The Great American "I Told You So"

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

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

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.

It was never about health care

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:

Healthcaremageddon

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.

They dare not call it journalism

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

"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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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?

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"

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



Both candidates won handily.

Lucky or Good?

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

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

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

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.)