Undercover Blue

Extending The Obama Brand In 2010

2010-06-19T21:18:00.000-04:00

In 2008, the Obama team's massive ground game left a few local party officials openly skeptical. In Western North Carolina, they wondered until late October where they fit into the Obama Election Day strategy, or if the strategy was simply all about Obama.

In the end, the Obama team led voter registration and drove an intense get-out-the-vote effort targeting first-time voters, leaving poll greeting and ballot education at the polls to county parties. The hounds to the hunters.

It worked. In Buncombe County, Democrats won 36 of 36 races and tipped the state blue by 14,000 votes.

In the 2010 midterms, however, the DNC and Organizing for America will have to convince voters who went to the polls for the first time to vote for Obama to vote for Democratic candidates and incumbents lacking Obama's charisma. The Pew Research Center's Andrew Kohut describes Obama's legion of surge voters as "relatively sleepy" since the election. The challenge will be to wake them up and get them back to the polls again.

Leading that effort has fallen again to Obama confidant David Plouffe. Matt Bai writes in the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

"Let's be clear -- these are not Democratic voters," Cornell Belcher, the Obama campaign pollster, cautioned me. "They're Obama voters." The lesson that Plouffe and his operation took away from the dismal 2009 elections is that Obama can act like a matchmaker of sorts, introducing the party's candidates to new voters and vouching for their intentions, but it's only going to matter if the candidates themselves embrace the so-called new politics. What that means, practically speaking, is that the White House is urging candidates to divert a fair amount of their time and money -- traditionally used for buying TV ads and rallying core constituencies -- to courting volunteers and voters who haven't generally been reliable Democrats.

That could be a tough sell. The thrust of Bai's article is that Obama never earned his stripes in the party trenches before running for office and never worked as a party strategist. He is "a genuine outsider who spends a fair amount of energy reassuring Democrats that he really does care about the organization."

OFA may have "virtually supplanted the party structure." But there is a difference between moving in and fitting in. As in 2008, there is the same recurring question: Are OFA's activities meant to help the party or to help OFA? So long as the question still gets asked at the county level, the marriage of the DNC and OFA will remain unconsummated.

There remains "something of a cultural chasm between the White House and the party apparatus," Bai writes. Older Democrats "have a harder time imagining that a bunch of volunteers and a dozen virtual town-hall meetings are going to matter more than labor endorsements and some killer 30-second spots." Insiders remain unconvinced that OFA is anything more than a fad, and Obama's election anything more than a fluke fueled by voter dissatisfaction and "an absurd amount of money."

Yet back in Buncombe County -- Democratic Rep. Heath Shuler's conservative district -- progressive Patsy Keever embraced the "new politics" and ousted an incumbent state representative in the recent North Carolina Democratic primary. Even though outspent 4-to-1, Keever's boots-on-the-ground campaign -- led by an Obama field veteran -- trounced a traditional one built around ad buys and bulk mail.

That may be change progressives can believe in. But for many party stalwarts the honeymoon is still on hold.

(Cross-posted from the Huffington Post.)

The Great American "I Told You So"

2010-05-01T15:05:00.002-04:00

In the current Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi talks about the ridicule he and the editors caught last year over his big Goldman Sachs takedown, "The Great American Bubble Machine." The financial media cognoscenti had laughed at his suggestion that Goldman had committed securities fraud. Taibbi gets to laugh now, and it probably won't be his last:

The truth is that what Goldman is alleged to have done in this SEC case is even worse than what all these assholes laughed at us for talking about last year.

Prior to the "Bubble Machine" piece, I had heard rumors that Goldman had gone out and intentionally scared up toxic mortgages and swaps in order to get short of them with sucker bookies like AIG. But – and this seems funny in retrospect – I foolishly dismissed those tales as being too conspiratorial. I thought it was bad enough that Goldman was shorting the subprime market even as it was selling toxic subprime-backed securities to chumps on the open market. The notion that the bank would actually go out and create big balls of crap that would be designed to fail seemed too nuts even for my tastes.

In the year since – and this, to me, is the main lesson from the SEC case against Goldman – the public has quickly come to accept that when it comes to the once-great institutions of modern Wall Street, literally no deal that makes money is too low to be contemplated.

(Crossposted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Reality Bites

2010-04-10T16:32:00.003-04:00

From self-described the champions of "fiscal restraint":

Junior Florida Republican Party staffer had $1.3 million charged to party credit card

Among the damages:

Over the next 2½ years, nearly $1.3 million in charges wound up on Melanie Phister's AmEx — $40,000 at a London hotel, and nearly $20,000 in plane tickets for indicted former House Speaker Ray Sansom, his wife and kids, for starters. Statements show thousands spent on jewelry, sporting goods and in one case $15,000 for what's listed as a month-long stay at a posh Miami Beach hotel, but which the party says was a forfeited deposit.

The credit card records, obtained by the St. Petersburg Times and Miami Herald, offer the latest behind-the-scenes look at extravagant and free-wheeling spending by the party touting fiscal restraint. Not only did certain elite legislative leaders have their own party credit cards to spend donors' money with little oversight, but Phister's records show these leaders also liberally used an underling's card — without her knowledge, she says.

[...]

The Florida Democratic Party requires staffers and leaders to use their own credit cards and seek reimbursement for appropriate expenses. That's now the practice at the Florida Republican Party, and fundraiser Hoffman suggested it's about time.

[h/t C&L]

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Grounded in reality

2010-04-04T10:05:00.001-04:00

Sandpoint (Idaho) Tea Party Patriots president Pam Stout's appeared last week on Letterman to discuss her newfound interest in politics. Of the grandmotherly Stout's politics, Digby writes:

Her politics aren't grounded in real life but in abstract concepts.

Stout's group, the New York Times wrote in February, "joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty, that includes representatives from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, the John Birch Society, and Oath Keepers, a new player in a resurgent militia movement." With all the grounded-in-reality that that entails.

For instance, the Detroit Free Press reported last week that indicted Hutaree militia member, Tina Stone, complained on her Facebook page that H.R. 1388 (signed recently by President Obama) allocated "$20 billion to help the terrorist group Hamas settle in the U.S." Apparently, Stone credulously accepted bogus facts she received in a chain email.

Here’s another example of "grounded in reality" from my weekly dose of right-wing talk radio.

This year again, North Carolina faces high unemployment and another huge budget deficit. State and local governments feel the pinch. Thursday, WBT Charlotte's drive-time host interviewed Mecklenburg County commissioner, Republican Karen Bentley, about plans the county floated to save money by closing public libraries and laying off staff. People in Charlotte were up in arms. Bentley was critical of the county’s handling of its budget crisis [timestamp 33:10]:

Bentley: The various county departments have never had to think like a business. I mean, the private sector started adapting to this two or three years ago. And we change our processes. Unfortunately, we have to lay people off and we figure out how to be more efficient. Government is not good at that, and we’ve got to get good at that quickly. So, of course, I am very much opposed to raising taxes. This is absolute last resort.

[…]

Talking about the libraries, specifically. Their first response to filling the immediate budget gap was to lay people off and close twelve branches.

Servatius: Right.

Bentley: That was their first option. And this is how they think. They don’t think creatively. They don’t think like private-sector business folks, and when the public cried foul on it they went back to the table, and voila, they came up with this proposal that said maybe we don’t need to close twelve branches. And to me, that’s the frustration of local government, is their first reaction is to keep doing the same things the way they’ve done them forever.

Uh-huh. The private sector would never react to budgetary crises by simply laying people off and closing factories. The private sector would respond more creatively -- by giving their CEO's bonuses for doing it. Because only the government would consider going "back to the table," reversing itself on layoffs and closings, and saving people's jobs in response to public outcry.

For some reason, the myth persists that the private sector is somehow better, "purer," than government. But it would be a mistake to argue that, say, a urologist is better than a Navy Seal. It depends on what you need done.

Government might indeed run more effectively if we emulated the Übermenschen of Planet Rand. If such a mythical place actually existed. The problem is, it doesn't. Even in "real America," in quaint spots like Frog Jump, TN, people like Republican candidate for Tennessee's 8th Congressional District, Stephen Fincher, are none too fussy about taxpayer largesse so long as it's not going to someone they perceive as less deserving than they are.

According to the Washington Post, the gospel-singing Fincher pulls in $200,000 a year in federal farm subsidies. Supported by both the national Republicans and some (though not all) of Tennessee's "tea party" groups, Fincher no doubt decries "parasites" and "moochers," confiscatory taxation, his lost freedom, and government interference in free markets all the way to the bank.

"I don't see the agricultural subsidy thing as an issue at all," says David Nance, founder of the Gibson County Patriots. "If it were an issue, then we would never elect a farmer to Congress at all. Because basically, most farmers get agriculture subsidies. If they didn't, they'd be broke, and we'd be buying our food from China."

"Flexibility is the first principle of politics," Richard Nixon once instructed a staffer. That's one reality some "tea party" purists have already accepted.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

It was never about health care

2010-03-28T12:16:00.002-04:00

September 11 let the air out of many Americans' sense of invulnerability. Fear filled the vacuum left behind and intensified the darkness already there. Fear of change. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the Other.

At dinner last night we talked about what was really behind the right's histrionic response to enactment of health insurance reform -- reform based in too large a part on Republican ideas. By the time the Sunday New York Times was online, Frank Rich had transcribed the essentially the same conversation under the title we might have given it, The Rage Is Not About Health Care:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

We looked back last night (as Rich does) to the the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Although children, we could not remember the same level of widespread venom even then. And we knew -- as Rich also recounts -- that today's rage was brewing long before the House and Senate drew up the first drafts of the health care bill signed last week. It was growing in the summer and fall of 2008 as Americans faced the reality that Barack Obama, not John McCain, might win the presidency that November. For many, that election night was their last contact with reality.

This weekend a friend recounted his experience outside a Buncombe County polling place just after the polls closed that night. A local policeman rolled into the parking lot and chatted with him and some women closing up the voting place. The officer told them he and his father had already purchased half a dozen handguns in advance of the election's outcome.

Last summer an acquaintance in eastern Tennessee said the local Wal-Mart could not keep long guns and ammunition in stock because of people's fear of an H1N1 pandemic. They expected to barricade themselves in the hollows, one supposes, and take out with a head shot any disease-ridden ghoul that came staggering slowly over the ridge.

Now people like this and this are telling their wives they need to buy still more guns and ammo because the biggest threat this nation faces today is debt tomorrow. And terrorism. And fascists and socialists and communists, Oh, my! And yes, as Digby wrote yesterday, many "would rather do without health insurance themselves than have the same benefit going to black and brown people." But labeling it racism is too simple. As Dave Neiwert points out, the main targets of Glenn Beck's (most recent) eliminationist rhetoric are progressives of whatever color.

All the chest-thumping, flag-waving bluster and boasts of firepower are more an exercise of fear than freedom. Fear of change. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the Other.

Health care? It was never about health care. It is about standing athwart history, yelling GO BACK!

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Healthcaremageddon

2010-03-25T19:49:00.002-04:00

A post by David Frum, the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, David Frum, that I cited Sunday night was all over the Net on Monday. Frum's take on the anti-government hysteria surrounding the health care debate included this:

Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

Today, President Obama signs the Senate bill passed on Sunday. Passage of the health care bill is a Republican Waterloo, Frum writes. Maybe. But I’ll be holding my breath for some time afterwards.

Okay, I’ll say it.

I’m holding my breath waiting to see if some overstimulated tea party sympathizer strung out on too many months of anti-government hyperbole is going to fly a Cessna into another office building. Or fill a Ryder truck with another bomb made from fertilizer. Or shoot a few more cops answering a domestic disturbance call. Or walk into a government building in D.C. and open up on guards with a handgun. Or take his 12-gauge and the Liberal Hunting Permit he bought at the gun show and walk down to another Unitarian church to kill him some liberals.

Because Glenn Beck and Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sean Hannity and Rep. John Boehner (among others) convinced him that liberals are out to confiscate his guns, throw him into a concentration camp, and murder his grandma with the commie, fascist, unconstitutional health care bill that – under orders from the Kenyan pretender and committed socialist, Barack Obama – Nancy Pelosi and her gang of thugs passed illegally by, you know, besting the GOP in a House floor vote.

It’s Healthcaremageddon. Oh, the humanity.

As Jon Stewart told conservatives last spring, “I think you’re confusing tyranny with losing.”

Responding to the weekend follies outside the Capitol, Digby on Sunday contrasted the different reactions to losing on the left and on the far right:

The Republicans are losing their minds and their shock troops, the tea partiers, are facing the reality that they aren't likely to win this fight. They don't like that and they are acting very, very badly. This has nothing to do with "both sides do it." The facts have shown over many, many years that the left gets depressed when these things happen --- and the right has a screaming, spitting, head-banging tantrum. How the two sides handle defeat is a defining characteristic.

Obama has been trying to pass health care reform since last summer, but a few Senate holdouts in his own party have stymied his reported "dictatorial" ambitions. Until now. During Stewart’s recent interview on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly said Obama has shown his inexperience in being unable to handle congress. Stewart shot back, “How many tyrants do you know who really suffer because they can’t get cloture?” [timestamp 23:35]

This is the fearsome, freedom-eating tyrant that has the far right clutching their pearls, screaming epithets at legislators and reaching for weapons? If it weren't so potentially explosive....

Excuse me, but that’s ... just ... sad.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

They dare not call it journalism

2010-03-14T19:24:00.001-04:00

Howell Raines, the former executive editor of the New York Times, takes on Roger Ailes and the “video ferrets” of Fox News this morning in the Washington Post:

For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party. And let no one be misled by occasional spurts of criticism of the GOP on Fox. In a bygone era of fact-based commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions would have been given their proper label: disinformation.

Under the pretense of correcting a Democratic bias in news reporting, Fox has accomplished something that seemed impossible before Ailes imported to the news studio the tricks he learned in Richard Nixon’s campaign think tank: He and his video ferrets have intimidated center-right and center-left journalists into suppressing conclusions — whether on health-care reform or other issues — they once would have stated as demonstrably proven by their reporting. I try not to believe that this kid-gloves handling amounts to self-censorship, but it’s hard to ignore the evidence. News Corp., with 64,000 employees worldwide, receives the tender treatment accorded a future employer.

That is, don’t bite the hand that might be cutting your next paycheck. Even if, as Jon Stewart put it this week, “Fox News might be the meanest sorority in the world.”

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Bought and Paid For

2010-01-30T11:38:00.000-05:00

"It's our democracy. We bought it, we paid for it, and we're going to keep it." - Vote Murray Hill Incorporated for Congress! Murray Hill, Inc. adds,

“Until now,” Murray Hill Inc. said in a statement, “corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.”

Murray Hill, Inc. wants to run in the Republican congressional primary in Maryland’s 8th district. "Clearly, I don't know how much more Republican a corporation can be," Murray Hill Inc., designated human spokesperson, Eric Hensal, told Thom Hartmann in an interview here.

[h/t Crooks and Liars; cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans]

America's War On Terror: A Cage Of Our Own Making

2010-01-15T09:00:00.000-05:00

America’s fight against terrorism is a stooge scene. Washington meets every new attack not by addressing the root causes of Islamist violence, but by adding another layer of security to infringe on Americans’ privacy and dignity.

In the Three Stooges short, “A Plumbing We Will Go,” Curly tries to stop the water spraying out of a bathroom wall by threading on some pipe fittings. The water just sprays out the end. So he threads on more. And more. And more. But the water just sprays from the end of each new piece. Curly eventually discovers that he’s imprisoned himself in a cage of pipe, with water still spraying out of the last piece he added.

So, terrorists armed with box cutters bring down three airliners on September 11, 2001. Washington’s response? Institute a massive domestic electronic surveillance program. Gut habeas corpus. No nail clippers in carry-on. Make passengers empty their pockets and raise their arms for a sweep with a handheld metal detector.

Richard Reid makes it through airport security in Paris with explosives in his shoes. Washington’s response? Make passengers stand in line and take off their shoes.

Police in England disrupt a plot to blow up transatlantic flights using liquid explosives. Washington’s response? No skin cream, toothpaste, shampoo over 3 oz. in your carry-ons; have them ready in a zip-lock bag for inspection. Deposit anything larger in the trash bins, please.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab goes through airport security in Lagos, Nigeria. He goes through security again in Amsterdam. He then tries to bring down an airliner over Detroit using a bomb hidden in his underwear. Washington’s response? Colonoscopies for passengers boarding in Cleveland.

Okay, full body scans. Whatever. Thread on another stick of pipe. Overlay another level of “security.” But whatever you do, don’t address the motives behind the violence.

At a White House press briefing last week, reporter Helen Thomas asked and asked again why these terrorists “want to do us harm.” White House Counterterrorism and Homeland Security advisor, John Brennan, gave Thomas a response right out of the Bush administration playbook, “Al Qaida is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents.” Not exactly post-Pearl Harbor "slant-eyed japs" rhetoric, but not far off either.

Glenn Greenwald went all reductio ad absurdum on that response:

Brennan's answer -- they do this because they're Evil and murderous -- is on the same condescending cartoon level as the "They-Hate-us-For-Our-Freedom" tripe we endured for the last eight years. Apparently, if Brennan is to be believed, Islamic radicals, in their motive-free quest to slaughter, write down the names of all the countries in the world and put them in a hat and then stick their hand in and select the one they will attack, and the U.S. just keeps getting unlucky and having its name randomly chosen. Countries like China, Brazil, Japan, Chile, Greece, South Africa, France and a whole slew of others must have really good luck. That Al Qaeda is evil and murderous and perverts Islam is a judgment about what they do, not an answer as to what motivates them.

Osama bin Laden himself gave a few clues in his February 1998 fatwa, Greenwald notes. Why do they attack us? Because we have our infidel "crusader armies" on the Arabian peninsula and in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s holiest sites. Because of the destruction wrought on Iraq and Iraqi children by economic sanctions. Because of U.S. support for Israel – because of Gaza, and Sabra and Shatila. Post-September 11, add the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, uncounted civilian deaths, and torture, prisoner abuse and killings at American-run prisons, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram.

For the executive branch, giving Thomas’ question the answer it deserves is a no-win proposition. To discuss why Islamist terrorists preferentially target the United States means examining those events. It might require a serious examination of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and maybe changes to it, changes that might provide al Qaida’s murderers with a thin veneer of legitimacy. The media, the GOP and the American right wing would have a field day.

It's easier just to keep threading on more pipe until we find ourselves prisoners in a cage of our own making.

(Cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future.)

Cliff May lands a Triple Coulter

2010-01-02T00:49:00.004-05:00

The Triple Coulter

A hair flip, followed by an exasperated sigh, completed with "It's just a joke!"
after being called out for saying something offensive, especially for shock value.

Like suggesting that the U.S. solve its Guantanamo prisoner problem by murdering the remaining prisoners.

Glenn Greenwald calls out Cliff May:

National Review's Cliff May, yesterday:

A Bipartisan Proposal

Step (1): Return all Gitmo detainees to Yemen.

Step (2): Use Predator missiles to strike the baggage-claim area 20 minutes after they arrive.

Just an idea.

Virtually all of the 90 Yemeni detainees currently at Guantanamo have been imprisoned for years despite never having been charged with any crime. Roughly half of them have been officially "cleared for release" -- meaning even the U.S. Government believes they did nothing wrong or pose no danger to the U.S. Two weeks ago, the Obama administration, to its credit, released 6 Yemeni detainees -- after years in captivity -- because a federal court was about to grant their habeas petition on the ground that there is no evidence to justify their detention. In response, people like John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein are demanding with a monarchical wave of the hand that all Yemenis be kept imprisoned anyway and not released, and according to this morning's New York Times, the Obama administration now plans to hold the rest of them indefinitely.
[...]

But Cliff May thinks we should take them all, including all the innocent ones, and just slaughter them -- and do so in the most cowardly way possible: by dropping a missile on them from the air while they're standing there, unarmed and unsuspecting. And if he suggested this murderous proposal only in humor, that's so warped it might actually be worse.

May responds by landing a Triple Coulter.

The Right is Left, right?

2009-12-11T07:30:00.001-05:00

The GOP has gone to the (blue?) dogs, according to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). Here's the blurb from The Hill:

Conservative Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) on Wednesday called out the leadership of the Republican Party for straying too far from conservative principles.

DeMint, in an interview with the Christian Broadcast Network, also said that he is trying to recruit a new crop of GOP lawmakers to challenge the party establishment.

"The problem in the Republican Party is that the leadership has gone to the left," he said. "I need some new Republicans."

Rush Limbaugh took a swipe at the GOP leadership for not saying "no" enough, says The Hill:

“They are up there adding amendments. There’s no question they’re adding amendments to it. McConnell’s office did call here and say that they are opposing this, so I don’t know if adding amendments is a strategery [sic] to bollix it up and slow it down. But I — I disagree. They just need to say no; there’s nothing wrong with saying no to this!” Limbaugh said Tuesday.

Not to be outdone, the Tea Party and the Social Security Institute slammed the GOP for "collaboration with the enemy."

GOP moderates are the real threat, Stephen Colbert cautions, and the GOP's new purity test is the "perfect" response, "a party of white, Christian men who call Obama a Nazi pushing the concept of purity."

It’s Not Real Reform If It Doesn’t End The Need For This

2009-12-10T13:00:00.001-05:00

From the National Association of Free Clinics event going on now in Kansas City, MO:

Over at Firedoglake, nyceve has more. At timestamp 3:06, she starts losing it:

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans)

Nevadans Not Wild About Harry

2009-12-05T11:28:00.003-05:00

Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake has been warning that Harry Reid will pay a steep price if he doesn’t do whatever it takes (including using reconciliation) to pass a Senate health care bill with a public option intact.

A recent Mason-Dixon poll shows that Reid has plenty of trouble ahead even without incurring the wrath of the blogosphere.

Two potential Republican challengers – former Nevada basketball star, Danny Tarkanian, and former state GOP chair and former television anchorwoman, Sue Lowden – both outpoll Reid by a minimum of six percentage points. Both outpoll Reid among independents by double digits.

Politics Daily suspects there may be “an anybody-but-Reid sentiment at work more than a preference for a Republican.”

That and the voter enthusiasm gap mean Reid had better not fail on health care.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Obama White House Seeks Delay On Declassification

2009-11-30T20:29:00.001-05:00

Secret agencies like their secrets secret. Even old secrets. The Boston Globe reported Sunday that “roadblocks” and “turf battles” among government agencies will likely delay the release of millions of pages of documents scheduled to be declassified on December 31. Some date back to World War II.

In spite of President Obama’s pledge to bring new openness to government, the executive order drafted to replace one signed by President Bush in 2003 “is meeting resistance from key national security and intelligence officials, delaying its approval.” To head off the deadline, the new draft order may have to modify the “automatic declassification” provisions of a Bush Executive Order:

Section 3.3(e)(3) By notification to the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office, before the records are subject to automatic declassification, an agency head or senior agency official designated under section 5.4 of this order may delay automatic declassification for up to 3 years for classified records that have been referred or transferred to that agency by another agency less than 3 years before automatic declassification would otherwise be required.

When is “automatic declassification” not automatic? When agency officials can drag their feet indefinitely. To meet the looming deadline, the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy News reports, “several agencies would have to forgo a review of the affected historical records, which they are unwilling to do. And so it seems they will simply be excused from compliance.”

According to the Boston Globe:

“They never want to give up their authority,” said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel at the National Security Archive, a research center at George Washington University that collects and publishes declassified information. “The national security bureaucracy is deeply entrenched and is not willing to give up some of the protections they feel they need for their documents.”

Our documents, they need to be reminded. The Globe concludes by acknowledging that even declassification does not render a document public:

Officials estimate that there are 400 million pages of historical documents that have been declassified but remain in government records centers and have not been processed at the National Archives, where the public can view them.

One such document is the official crash report on the B-29 that crashed during a test flight near Waycross, GA in 1948. Writing for the New Jersey Post-Courier in 2003, Matt Katz laid out the details fifty-five years later. The crash killed nine, including three civilian contractors from RCA. The contractors’ widows tried in vain to find out what happened in their husbands’ last moments. After the widows filed a lawsuit charging negligence, the government quashed the case by declaring the official crash report a state secret. United States v. Reynolds (1952) was the landmark case that formally recognized the state secrets privilege.

Only by accident did the daughter of one contractor come across the Air Force accident report – declassified in 2000 – for sale on the Internet. An engine had caught fire. The plane broke apart in mid-air. But there was more, Katz writes: “Failure to follow procedure. Failure to carry out special safety orders. Pilot error. These were the causes identified by the Air Force – all evidence that could have been used 50 years ago to support the claims of negligence.”

There was more:

• Two Air Force orders calling for changes in the exhaust system – "for the purpose of eliminating a definite fire hazard" – were not complied with. The fire began in the exhaust system.
• An Air Force order requiring the inspection of rivets was ignored. Loose rivets may have been a factor in the crash.
• The plane needed "more than the normal amount of maintenance." It had been out of commission because of technical problems 97 of the 189 days before the crash.

The victims’ families in this case only had to wait half a century for their answers from the military. Now, after extensions by presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, America’s secret agencies will get yet another extension from the Obama administration “of an undetermined length - possibly years,” according to the Globe report.

Change deferred. Is it change denied?

(Cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future.)

Corporate Ventriloquism

2009-11-15T14:53:00.001-05:00

Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake had a dustup a few weeks ago with Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) over an amendment to H.R. 3200 that Eshoo sponsored governing the licensing of biologic drugs. Hamsher, a three-time breast cancer survivor, contended that a loophole allowed manufacturers to extend their twelve-year exclusive license to drugs by making minor tweaks to the molecules.

Eshoo got testy about being called out, saying, “My amendment prohibits by its plain language exactly what Ms. Hamsher alleges it would encourage.” But other experts contended that Eshoo didn’t understand the “plain language” of her own amendment, that it said just the opposite of what she thought. Also, Energy and Commerce chair Henry Waxman’s statements supported Jane’s contention that the provision contained a loophole that allowed Big Pharma to “evergreen” its exclusive licenses to biologic medications.

This morning, Marcy Wheeler pointed to an NYT piece describing the pushback from Big Pharma. They worked at getting congresscritters from both sides of the aisle to enter their talking points into the Congressional Record:

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.

[snip]

Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists.

[snip]

Members of Congress submit statements for publication in the Congressional Record all the time, often with a decorous request to “revise and extend my remarks.” It is unusual for so many revisions and extensions to match up word for word. It is even more unusual to find clear evidence that the statements originated with lobbyists.

It would be nice to see those e-mails, by the way. It makes you wonder who wrote the “plain language” for Eshoo’s anti-evergreening amendment.

(Full disclosure: This writer has had Roche as a client.)

(cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans)

Which Public Is That?

2009-11-06T00:05:00.000-05:00

The Beltway cognoscenti keep telling us that a bipartisan solution to health care reform is what the public wants. Just what public is it that's more interested in process than results?

Conventional wisdom says that Obama has failed to make Washington more bipartisan if Democrats ram through a health reform bill without Republican support. That would be the Republican support that House Republican whip Rep. Eric Cantor just swore Democrats will never get. “[N]ot one Republican will vote for this bill," Cantor told a “tea party” crowd on Thursday.

Republican strategist Mike Murphy from Thursday’s Morning Edition (NPR):

… I think the great mistake of the Obama presidency, the thing that has taken his numbers among the critical independents who put him in office from very high to low now, is they were elected as a bipartisan problem solver, almost a post-partisan politician. But from the day they've been in, they got a little drunk on the power and they've governed as a one-party liberal party. It's been more of the Democratic dogma, particularly in the House under Pelosi.
And while they have the pure political power to force some things through with their majorities, the Democrats, in my view, are governing too far to the left. They're losing the middle of the country.

Put aside for a moment the up-is-downisms. The public is disillusioned because, as Murphy suggests, Democrats aren’t being bipartisan enough? Or is it really because they have accomplished too little in trying to placate an avowedly obstructionist opposition party?

Observe the coverage of the off-year elections. It is the end of the honeymoon, says Murphy. The media made it out to be a turning point for the White House -- picking up two House seats is, of course, bad news for the Democrats. It's a wonder television news didn't brand the coverage with a catchy name and trademarked graphics.

This should give health care reformers in Congress pause, suggest our media mavens. Why?

Suspense, drama, conflict and histrionics are the stuff of good TV. One would think the media would be egging on Democrats to use the reconciliation process to pass health care reform – with a public option. Think of the ratings. You ain't seen nothin' yet.

See Rep. John Boehner crying on the House floor, streaking his bronzer! Hear Congresswoman Michele Bachmann declare President Obama the antichrist on the steps of the Capitol! Experience the riveting oratory of Joe the Bummer! Watch conservatives in Congress rend their garments as tea partiers fling themselves onto a pyre of burning Constitutions!

Now that’s must-see TV. So why is our “liberal” media suggesting that that would be the worst that could happen? For whom, exactly? It is because the corporate titans behind mass media have a vested interest in seeing health reform fail?

There are more questions than answers.

What public is it that would rather have a bad bipartisan bill rather than a more robust single-party one? The public that's disenchanted because health reform has not been passed already? The majority of Americans that consistent polling shows want a bill with a public option? The people already suffering under a failed and costly health care system? The pragmatic average Joes who go to see Larry the Cable Guy shout "Git ‘Er Done!" from the stage?

That public is more interested in process than results?

Cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future.

Lions and tigers and "progressives"

2009-11-04T09:15:00.004-05:00

We received this second attack flyer on Saturday, just in time for Tuesday's local elections.

Both candidates won handily.

Lucky or Good?

2009-11-02T11:17:00.000-05:00

The congressman’s staffer said her goodbyes and left the service desk. The cashier, pleasant-looking and about fifty, had listened to the health care conversation from behind the counter. Now that it was just the two of them, she opened up to my wife.

It has been a bad three years. She had been healthy, she said, until she developed a blood disorder. After the diagnosis, her health insurance was cancelled.

There has been a string of cancers diagnosed in her family – six or seven – including her father. The stress on the family is severe. Her mother had a stroke.

But she is lucky – blessed she said – to have this new job. And in this economy, she’s right. The health benefits are especially good. The women’s clothing company is a big supporter of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure movement to fight breast cancer.

Lucky for her again. Since taking the job, she has been diagnosed with breast cancer. Fortunately, her employer is supportive.

Because what with her mother’s stroke, she didn’t want to stress her parents further. She avoided telling them about her breast cancer until she began radiation treatments recently.

They say it’s better to be lucky than good. That is employer-based health care in America. The lucky get treatment until they are too sick to work and their employer has to let them go. Business is business.

It is a good thing the cashier likes her new job. She had better not lose it – for any reason. She’ll lose her insurance too.

Wide-eyed, it had never occurred to her that she could call her congressman or senators and tell them her story, that they might actually listen. My wife urged her to visit or call, and soon.

Because very soon, all of America will find out if they’re listening and if we're lucky.

(Cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future.)

The End Is Always Nearer on the Right Side of the Street

2009-10-28T20:02:00.003-04:00

A friend sent me a link received in one of those multi-forwarded, zombie right-wing chain mails that spammers use for harvesting emails for their lists. The email was headed, "Obama to sign away US freedom in December?"

With the forward came this plaintive request:

Please give me your opinion on this fellow - and give me some material to shoot back to the idiots sending it to me
pleeeeeease!

The link (which I won't bother to embed) is to a YouTube clip of one Lord Christopher Monckton, a former Maggie Thatcher advisor and climate change skeptic, speaking before a Minnesota Free Market Institute meeting in mid-October.

There's a climate change treaty to be signed in Copenhagen this December. "In the next few weeks," says Monckton, "unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy and your prosperity away for ever, and neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back again."

The end is near. Again.

Exaspberated, I replied (tongue firmly in cheek):

But, but, but ... he's melodramatic. He has a classy British accent. He quoted Churchill. He kisses our American asses and says he "so loves and admires" us. He can't be a kook, can he?

Now, you thought they thought Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and defeated communism, and, being a Thatcherite, surely Monckton does. Au contraire! Monckton said Obama will sign our freedom away to a "communist world government" and once done, it cannot be undone. OMG!

Okay, there is that bit about the Congress having to ratify treaties, what with all their pages and pages of exemptions, but why should we let that minor detail get in the way of some good, old-fashioned conservative red baiting?

I mean, it's like that time in 1988 when that pinko Ronald Reagan sold out the the ol' US of A by signing the UN Convention Against Torture (the one Congress didn't ratify until 1994?). That commie rat bastard Reagan signed away America's sovereign, God-given right to torture people! We could have used torture against those Islamofascist bastards, al Qaida, ya know?

But NOOOOO!!!! The UN stopped us dead in our tracks, didn't it?

I, too, think of the US of A as the beacon of freedom to the world. I'm just relieved, as Monckton must be, that even after all that leftist propaganda about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, that the world still sees us as he does, as the beacon of freedom. Now if we can only stop those lefties from keeping Miami Beach real estate from slipping beneath the waves like the Hood.

Sorry if I'm just all alarmist-out, but after a decade of the-end-is-near rhetoric from the right, I'm afraid I can hardly muster a yawn.

Do these people bathe in fear because they can't get an erection any more, and a chill up their spines is as good as it gets?

Other than that, she was probably a swell gal

2009-10-27T07:48:00.002-04:00

SC Gov. Mark Sanford doesn't know enough to quit while he's behind. He's in Newsweek with a review of some new books about the life of Ayn Rand. Sanford's takeaway? "Government doesn't know best."

Whoa.

Sanford pauses in his paean to Rand long enough to acknowledge that her freedom fetish did not apply to members of her cult:

Ironically, as Heller's biography makes clear, while Rand's philosophy was based on the individual's absolute freedom, Rand herself exercised a dictatorial control over her followers. She would denounce anyone who expressed opinions even slightly diverging from her own... For the leader of a group dedicated to human freedom, Rand didn't allow much of it around her.

Sanford doesn't mention (and may not know) that Rand based one of her early fictional heroes on William Edward Hickman, who author Michael Prescott describes as "a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer. Other than that, he was probably a swell guy."

Prescott continues:

According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan - intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man - after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should." (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)

The free-spirited Hickman kidnapped, held for ransom and dismembered a twelve year-old girl, after which the throw-social-convention-to-the-wind sprite threw her body parts out the door of his car.

Yeah, he was an axe murderer, but that wasn't what impressed Rand, but his personal credo, "what is good for me is right." As she writes in her journals:

"This is not just the case of a terrible crime. It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. It is the fact that a crime has been committed by one man, alone; that this man knew it was against all laws of humanity and intended that way; that he does not want to recognize it as a crime and that he feels superior to all. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul."

Yes, a real man.

And Rand? Yeah, she was a sociopath, but that's not what impresses Gov. Mark Sanford. Rand's "one more major flaw" was that her sociopathy led her to her reject conventional Christian morality. But interpreting Atlas Shrugged as parable about limited government makes Rand "more relevant than ever."

Thus endeth Sanford's high school book report. A lot of people read Atlas Shrugged in high school. Most of them grow up.

The Public Necessity

2009-10-26T04:14:00.001-04:00

The health care debate – with its leaks, mixed signals and close-to-the-vest dealing – has reform supporters losing their cool while Obama, infuriatingly, maintains his. The uncertainty has strained the tenuous loyalties of a fickle American left. How much talk about "triggers" is real, how much is process, and how much is rope-a-dope?

David Dayen defines the problem for Firedoglake:

Is the White House “insisting” on triggers to take the heat off of Harry Reid, who is having trouble finding the last votes for cloture? Are they drawing fire away from Senate moderates? Are they doing it to keep Snowe thinking the White House is on her side? Do they want to pull a switcheroo in conference committee? Do they actually think that the public option will need some time to get right, so a trigger might help to aid that delay? Are these the words of one rogue faction in the White House that can’t stand the public option and the “left of the left”?

Reports about Thursday night’s White House meeting between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Barack Obama suggest that Obama is not prepared to twist the arms of remaining Senate holdouts to secure a bill with a public option (sans “triggers”), even though that goal now seems within reach:

"Everybody knows we're close enough that these guys could be rolled. They just don't want to do it because it makes the politics harder," said a senior Democratic source, saying that Obama is worried about the political fate of Blue Dogs and conservative Senate Democrats if the bill isn't seen as bipartisan. "These last couple folks, they could get them if Obama leaned on them."

Meanwhile, Obama's Organizing for America (OFA) found its legs on October 20th, generating 315,000 phone calls to Capitol Hill in support of health care reform. While the approved script called for supporting the “the President’s plan for health reform” – whatever that is – many OFA volunteers support a “robust public option.” OFA’s back channel exhortations for supporters to increase the pressure and “win this thing” tell a very different story from the media narrative about a reluctant, unengaged president.

After eight years of Bush-Cheney, the left was primed for the change Obama promised – and thoroughly distrustful of Washington politics, even his. The mixed signals have Obama’s base clinging to the hope that their leader is playing rope-a-dope with opponents, while other progressives are already declaring Obama a conservative.

If it makes them dig in and fight harder, fine.

But Thomas P.M. Barnett's warning to the Pentagon is one to which progressives should pay heed: "we field a first-half team in a league that keeps score until the end of the game." Progressives have to maintain focus and momentum if they hope to punch through the insurance industry’s goal-line defense. “Allies” in Congress won’t manage that on their own. One year after November 2008, will voters again rise to the occasion or remain on the sidelines with an “Obama hangover”?

A society accustomed to sitting on the couch and being passively entertained is one more accustomed to being governed rather than to governing. Once the vote-counting is over, many citizens tune out again until the next election. A colleague echoing the familiar FDR “make me do it” anecdote, noted that few realize just how hard it is for even their favorite leaders to change things themselves without being pushed hard by supporters.

Anna Quindlen argues in Newsweek that the founding fathers engineered our system to resist radical changes of direction, that Obama is a process-oriented centrist more than the populist firebrand progressives thought they were electing, and that health reform therefore may be more incremental than sweeping.

Perhaps. But that very system did not inhibit the Bush administration from taking the country in a radical direction overnight, nor did it stop a population alarmed by those radicals from firing them overnight. Obama didn’t do that. We did.

Quindlen concludes by reminding readers that if Americans want change, they had best not sit back and expect someone else to do it for them, because

“... if the American people want the president to be more like the Barack Obama they elected, maybe they should start acting more like the voters who elected him, who forcibly and undeniably moved the political establishment to where it didn't want to go.”

OFA got a taste again of what that's like on October 20th. If the rest of America really believes that the health reform it needs is not just a public option, but a public necessity, more Americans will have to get up off the couch and go get it. Neither Obama nor the Democrats will deliver it to their doorstep like a pizza.

(Cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future.)

Not Exactly the Mercury Theatre on the Air

2009-10-25T15:07:00.001-04:00

At least the damage was minimal, Frank Rich suggests in this morning’s New York Times. It’s not as if the “balloon boy” fraud led the country into invading a sovereign country in search of nonexistent WMDs, or into investing in dot-coms with no business plans, or into buying oversized homes with no-income no-asset loans.

But “balloon boy” is this generation’s “War of the Worlds” hoax, Rich believes, “the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where ‘news,’ ‘reality’ television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled” — a culture in which media snake oil salesmen are as likely to be suckered as their audiences, if not more so.

Rich observes,

As “balloon boy” played out, the White House opened fire on one purveyor of fictional news, Fox News, where “tea party” protests are inflated into a national rebellion rivaling the Civil War and where Glenn Beck routinely claims Obama is perpetrating a conspiracy to bring fascism to America. But the White House’s argument is diluted by the different, if less malevolently partisan, fictions that turn up on Fox’s competitors. On CNN, for instance, Lou Dobbs provided a platform for the nuts questioning Obama’s citizenship. When an ABC News correspondent insisted that Fox was “one of our sister organizations” in an exchange with the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, last week, he wasn’t joking.

Not that anyone around him would have gotten it if he were.

(Crossposted from Scrutiny Hooligans)

We’re Number Last!

2009-10-25T11:03:00.002-04:00

FactCheck.org sent out one of its regular e-mail updates this week. They examine the “37th in the world” statistic bandied about in the health reform debate. The 2000 World Health Organization report has not been updated, they note, and has its critics and limitations.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center looks at some more recent figures to put things in perspective:

Among the other stats on how the U.S. health care system and health stacks up internationally: A 2007 Commonwealth Fund report ranked the U.S. last out of six industrialized countries in health system performance, which included measures on quality, access, efficiency, equity of care and healthy lives. “Access” and “equity” measures are affected by the lack of universal health care. On life expectancy, the U.S. ranks 50th and below France, Canada, the U.K. and the European Union average, according to the CIA World Factbook. Infant mortality is also higher in the U.S. than all of those countries and more. A 2006 report on infant mortality by the nonprofit Save the Children showed the U.S. tied for next to last among industrialized countries.

America retains its #1 ranking on health care costs, spending nearly twice as much, on average, as other developed countries. But when it comes to health care, Wal-Mart Nation still pays more and gets less. And for reform opponents, that’s a record worth defending, even if it’s not something to brag about.

(Crossposted from Scrutiny Hooligans)

Debunking the Hissy Fit Du Jour

2009-10-24T08:01:00.002-04:00

Glenn Greenwald yesterday noted the hand-wringing and pearl clutching by the press over the White House calling out Fox News as an opinion outlet rather than a news network, and "a wing of the Republican Party." Greenwald lays out a bill of particulars:

All that hand-wringing rhetoric: why? Because the Obama administration threatened to criminally prosecute Fox? Or because the adminstration surveilled its reporters' telephone calls? Or illegally obtained their telephone records? Or shot missiles at hotels in which they were staying? Or dropped bombs on their offices? Or imprisoned them for years without charges? Or barred Fox reporters from riding on administration planes? Or conspired to "weed out" any critical voices from being heard on network and cable news programs? No, those are all things that the Bush administration did to reporters (see the links) -- all well above and beyond the numerous, constant rhetorical attacks from the Bush White House on media organizations they perceived to be hostile. Where was Tucker Carlson when that was happening, or Ruth Marcus, or Anderson Cooper, or David Carr?

And Glenn doesn't even mention getting a gay prostitute/journalist to ~~TASS~~ toss softball questions at White House pressers or paying opinion columnists to publish favorable pieces about them.

Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann further debunk the hissy fit with the TV equivalent of twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossies with circles and arrows, etc. Heaven forbid the right wing should attempt to rewrite history:

Four Point Oh!

2009-10-23T23:06:00.002-04:00

WNC Blogapalooza 4.0

Mountain XPress handles the voting here.

Projection TV: Real Americans Watch Fox News

2009-10-20T19:51:00.000-04:00

A focus-group study by Democracy Corps explains that Republican base voters live in “a world apart from the rest of America.”

The Tea Parties of August already made that pretty clear.

Republican base voters believe themselves an oppressed minority that possesses “knowledge and insight that the majority of Americans – whether too lazy or too misguided to find it for themselves – do not possess.” And – surprise – they get their special knowledge and insight largely from Fox News.

In 1999, Al Franken wrote the same thing. During the Clinton health care debate, the Annenberg School for Communications found that conservative talk radio listeners judged themselves the most informed on the topic. Testing, however, revealed that they were the least informed.

Franken wondered [my edit],

But why would people so woefully lacking in the basic facts of an issue think they were the best informed? Social scientists call the phenomenon "pseudo-certainty." I call it "being a f*#king moron."

A decade later we have Glenn Beck reinforcing his viewers' paranoid proclivities and helping them project their own darkest impulses onto opponents.

According to Democracy Corps, four core beliefs set the Republican base apart:

1. Deception and a Hidden Agenda – “Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives.”
2. Speed – Obama is implementing change rapidly to keep ordinary Americans from knowing what he is doing.
3. Driving Government to the Brink and Total Control – Obama is deliberately trying to burden America with so much debt that citizens will be unable to resist efforts to implement Obama’s ultimate plan ...
4. The Ultimate Goal: Socialism and End to Liberties – Government takeover of health care is just the first step towards a complete suppression of liberty by our inefficient, ineffective and corrupt government.

It is a pretty stunning case of projection, as one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers suggests:

[Obama] is the out of control spender when they sat on their hands through all of Bush's malfeasance. That is why his talking to schoolchildren is dangerous when our government wiretapping its citizens wasn’t. That is why saving the financial system from years of Republican regulation is taking away our future. The more evil revealed about the right’s excesses on torture, or wars of choice, or nearly destroying the economy, the more evil Obama will look in their eyes, as they cannot tolerate owning responsibility, because in their own minds they are only good.

Paul Rosenberg explains the viewpoint in a separate discussion at Open Left:

[T]he disconnect is particularly strikingly. That is, until you take a step back, and see the underlying consistency ... in their minds, they alone are America. If they're not running things, then it's not America... If you are the real America and everyone else is not, well, then, you can do pretty much whatever you want – and do it all in the name of America.

Conservatives and independents in the Democracy Corps focus group were sensitive to charges that racism is behind their criticism of Obama. So much so, that they came back to it “again and again.”

However much it is, their discomfort is not all about race. It’s broader. It’s tribal.

“Real Americans” view those outside their tribe with suspicion, like teenagers in the mall they are convinced are there to shoplift – illigitimate, untrustworthy, low-caste Irresponsibles, bad apples who don’t deserve America. Those outside their tribe don’t deserve to carry the flag, don’t deserve to wear the uniform or to enjoy the blessings of liberty. Especially, they don’t deserve to vote.

“Real Americans” believe America’s bad apples pay no taxes. The “lucky duckies” don’t even pay sales tax, property tax, tax on gasoline, on heating oil, cigarette tax, telephone excise tax, unemployment tax, Social Security tax, Medicare and Medicaid.

“Real Americans” would love to repeal the 16th Amendment, but so long as they pay taxes, they'll be the betters of countrymen they think pay any less. They will rail about how unfairly they’re treated and what a drag on the economy and their fortunes are the great unwashed who have turned this once great country into one "where poor people can put billionaires out of business."

These Atlases see themselves stoically carrying America upon their shoulders while being dragged relentlessly down by the grubby, grasping hands of the less well-born; by people not as honest, upstanding and hard-working as they are; by the parasites of capitalism who contribute nothing; by deadbeats and losers who have structured their lives so they can spend them sucking the teat of real America.

No wonder they feel "a world apart." And Fox News is there to remind them, if they ever have doubts.

(Crossposted from Huffington Post.)

What Civilized Country Operates Like This?

2009-10-13T18:24:00.000-04:00

You have seen it. The plastic bucket beside the cash register at the convenience store. A photo is taped to it. A child needs an operation. His father lost his job. The family lost its insurance. They are about to lose their home. Can you spare some change?

What civilized country operates like this? In case God-and-country defenders of the status quo need reminding, America’s for-profit health insurance system serves neither.

Reform advocates must hammer away at this relentlessly: health insurance reform is a moral issue more than an economic one.

Nicholas Kristof delivered further proof that the system is morally bankrupt in the October 4 New York Times.

Travis and Michael Waddington hoped to donate a kidney to their father, David, 58, a wine retailer and victim of polycystic kidney disease. PKD had destroyed David’s kidneys. Since the disease is genetic, Travis and Michael needed to be tested for the disease themselves before donating. Yet a positive result might mean the sons might never be able to get insurance. So their doctors advised against getting tested. Another advised getting tested under fictitious names. To protect their sons, husband and wife shot down the idea, even at the risk of David’s life.

Eventually, David received a kidney from a deceased donor, but Michael recently began experiencing PKD symptoms and now faces an insurance nightmare now all too familiar, obtaining affordable insurance – or any insurance – after being diagnosed with a serious illness.

Closer to home, an acquaintance recently donated a kidney to his father under somewhat different circumstances, but with similar risks. Such acts of mercy by organ donors (talk about risky behavior) present insurers with an elective pre-existing condition, and present donors with a moral dilemma. Fortunately, his father’s insurance covered both transplant surgeries. But both the son’s own physician and the transplant surgeons recommended that he say nothing to his insurer. It was illegal to deny coverage or insurance to organ donors, doctors told him. Nonetheless, they often heard of it happening.

Why tempt fate? He told his insurer nothing.

Kristoff calls an insurance system that forces patients into such impossible choices, “the disgrace of the industrialized world.”

But that’s putting it mildly. As T.R. Reid puts it in The Healing of America, our system is virtually a worldwide laughingstock. One thing on which experts at international health care symposia can agree, Reid explains, is that the U.S. for-profit insurance system is a mess. “Bashing the U.S. system is a standard agenda item.”

Joanne Ford, a patient on Social Security disability and wearing Coke-bottle eyeglasses, arrived for a Remote Area Medical free clinic in Knoxville. She came hoping to get a new pair for free. But nearly last in line, she almost missed her chance. Interviewed by 60 Minutes, Ford said tearfully, “I am sad that we are the wealthiest nation in the world and we don’t take care of our own.”

Even the socialist bogeymen of Europe treat their own better.

For-profit insurance can be cruel and capricious, not unlike the age of Dickens that Keith Olbermann invoked in a recent hour-long commentary. America’s uninsured have "a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts," a new Harvard study finds. Furthermore, 45,000 Americans a year die from lack of health insurance. Like Dickens’ London, America’s working poor too often are either invisible or else blamed as surplus population –– impediments to the economic fortunes of their “betters.”

It is a seasonal tradition to revisit cherished redemption stories during the coming dark nights around the solstice, to refresh human connections not just to family and friends, but to our fellow men. Defenders of the status quo, especially, need to refresh theirs.

America would do well to revisit those redemption stories earlier this year as it considers how best to rehabilitate a business more informed by Wall Street than A Christmas Carol. For-profit health insurance is rare in the civilized world, and rightly so. It is a cold-hearted business more interested in serving the numbers on its balance sheets than the humanity behind the numbers.

That calls into question the humanity of its defenders, like the conservative radio icon who brags about taking on all comers with half his brain tied behind his back. That would be the feeling half. The human half. The half that Messrs. Scrooge and Potter let atrophy as an impediment to being good men of business.

Right now, a popular caterer downtown has posters on her door. A child needs an operation. A strawberry blonde boy in an adult-sized straw hat. He has a severe immune deficiency disease. He is with his parents at Duke University Medical Center for a bone marrow transplant. There's a pancake breakfast to raise money.

You might as well hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.

What civilized country operates like this?

(Cross-posted from Huffington Post.

Better Dead Than Insured

2009-09-27T11:17:00.000-04:00

The New York Times/CBS News poll out yesterday posed the following question:

57. Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a government administered health insurance plan — something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get — that would compete with private health insurance plans?

Sixty-five percent said yes. Twenty-six percent said no. According to health insurance reform opponents, that makes nearly two-thirds of Americans socialists or worse.

At the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson observes:

Think about that. The public option has been demonized non-stop for the past half-year; it’s the key to the Republican charge that instituting such a program is tantamount to bringing socialism to America. They have clearly rallied the Republican base to this position, just as they rallied the base to fear the coming of death panels and publicly-subsidized immigrant care. But whereas pluralities of Americans simply said they didn’t know enough to believe one thing or the other about death panels and immigrant care, virtually all Americans not in the Republican base support the public option.
[snip]
Since Republican legislators represent the 26 percent of Americans opposed to the public option, their opposition to same poses no mystery. The conundrum is why some Democrats -- all save those from the most right-wing districts -- oppose it. When The Post’s uber-policy blogger Ezra Klein asked North Dakota Democratic Senator Kent Conrad yesterday why he didn’t support the public option, Conrad replied, “I don't think a government-run plan best fits this culture.” In Conrad’s mind, such as it is, American culture doesn’t seem to be shaped by the American people.

Funny how that works inside the Beltway. The status quo -- which, presumably, Conrad does think fits this culture -- produces outcomes like this from the Dayton, Ohio Daily News:

OXFORD — Friends say the Miami University graduate who died this week after reportedly suffering from swine flu delayed getting medical treatment because she did not have health insurance.
[snip]
Young became ill about two weeks ago, but didn’t seek care initially because she didn’t have health insurance and was worried about the cost...

That puts "Kimi" among the 45,000 a year whose deaths are attributable to lack of insurance coverage in America, according to a new Harvard Medical School study.

But then, better dead than red ... at least for a noisy 1/3 of the people in our democracy. Here's what that looks like:

Kimberly "Kimi" Young, 22, died
Tuesday night Sept. 22, 2009 at
University Hospital.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

If You Like Medical Bills, You’ll Love These

2009-09-21T04:40:00.000-04:00

Activists in the blogosphere are studying well over 500 amendments to Sen. Max Baucus’ Senate Finance Committee health care reform bill, including three “public option” amendments. All sides will hotly debate, soundly trash, and amend the hell out of the Baucus bill, H.R.3200 (on the House side) and any others that come out of the woodwork by October.

But those aren’t the only kind of bills Americans should be worrying about.

My sister died at 37 from a metastatic sarcoma (the same cancer that took Ted Kennedy, Jr.’s leg). I watched her die, went to her funeral, and then went back to her apartment to sift through stacks of medical bills.

In exhaustion and grief, we couldn’t tell which bills were paid, which were not, which were rejected, which were under review, and which were still in the pipeline and wouldn’t arrive for weeks or months. This doesn’t happen in most industrialized countries and shouldn’t happen here. It's a disgrace, a disgrace that none of the bills pending in Congress will cure. A disgrace that health insurance conglomerates and their allies in Congress are fighting hard (and spending hard) to preserve, along with the profits the billing process helps generate.

Over 60 percent of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are from medical bills. Over three-quarters of those are in families who had health insurance, were probably satisfied with it, and thought their coverage was adequate until a serious illness proved otherwise. But it's the burdensome billing process itself that the health care reform debate has not addressed.

At the America’s Future Now! conference in June, Dr. Salomeh Keyhani of Mt. Sinai Hospital detailed the number of weeks doctors, nurses and their staffs spend each year dealing with insurance paperwork and procedures. Insurers make it as difficult as possible for customers to collect. Bottom line: if patients and doctors get frustrated and go away, the insurer won’t have to pay. Keyhani described the labyrinthine claims process as “passive aggressive” by design.

Keyhani's name came up again last week in connection with a nationwide poll published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Keyhani helped conduct the survey funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation of 5,000 physicians representing a spectrum of specialties and regions, including American Medical Association members. The survey, Keyhani told NPR, found that "nearly three-quarters of physicians supported some form of a public option, either alone or in combination with private insurance options." That included AMA members, whose organization opposes a public option.

Yet only a single-payer-style plan promises to eliminate the mountains of bureaucratic paperwork that make our patchwork system cost nearly twice what other advanced countries pay. But since a nationwide single-payer system is off the table, even if a strong public option gets to the president's desk, most Americans will be sifting through confusing stacks of insurance paperwork for years to come. Some reform.

The anti-reform forces had their Tea Party in Washington on September 12. They offered no alternatives and screamed loudly about not being heard, but not loudly enough to drown out a majority that decides to speak with one voice.

President Obama must know that he has only to say the word and a sea of pro-reform supporters will travel to Washington in support of real reform and a robust public option. If summoned, supporters should bring their collections of medical bills, rejection letters and appeal forms and wave them overhead.

Talk about “Don’t Tread On Me.” Medical insurance paperwork is universally recognized and universally loathed. It could serve as a potent symbol of everything wrong with America’s dysfunctional, for-profit health insurance system.

Reform supporters might, en masse, flood congressional fax machines with their medical bills. Or stage media events with fax machines set up in public spaces for patients to fax their medical bills to Congress -- just to put an exclamation point on demands for meaningful reform.

There's something viscerally satisfying about feeding documents into a fax machine and knowing they're spitting out onto the floor of your congresscritter’s office. It's the next best thing to being there.

(Cross-posted from OurFuture.org)

What Does Happen Here

2009-09-14T19:55:00.001-04:00

Last weekend, tens of thousands of health reform protesters prompted by Glenn Beck descended on Washington. They fear America is turning fascist because Barack Obama wants health insurance reform that reduces cost, guarantees choice, and is affordable and high quality for every American.

Diabolical.

“Don’t Tread On Me” is their battle cry — emphasis on “Me.” There is no "we" in their America, no welcome for your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of Americans, much less immigrants. E pluribus unum is Greek to them. They have reduced freedom to a fetish.

This is the kind of cheap, plastic, made-in-China patriotism you buy at Wal-Mart at everyday low prices — all packaging and empty on the inside.

Read more at Campaign for American Future.

The Bile Boils Over

2009-09-12T17:21:00.000-04:00

Enter the Tea Baggers, the Birthers, the Deathers, Glenn Beck, town hall shouters, guys with guns, and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC). The right's simmering kettle of bile is boiling over.

You almost can't blame them for losing it. Conservatives spent three decades building, Bolero-like, towards their denouement: control of both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House. And a permanent Republican majority.

Their efforts climaxed with the presidency of George W. Bush. They lost it all to Barack Obama.

Bush's presidency climaxed on a pile of rubble in New York just after 9/11.

A flood of post-September 11 articles asked how the attacks happened, what we would do next, and why terrorists hate us. One savvy pundit asked, Would America keep its head?

We invaded Iraq on trumped-up intelligence. We conducted illegal surveillance on our own citizens. We imprisoned people without charge, here and abroad. We rendered prisoners for torture and tortured others ourselves in violation of international law. All the while, millions of staunch, law-and-order conservatives supported and defended it, and still do. Vigorously.

Did America keep its head? Uh, no.

But with the election of its first bi-racial president, the electorate threw the movement conservative and neocon bums out. Had America's temporary insanity finally abated? Uh, no. It's worse.

Osama was one thing. But Obama?

People weren't this crazed over Jackie Robinson, were they? Father Coughlin was off the air by then. People's minds were not as marinated in the mind poison the right-wing has pumped out daily for the last twenty years.

Case in point. I once worked in an office where a guy recorded Rush Limbaugh every afternoon. Using a small FM transmitter, he rebroadcast the show the next morning to fellow dittoheads in the building so they would be primed for Limbaugh's live broadcast at noon.

No lie.

In Appalachia, dentists call it "Mountain Dew mouth." Children carry around the acidic, heavily caffeinated soda, taking a sip every few minutes. It's "like bathing the teeth in it all day," according to one dentist. Children go from decayed to toothless.

Is the mind rot from listening to Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity or Savage every day any different? Or from passing on the sludge from Drudge or WorldNetDaily? Or from reading those chain e-mails forwarded by relatives and friends who spread them like Typhoid Mary? Inhaling mercury vapors might be less harmful.

Conservatives bathed in daily lies -- from WMDs to "death panels" -- have become so comfortable spreading them that they treat it like good, clean fun for the whole family. They spread them dutifully, no matter how extreme or outlandish (assuming they know the difference any longer).

The day of Obama's speech, Crooks and Liars' Dave Neiwert again insisted that "ideas, agendas, talking points, and memes in general regularly [migrate] from the extremist right in America into mainstream conservatism." This week we saw just how far up the infection goes.

Hours before South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson yelled "You lie!" at the president, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appeared on NPR's Morning Edition and rebuffed an invitation to condemn the "death panel" rhetoric. The GOP leadership won't quit the useful idiots who do their dirty work for them.

By Obama's address that evening, "the town hall freak show" had come to a joint session of Congress.

Responding to Birthers, Deathers, and a flood of right-wing paranoia from the likes of Glenn Beck, Open Left's Paul Rosenberg discusses the mental elasticity of linear thinkers like Beck. They build elaborate conspiracies like Frankenstein's monster, linking together random bits of their own chaotic fears. "They are put together, but can't be logically deconstructed," he writes, nor argued with "any more than you can reason with a nightmare."

Responding to his flood of hate mail filled with "spitting, incoherent rage," Paul Krugman commented, "Something is going very wrong in the head of a substantial number of Americans."

The poison has spread to the GOP's very soul.

Cross-posted from Huffington Post.

Hide The Pseudoephed - Wall Street's Back At It

2009-09-06T23:36:00.001-04:00

A severely anorexic friend once had her heart stop beating in church. A heart specialist at the service got her going again, but they had to jump-start her twice again on the way to Mission.

She'd recently taken to sucking on a Big Gulp cup of water all day. Flushed all her electrolytes. The hospital had never seen readings that low. But she was no longer using laxatives, she rationalized. That meant she was in recovery.

So what do we make of our friends on Wall Street and their new Big Gulp? Sunday's New York Times explains:

After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.

The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

The earlier policyholders die, the more investors ... reap?

If my wife had been drinking, she'd have done a spit-take. "What sick f***s would buy these?" she exclaimed. Or think them up?

But thank heavens, they've stopped bundling mortgages.

This behavior is like a gambling or meth addiction. It's not even about the money any more. Wall Street doesn't need bailouts. It needs rehab and a priest.

Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.

Push them harder

2009-09-05T11:45:00.001-04:00

From Steve Benen at Washington Monthly:

IT'S COME TO THIS.... In 1988, then-President Reagan spoke to students nationwide via C-SPAN telecast. Among other things, he talked about his positions on political issues of the day. Three years later, then-President Bush addressed school kids in a speech broadcast live to school classrooms nationwide. Among other things, he promoted his own administration's education policies.

President Obama wants to deliver a message to students next week emphasizing hard work, encouraging young people to do their best in school. The temper tantrum the right is throwing in response only helps reinforce how far gone 21st-century conservatives really are.

Eventually, the spectacle of right-wing lunacy could supplant reality TV as profitable, ratings-rich popular entertainment.

So if I were a producer of such tripe, I'd be sending my scouts looking for the furthest-right wingnuts. As reality-TV talent, they've got it all: duplicitous, petty, rigid, manipulative, mean-spirited, histrionic, boogiemen hiding in their closets. America's Most Maladjusted. Now that's entertainment.

Push them harder, I say. This show is just getting good.

Like Tax Cuts That Way

2009-08-25T22:13:00.002-04:00

What Digby said:

This is one of the problems with health care reform, as I've mentioned before. If the economy is doing well and deficits are going down, everybody's working and the fiscal scolds insist that reform will rain on the parade and ruin everything. More people working means more people have health insurance and the calls for reform are muted. If the economy is in trouble, then the fiscal scolds insist that the sky is falling because of rising deficits and reform will make everything even worse. Fewer people working makes the need more critical, but many of them see the deficit as a sign that government is dysfunctional and so they reject reform. No matter what, "the deficit" has a stranglehold on the political discourse in ways that makes reform nearly impossible.

The economy's good? It's time for tax cuts.

The economy's bad? It's time for tax cuts.

The tax cuts don't produce jobs as promised? It just means you need more tax cuts.

It's never time for health care for all Americans.

Elsewhere on Hullabaloo:

If these Democrats had a brain in their heads they'd realize that the best way to maintain their power (and keep getting those big bucks) is to pass a good bill. Successful reform will be their only defense because the true political downside to passing a bad bill now is being out there alone selling out the American people all by themselves.

Hey, McFly! Your shoe's untied!

When are these guys going to wise up?

Do Progressives Have What It Takes To Win?

2009-08-21T06:11:00.002-04:00

Maybe it is something congenital about the left. Faced with lies, propaganda and intimidation, liberals go to Google to arm themselves with more and better facts.

Here! See my data?

Writing on Philly.com, Dick Polman wonders "whether there is some fundamental flaw in the Democratic gene pool ..." that the Democratic leadership was caught off guard by the conservative backlash against health care reform.

Recent town hall displays -- including the swastikas and death threats, explicit and implied -- prove again that it's past time that progressives got a clue and stopped bringing letter openers to gun fights.

Read more at Huffington Post.

Back to Boise

2009-08-09T12:55:00.004-04:00

Today I finally looked back in on Bill Cope of Boise Weekly. A few weeks ago, I saw where Cope had ventured into the mountains to get some insight on socialist health care from "Badger" Bob, the socialist. Bob is both a capitalist libertarian and a socialist, so he ought to know socialism when he sees it. Bill found Bob drinking pitchers of Oly and throwing horseshoes with his buddy, Hoot, "a straight-up libertarian."

Things got a little heated:

"Tell me something, Hoot. Were you so damned confident in the free markets back when Enron was kicking the crap out of California by manipulating the energy grid? Or how about when we found out that Halliburton bunch was screwing the military out of billions? Did that make you proud of your unfettered laissez faire? Huh? Or what we're going through now with all these damn banks and such? ... Doesn't that make you wonder even a little bit if unregulated commerce ain't entirely what it's cracked up to be? You really suppose this is what your precious Adam Smith had in mind?"

If you look further, Cope explains the common medical condition, HUHA.

Something I ran across

2009-08-08T09:33:00.002-04:00

As for the argument that government is unable to pull off anything like health care successfully, Steve Benen at Washington Monthly recalled a memorable scene from film:

It reminds me a bit of a scene in “Life of Brian.” The People’s Front of Judea are having a meeting and considering what the Romans had ever done for them. Reg asks, “Apart apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Health Care Debate Loses Coherence

2009-08-03T20:41:00.004-04:00

The descent into complete incoherence among conservatives -- especially on talk radio -- has become widespread as the health care debate intensifies. The once Mighty Wurlitzer is wheezing and groaning.

One suspects, however, that behind much of the "Don't Tread On Me" rhetoric directed at Obama is a spluttering "... but, but, but, you're black!"

Read more at Huffington Post.

The Uninsured Line Up For Care In Rural Virginia

2009-07-27T19:35:00.002-04:00

This weekend was the tenth anniversary of Remote Area Medical’s free health fair in Wise County, VA. Stan Brock founded Knoxville-based RAM in 1985 to insert mobile medical teams into remote areas of third-world countries. Now over sixty percent of RAM’s work is in rural areas of the United States.

More than one thousand people arrived before sunup on Friday or camped out in their vehicles for a chance at health care they cannot afford to buy. Most are the working poor and hail from Virginia, with Tennessee a close second, followed by Kentucky and other surrounding states. Cars in the county fairgrounds lot held comforters and pillows, sleeping bags and sleeping people.

Read more at The Huffington Post.

Waiting in line for health care

2009-07-19T09:28:00.001-04:00

Just back from a Saturday morning trip over to Newport, TN, where Knoxville-based Remote Area Medical (RAM) is holding one of its medical “expeditions.”

RAM’s head honcho, Englishman Stan Brock used to wrestle large snakes and gators for Marlin Perkins on TV's "Wild Kingdom." Brock formed RAM in 1985 to bring medical care to patients in remote areas of third-world countries. Now, sixty percent of RAM’s work is in “urban and rural America.”

The earliest patients arrived at Cocke County High School on Thursday to secure a numbered place in line for Saturday's free health care clinic. RAM expected to treat about 480 patients on Saturday and about half again as many Sunday. (They stopped accepting new patients about 9 a.m. Saturday morning.)

Most of the cars in the high school parking lot were nondescript. Some had people still sleeping in them. Others had blankets or sleeping bags inside or airing out on the hood. A few autos were missing grilles or glass and looked as if people lived in them. Some of those held animal carriers. RAM’s Newport expedition included veterinarians who provided pet services.

RAM’s patients are Americans without health insurance or jobs that provide it. Most need eyeglasses or dental care. Some exiting the gymnasium had rolls of gauze where teeth had been. One man held an ice pack to his jaw. A mother told us that while she has insurance through her job, her husband and kids do not. But adding them to her policy would take her entire monthly take home pay.

RAM does much of its work in Tennessee because the state allows doctors and dentists licensed in other states to practice within its borders for these events. North Carolina is not one of those states, Brock said in an e-mail earlier this week, otherwise residents in WNC’s remote western counties might receive a visit from RAM.

We noticed that October 3-4, RAM will be visiting the Appalachian coal country town of Grundy, VA, hometown of NC Governor Bev Perdue. Maybe the governor would support changing the rules in cash-strapped North Carolina to allow the state’s growing number of unemployed and uninsured a chance for the kind of free care RAM brings to Grundy.

[Photo courtesy of Jill Boniske.]

Good for whatever ails ya

2009-07-18T00:27:00.003-04:00

Used to be, there was nothing that couldn't be fixed with another round of tax cuts. Now, it's More Market Capitalism.

This tidbit from the Mahablog:

I have discovered a proposal for “fixing” health care on the Cato Institute website that is an absolute hoot.

The plan (see PDF) is to eliminate employee health benefit insurance and all government health care support, and throw everyone into the private insurance market. Insurance companies would be allowed to risk-rate premiums, so that as people got older and/or sicker their premiums would go up.

However, Cato says, this doesn’t have to be a problem. The solution is ... wait for it ... insurance insurance. They call it “health status insurance,” but essentially it’s insurance insurance. It’s a separate policy you take that will insure you against catastrophic increases in your health insurance.

I’m not kidding. That’s the brilliant plan.

When the boat springs a leak, be sure to drill a hole in the bottom to let the water out.

This is from Cato's Exec Summary:

None of us has health insurance, really. If you develop a long-term condition such as heart disease or cancer, and if you then lose your job or are divorced, you can lose your health insurance. You now have a preexisting condition, and insurance will be enormously expensive—if it’s available at all.

Free markets can solve this problem, and provide life-long, portable health security, while enhancing consumer choice and competition. “Heath-status insurance” is the key. If you are diagnosed with a long-term, expensive condition, a health-status insurance policy will give you the resources to pay higher medical insurance premiums. Health-status insurance covers the risk of premium reclassification, just as medical insurance covers the risk of medical expenses. With health-status insurance, you can always obtain medical insurance, no matter how sick you get, with no change in out-of-pocket costs.

I am reminded of Curly in the bathtub, caged by his own plumbing repair, from "A-Plumbing We Will Go."

Bailout Bank Banks Bucks

2009-07-14T17:14:00.006-04:00

Goldman Sachs rakes in billions:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. set aside a record $11.4 billion for compensation and benefits in the first half of 2009, up 33 percent from a year earlier and enough to pay each worker $386,429 for the period.

The figures were released today with the firm’s record second-quarter earnings results. Revenue jumped 31 percent to $23.19 billion in the first half and the New York-based firm set aside 49 percent to cover its largest expense, compensation and benefits.

But here in downtown Charlotte, the banking center of the South, things aren't so rosy:

Just as first-time claims for unemployment insurance surged in the sour economy, final payments – made when laid-off workers have exhausted their initial benefits and all extensions – are climbing, with Mecklenburg County numbers more than double from a year ago.

[...]

Relief, in the form of new jobs, doesn't appear imminent, based on the latest labor statistics. The national unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent in June, a 26-year high, with companies cutting 467,000 jobs – more than economists expected. Charlotte-area unemployment has outpaced the nation, reaching 12 percent in May. Economists expect both numbers to rise further before the end of the year.

Last month, the number of Mecklenburg County residents who ran out of unemployment benefits climbed to nearly 2,900 – the fourth straight month above 2,000 and more than double the number of people in June 2008, according to new data from the N.C. Employment Security Commission. Before the recession, the number of final payments in a single month never topped 2,000.

I'm just lucky to have a job again.

Still, I'm thinking of The Mouse That Roared for some reason.

So that's how it works!

2009-07-11T13:33:00.002-04:00

Bill Cope of Boise Weekly ventures into the mountains to get some insight on socialist health care from "Badger" Bob, the socialist. Bob is both a libertarian and a socialist, so he ought to know socialism when he sees it. Bill found Bob drinking pitchers of Oly and throwing horseshoes with some buddies.

Hoot threw a shoe and it missed the stake by so far, the people on the other end ducked for cover behind a derelict Volkswagen. Then he said, rather too loudly I thought, "There's a gull-durn good reason those Republicans are trying to warn folks about socialism. Because socialism sucks, that's why!"

"Hoot," said Bob, "you didn't seem to mind those socialist roads we took to get up here. Or that socialist bridge that got us across the river. And I assume you have no objections to the socialist cops that caught the guy who stole your truck, or those socialist firefighters who stopped your shed from going up in flames last fall. And if it weren't for the socialist VA, you'd ..."

"What you saying, Badge? Them ain't socialism. Them're just plain ol' government stuff we gotta have to get by."

"That's one of the problems here. Whenever it's good for you Republicans, it's essential government services. But when it's good for everyone, it's socialism."

I thought all those guys were tea drinkers.

A very, very fluid situation

2009-07-10T21:46:00.004-04:00

I was too busy to really comment on the Blue Dog letter story this morning, but I had noticed how minor many of their grievances with the public plan were. Rep. Heath Shuler, in particular, is one who complains about the lack of health services in our rural districts. Read on.

dday runs down and comments on their complaints:

What's interesting about the letter is how insignificant the changes actually are. Among other things, they want:

• a deficit-neutral policy, which is what every single proposal for this bill has included;
• aggressive solutions to bending the cost curve, which also is a goal of pretty much everyone;
• protecting small businesses, which every iteration of the plan has, including the employer mandate proposals that exempt certain small businesses and make them eligible for purchasing health care through the insurance exchange;
• rural health equity, a pretty small point;
• a public option that doesn't use Medicare bargaining rates, which isn't different from what, for example, Chuck Schumer has called for, although I find that to be a toothless public option, which I'll explain later;
• time to read the bill, which I support;
• bipartisanship, which is the most ridiculous of these demands, but which actually does exist in the bill on the Senate side, where dozens of Republican amendments have been included in the HELP Committee markup.

Obama himself professes to want a deficit neutral plan, so many of these points, I believe, are posturing either for political points or amendments to sweeten the cost of securing their votes, or both.

At the Wonk Room, Igor Volsky notes:

More importantly, the letter contains an inherent contradiction: the Blue Dogs want to find more savings within the system — they’re asking for Delivery System Reforms and “maximizing the value of our health care dollar” — but they’re also asking the bill to spend more on rural health and physician reimbursement. And they are reluctant to support any legislation that moves us towards that goal, causes providers to lose revenue, or regulates the system to improve efficiency.

Consider their objection to a “Medicare-like” public option that reimburses providers 5 to 10 percent above Medicare rates. According to MedPAC, Medicare rates are adequate and consistent with the efficient delivery of services. In fact, over-payments by private insurers to health-care providers drives up overall costs. “Hospitals which didn’t rely on high payment rates from private insurers ‘are able, in fact, to control their costs and reduce their costs when they need to’ and ‘combine low costs with quality,’” Glenn Hackbarth, the chairman of MedPAC, said during recent testimony in front of the House Ways and Means Committee. Moreover, if the public plan pays bloated market rates, it will fail to offer lower premiums within the Exchange, and would cause the government to spend more money on subsidies. [Emphasis mine]

Also today, more Blue Dog news:

More than 60 Democrats signed a letter authored by freshman Rep. Debbie Halvorson of Illinois and second-term Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina asking Waxman to jettison his plan to reinstate drug price controls to help low-income seniors. Instead, they are asking Waxman, Rangel and Education and Labor Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) to support the drug industry’s offer to spend $30 billion help cover those costs – a deal that is backed by the White House and the Senate Finance Committee.

Waxman wanted to reinstate the price controls to save the government tens of billions of dollars over the next decade – money currently paid to prescription-drug makers – so that he could plow those savings back into the system and close a sizeable gap in the current government-funded prescription-drug program. The industry was hoping to avert such controls by pledging $30 billion to help seniors and another $50 billion to help pay for health reform.

$30 billion and then another $50 billion? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Whaddya figure these public-spirited drug makers would rather spend $80 billion and take hefty tax deductions on those costs rather than take the hit to their gross incomes from Waxman’s cost controls? Screw saving taxpayers billions in drug costs up front. That’s the small-government, free-market way. Thanks, Heath.

But wait. Just in, some of the New Dems (DLC-type centrists) are going in another direction:

A band of 22 New Democrat and Blue Dog lawmakers say they support a “robust” government-run health plan, boosting chances of moving healthcare reform with a public insurance plan through the House.

Democratic centrists remain the biggest obstacle to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) ability to pass a healthcare bill with a public plan, and many conservative Democrats oppose a public option as unfair to private insurers.

But the letter from the 22 New Dems and Blue Dogs indicates opposition from this group is far from universal.

[…]

The 20 New Democrats on the letter represent nearly one-third of the 68-member caucus. It is signed by two Blue Dogs and three members who are both New Dems and Blue Dogs.

See Blue Dog Rep. Loretta Sanchez comment on why she opted out of the letter:

This situation is very, very fluid.

Essence of Palin

2009-07-09T09:38:00.001-04:00

Dahlia Lithwick over at Slate distills Sarah Palin into a single paragraph [Emphasis mine.]:

It's too easy to characterize Sarah Palin as an irrational bundle of bristling grievance. But I think it's more complicated than her simple love for playing the victim all the time. If you think of Palin as someone who never felt herself to be fully heard or understood, not truly politically realized in the eyes of the American public, her rage toward the country, the media, and those of us who fail to love and understand her is easier to comprehend. Think of an American visiting France who believes that if he just speaks louder, he will be speaking French. Palin has done everything in her power to explain herself to us, and still we fail to appreciate what she is all about. I'd be frustrated, too, if I thought I was offering up straight talk and nobody was getting the message. Especially if I held a degree in communications.

I've used that "speak louder" idea myself to describe the frustration many liberals feel in trying to communicate with conservatives. As with Palin, if your audience is not getting you, maybe the problem is you.

“Thar's no Jack S. like our Jack S!”

2009-07-08T16:14:00.003-04:00

From Roll Call:

Senate Democratic leaders have stepped up the pressure on their rank and file to unify on procedural votes after finally gaining a filibuster-proof majority, but centrists who have long been headaches for the leadership are so far refusing to commit to the strategy.

[...]

The message to Democrats, Durbin said, is: “Don’t let the Republicans filibuster us into failure. We want to succeed, and to succeed we need to stick together.”

[...]

But Durbin said that moderates, such as Bayh and Nelson, have voted with Democrats on procedural issues many times before.

“They may vote against final passage on a bill. They may vote with Republicans on amendments,” he said. “But on this idea of allowing the filibuster to stop the whole Senate, I think, we have persuaded them more often than not that they shouldn’t let the Republicans control our agenda. We ought to control our own agenda.”

Add Mary Landrieu to that group.

Al Capp's Sen. Jack S. Phogbound would fit right in.

Flailin' Palin

2009-07-07T10:08:00.003-04:00

Read Richard Cohen in today's WaPo:

Naming Palin to the GOP ticket -- a top-down choice by McCain -- was the most reckless decision any national politician has made in the longest time, and while it certainly says something about McCain, it says even more about his party. It has lost its mind.

And it gets better...

Eugene Robinson elaborates:

The reasons she gave for stepping down are not just contrived or implausible but literally nonsensical. She can most effectively serve the people of Alaska by ceasing to exercise the powers of chief executive? She worries that as a lame duck she would somehow be compelled to waste taxpayer money on useless junkets? In her "Don't Cry For Me, Alaska" news conference announcing her departure, the folksy non sequiturs -- "Only dead fish go with the flow" -- were like nuggets of Cartesian logic amid a tub of mush.

But I'm stating the obvious. The thing is, Palin's unsuitability for high public office has been obvious all along. Tina Fey got it right; the rest of us were far too reluctant to state plainly that the emperor, or empress, has no clothes.

Bill Kristol, compares Palin favorably to George W. Bush:

It's silly to claim Palin has no chance to win the nomination or the presidency.

[...]

The hostility of the GOP establishment may be an obstacle to her success. On the other hand, given the performance of GOP operatives and pols over the past few years, maybe their opposition isn't a bad thing.

In any case, this is the same GOP establishment that rallied behind first-term governor George W. Bush in 1997-98 and then propelled him to the nomination in 1999-2000. Had Bush accomplished more than Palin at that point?

Texas has a lot more people than Alaska does, but the Texas governorship is a weaker office -- and some of Bush's first-term initiatives went down in flames, while Palin's have largely succeeded.

As one of their finest under-performers, Kristol is supremely qualified to critique other "GOP operatives and pols." Aren't they supposed to object to affirmative action hiring?

Those wild and crazy Stompers

2009-07-03T12:45:00.000-04:00

An e-mail arrived today from Asheville City Council candidate, Cecil Bothwell, which included this note:

Those wild and crazy Stompers
Thunderpig is on the loose again. Our volunteer video crew posted a YouTube version of Mayor Leni Sitnick's speech at the Grey Eagle campaign kick-off event, June 12. Because the team used a sound feed from the sound board, that is, from the stage microphones, the sound dropped out when Leni had to pause for applause from the capacity crowd. So our intrepid amateur videographers spliced in some applause from elsewhere in the recording so Leni's pauses "made sense."

Well, the Carolina Stompers, those ever vigilant defenders of all things radically right, took note and decided to mock our efforts. Good on you guys! We've reposted the original video here.

In response to the Stompers' critique, the blogger who goes by the name Thunderpig put together a new version of Leni's talk. Click the laugh track below for his version of her great speech. (Thanks to Thunderpig for helping to publicize this campaign and thanks again to Asheville's best mayor ever for endorsing me!) Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh

The Stomper-doctored Sitnick video (in sepia-tone) and the pointless effort that went into it reminded me of a story.

An old friend of mine - an upstairs neighbor, Chris - used to have a blue tick hound named Blue. No lie.

Blue was a hunting machine ... except Chris didn't actually hunt. But Blue loved to chase squirrels.

Chris and Blue would be out in the yard and, just for fun, Chris would call Blue to attention and snap, "Blue! S-q-u-i-r-r-e-l."

Blue would take off like a shot and tear around the yard, running around tree trunks, glancing up and down and sniffing, looking for the squirrel. Eventually, Blue would slow down, stop, and look back at Chris quizzically as Chris slapped his thigh and laughed.

Stompers! D-e-m-o-c-r-a-t-s.

Inoculated at Birth

2009-07-02T08:35:00.002-04:00

South Carolina’s Gov. Mark Sanford is contrite about his extramarital affair. He plans to tour the state asking constituents for forgiveness. In South Carolina, he will probably get it.

In Southern Baptist-steeped South Carolina, public repentance is a tradition. Weepy evangelists, altar calls, redemption pageants and encounter weekends are deeply rooted in the culture.

There is a joke southern towns share about having a church on every street corner. It is also a competition – several claim the informal title of “Buckle of the Bible Belt.”

In this culture, it is a time-honored ritual to answer a tearfully delivered altar call at the end of the church service. The repentant rise slowly from their seats and shuffle humbly to the front of the church – or stadium, in the case of a Billy Graham crusade – for a humiliating public cleansing, to shed their own tears and accept Jesus as their personal savior. Or to accept him again. Or to receive forgiveness, prayers and the laying on of hands after “backsliding.”

Church audiences love testimonies, sordid, public confessions of a life ill-spent before finding God. Personal testimonies featuring all the forbidden fruits – alcohol, sex, drugs, and rock and roll – allow them to vicariously partake of guilty pleasures right out in public.

In church, even, and without taking their clothes off.

Returning to the faith after some really good sinning was entertainment in these parts long before the VCR.

Decades ago, I caught a piece of a late-night, AM gospel talk radio show out of somewhere in Georgia. The host was interviewing Demond Wilson, the actor from the 1970s TV sitcom, “Sanford and Son.” After the show went into reruns, Wilson had become a minister and was on the radio to talk about his new ministry.

But the host didn’t want to hear about that. He wanted to hear about Wilson’s life as a rich Hollywood celebrity. What about the wild parties? the host wanted to know. What about the sex and the drugs?

Wilson explained that he and his wife weren’t really party people. He played tennis, he said, with some star (whose name I can’t remember). But basically, he went to work and they had largely kept to themselves.

The host kept at it. He kept pushing.

You could hear the anxiousness in his voice. He’d expected some really quality sinning, but this more was like coitus interruptus.

“But when did you really hit bottom?” he asked a couple of times. This guy hoped to hear how Wilson had found Jesus after coming to in some strangers’ bathroom after a drunken orgy, a needle still in his arm. You know, a really good testimony.

He never got it. Wilson just decided one day that he would rather give up acting and serve God. The radio host was audibly disappointed.

What has any of this got to do with Gov. Mark Sanford’s Argentine junket? Inoculation.

For conservative politicians, the testimony has morphed into “inoculation politics,” e.g., falsely accusing opponents of personal failings they themselves share. Accustom the public to your neighbors’ faults so as not to look as bad in case you are caught indulging them yourself.

“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God,” Paul wrote in Romans 3. Anybody who has ever been to a revival meeting knows that one.

Sinning. Everybody does it. But unlike a godless liberal, a good conservative who confesses his sin publicly is eligible to be welcomed back into the fold. Just one of the boys.

“Hallelujah, brother!” as Dwayne Hickman once said.

Southern-strategy Republicans learned that lesson well. Man is sinful by nature. The Mark of Cain. It's old news.

Soon enough, Sen. John Ensign of Nevada (and of the Promise Keepers) will be old news. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (of The Fellowship), too.

But unlike Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-FL) men’s room affairs, Mark Sanford's Argentine junket sounds like really good sinning. Already, fleets of tabloid photographers have arrived in Buenos Aires, hoping to give us a glimpse of just how good.

Thus, when Sanford contritely strikes out on his political redemption tour of South Carolina, pious sinners anxious to hear all the details will probably forgive him his sins. They've already been inoculated.

Published as a "letter" in the July 2009 issue of the Asheville Daily Planet.

Bringing Wellness to an Insurance Fight

2009-06-29T21:31:00.001-04:00

Congress seems nervously eager to water down any form of public insurance option. Co-ops and triggers have been attacked as obvious gimmicks for sabotaging a robust public option. However, it is harder to find fault with promoting wellness and reducing obesity.

So, what could be wrong with encouraging Americans to eat more vegetables? Why not include wellness provisions in a health insurance reform bill?

For one, because the food industry is big business.

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Not the Health Care Co-ops They Had in Mind

2009-06-17T13:52:00.001-04:00

Here is one possibility we could see and, given the abandonment of single-payer and what looks like a systematic effort to sabotage the public option, a co-op that a growing number of Americans would gladly join:

Democratic Party Lays Plans for Insurance Cooperative
Democratic Party insiders have quietly begun laying plans for a national nonprofit insurance cooperative owned and operated for the benefit of its members.
Inspired by an idea suggested by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., the proposed plan, code-named Trenton, would be open to all registered Democrats and their families.
Leaders from both major parties have declared a single-payer health care plan dead on arrival in the U.S. Senate.
This month, Rasmussen’s partisan identification survey estimated the number of Democrats at 39.4% (leading Republicans by 6.8 percentage points). Dr. Michael McDonald of George Washington University recently estimated the 2008 voting-eligible population in the U.S. at roughly 213 million.
By those estimates, nearly 83 million Democrats and their families would be immediately eligible, with another 60 million independents up for grabs. When launched, Trenton could attract the largest single pool of insurance customers in the United States.
“We’re looking at a pool with far more bargaining power for driving down costs than the VA," said an unidentified official.
The proposed Democratic insurance co-op would not deny coverage to patients with preexisting medical conditions.

It's not a headline many on Capitol Hill, in Big Pharma or Big Insurance would welcome, and certainly not the co-op Kent Conrad envisions. But it's one alternative frustrated Democrats have kicked around for years.

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Setting a new tone

2009-06-15T11:22:00.002-04:00

A friend put me on to this article in the New Yorker that explores how "the culture of money" among doctor who see themselves as entrepreneurs led to the overuse of medicine and significantly higher costs in McAllen, TX.

But I was struck by this paragraph about how key employers set the cultural tone for business in some areas:

Woody Powell is a Stanford sociologist who studies the economic culture of cities. Recently, he and his research team studied why certain regions—Boston, San Francisco, San Diego—became leaders in biotechnology while others with a similar concentration of scientific and corporate talent—Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York—did not. The answer they found was what Powell describes as the anchor-tenant theory of economic development. Just as an anchor store will define the character of a mall, anchor tenants in biotechnology, whether it’s a company like Genentech, in South San Francisco, or a university like M.I.T., in Cambridge, define the character of an economic community. They set the norms. The anchor tenants that set norms encouraging the free flow of ideas and collaboration, even with competitors, produced enduringly successful communities, while those that mainly sought to dominate did not.

A friend observes the same thing about cities like Seattle. Where once it was Boeing, now Microsoft sets the economic tone.

Living in Western North Carolina with a withered textile/furniture manufacturing base - one that sorely needs reviving - the idea of attracting anchor-tenants as a way of setting a new tone for manufacturing investment deserves attention.

Greenville, SC had seen its textile-based economy wither in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Building on the strength of the statewide technical school system, Democatic Governor John C. West lured Michelin Tire Company to Greenville, SC in the early 1970s, "anchoring" the area's transition to a mixed manufacturing economy. Republican Governor Carroll Campbell built on that momentum in attracting BMW and Fuji Film to the area in the late 1980s.

Downtown Greenville, SC was boarded up and dying in the 1970s when Mayor Max Heller began promoting his plan to narrow Main Street, widen sidewalks and create a European-style downtown.

Heller convinced Hyatt to locate a new hotel at the north end of Main Street (rather than on a nearby interstate highway) to "anchor" the downtown redevelopment and set a tone that downtown was a place to invest. Decades later, downtown is thriving, lined with shops, restaurants and outdoor cafes. In the most Republican area of South Carolina, in downtown Greenville there stands a bronze statue of Austrian Jewish refugee, and Democrat, Max Heller.

The anchor-tenant concept could be used to revive manufacturing in Asheville/Buncombe. What name-brand company do we want to attract as an anchor-tenant?

Time to line up, sign up and enlist

2009-06-14T19:46:00.002-04:00

Health care reform is going to be a helluva fight if the Dems don't surrender before the first shot.

What Digby said:

This is just beginning and a lot can happen, but I can't say that it's going very well so far. They took single payer off the table before they even began, so they are starting this negotiation with this public plan option as the leftward position to be bargained away in the inevitable "compromise." The way they're going we'll be lucky if we don't end up with "reforming" Medicare into a private, for profit insurance company.

Health Care Reform Is About Choices

2009-06-12T13:49:00.001-04:00

Health Care Reform Is About Choices

Some people would rather keep things as they are. Some people would rather live in an America with a health care system ranked 37th in the world. Some people would rather America spend twice as much in GDP per capita for health care than industrialized countries with national systems. Some people would rather pay more and get less.

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Reaping Privatization's Rewards?

2009-06-09T23:51:00.002-04:00

Privatization advocates argue that the private sector runs a more efficient and cost-effective ship than the government. Small-government conservatives – the same people, often – argue that fighting wars and fighting crime are among the few constitutionally legitimate functions of government, yet they support turning over even those government functions to the for-profit sector.

You can’t let constitutional legitimacy get in the way when there’s money to be made.

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

We need a symbol

2009-06-08T15:07:00.003-04:00

More of my comments from the CAF thread:

Every American has skin in this game. Our job is not to glaze their eyes with statistics and polls. It is to remind them how broken the system is and to show them a way out.

I’m not much for futile, symbolic gestures, and the further left progressives go, the more popular those wastes of time become. Still, symbols can be powerful persuaders if done right. Harry and Louise, for example.

Recalling Firedoglake’s 2006 rubber stamp campaign, I suggested to Christy Hardin Smith a symbol everyone could use to drive home the problem with the broken health care system: stacks of medical bills.

http://media.collegepublisher.com/media/paper1146/stills/403b7303951e1-9...

http://www.armyofmom.com/SPF%20xanax%20bills.JPG

http://blogs.babycenter.com/momformation/files/2008/09/bills.JPG

My sister died at 37 from a metastatic sarcoma (the same thing that got Ted Kennedy, Jr.’s leg). I watched her die, went to her funeral and, in mourning, went back to pack up her apartment and sift through stacks of medical bills, trying to figure out what she owed to whom and how we would get them paid. This doesn’t happen in most industrialized countries and shouldn’t happen here. It's a disgrace.

We need a symbol to stand in for our failed for-profit health care system, a symbol that a) every American recognizes; b) every American loathes; c) most people have touched and have in their homes; d) won’t disappear with a compromise reform plan; e) anyone can mail to, send to or throw onto their representative’s desk, or wave over their heads for the media; and f) that our representatives themselves can wave over their heads during debate.

I think stacks of medical bills are that symbol.

I attended a local organizing meeting pushing health care reform Thursday night, and was surprised to find that the activists there had the same reaction many progressives in the crowd at AFN had. They want single payer and they are ready to fight for it regardless of what the White House supports.

One woman recounted a terrible story about her six-foot-plus son dying of colon cancer (he had a congenital predisposition to it) because he had no insurance and couldn’t get a yearly colonoscopy until he had Stage 3 cancer and was down to 110 lbs. Obama’s OFA is reportedly collecting thousands of similar personal stories from across the country.

Great. But the problem is that too many among the general public will be sympathetic, but unable to connect those stories, faces and names to their own lives. Most everyone has dealt with medical insurance paperwork. Instantly recognizable. Universally hated.

There will be some kind of mass rally in D.C., I expect. I see a touch of "Meet John Doe" or "Mr. Smith" in thousands of people arriving in D.C. clutching sheaves of medical bills, and medical bills spitting out of Capitol Hill fax machines for days (with videos posted on YouTube). A little something our reluctant Smiths can use for show-and-tell in the wells of the House and Senate. I don't think they grasp the depth of anger and frustration out here. They just need a little educating.

If this fight comes down to a few progressive activists and congressmen vs. an extremely well-funded insurance industry, the American people lose. This battle can’t be won with polls and statistics. It has to be won with boots on the ground and symbols that capture the American psyche.

Weighing in on health care

2009-06-08T14:14:00.002-04:00

This is my response to Bernie Horn's post on health care at Campaign for America's Future:

"This is Negotiating 101," David Sirota said at AFN last Tuesday. You don't start negotiating from where you expect to end up.

The Big Money Boys will work to beat us down from whatever we start out asking for. If we begin the process asking for some kind of public option, we may not even get that. In fact, you can see from some of the proposals floating around that Frank Luntz still has some influence - "trigger" provisions are meant to give the illusion of some kind of public plan without actually delivering one, just what Luntz suggests.

As you said, "even if a single-payer proposal starts out with a majority of Americans in support, it won’t hold majority support after the insurance industry clobbers it with ads." Maybe. Maybe. But that's my point, and Sirota's. That's where we have to start. We have to aim high if we expect to get in the end what we'd accept as a minimum. That's why pushing single-payer makes good strategic sense, not just good public policy sense.

Those who remember ClintonCare being shot down by the “Harry and Louise” ads are understandably gun-shy this time around. ClintonCare was an all-or-nothing proposition and we ended up with nothing. By pushing the public option, the gun-shy (the pragmatic, if you prefer) hope not to provoke the massive retaliation we all know is coming against real reform anyway. (A neighbor describes the coming health care battle as another Gettysburg.) But we don't have an all-or-nothing situation this time. There are various proposal floating around, and this time a public option allows people the comfort of keeping what they have. It's sellable. I get that.

But single-payer isn't politically viable? I'm not so sure. As I recall, Obama was unelectable. But he somehow managed to dispel preconceptions and stereotypes in winning the presidency. Politicians, they say, are always looking for a parade to run to the head of. That's what Obama seems to be doing behind the scenes with Organizing for America (OFA), trying to organize that parade. If a single-payer parade materializes, and if it is massive, just watch the pols run to get in front of it. If it doesn't materialize, single-payer won't either.

We're dealing with corporate entities happy to deny care to the sick and dying to save a nickel. Don't think they won't neuter any public option before implementation if it means extra shareholder value. We have to push hard for more than a public option if we hope to preserve a viable public option by the time the dust has settled and the bill is ready for signing.

Not meaning what they say it means

2009-06-07T15:29:00.004-04:00

Once again the NYT doesn't quite get the story right:

U.S. Lawyers Agreed on Legality of Brutal Tactic

Well, in fact, not so much. The story is based on some leaked Jim Comey e-mails that say something else. The OLC was asking about whether the nasty interrogation techniques being considered were in compliance with 18 USC 2340-2340A, the anti-torture federal statute. Marcy has the dirt:

That is ... [the] OLC was clear that the advice did not extend to the Geneva Conventions or the Convention Against Torture. The question at hand was, did waterboarding and sleep deprivation comply with a law--2340-2340A, not whether it complied with all laws.

Follow the link.

"The concrete is being mixed..."

2009-06-06T13:48:00.004-04:00

Robert Reich cautions that the Big Insurance and Big Pharma are already rolling out plans to sink the public option.

So they're pulling out all the stops -- pushing Democrats and a handful of so-called "moderate" Republicans who say they're in favor of a public option to support legislation that would include it in name only. One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to the states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they've been doing for years. A third is bind the public plan to the same rules private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers.

Isn't that right out of the Luntz playbook?

Olympia Snowe, Reich says, is pushing another unreachable "trigger" provision to protect the insurance companies from any immediate erosion of their profits. The same push is happening on the House side.

Reich:

This is it, folks. The concrete is being mixed and about to be poured. And after it's poured and hardens, universal health care will be with us for years to come in whatever form it now takes. Let your representative and senators know you want a public option without conditions or triggers -- one that gives the public insurer bargaining leverage over drug companies, and pushes insurers to do what they've promised to do. Don't wait until the concrete hardens and we've lost this battle.

Kennedy lays down a marker

2009-06-06T06:36:00.002-04:00

Sen. Ted Kennedy is still fighting his brain cancer and still fighting the good fight:

WASHINGTON — All Americans would have access to “essential health care benefits,” with no annual or lifetime limits, employers would have to contribute to the cost of coverage and the government would create a new public insurance program under sweeping legislation drafted by Senator Edward M. Kennedy and circulated Friday.

Under the legislation, the government would subsidize premiums for people with incomes up to 500 percent of the poverty level ($110,000 for a family of four), and private insurers would have to pay out a specified percentage of their premium revenues in benefits.

The new government-run program would pay doctors and hospitals at Medicare rates, plus 10 percent.

Mr. Kennedy’s bill would also establish a new insurance program to provide home- and community-based care for 10 million people with severe disabilities.

The Conyers HR 676 (a.k.a. Medicare for All) is up to 78 cosponsors so far. This is going to be the fight of a lifetime - another Gettysburg according to one friend.

Recalling Firedoglake’s 2006 rubber stamp campaign, I have suggested a symbol everyone could use to drive home the problem with the broken health care system: stacks of medical bills.

http://media.collegepublisher.com/media/paper1146/stills/403b7303951e1-97-1.jpg

http://www.armyofmom.com/SPF%20xanax%20bills.JPG

http://blogs.babycenter.com/momformation/files/2008/09/bills.JPG

We will need a symbol to stand in for our failed for-profit health care system, a symbol that targets insurance companies and that a) every American recognizes; b) every American loathes; c) most people have in their homes; d) won’t disappear with a compromise reform plan; e) anyone can mail to, send to or throw onto their congresscritter’s desk, or wave over their heads for the media; and f) that our congresscritters themselves can wave over their heads during debate.

I think stacks of medical bills are that symbol.

I attended the local Obama group’s organizing meeting on pushing health care reform Thursday night, and was surprised to find that the 30 Obama supporters there had the same reaction many progressives in the crowd at America's Future Now! had. They want single payer and they are ready to fight for it regardless of what Obama is supporting.

One woman recounted a terrible story about her son dying of colon cancer (congenital predisposition to it) because he had no insurance and couldn’t get a yearly colonoscopy until he had Stage 3 cancer and was down to 110 lbs. Obama’s Organizing For America is collecting thousands of personal stories from across the country.

Great. But the problem is that too many among the general public will be sympathetic, but unable to connect those stories, faces and names to their own lives. Most everyone has dealt with medical paperwork. Instantly recognizable. Universally hated.

There will be some kind of mass rally, of course. I see a touch of "Meet John Doe" or "Mr. Smith" in thousands of people arriving in D.C. clutching sheaves of medical bills, and medical bills spitting out of Capitol Hill fax machines for days (with videos posted on YouTube). A little something our reluctant Smiths can use for show-and-tell in the wells of the House and Senate. I don't think they grasp the depth of anger and frustration out here. They just need a little educating.

Lock and load.

Media on the ropes

2009-06-03T10:00:00.003-04:00

The forum yesterday on the fate of the news media and its relationship to the blogs posed more questions than answers. Mostly of funding and legal issues. Marcy Wheeler raised the issue of how much we all count on the efforts of other - like the ACLU - to do the leg work of getting at government source material. Their lawyers do the work and we benefit.

Other notable comments were from a former reporter who noted that advertising losses have forces staff cutbacks and higher workloads which lead to lousy reporting. But it begs the question of which came first, the lousy reporting or the loss of revenue and readership.

Cheap hotel we're in has no wireless, plus the hour each way on the metro makes blogging while here more of a pain than it should be.

Sirota at America's Future Now! conference

2009-06-02T14:50:00.007-04:00

One divide here is between passion and caution on health care reform. At several events, cries of "single payer" come up when health care is being discussed. They are the further-left, all-or-nothing folks who want single payer swept in now ... or nothing, I suppose. There's a real reluctance by the power players here to push hard for single payer. On Monday, Gov. Howard Dean explained it as more palatable (and salable?) to simply place a public option on a menu of choices Americans can choose from.

Their caution is warranted. In 1993, the Clintons pressed for sweeping change and got nothing. Obama is playing it closer to the vest and asking for something more incremental. But is that the right strategy?

It's time for progressives to press hard for single payer, David Sirota observed this morning. We can expect the change we will actually see from this process to be somewhat incremental - and perhaps including some kind of public option - so why push for less than what most Americans want? If we push hard Congress hard for more than we expect to get, that makes compromising for less more productive. That's something many Democrats and progressives don't seem to get, Sirota said, but it's time they learned. It's Negotiating 101.

The Proof is in the Lying

2009-05-29T12:22:00.001-04:00

Greg Sargent reports that the documents Cheney wants declassified don't say what he says they do, according to Sen. Carl Levin:

Mr. Cheney has also claimed that the release of classified documents would prove his view that the techniques worked. But those classified documents say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of the abusive techniques. I hope that the documents are declassified so that people can judge for themselves what is fact and what is fiction.

TPM has the video.

As Stevie might say, You Haven't Proved Nothin'.

Empathy for the Common Man

2009-05-27T14:13:00.001-04:00

One of the president’s stated qualifications for his Supreme Court picks – including Judge Sonia Sotomayor – is that they approach judicial rulings with empathy for the real people whose lives their decisions will affect. The notion owes more to Solomon than to the strict constructionist dogma of the Federalist Society. As others have observed, if interpreting the Constitution were a simple matter of strict textual analysis, we might see fewer five-four decisions (and more disputed babies divided in half).

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Pentagon Rejoins the Fight Over Guantanamo

2009-05-21T09:51:00.002-04:00

Conservative talkers will be flogging this story from the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — An unreleased Pentagon report concludes that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.

The conclusion could strengthen the arguments of critics who have warned against the transfer or release of any more detainees as part of President Obama’s plan to shut down the prison by January. Past Pentagon reports on Guantánamo recidivism have been met with skepticism from civil liberties groups and criticized for their lack of detail.

That might be because the Pentagon considers former detainees giving interviews critical of the United States as "terrorism or militant activity." According to a report by Seton Hall Law School's Mark Denbeaux, the "Tipton Three" who participated in the documentary The Road to Guantánamo and one of five Uighurs released to Albania wrote a New York Times op-ed urging "American lawmakers to protect habeas corpus." The Pentagon counts all as anti-American activity under the rubric, "returned to the fight."

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Haven't we seen this movie?

2009-05-20T00:15:00.003-04:00

From today's New York Times:

Arms From U.S. May Be Falling Into Taliban Hands
By C. J. CHIVERS

KABUL, Afghanistan — Insurgents in Afghanistan, fighting from some of the poorest and most remote regions on earth, have managed for years to maintain an intensive guerrilla war against materially superior American and Afghan forces.

Arms and ordnance collected from dead insurgents hint at one possible reason: Of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents’ corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition the United States had provided to Afghan government forces, according to an examination of ammunition markings by The New York Times and interviews with American officers and arms dealers.

[...]

The scope of that diversion remains unknown, and the 30 magazines represented a single sampling of fewer than 1,000 cartridges. But military officials, arms analysts and dealers say it points to a worrisome possibility: With only spotty American and Afghan controls on the vast inventory of weapons and ammunition sent into Afghanistan during an eight-year conflict, poor discipline and outright corruption among Afghan forces may have helped insurgents stay supplied.

As I recall, we left on the order of 1.6 million M-16 rifles and other carbines behind in Saigon that later turned up all across Southeast Asia, the Philippines and Central America.

Those who fail to learn the lessons of history...

Torture Deniers

2009-05-19T18:35:00.005-04:00

Gov. Jesse Ventura is not someone for torture deniers to take on lightly:

Fearful authoritarians like Brian Kilmeade and his ilk are pretty quick to sell their American birthright for what Franklin called a little "temporary security." These are the kinds of Americans who brought us the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. I wrote about the latter at the time it passed (Asheville Citizen-Times 10-22-06):

The detainee treatment question is not about the blackness of terrorists’ hearts.

It is about our own hearts. About our standards of behavior, not theirs. Neitzsche cautioned, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.”

Fighting terrorism requires tough measures. Tough, but smart. And effective.

Promoting democracy requires living by our principles, not retreating from them.

America aspires to set a standard for the world, a moral high bar so high that sometimes she fails in reaching it. In our post-Sept. 11 zeal we allowed our enemies to re-set that bar for us — ankle-high. Stay one step above those who cut off prisoners heads on videotape and we can still claim moral superiority. Not that the world will pay attention any longer.

Osama bin Laden wants to destroy America? He needn’t bother. We just might do it for him.

I have run out of patience with even describing these "principled patriots" as torture apologists. They are torture deniers.

No more choo-choo?

2009-05-19T11:42:00.001-04:00

"The gravy train has got to stop," - Royal Dutch Shell investor

Shareholders voted against approving the executive pay policies of Royal Dutch Shell on Tuesday, giving the energy company a clear signal it had not done enough to address remuneration concerns that dominated proceedings at its annual meeting for a second year.
- Financial Times

In a sign that the public may finally be calling corporations to heel, several investor groups have been pressuring corporate boards on executive pay, at least in Europe, the Financial Times reports:

Xstrata suffered a stinging protest by shareholders over its pay policies on Tuesday as more than a third of votes cast on its remuneration report at its annual meeting failed to back it.
BP experienced a similar protest vote against its remuneration plan last month and pay is expected to be a contentious issue at Shell’s annual meeting this month.
“The turnout at meetings is higher, and a much higher level of votes is being cast against remuneration proposals in a number of countries, such as the Netherlands and Sweden,” says Jean-Nicolas Caprasse, head of proxy voting agency RiskMetrics European and Middle Eastern business.
Europe in recent months has seen revolts in the Netherlands (Heineken, ASML, KPN) and Sweden (Volvo, Nordea). The past few weeks have seen that mood take hold in Britain.
“Remuneration is the number one subject in the UK and Europe”, says Mr Caprasse. “One thing shareholders agree is that they don’t want to reward failure and they’ve seen a lot of failure in the past year. It has united shareholders’ focus.”

Bank of America investors last month scored a small victory by deposing Ken Lewis as CEO. Perhaps it is because the economic wreckage is worse in Europe that investors across the pond have done more to date than American shareholders. Stay tuned.

Now Concentrated!

2009-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

Gallop has a new poll showing across-the-board party identification losses for Republicans since Bush took office, with the biggest declines "after Hurricane Katrina and Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court ... and amid declining support for the Iraq war." There are significant losses among every subgroup except conservatives, senior citizens and frequent churchgoers.

The parties were also evenly matched on basic party identification in 2001 (which does not take into account the partisan leanings of independents), with 32% identifying themselves as Republicans, 33% as Democrats, and 34% as independents. The 2009 data show the GOP losing five points since then, with identification increasing three points among both Democrats and independents.

While the Bush/Cheney years did most of the damage measured by Gallop, the shrinkage has accelerated since November. Rather than looking to broaden its appeal, the Party of Limbaugh now seems locked in a death spiral of ritual purification. Like a reduction in cooking, the GOP is driving off its more moderate elements, thickening, concentrating and intensifying what remains. Or as Wikipedia puts it,

While reduction does concentrate the flavors left in the pan, extended cooking can drive away volatile flavor compounds, leaving behind less interesting tastes.

Tastes that appeal to fewer and fewer Americans, it seems.

The count grows

2009-05-18T09:40:00.001-04:00

Because of the use of unnamed sources, the count is somewhat muddy, but citations are mounting that the Bush administration used torture to look for political cover for the Iraq invasion:

1. Maj. Paul Burney - SASC report
2. "A former senior U.S. intelligence official" - McClatchy April 21
3. Charles Duelfer - Daily Beast report
4. One "U.S. intelligence officer" (or two?) in addition to Duelfer - Daily Beast report
5. Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson - Washington Note
6. Army Lt. Col. Brittain Mallow (retired) - McClatchy May 15

Cheney said Gitmo detainees revealed Iraq-al Qaida link - McClatchy May 15

The head of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002-2005 confirmed to McClatchy that in late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence officials were tasked to find, among other things, Iraq-al Qaida ties, which were a central pillar of the Bush administration's case for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"I'm aware of the fact that in late 2002, early 2003, that (the alleged al Qaida-Iraq link) was an interest on the intelligence side," said retired Army Lt. Col. Brittain Mallow, a former military criminal investigator. "That was something they were tasked to look at."

He said he was unaware of the origins of the directive, but a former senior U.S. intelligence official has told McClatchy that Cheney's and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's offices were demanding that information in 2002 and 2003. The official, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the matter, requested anonymity.

Perhaps this is the ticking time bomb we keep hearing about?

Now it is about Geneva

2009-05-17T11:27:00.002-04:00

There's one thing no one yet seems to have made an issue of from the Daily Beast report that the Office of the Vice-President suggested using waterboarding on an Iraqi intelligence official: Iraq is a Geneva Convention theater.

Using waterboarding on an Iraqi POW would be a clear-cut violation of the Geneva Convention. Even suggesting it might be conspiracy to commit a war crime. Besides, the OLC memos purportedly made the enhanced techniques legal only for use against al Qaida and Taliban members in extreme cases.

Kagro X undercut himself with his suggestion that the torture regime was comparable to the Spanish Inquisition, but his basic points were sound, as Jane reiterated:

1. Private contractors were conducting torture
2. It was torture for political gain
3. Pollsters should be asking if Americans support using torture to extract false confessions for political purposes, because that's what happened

These are points to keep hammering home. But we could add the Geneva element with respect to the Iraqi prisoner Charles Duelfer mentions. The convention doesn't seem to have been an impediment for the OVP, unless they thought that by merely "suggesting" waterboarding that they would not be crossing that line (hoping Duelfer, et. al. would take the hint and act on their own).

Because of the use of unnamed sources, the count is somewhat muddy, but the citations are mounting that the Bush administration used torture for political cover for the Iraq invasion:

1. Maj. Paul Burney - SASC report
2. "A former senior U.S. intelligence official" - McClatchy April 21
3. Charles Duelfer - Daily Beast report
4. One "U.S. intelligence officer" (or two?) in addition to Duelfer - Daily Beast report
5. Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson - Washington Note

Katrina vanden Heuvel just raised the issue on This Week (still in progress).

The trick bloggers have to remember is to be careful about how they report these issues. Go hyperbolic and the argument becomes about how we say things, rather than about the facts themselves.

Kagro X nails it

2009-05-16T23:55:00.001-04:00

Now if we can just get the MSM to report the same:

Okay, invoking "Spanish Inquisition" was sensationalist rhetoric that left him open to discrediting, but otherwise he was spot on. Jane Hamsher sums it up:

... watch Kagro X (David Waldman of CongressMatters) on CNN.com and he'll be your hero, too.

The successful hijacking of the torture debate by its proponents obscures the underlying facts, as Kagro makes abundantly clear:

1. Private contractors were conducting torture
2. It was torture for political gain
3. Pollsters should be asking if Americans support using torture to extract false confessions for political purposes, because that's what happened

This cannot be hammered home strongly enough, and is the most concise distillation of the real issue at hand I have seen.

BushCo's White Whale

2009-05-14T14:30:00.003-04:00

From the Daily Beast:

*Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.

*The former chief of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, in charge of interrogations, tells The Daily Beast that he considered the request reprehensible.

*Much of the information in the report of the 9/11 Commission was provided through more than 30 sessions of torture of detainees.
At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam’s secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.

If I remember my secret OLC memos, those techniques were only authorized for members of al Qaida and the Taliban. And using the harsh techniques on an Iraqi POW would be a violation of both the Geneva Convention (which applied in the Iraq theater) and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (cruel, inhumane or degrading, even if they argue waterboarding isn't torture).

The deeper we go down the torture rabbit hole, the clearer it seems that the torture regime was built, not around any ticking time bomb scenario, but around the Bush administration trying to establish a link between al Qaeda and Iraq, both before and after the invasion.

In today's Washington Note, Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to of Secretary of State Colin Powell:

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet.

As dday over at Hullabaloo, puts it,

Over and over again, we have seen Iraq as the white whale to the Bush Administration, as their sole focus through much of the first term appeared to be laying down the basis for invasion and occupation. Everything flows from this original sin.

Formal charges may flow as well. Obama may not be able to stop an investigation now.

A Real Game Changer

2009-05-14T00:33:00.002-04:00

Rebranding is this week's colossal-osal, gigantic-antic, magic formula for returning the Republicans to national-party status:

A member of the Republican National Committee told me Tuesday that when the RNC meets in an extraordinary special session next week, it will approve a resolution rebranding Democrats as the “Democrat Socialist Party.”

When I asked if such a resolution would force RNC Chairman Michael Steele to use that label when talking about Democrats in all his speeches and press releases, the RNC member replied: “Who cares?”

Which pretty much sums up the attitude some members of the RNC have toward their chairman these days.

Steele wrote a memo last month opposing the resolution. Steele said that while he believes Democrats “are indeed marching America toward European-style socialism,” he also said in a (rare) flash of insight that officially referring to them as the Democrat Socialist Party “will accomplish little than to give the media and our opponents the opportunity to mischaracterize Republicans.

Ya think?

[h/t Digby]

Ali Soufan "Snopes" Cheney

2009-05-13T20:33:00.002-04:00

All through my reading of the Senate Armed Services report on detainee treatment (Levin report), I kept scratching my head, wondering where did Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld get the idea that they should be using SERE techniques for interrogating al Qaeda prisoners? Civilian contractors were involved, we knew. But today we got more.

From former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan's statement at today's 2-1/2 hour Senate Judiciary Committee hearing (video):

In summary, the Informed Interrogation Approach outlined in the Army Field Manual is the most effective, reliable, and speedy approach we have for interrogating terrorists. It is legal and has worked time and again.

It was a mistake to abandon it in favor of harsh interrogation methods that are harmful, shameful, slower, unreliable, ineffective, and play directly into the enemy's handbook. It was a mistake to abandon an approach that was working and naively replace it with an untested method. It was a mistake to abandon an approach that is based on the cumulative wisdom and successful tradition of our military, intelligence, and law enforcement community, in favor of techniques advocated by contractors with no relevant experience.

The mistake was so costly precisely because the situation was, and remains, too risky to allow someone to experiment with amateurish, Hollywood style interrogation methods- that in reality- taints sources, risks outcomes, ignores the end game, and diminishes our moral high ground in a battle that is impossible to win without first capturing the hearts and minds around the world. It was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against al Qaeda. [Emphasis mine.]

The former FBI interrogator testified from behind a screen to protect his identity. It didn't protect Cheney from incoming fire, though. As someone who interrogated Abu Zubaydah, as someone who was there, i.e., not basing opinions on written or verbal reports from subordinates, Soufan debunked many of the intelligence successes Cheney claims for his torture program. Soufan said Zubaydah gave up the names of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Jose Padilla under the standard Informed Interrogation Approach.

Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) was left to angrily walk a very shaky tightrope between formally disapproving of the "enhanced techniques" and trying to stomp down any suggestions of criminality that might require drawing up formal charges against Cheney, et. al.

Soufan had nothing nice to say about the $1000 a day "outside contractors with no expertise in intelligence operations, investigations, terrorism, or al Qaeda" who interfered with his interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. Soufan didn't name names, but one supposes that he's referring to "voodoo scientists" Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, recently re-outed by ABC News:

Both men declined to speak to ABC News citing non-disclosure agreements with the CIA. But sources say Jessen and Mitchell together designed and implemented the CIA's interrogation program.

"The whole intense interrogation concept that we hear about, is essentially their concepts," according to Col. Steven Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator.

Both Mitchell and Jessen were previously involved in the U.S. military program to train pilots how to survive behind enemy lines and resist brutal tactics if captured.

Read: SERE trainers.

But it turns out neither Mitchell nor Jessen had any experience in conducting actual interrogations before the CIA hired them.

"They went to two individuals who had no interrogation experience," said Col. Kleinman. "They are not interrogators."

Soufan said in his testimony today that the contractors employed harsh techniques over the objections of the FBI and CIA interrogators on the scene:

Throughout this time, my fellow FBI agent and I, along with a top CIA interrogator who was working with us, protested, but we were overruled. I should also note that another colleague, an operational psychologist for the CIA, had left the location because he objected to what was being done.

How in the hell, I keep asking myself, are contractors in any position to "overrule" government officials in such matters? Scott Horton, chair of the New York City Bar Association's International Law Committee, suggested in Salon two years ago that "the decision to introduce and develop these methods was made at a very high level." Der Spiegel confirmed that just yesterday:

[Soufan] ... asked Mitchell who had authorized him to use the aggressive methods. Mitchell responded that he had received approval from the "highest levels" in Washington. All this happened in April 2002, four months before the Bush administration issued its first torture memorandum to legally justify the interrogation techniques.

No wonder Dick Cheney's everywhere defending his little shop of horrors.

More Kafka than Kafka

2009-05-11T23:07:00.003-04:00

Over at Kos, McJoan links to an outstanding (and lengthy) piece in the Chicago Tribune's Sunday magazine on a local attorney, Candace Gorman, who is representing clients at Guantanamo at her own expense. The roadblocks and travails are epic.

Here's the money quote:

"Guantanamo is more Kafka than Kafka."

Waterboarding - How can we justify it? Volume!

2009-05-10T21:57:00.007-04:00

The conservative full-court press to defend torture continues. From today's Face the Nation appearance, something I noticed in former VP Dick Cheney's defense of waterboarding. He keeps insisting that two yet-unseen CIA memos prove "precisely how much was achieved" through enhanced techniques, including waterboarding. Nothing new in his rhetoric, I think, but his justification for using waterboarding is that it makes subjects much more talkative [Transcript page 4; Emphasis mine]:

SCHIEFFER: Well, Mr. Vice President, let me ask you this. I mean, I'm not asking you to violate any rules of classification, but is there anything you can tell us specifically that those memos would tell us? I mean, some information we gleaned, some fact that we got that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise?

CHENEY: That's what's in those memos. It talks specifically about different attack planning that was under way and how it was stopped. It talks about how the volume of intelligence reports that were produced from that.

But quantity does not mean quality. In March the Washington Post reported on the quality of "the volume of intelligence reports" gleaned from waterboarding Abu Zubaida:

The application of techniques such as waterboarding -- a form of simulated drowning that U.S. officials had previously deemed a crime -- prompted a sudden torrent of names and facts. Abu Zubaida began unspooling the details of various al-Qaeda plots, including plans to unleash weapons of mass destruction.

Abu Zubaida's revelations triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms. The interrogations led directly to the arrest of Jose Padilla, the man Abu Zubaida identified as heading an effort to explode a radiological "dirty bomb" in an American city. Padilla was held in a naval brig for 3 1/2 years on the allegation but was never charged in any such plot. Every other lead ultimately dissolved into smoke and shadow, according to high-ranking former U.S. officials with access to classified reports.

"We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms," one former intelligence official said.

Jose Padilla, the one-time "dirty bomber," was convicted of being a "terrorist wannabe." Padilla's attorneys allege he was tortured in U.S. custody and his mind destroyed.

Canadian Maher Arar was identified in similar fashion and was detained while changing planes at JFK airport. Arar received an all-expenses paid rendition to Syria and regular beatings for ten months until being released. Another Canadian, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, named Arar after two years of torture in Syria for possible al-Qaida connections. According to The Guardian (London), El Maati eventually "reeled off the names of everyone he knew in Montreal," including Arar. The Canadian government has since apologized for its part in Arar's treatment and paid a cash settlement.

Torture may loosen tongues. It may have loosened Zubaida's and El-Maati's. It may even yield "volumes" of information, but that's not justification for a war crime. As Wanda Sykes joked at the end of her White House Correspondents' dinner performance on Saturday night, "That's like me robbing a bank and going in front of the judge and saying, 'Yes, Your Honor, I robbed a bank, but look at all these bills I paid.'"

Words by Luntz

2009-05-07T09:05:00.004-04:00

The latest in spinmeistering by Frank Luntz has been leaked: The Language of Health Care 2009.

We comment on Politico's exclusive at CAF:

Politico's Mike Allen shares excerpts from the Frank Luntz's latest exercise in conservative spinmeistering. Allen received a bootleg of a confidential 26-page report from Luntz that is circulating among Capitol Hill Republicans. It his game plan for defeating health care reform by seeming to embrace health care reform.

"The status quo is no longer acceptable," Luntz writes. "If the dynamic becomes ‘President Obama is on the side of reform and Republicans are against it,’ then the battle is lost and every word in this document is useless."

From the extracts Allen shares, the rest of "this document" deals with how Republicans can steer constituents towards keeping the "current arrangement."

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Do you smell something?

2009-05-06T02:15:00.007-04:00

John Bolton in today's WaPo, wringing his sweaty hands about President Obama not nipping foreign torture investigations/prosecutions in the bud [Emphasis mine.]:

Despite uncertainties here, developments overseas proceed apace. Spanish Magistrate Baltasar Garzón opened a formal investigation last week of six Bush administration lawyers for their roles in advising on interrogation techniques. Garzón did so over the objections of Spain's attorney general, as he did in 1998 in proceeding against former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet. Under Spain's inquisitorial judicial system, Garzón is essentially unaccountable, whatever the views of Spain's elected government.

A judiciary independent of elected officials? The Horror!

Asked repeatedly about Garzón's investigation, the State Department has said only that it is a matter for the Spanish judicial system. Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder went further, implying that the Obama administration could cooperate. "Obviously, we would look at any request that would come from a court in any country and see how and whether we should comply with it," Holder said. This is deeply troubling.

Troubling indeed. Deeply troubling. "[W]e would look ... and see how and whether we should comply..." Sends a chill up your spine doesn't it? Liberal fascists.

...Garzón's is far from a run-of-the-mill police investigation in which an American tourist abroad runs afoul of some local ordinance. Indeed, from what appears publicly, U.S. consular officials would do more for the tourist than Obama is doing for the former Bush officials.

Whaddya say, John? Threaten to nuke Madrid?

There is never a shortage of second-guessers about U.S. foreign policy. For example, former U.N. high commissioner for human rights Mary Robinson said during the NATO-Serbia war over Kosovo that "civilian casualties are human rights victims." She asked, "If it is not possible to ascertain whether civilian buses are on bridges, should those bridges be blown?"

"Be sure of your target," my ass! Blow 'em to hell, John.

And here Bolton channels Tim Matheson from the student court scene in Animal House [Emphasis mine.]:

The question here is not whether one agrees or disagrees with the advice the lawyers gave, or with their superiors' operative decisions concerning interrogation techniques. Nor is it even whether one believes our Justice Department should launch criminal investigations into their actions...

Instead, the critical question is who judges the official actions that U.S. personnel took while holding government office. Is it our own executive and judicial branches, within our constitutional structures and protections, or some unaccountable foreign or international magistrate in some unaccountable distant court?

[Start humming the Star-Spangled Banner here.] "I put it to you, Greg - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!"

But Bolton's not done yet,

... whether or not Obama has decided against prosecuting CIA agents, his decision in no way binds the creative mind of Señor Garzón, a man who has never shied from spotlights. Indeed, U.N. Special Rapporteur Manfred Nowak has already said that the other 145 states party to the Convention Against Torture must launch their own criminal investigations if the United States does not.

Behind-the-scenes diplomacy is often the best, and sometimes the only, way to accomplish important policy objectives, and one hopes that such efforts are underway. But in this case, firm and public statements are necessary to stop the pending Spanish inquisition and to dissuade others from proceeding. The president must abandon his Ehrlichman-like policy and pronounce unequivocally that Spain should take whatever steps are necessary to stop Garzón. [Emphasis mine.]

The Bush's administration's "take whatever steps are necessary" approach is just what led to the OLC lawyers being investigated, Johnnie. So unless you want to try another few rounds of swaggering and tough talk, if we really want to put the brakes on investigations by those other 145 states, the United States could just launch its own investigation. But that scares you too, doesn't it?

Do you smell something? That's the smell of fear sociopaths give off when cornered.

OPR watch

2009-05-05T22:04:00.005-04:00

We are closer to knowing whether of not the White House Office of Legal Council (OLC) attorneys Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury will face consequences for the sorry torture memos they crafted in support of the Bush torture regime. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report on "memogate" is due out soon, and may reflect badly on the OLC attorneys, say news reports. "Among the questions it is expected to consider is whether the memos reflected the lawyers’ independent judgments of the limits of the federal anti-torture statute or were skewed deliberately to justify what the C.I.A. proposed," the New York Times reports.

If so, the consequences could be considerable. So far, no one wants to admit that all the king's men signed off on what they knew was torture. Each new revelation makes denying that fact more difficult, and avoiding our treaty obligations - "the supreme Law of the Land," per U.S. Constitution Article Six - even more so.

Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan puts it bluntly:

The reason this is vital is that it gets to the core of the question of good faith in authorizing the elaborate torture program that Bush and Cheney constructed as their central weapon in the war against Jihadist terrorism. If we can see that the memos were transparent attempts not to explicate the law in good faith to guide the executive branch - but were emanations of the executive branch to provide phony and flawed legal cover for already-decided illegal acts, then we have a conspiracy to commit war crimes.

Having read the Senate Armed Services Committee report, I have already made up my mind (as has Andrew).

How is giving bad legal advice a crime? The question of culpability for that was addressed last month at Opinio Juris by Melbourne Law School's Kevin Jon Heller. A Nuremberg case involving the deportation of 6,000 French Jews to Auschwitz in March, 1942 has parallels:

Scholars who believe that the individuals who wrote the OLC memos authorizing torture should be criminally prosecuted — as I do — normally cite the Justice Case, decided by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT) in 1947...

There is, however, another NMT case that does provide significant support for prosecuting the authors of the OLC memos: United States v. von Weizsaecker et al., better known as the Ministries Case... The critical defendants are Ernst von Weizsacker himself, who was the State Secretary in the Foreign Office, and Ernst Woermann, who was the Undersecretary of State and head of the Political Department in the Foreign Office...

The tribunal found that the two both knew that the deportations violated international law, and that they had a duty to object when Eichmann wrote to ask if they had any objections. They did not. Both were convicted.

Indeed, in one critical respect, the case against the authors of the OLC memos is even stronger than the case against von Weizsaecker and Woermann. The latter’s criminal participation in the deportations consisted solely of omissions – failing to point out that the deportations violated international law. The former’s criminal participation in the CIA’s torture regime, by contrast, consists of both acts and omissions, because Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury not only failed to point out that the torture regime violated international law (and US law, as well), they crafted legal arguments to conceal the illegality of that regime.

At a minimum, the Times suggests, the report may suggest disbarment. Bush administraion officials are already "scrambling" to minimize the damage.

Git 'er done

2009-05-05T21:34:00.003-04:00

From the WaPo, Sen. Patrick Leahy:

"The apparent predetermined outcome of these legal memos raises the question of where the demand for this outcome and for approving these policies arose. Press accounts indicate that these were not the results of requests from CIA officers on the ground and in the field, but arose through pressure from senior administration officials in Washington...."

Leahy again:

"I still believe my proposal for a Commission of Inquiry remains the best way to move forward with a comprehensive, nonpartisan, independent review of what happened."

I'm not with Leahy on a commission - a guaranteed whitewash. I'm with Conyers on a special prosecutor, i.e. Patrick Fitzgerald. Give him a clearcut mission, cut him a check, cut him loose, and have him get back to us when he's done (like with Scooter). Obama can then "I'm not going to comment on an ongoing investigation" for a couple of years while Fitz does his quiet, thorough and methodical thing.

In the meantime, we get national health care done.

The Glass is Half Full of It

2009-05-01T14:45:00.002-04:00

Following up on Jon Stewart's April 28 Cliff May interview:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 1

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First 100 Days

In the first part of the extended interview, Cliff May had an intriguing interpretation of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) "torture memos" that I had not heard anyone make before. May contends [2:10] that the OLC was bending over backward to define the line between "aggressive techniques" and torture to ensure that the U.S. did not accidentally stray over that line. They are if anything, he says, "anti-torture memos":

Here's what they say. They say there is a line that you may not cross. You can inflict discomfort. Even some pain. But if you cross this line, it's torture. And we're going to tell you what that line is, and you may not cross it under any circumstances.

In May's view, the "glass is half full" question the memos were trying to answer was: Where is the line between coercion and torture, so we do not accidentally cross it?

That is the ostensible purpose of the OLC memos. But as reflected in the Senate Armed Services Committee report, the single-mindedness administration officials displayed in pursuing "enhanced techniques" and the careless disregard they showed for their own JAG and military interrogation experts' opposition to them (for non-CIA detainees) suggests another interpretation.

Established legal methods of interrogation went unexamined. The comparative effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation methods went unexamined. Employing the "enhanced techniques" was as much a forgone conclusion as the invasion of Iraq, and pursued with the same "don't bother me with the facts" doggedness.

Physical coercion was the only tool in the toolbox, so the OLC provided similar "get tough" advice to both the military and the CIA. Days ago, the Los Angeles Times reported on CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson's non-review of the techniques' effectiveness:

[N]either the inspector general's report nor the other audits examined the effectiveness of interrogation techniques in detail or sought to scrutinize the assertions of CIA counter-terrorism officials that so-called enhanced methods were essential to the program's results. One report by a former government official -- not an interrogation expert -- was about 10 pages long and amounted to a glowing review of interrogation efforts.

"Nobody with expertise or experience in interrogation ever took a rigorous, systematic review of the various techniques -- enhanced or otherwise -- to see what resulted in the best information," said a senior U.S. intelligence official involved in overseeing the interrogation program.

As a result, there was never a determination of "what you could do without the use of enhanced techniques," said the official, who like others described internal discussions on condition of anonymity.

[...]

The limited resources spent examining whether the interrogation measures worked were in stark contrast to the energy the CIA devoted to collecting memos declaring the program legal.

Much like the energy Cliff May and Bush apologists have displayed in defense of both the memos and the legality of using the enhanced techniques. More like CYA than CIA.

Their efforts suggest that the "glass is half empty" question the torture memos were really trying to answer was: Just how much pain and suffering may we inflict on a detainee and still plausibly deny that we are committing war crimes?

Occam's Taser

2009-04-30T22:39:00.002-04:00

All else being equal, the most simple-minded solution is the best, a.k.a. "When in doubt, hit something."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Cliff May

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Cliff May's a manic piece of work. What's staggering is how much effort the commonsense hard right is putting into defending torture as the only option for getting information from terror suspects. It's common sense. EVERYBODY KNOWS...

The world is flat and the sun moves around it.

When cars run off the road they explode ... multiple times.

Shoot a guy in the chest and he'll fly backward off his feet (probably through plate glass).

You rough up prisoners to get them to talk: 24, Casino Royale, Rambo II, Marathon Man, etc.

Jon Stewart is usually pretty good, but he let May entangle him in a twenty-minute, false-choice argument over whether to engage in "stress and duress interrogation" or nothing.

You've got a guy. You know he has plots. You know Americans are going to be killed. Do you get tough with him at all, or do you simply say, 'Nothing we can do, send him back to his cell for a nice dinner with an extra blanket,' and let people die?

May then got to argue at length over where the line is drawn between inflicting discomfort and torture, as though where that line is is the crux of the issue, because abusing prisoners is the only intelligence gathering tool in his toolbox.

And like the Bush OLC, May expends all his considerable energy trying to define - as though any reasonable, law-abiding official would - just how much abuse interrogators can inflict without violating the law, because there is no other option. Because EVERYBODY KNOWS abusing prisoners is how you get them to confess.

When threatened, conservatives are good, as May is, at putting opponents on defense by challenging them on their commitment to defending their loved ones: What would you do if it were your family member at risk?

It's a false choice, and should be called out as such.

What makes Conservatives Without Conscience ASSUME rough handling - including torture - is the best way to get good intelligence out of a captive? What made the amateurs in the White House and the Pentagon ignore their own interrogation professionals who told them otherwise in page after page of the Senate Armed Services report?

But ask them that and they'll look at you as if you're an idiot. Why? Because EVERYBODY KNOWS...

Killing their wives and children

2009-04-27T16:30:00.005-04:00

In light of the current debate over using torture in interrogations, I recall a similar debate. Sometime in 1991, I think, NPR ran a debate on the death penalty. I wish I could find it again and credit the players.

There are some crimes, the death penalty advocate contended, that are so heinous that society must express its outrage by imposing the ultimate punishment – death. The death penalty, he claimed, was a deterrent to violent crime. For society not to use it is to bear responsibility for the deaths that follow when murderers go undeterred.

Responding, the opposing attorney asked rhetorically, “Why is death the ultimate punishment? What if I could demonstrate to you that torture is an even better deterrent to violent crime? Would we then say, ‘Then for every murderer you do not torture, you are taking an innocent life?’ What about killing the wives and children of murderers? They used to do things like that in biblical times. What if I could demonstrate to you that killing the wives and children of murderers was an even better deterrent?”

The point, he said, is that we have standards of behavior as a civilized society. We set limits beyond which we as civilized people do not go. Government should be constrained by the same standards of behavior, and ought not be allowed, under color of law, to practice the same behavior it punishes.

Much of the torture debate is an argument over efficacy, over whether or not torture "works." As with the death penalty argument above, efficacy is beside the point. Torture is another standard civilized societies do not violate. Torture is a crime. Torture is against the law. Period.

They walk among us

2009-04-26T14:20:00.000-04:00

Dr. Ernst Janning was a respected lawyer and jurist before he lost his way...

In response to David Broder's execrable WaPo piece describing bringing torturers to justice as scapegoating, and Michael Sheuer's fear-mongering WaPo tantrum that America is "a half-baked Third World country" if it stops perverting its principles in the name of security, here's a little piece originally published in the Asheville Citizen-Times in 2005. My editors found it shocking enough that they included a caveat. They ran it because I sent them two and a half pages of footnotes.

CITIZEN-TIMES.com
Outsourcing of torture will only wind up imperiling troops, undermining war effort

By Thomas Sullivan
April 9, 2005 6:00 am

Gulfstream’s executive jets are popular with U.S. intelligence agencies, and luxurious. More luxurious than destinations their manacled and diapered passengers disappear to, thanks to “extraordinary rendition,” also known as “outsourcing torture.”

For terror suspects en route to exotic prisons in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Uzbekistan, the tranquilizing suppositories are complimentary. (Note: extensive documentation for the information here is available by contacting Sullivan).

The Gulfstream V, tail number N379P (changed to N8068V, then N44982), Gulfstream N85VM (aka N227SV), and the Gulfstream III, number N829MG, have logged flights around the globe since September 11. Also, a white Boeing 737, number N313P. Many flights originated in Smithfield, North Carolina.

Allegedly, they’re used for extra-judicial “rendering,” a limited practice under Presidents Reagan and Clinton that’s become an expansive dragnet under a classified directive from President Bush. Apprehended (or abducted) “ghost detainees” are held in secret and off the record in a network of prisons from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan. Some go to third countries known for abusing prisoners, where, we’re assured with a wink, they won’t be tortured.

The usually Bush-friendly Washington Times has condemned the administration’s “torture doublespeak” and violations of U.S. and international laws signed by presidents and approved by Congress. Nat Hentoff writes, “One of the CIA’s jets transporting suspected terrorists made 10 trips to Uzbekistan,” where according to Craig Murray, its former British ambassador, “ ‘drowning and suffocation, rape was used... also the insertion of limbs in boiling liquid... it’s quite common.’ Mr. Murray also … received photos of one prisoner who was actually boiled to death.” (The deceased, a Mr. Azavof, was apparently not a CIA rendition.)

German prosecutors have confirmed parts of Khaled Masri’s story. Detained in December 2003 at the Macedonian border, the German citizen was flown to Afghanistan, stripped, beaten and interrogated until May, then released without charge. He may have been mistaken for Khalid Masri, an al-Qaida operative. Flight records show that Boeing N313P visited Skopje, Macedonia en route to Kabul at the time.

Canadian engineer, Maher Arar, was detained while changing planes at JFK airport. Delivered to Syria, he endured 10 months of beatings, then was released without charge. Another Canadian, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, named Arar after two years of torture in Syria for possible al-Qaida connections. According to The Guardian (London), El Maati eventually “reeled off the names of everyone he knew in Montreal,” including Arar. Concurrent records show a Gulfstream, number N829MG, logged a flight along the route Arar’s lawsuit describes.

Italian police investigating the kidnapping of an Islamic militant in Milan have sought flight records for Gulfstream N379P. Italian and German prosecutors have not ruled out criminal charges against those involved in violations of human rights and local sovereignty.

Eight men have filed suit in U.S. District Court against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over their detentions in Iraq and Afghanistan. All were subjected to “torture and other cruel and degrading treatment,” which included “repeated beatings, cutting with knives, sexual humiliation and assault, mock executions, death threats, and restraint in contorted and excruciating positions,” according to the complaint filed by the ACLU and Human Rights First.

The Washington Times quotes Human Rights First co-counsel, retired Rear Adm. John D. Huston, former Judge Advocate General of the Navy, “One of the greatest strengths of the U.S. military throughout our history has been strong civilian leadership at the top of the chain of command. Unfortunately, Secretary Rumsfeld has failed to live up to that tradition. In the end, that imperils our troops and undermines the war effort.”

And it betrays those who serve honorably.

The U.S. House overwhelmingly passed an amendment by Democrat Edward Markey of Massachusetts denying Iraq supplemental funds for extraordinary renditions. Markey notes, “The war against terrorism is a war against those who engage in torture. If we fight our enemy using the same inhumane and morally bankrupt techniques that we are trying to stop, we will simply become what we have beheld.”

It may take Abu Ghraib-like photos before leaders who bloviate about not needing “permission slips” stop these abominations in defense of inalienable rights. How many of the prison network’s estimated 10,000 detainees were terrorists before being imprisoned is unclear. What is clear is that people from Hong Kong to London, including the Islamic world, are reading about these “torture flights” and wondering, are Bush and company fighting terrorists, breeding them, or becoming them?

After the document releases this week, we now know for sure.

Michael Sheuer began his over-the-top column WaPo column today with yet another ticking time bomb scenario - this one involving interrogating Osama bin Laden. As I read it late last night, I thought I might find at the end of it that I'd been reading a "gotcha" piece mocking Americans who would breathlessly defend torturing prisoners. I had just finished watching "Judgment at Nuremberg" for the first time since I was a child. (After this last week, it was time.) I was shocked that the parallels between then and now were so vivid. Still, I was unprepared for someone writing in the Washington Post to audition so soon for the remake.

Outrageous

2009-04-24T15:17:00.006-04:00

I just finished reading the Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee treatment, and the more I read, the angrier I got: Page after page of military and law enforcement interrogation experts saying this stuff is illegal, immoral, doesn't work, is counter-productive, will screw up prosecutions, etc.; the SERE techniques are not applicable to interrogations; are used to harden our trainees, not loosen them up; the SERE trainers are not interrogators nor trained nor qualified in it. Yet page after page of pressure to keep pursuing these tactics from the top (political) ranks in the Pentagon and the Executive Branch: Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Yoo, Bradbury, Bybee. President Bush’s February 7, 2002 memorandum that terror suspects were not entitled to prisoner of war status under the Third Geneva Convention opened the door for it, and where do you think he got that idea? The fish rots from the head.

The tactics filtered down through the military from Guantanamo to Afghanistan to Iraq and Abu Ghraib.

One asks why, in the face of overwhelming expert advice to the contrary, top government officials were devoting so much time, money and manpower to deciding just how much pain and suffering they could inflict on prisoners in their custody, and how we could twist U.S. and international law in such a way that they could pretend it was all legal?

What the Villagers don't seem to get is this isn't about partisan politics. It's about our American identity, and goddamn it, we peasants don't like what we're seeing in the mirror. This is not who we are. It violates everything we tell ourselves we stand for, going back to childhood. These morons think it's about circling the wagons and defending Club Beltway. Bullshit.

This is outrageous.

This is the GOP's latest strategery?

2009-04-23T15:40:00.003-04:00

In the context of people being beaten, shackled and water boarded by order of the highest officials in the Bush administration, I'm not sure the GOP really wants to evoke the phrase "banana republic" too loudly.

"A perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm"

2009-04-22T07:28:00.008-04:00

In a story on the CIA's decision to use torture on terror suspects, the New York Times reinforces why a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing:

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

The administration of President George W. Bush in seven words.

Ask the prisoners who died under interrogation, those abused at Abu Ghraib, those "renedered" to Syria, or those held for years in Guantanamo then released without even an apology. Ask those who lost everything to the financial crisis. Ask those who would have, had Bush privatized Social Security. Ask Gov. Don Siegleman, fired U.S. attorneys (and Monica Goodling), and the displaced populations of New Orleans and Baghdad.

Molly Ivins warned us not to let Bush anywhere near Washington. Is there anything he touched that didn't turn to shit?

Coming Soon?

2009-04-21T11:58:00.006-04:00

(UPDATED and updated again, below)

From the Washington Independent today. The Bush "we don't need no stinkin' Geneva Convention" Executive Order is still out there waiting to see the light of day:

The still-unreleased Office of Legal Counsel memo spelled out for the CIA what interrogation practices were considered lawful after President Bush issued an executive order on July 20, 2007 that sought to reconcile the CIA’s interrogation program with the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article 3, which prohibits inflicting “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” upon wartime detainees.” The Supreme Court, in 2006’s Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, ruled that Common Article 3 protections applied to enemy combatants in U.S. custody, a determination that the Bush administration had resisted since creating its post-9/11 detention and interrogation policies. Congress in 2006 responded by passing the Military Commissions Act, which reserved for the president the right to define the applicability of Common Article 3 protections for detainees in the war on terrorism. Bush’s order, known as Executive Order 13440, determined that the the CIA’s interrogation program fit within Common Article 3, provided that it met certain criteria, such as the exclusion of practices like “murder, torture, cruel or inhuman treatment, mutilation or maiming.”

Well, of course. "If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong." It's time to start impeaching the legal degenerates behind this policy.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

UPDATE: Sens. Leahy, Feinstein and Whitehouse are making noise today about future prosecutions/impeachments. Firedoglake and Think Progress are circulating petitions about holding Bush officials accountable for the torture memos and the abominations they justified.

Make some noise yourself. Sign the petitions. But more importantly, call your congressman and senators. Tell them you’re watching. Tell them you’re waiting. Tell them you expect action. Make Obama do it.

UPDATE 2: Add Rep. Jerry Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee to the list above.

"A child would recognize these tactics as cruel and inhumane."

2009-04-17T08:57:00.007-04:00

Georgetown's David Cole comments on the Bush torture memos in the WaPo:

A child would recognize these tactics as cruel and inhumane. The United States itself treated waterboarding as torture when the Japanese used it against our troops in World War II. Yet through pages and pages of dense legal reasoning, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers somehow reach the conclusion that these tactics, even when employed in combination and over a 30-day period, are not torture, and not even cruel, inhuman, or degrading.

The memos themselves ponder whether, if the law defines a tactic as torture if it causes "pain and suffering," then it might be legal if it causes only pain without the suffering or suffering without the pain.

Nothing else needs to be said.

Patriots buy American trucks and Communist assault rifles

2009-04-08T16:24:00.006-04:00

Firedoglake links to a story by the Washington Independent on the recent Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot in Kentucky:

The thousands of attendees who only showed up to shoot could avoid some of the more extreme political elements at the event, even if the extremists were hard to miss. The Barack Obama “Birthers,” who believe that the president cannot prove that he is an American citizen, were present in a table located close to the main range, near the NRA’s sign-up booth. It’s a location that allows them to pass out fliers for RiseUpAmerica.com, with a 10-point explanation of how “Barry Soetoro” could be removed from the presidency, to anyone walking through to the rest of the event. “He’s an illegal alien!” shouts Theresa Padgett, one of their volunteers. “We have an illegal alien running the country.”

“We need your help,” says Carl Swensson, the group organizer who has put together a “citizen jury” to indict the president. “They can’t go across the country and arrest everybody, although they do have pretty good facilities in the FEMA camps,” he says, referring to a conspiracy theory about the government building holding centers for dissidents. In the early afternoon Swensson and Padgett were joined by Orly Taitz, an attorney who has filed multiple lawsuits challenging the president’s citizenship, and they got organizers to read an announcement about their effort over the loudspeakers. By the end of the day they have collected at least 400 signatures, and dozens more from retired military members who wanted to sign on to one of Taitz’s lawsuits. Still, some people who signed onto the Obama citizenship petitions are grim about the chances of surviving this presidency with something as quick and easy as a legal disqualification.

Alan, a registered nurse from Illinois, asks whether last week’s massacre in Binghamton, N.Y. was a set-up. “How many government shooters or special ops teams,” he asks, “how many guys were in there killing people just so they could make gun owners look bad?” He’s not convinced by media reports about the massacre, especially because the shooter killed himself. “These people always kill themselves. They’re either mind-controlled or they’re set up.”

Glenn Beck? Beck? That's German, ain't it?

Eric Boehlert has the skinny on Beck:

ICRC report out

2009-04-07T08:45:00.002-04:00

Here's the ICRC report they wrote about in the New York Times Review of Books a few weeks ago and posted last night, Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody :

http://www.nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf

Lighten up, Granddads

2009-04-03T10:57:00.001-04:00

Nancy Folbre makes the case in the Times for spending now for a better future:

Think of the United States economy as a family farm in need of modernization. Energy prices are going up, but all the tractors are gas guzzlers. Some of our fields have accumulated toxic levels of pesticide, and we need to develop new and better technologies of sustainable production. Our grandchildren want to run the farm, but will need good health and a college education to do it well.

Spending money on increased energy efficiency, research and development, health, and education could increase the value of their assets, helping them repay debt.

In other words, the mommy party wants to borrow money to help the kids, not to hurt them. Keynes, history and environmental concerns lend credence, though not certainty, to this plan. So the granddads should lighten up.

From the "Sink your life savings in a boat" Dept.

2009-03-30T22:00:00.002-04:00

Boston Globe story on the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation:

Just months before the start of last year's stock market collapse, the federal agency that insures the retirement funds of 44 million Americans departed from its conservative investment strategy and decided to put much of its $64 billion insurance fund into stocks.

... Bodie, the BU professor who advised the agency, questioned why a government entity that is supposed to be insuring pension funds should be investing in stocks and real estate at all. Bodie once likened the agency's strategy to a company that insures against hurricane damage and then invests the premiums in beachfront property.

... The Government Accountability Office is preparing a new review of the investment policy, but in the meantime it continues to place the agency on its list of federal programs at "high risk."

David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo comments, "Bush was able to do for the PBGC what he tried and failed to do for Social Security."

Fifteen Guys Named Joe

2009-03-30T09:45:00.004-04:00

With the Senate Democratic caucus just two votes shy of a filibuster-proof, 60-vote majority, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) no longer has the clout he once did. But Senate colleagues have taken a lesson from him. In a Senate now dominated by Democrats, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) thinks Fifteen Guys Named Joe can have similar clout.

Last week Democratic Senators Bayh, Tom Carper (DE) and Blanche Lincoln (AR) took to the pages of the Washington Post to explain the raison d'être for their new Moderate Dems Working Group:

The stakes are too high for Democrats to fear a policy debate. Such debates produce better legislation. On nearly all important votes, a supermajority of 60 senators will be needed to pass legislation. Without Democratic moderates working to find common ground with reasonable Republicans, the president's agenda could well be filibustered into oblivion.

And you will help Republicans do that if you don't get what you want, is that it?

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Losing sight

2009-03-27T19:49:00.004-04:00

from Atlantic:

Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the world go round. A civil servant from Washington invited into their conference rooms, even if just for a meeting, could be forgiven for falling under their sway. Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.

As a former government regulator told me, you had people who wanted nothing more from their job than to be the good cop ... and then you had those who always wanted to be something else. They wanted to be one of the Big Money Boys. And they lost sight of who they served and what it was they were hired to do.

Behold AIG

2009-03-23T11:27:00.000-04:00

Four years ago, I wrote a column describing the modern corporation as a science-fiction monster – an artificial life form neither biological nor technological, but legal, a soulless creation possessing only appetite and instinct. Behold AIG.

Friday, the New York Times reported that the insurance giant is suing the U.S. government for $306 million. After receiving almost $200 billion from U.S. taxpayers to keep it from collapsing, AIG has taken legal action against its benefactors – us – who hold an 80% stake in the company. All this while sparking national outrage by paying bailout-funded bonuses totaling $165 million to some of the same avaricious jerks that brought our economy to its knees.

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Reassurance

2009-03-22T10:47:00.004-04:00

Tom Friedman today cites Congress for more posturing than progress on the economy and the president for joking about his lousy bowling skills on Jay Leno’s show. Friedman writes, “There don’t seem to be any adults at the top.”

But Friedman’s reactions frame a much narrower time span than mine. In the context of the last eight years, I had the opposite reaction, at least to the president on Leno.

Obama was cool, friendly, confident and in control. Putting aside the “special Olympics” flap, when he joked his jokes were funny, self-deprecating and not mean-spirited. Watching was unexpectedly emotional. It was joyful, reassuring.

The last eight years have been, emotionally, somewhat akin to the experience of a four or five year-old losing his parents on a crowded city sidewalk. Surrounded by strangers in a strange, potentially dangerous place, you realize that the world has gone suddenly very wrong. Your parents are no longer beside you. Your head snaps around searching for them. The panic builds as you realize you are lost.

Then you spot them down the street and a sudden wave of joy and relief washes over you. The panic subsides. Everything is going to be all right now.

I’m not suggesting Obama is a parent figure, and things may not be all right, but after eight, long years of George W. Bush, Obama's appearance on Leno evoked that kind of emotional response. Congress may still be filled with childish fools, but there’s an adult in charge again at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Unserious

2009-03-05T19:55:00.001-05:00

Here on the left, we're shrill. We're unhinged. Amateurs. Unpatriotic. For eight years we warned America about war crimes, torture, rendition, phony intelligence, domestic surveillance, insider deals, greed, corruption and the gutting of the Constitution. We can't be taken seriously. Not like the professionals.

Not like these guys:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

[h/t Scrutiny Hooligans]

Less Than Stimulating

2009-02-14T17:07:00.000-05:00

When President Obama warned Republicans last week not to "come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis," one idea he may have had in mind is a second American Jobs Creation Act. The GOP proposal was rejected in the Senate last week, but lives on in conservative rhetoric.

The first AJCA, enacted under President Bush in 2004, allowed corporations with offshore profits to repatriate them at a steep tax discount – virtually a tax holiday. Like many conservative tax giveaways, the AJCA was supposed to create jobs and boost the economy. There were doubters.

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Undercover Blue

Extending The Obama Brand In 2010

The Great American "I Told You So"

Reality Bites

Grounded in reality

It was never about health care

Healthcaremageddon

They dare not call it journalism

Bought and Paid For

America's War On Terror: A Cage Of Our Own Making

Cliff May lands a Triple Coulter

The Right is Left, right?

It’s Not Real Reform If It Doesn’t End The Need For This

Nevadans Not Wild About Harry

Obama White House Seeks Delay On Declassification

Corporate Ventriloquism

Which Public Is That?

Lions and tigers and "progressives"

Lucky or Good?

The End Is Always Nearer on the Right Side of the Street

Other than that, she was probably a swell gal

The Public Necessity

Not Exactly the Mercury Theatre on the Air

We’re Number Last!

Debunking the Hissy Fit Du Jour

Four Point Oh!

Projection TV: Real Americans Watch Fox News

What Civilized Country Operates Like This?

Better Dead Than Insured

Kimberly "Kimi" Young, 22, died Tuesday night Sept. 22, 2009 at University Hospital.

If You Like Medical Bills, You’ll Love These

What Does Happen Here

The Bile Boils Over

Hide The Pseudoephed - Wall Street's Back At It

Push them harder

Like Tax Cuts That Way

Do Progressives Have What It Takes To Win?

Back to Boise

Something I ran across

Health Care Debate Loses Coherence

The Uninsured Line Up For Care In Rural Virginia

Waiting in line for health care

Good for whatever ails ya

Bailout Bank Banks Bucks

So that's how it works!

A very, very fluid situation

Essence of Palin

“Thar's no Jack S. like our Jack S!”

Flailin' Palin

Those wild and crazy Stompers

Inoculated at Birth

Bringing Wellness to an Insurance Fight

Not the Health Care Co-ops They Had in Mind

Setting a new tone

Time to line up, sign up and enlist

Health Care Reform Is About Choices

Reaping Privatization's Rewards?

We need a symbol

Weighing in on health care

Not meaning what they say it means

"The concrete is being mixed..."

Kennedy lays down a marker

Media on the ropes

Sirota at America's Future Now! conference

The Proof is in the Lying

Empathy for the Common Man

Pentagon Rejoins the Fight Over Guantanamo

Haven't we seen this movie?

Torture Deniers

No more choo-choo?

Now Concentrated!

The count grows

Now it is about Geneva

Kagro X nails it

BushCo's White Whale

A Real Game Changer

Ali Soufan "Snopes" Cheney

More Kafka than Kafka

Waterboarding - How can we justify it? Volume!

Words by Luntz

Kimberly "Kimi" Young, 22, died
Tuesday night Sept. 22, 2009 at
University Hospital.