released. But could you say — would you be all right with them being transferred to an American prison?
REID: Not in the United States.
That floating plastic island in the Pacific is looking better and better every day.
No doubt Reid’s sudden lack of confidence in the federal prison system and trickle of piss tumbling down his pants has something to do with the low approval ratings coming out of Nevada. But more than that, he exhibits the exact same knee-jerk response to Republican fearmongering to which we’ve grown accustomed – a weak-kneed backpedal displayed in the name of looking strong and tough. This statement Reid’s office released makes absolutely no sense, proving again Digby’s point that, when politicians start speaking Engrish instead of English, you know they’re hiding something:
“President George W. Bush, Senator John McCain, Secretary Colin Powell, President Obama and I all agree – Guantanamo must be closed. President Obama’s approach is a responsible one. […]
“The amendment Chairman Inouye has offered today recognizes that it would be premature for Congress to act before the Administration proposes its plan. I support his amendment. On two important points, however, we do not need to wait for any instruction – and there should be no misunderstanding. Let me be clear: Democrats will not move to close Guantanamo without a responsible plan in place to ensure Americans’ safety. And we will never allow a terrorist to be released into the United States.
“This amendment is as clear as day. It explicitly bars using the funds in this bill to ‘transfer, release or incarcerate’ any of the Guantanamo detainees in the United States. When the Administration closes Guantanamo, we will ensure it does so the right way.”
So we have to close Guantanamo, but we will never allow terrorists to pump our gas or check us out at Wal-Mart, but we also won’t transfer, release or incarcerate any Guantanamo detainees, whether they’ve been absolved of any terrorism charges or not. But in the end, don’t worry, we’ll do the “right” thing. Sounds like they need some kind of detention facility outside the United States, maybe on foreign soil, to handle those dangerous sorts. Maybe Cuba has something opening up soon.
Harry Reid needs to get himself down to Guantanamo and personally inform the Uighurs, who have been held in a Kafka-esque legal black hole for seven years, innocent of crimes and cleared for release but without a country to call home, why his misplacing of his vertebrae means that they must stay locked in prison forever. Maybe they’ll say to his face what they said to Newt Gingrich through interpreters: “Why does he hate us so much and say those kinds of things? He doesn’t know us.”
Senate Democrats won rare praise from Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who hailed their “flexibility” on closing Guantanamo Bay and other national security issues.
“Well, they’re certainly coming in the right direction,” McConnell told reporters about Democrats’ decision to strip money to close the Naval detention center from the war supplemental bill.
McConnell said Americans “ought to be pleased that our friends on the other side of the aisle are showing some flexibility on this issue and heading in our direction,” adding that he hoped President Obama would show similar flexibility, as with his reversed decision on releasing photos of detainee abuse.
“The president has shown some flexibility on national security issues,” McConnell said. “I hope he will have some flexibility on the detainee facility at Guantanamo, because it really has worked very, very well.”
I can’t wait for the day Obama reverses hiimself and keeps Guantanamo open. The pundits will praise him endlessly for his wise centrism. And he might as well, considering the restoration of military commissions with the same flaws as before, including continued use of evidence obtained from HEARSAY – think about the implications of allowing evidence in an American-sponsored court based on anonymous whispers. Nobody wanted a change of venue from Guantanamo because they didn’t like the name. It was about the sad legacy of the policies practiced there.
The problem with Reid’s obnoxious, intelligence-insulting backpedal, aside from how easily anyone can discern the party on offense from the party on defense, is that the entire Democratic Party has flat stopped making any argument about national security from the perspective of civil liberties and human rights, and how respecting both ultimately makes us safer. Even if Democrats believe it – and most of them don’t – they either think it’s too nuanced for the country to accept (wrong) or too easily demagogued by the hissy fit stirrers on the right (who are completely discredited). And this of course starts right at the top. Obama put himself in this position, where the Senate Majority Leader is now flopping around like a fish trying to look “tough.” But Reid is of course collateral damage in this battle to burnish the “sensible center,” as defined by what George Bush did to keep us safe. Here’s Glenn:
What is, in my view, most noteworthy about all of this is how it gives the lie to the collective national claim that we learned our lesson and are now regretful about the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism. Republicans are right about the fact that while it was Bush officials who led the way in implementing these radical and lawless policies, most of the country’s institutions — particularly the Democratic Party leadership and the media — acquiesced to it, endorsed it, and enabled it. And they still do […]
As Maureen Dowd pointed out in the non-plagiarized part of her column on Sunday, the reason Bush was able to do what he did is because “very few watchdogs — in the Democratic Party or the press — were pushing back against the Bush horde in 2002 and 2003, when magazines were gushing about W. and Cheney as conquering heroes.” But all of this recent media commentary makes clear that media stars and Democratic leaders now are only pretending to find Bush/Cheney policies repugnant because Bush is now so unpopular and his policies were proven to be failures. As a result, a new face is needed for those policies, but the belief in the rightness of those policies hasn’t changed. They still consider Bush/Cheney policies “centrist” and responsible — only Leftist Purists oppose them — and thus heap praise on Obama for embracing them. We’re still the same country we were in 2003. Our media stars and political leaders from both parties still think the same way. That’s why the more Obama embraces the Bush/Cheney approach, the more praise he gets for Centrism.
This is not only a losing argument around the world, as the stars fall from their eyes when they witness the same distasteful policies wrapped up in a prettier package. It’s also a lose POLITICALLY to strengthen the arguments of your opponents and alienate your supporters. I’m just a DFH who doesn’t know how the world works, but it seems to me that the Democrats never succeeded by trying to take issues “off the table,” only by confronting them and offering a better argument. I guess that makes me unserious.
Wolf Blitzer just interviewed Carol Browner about the fuel efficiency standards, fretting about whether Americans are going to end up being like those poor Europeans with their tiny, little shrunken cars. And then he asked this:
If you still have your old car, you can keep it no matter what, right? You’re not going to be taking those away from people?
Is this being discussed on talk radio or something? I knew the wingnuts were having a meltdown over a non-existent threat to take away their guns, but I hadn’t heard they were freaking out because the government was going to take their hummers.
Why don’t they just admit they are afraid Democrats are going to confiscate their dicks and be done with it?
(Oh, and by the way, we are … It’s a second term agenda item, though.)
I know that Michael Steele made a big speech earlier, but I thought you all might be interested in what the real head of the Republican Party had to say today about the new mileage standards:
LIMBAUGH: Folks, this is the point. It is not that anybody at that press conference today, from Obama to Carol Browner and anybody else, they don’t care about being dependent on foreign oil. There are ways that are much more efficient and make much more sense than 35 or 39 miles to the gallon in a putt-putt to reduce our use of foreign oil.
They want the use of oil to continue. They just want the money for it. They don’t want the sheikhs getting the money, and they don’t want foreign oil companies getting the money. Obama wants it. Washington wants the money. And this is the first step: the universal or national fuel efficiency standard.
Do his dittoheads agree that the Shiekhs and the foreign oil companies should have the money rather than the United States government?
There was a time when such a thing might have been called treasonous. By Limbaugh. nowadays, bashing the US Government is considered patriotic. interesting how that works.
First, a short history lesson: in 1992 and 1993, the insurance industry made exactly the same kind of concessions on health care reform that they have thus far, lulling the Clinton Administration into believing they had a partner, only to double-cross them with attack ads that helped cement public opinion against reform and sink the plan.
This year, the industry offered concessions, attended the meetings, talked nice about reducing costs and ending discrimination in coverage, and then backing off their commitments. Now, one company has taken the next step:
One week after the nation’s health insurance lobby pledged to President Obama to do what it can to constrain rising health costs, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina is putting the finishing touches on a public message campaign aimed at killing a key plank in Obama’s reform platform.
As part of what it calls an “informational website,” the company has hired an outside PR company to make a series of videos sounding the alarm about a government-sponsored health insurance option, known as the public plan. Obama has consistently maintained that a government-run plan, absent high-paid executives and the need for profits, could be a more affordable option for Americans who have trouble purchasing private insurance. The industry argues that creating a public insurance program will undermine the marketplace and eventually lead to a single-payer style system.
Well, that would be just awful.
WaPo has storyboards of the proposed videos, and basically, we’re back in Harry and Louise land, with the scare level amped up. Confusing plans, forced rationing, an uncertain future – it’s all on display. If you read the Luntz memos, you could write one of these ads yourself. And since Luntz is being paid by health insurance companies, maybe he wrote them.
Insurance groups have mostly stayed off TV at this stage of the process, at the request of the Finance Committee Chair. But clearly, they’re ready to gut the plan whenever they see an opportunity.
The smart move at this time would be to lock the industry out of the negotiation room. Foxes don’t get to deliberate over their inclusion in the hen house.
MATTHEWS: To make an institutional charge is pretty dangerous against an agency that specializes in winning wars, CIA. For her to go after and call them liars, in effect…
Escalate’s a great word from Vietnam. Jim, what she did by attacking the CIA as an institution, forced the head of the CIA, her former colleague and friend in colleague, and maybe current friend, to say basically not only do we have notes of that meeting, which were contemporaneous and authoritative in that regard, but those notes say that she was told that we used the water boarding in the past tense. Clearly nailing her 180 from what she‘s claiming.
There you have it. The CIA notes are “authoritative” and “clearly nailed” Pelosi. (And the CIA “wins wars” which should come as a surprise to the Pentagon …)
Dem Rep David Obey writes a letter to CIA director Leon Panetta, saying that the agency’s recently-released documents detailing torture briefings botched another fact, raising more doubts about the accuracy of the CIA’s claims:
Dear Director Panetta:
In light of current controversy about CIA briefing practices, I was surprised to learn that the agency erroneously listed an appropriations staffer as being in a key briefing on September 19, 2006, when in fact he was not. The list the agency released entitled “Member Briefings on Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs)”, shows that House Appropriations Committee defense appropriations staffer Paul Juola was in that briefing on that date. In fact, Mr. Juola recollects that he walked members to the briefing room, met General Hayden and Mr.Walker, who were the briefers, and was told that he could not attend the briefing. We request that you immediately correct this record.
Sincerely,
David R. Obey
As Sargent notes, it’s not the biggest deal in the world, but it is yet another piece of proof that these “authoritative” notes are just a teensy bit sloppy.
Update: And by the way, it’s not like Panetta himself didn’t indicate, however obliquely, that the memos were drawn from “best recollections” of past events:
This letter presents the most thorough information we have on dates, locations, and names of all Members of Congress who were briefed by the CIA on enhanced interrogation techniques. This information, however, is drawn from the past files of the CIA and represents MFRs completed at the time and notes that summarized the best recollections of those individuals. In the end, you and the Committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened. We can make the MFRs available at CIA for staff review.
He doesn’t say that these notes were collected after the fact, but he certainly does leave open the possibility. And it’s looking more and more like it was done years later:
Here’s yet another reason (as if more were needed) to doubt that that CIA briefings document perfectly reflects what lawmakers were told about torture back in the early days of the war on terror.
Almost every briefing described in the document — including the September 2002 Pelosi briefing that’s directly at issue — refers to “EITs,” or enhanced interrogation techniques, as a subject that was discussed. But according to a former intelligence professional who has participated in such briefings, that term wasn’t used until at least 2006.
That’s not just an issue of semantics. The former intel professional said that by using the term in the recently compiled document, the CIA was being “disingenuous,” trying to make it appear that the use of such techniques was part of a “formal and mechanical program.” In fact, said the former intel pro, it wasn’t until 2006 that — amid growing concerns about the program among some in the Bush administration — the EIT program was formalized, and the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were properly defined and given a name.
