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“"If you think it's a socialist plot, then please drop out of the federal employees health program." -- Sen.Richard Durbin (D-IL), to Republican lawmakers at the health care reform summit. 2.25.10 "Let me just make this point, John, because we're not campaigning anymore. The election's over." -- President Obama, sparring with Sen. John McCain at the White House health care summit. 2.25.10 "The health insurance industry is the shark that swims just below the water and you don’t see that shark until you feel the teeth of that shark. … This is the way they operate. Nobody has any oversight over them. They’re not under any anti-trust rules. They can do what they want. … This is a rapacious industry that does what it wants." -- Senator Rockefeller (video) 2.25.10 “Dick Cheney recently suffered a fifth heart attack. Now he has one for each of his deferments.” -- Daily Dose of Durst 2.25.10 "Yes, lobbyists do a very effective and useful job on this hill. Somebody needs to stand up for the lobby. It is a matter of providing a lot of valuable information." -- Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), defending the beleaguered band of lobbyists operating from their K Street redoubt. 2-26-10 "The next time Congressman Franks wants to make assumptions about what policies are 'best' for the African American community, he should keep them to himself." -- DCCC spokesperson Stephanie Young on Rep. Trent Franks, (R-AZ) statement that "far more of the African American community" is being hurt by abortion than slavery. “The tens of millions of men and women who cannot afford their health insurance cannot wait another generation for us to act.” -- President Obama 2/26/10 “But most the time, this is like watching Lebron James play basketball with a bunch of kids who got cut from the 7th grade basketball team. He's treating them really nice, letting his teammates take shots and allowing the other team to try to score. Nice try on that layup, Timmy, you almost got it on. But after a couple minutes I want him to just grab the ball and dunk on these clowns already. -- Jonathan Chait after watching President Obama chair the health care summit “Emergency rooms should be able to turn patients away to cut costs.” -- Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.) 2.26.10 “Is the government now creating hobos?” -- Congressman Dean Heller (R-NV) on the government extending unemployment benefits 2.22.10 “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.” -- Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud, the London PR executive. 2.28.10 “I don’t like him. He is not a very pleasant person. He is nasty, mean; the skin of an onion would look deep compared to his. He has a short fuse, he is almost peculiarly unstable.” -- Former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo on John McCain. 2.28.10 “ ... continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work ..... and the same thing with the COBRA extension and the other extensions here" -- Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) 3.01.10 And now I am back there wanting to build some trust back in our media. I think the mainstream media is quite broken and I think there needs to be the fairness, the balance in there — that’s why I joined Fox. -- Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) on why she joined Fox news, with its distortions of facts and outright parroting of GOP talking points "Tough s--t." -- Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) when confronted by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who asked Bunning to drop his objections to extension of unemployment benefits. 02/26/10
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IN THIS ISSUE
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1. Jim Bunning's fiscal hardball jams GOP Fresh off last week’s high-profile White House summit, Republicans were eager to continue the health care debate they think they’ve been winning for months. Then came Jim Bunning. The Kentucky GOP senator’s unilateral decision to block an extension of federally funded unemployment benefits and other popular provisions has united Democrats and sent Republicans hiding from the political backlash. Making matters worse for the GOP: Bunning opposed the $10 billion aid package on the grounds that it isn’t paid for — effectively forcing his Republican colleagues to join him or risk undercutting their own efforts to make Democrats’ deficit spending a centerpiece of their 2010 campaign. 3.02.10 http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/33735.html 2. Live blogging the White House healthcare summit
3. From the DAILY GRILL
4. George Lakoff Calls for Volunteers to Organize for the California Democracy Act George Lakoff has been working to put together a statewide organization for the California Democracy Act, the ballot initiative that would eliminate the 2/3 rules and allow a majority of the legislature to make decisions about raising revenue and passing a budget. 2.16.10 More at https://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/6110/ 5. Ann Telnaes: What the Republicans mean when they say congress should start over on health-care reform (animation) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/cartoonsandvideos/telnaes/telnaes02262010.html 6. From MEDIA MATTERS
7. New SPLC Report: “Patriot” Groups, Militias Surge in Number in Past Year The number of extremist groups in the United States exploded in 2009 as militias and other groups steeped in wild, antigovernment conspiracy theories exploited populist anger across the country and infiltrated the mainstream, according to a report issued today by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Antigovernment "Patriot" groups - militias and other extremist organizations that see the federal government as their enemy - came roaring back to life over the past year after more than a decade out of the limelight. The SPLC documented a 244 percent increase in the number of active Patriot groups in 2009. Their numbers grew from 149 groups in 2008 to 512 groups in 2009, an astonishing addition of 363 new groups in a single year. Militias - the paramilitary arm of the Patriot movement - were a major part of the increase, growing from 42 militias in 2008 to 127 in 2009. 3/02/10 http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-report-number-of-patriot-groups-militias-surges-by-244-in-past-year 8. Late Night Jokes for Dems
9. 2008 Redux: McCain v. Obama At Health Care Summit (video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STRG6tOWgnQ 10. Jon Stewart (videos)
11. Obama Takes Dr. Barrasso To Medical School (video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mIHOq6N444 12. Dems Catch a Break on Health Care Today's resignation of Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA) essentially gave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi an extra vote to help her push health care reform bill through the House. Now, with Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) facing a primary challenge from Lt. Gov. Bill Halter (D), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is virtually guaranteed to have her vote -- assuming she still wants to be a senator -- as he tries to push the health care bill through the reconciliation process in the Senate. It's not a bad start for Democrats. 3.01.10 http://politicalwire.com/archives/2010/03/01/reid_catches_a_break_on_health_care.html 13. Salon’s White House summit report card: A slide show http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/02/25/healthcare_summit_slide_show/slideshow.html 14. It's time to end the filibuster For those fed up with an arbitrary tradition that allows a minority of Senators to prevent popular, much-needed legislation from even coming to a vote, go to Senator Durbin’s website: http://fedupwiththefilibuster.com/?f426e540 15. Fiore Cartoon: Capitalism Clapper (animation) http://www.markfiore.com/clapper_0 16. Weather: Hottest January Ever Say Climate Experts “Last November was the hottest November we’ve ever seen. November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen.” Veteran climatologist Professor Nicholls was speaking at an online climate change briefing, added: “It’s not warming the same everywhere but it is really quite challenging to find places that haven’t warmed in the past 50 years.” His extraordinary claims came after the World Meteorological Organisation revealed 2000 to 2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850. Donna Bowater 2.26.10 http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/160556
17. Lou Dobbs thinks Jim Inhofe deserves a round of applause (video) Lou Dobbs says Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) deserves a round of applause as a man "utterly vindicated" for his stand against climate change science. 2.24.10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56TIptQLhtY 18. What We Know About Global Warming (video) http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2010/03/what_we_know.html 19. Biden Rules Vice President Joe Biden could play a bigger role when it comes to the health-care process going forward than most people previously understood. Former Senate parliamentarian of 37 years Robert Dove said on MSNBC's The Daily Rundown that the vice president, who also functions as the president of the Senate, can override the parliamentarian when it comes to what qualifies under reconciliation. "The parliamentarian only can advise," Dove said. "It is the vice president who rules." 3.01.10 http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/03/01/2215134.aspx?ocid=twitter 20. In Case You Missed It (McCain Edition) In case you missed it, Sen. McCain went on Meet the Press on Sunday and doubled down on his laughable claim that he was lied to about TARP. He says he thought it was to bail out homeowners rather than Wall Street. This is actually the second time McCain has peddled this howler. This time McCain tries to muddle it a bit more. But he's still saying the same basic thing which is that he was told the money was going to be used to shore up the housing market and prevent people's mortgages from being underwater, which is complete nonsense. It was always a 100% clear this money was going to prop up the big financial institutions to prevent a cascading collapse of the financial system. He can't change his story now just because he didn't know he'd be running against J.D. Hayworth. Josh Marshall 3.01.10 http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/03/in_case_you_missed_it_mccain_edition.php 21. ACORN Cleared Brooklyn prosecutors on Monday cleared ACORN of criminal wrongdoing after a four-month probe that began when undercover conservative activists filmed workers giving what appeared to be illegal advice on how to hide money. "They (James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles) edited the tape to meet their agenda," said the source. 3.01.10 Read more HERE. 22. Republicans Set Filibuster Record The filibuster — tool of obstruction in the U.S. Senate — is alternately blamed and praised for wilting President Barack Obama's ambitious agenda. Some even say it's made the nation ungovernable. In the 110th Congress of 2007-2008, with Republicans in the minority, there were a record 112 cloture votes. In the current session of Congress — the 111th — for all of 2009 and the first two months of 2010 the number already exceeds 40. The most the filibuster has been used when Democrats were in the minority was 58 times in the 106th Congress of 1999-2000. 3.01.10 http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gRk0FZDifKVczo6ssCt82rw2lTYQD9E5NHCO1 23. Borowitz Report: Obama to GOP: I Will Quit Smoking if You Will Quit Being Dicks
24. Gregg: For Reconciliation Before He Was Against It (video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjoJgzf6Coc 25. “Gosh-Darn Pols!” by Madeleine Begun Kane
http://www.madkane.com/madness/2010/03/01/anti-cursing-california/ 26. Highway Hypocrites At least 118 Republican senators and representatives (Highway Hypocrites) have spent the past year railing against the Recovery Act, while simultaneously requesting funds to create jobs in their districts and taking credit for projects at ribbon-cutting ceremonies. To find out if your representatives are Highway Hypocrites go to http://my.democrats.org/page/content/highwayhypocrisy 27. Funny or Die's Presidential Reunion (video) http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/f5a57185bd/funny-or-die-s-presidential-reunion |
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1. Peter Beinart: Ram It Through! Democrats are considering using the reconciliation process to pass health-care reform in the Senate, a maneuver that would require only 51 votes. Republicans are outraged. Using reconciliation to pass health care, they insist, would be undemocratic. It’s an odd argument, when you think about it. Senate Republicans are employing the filibuster more than any Congress in history. (In the 19th Century, the Senate witnessed about one filibuster per decade. By the 1960s, filibusters still greeted less than ten percent of legislation. In this Congress, by contrast, Republicans have filibustered 80 percent of major bills). This near-permanent filibuster has created a de facto 60 vote requirement for passing most legislation. And because the GOP filibusterers disproportionately represent small states, that 60-vote requirement actually translates to about 2/3 of the American people. That, according to Republican logic, is democratic. Circumventing a filibuster and thus requiring 51 votes, by contrast, tramples the will of the people. 2.25.10 http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-25/ram-it-through/
2. Bill McKibben: The Attack on Climate-Change Science: Why It's the O.J. Moment of the Twenty-First Century The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It's worth trying to understand how they've done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that's begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito? The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson's defense had a problem: it was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown's blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson's guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986. If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him "a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America's worst nightmare, and the personification of evil." His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That's what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be. Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we've ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won't be overwhelming and it's unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you'll get something wrong. 2.25.10 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100315/mckibben 3. David Corn: Health Care Summit Shows Time for Talking Is Done Now that all that rigamarole is over, let's move on to the inevitable. I'm referring, of course, to the seven-hour shindig at Blair House on Thursday. The White House health care summit yielded few surprises. There was no bipartisan breakthrough -- or any sign of progress on that front. The meeting marked not the start of a process, but the end. It buried any notion that President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans can reach an accommodation on comprehensive health care reform. But that's not to say the gabfest had no value. It clarified the situation. Though much of the conversation consisted of participants pushing pre-existing talking points, the debate made the obvious really obvious: Obama and his Republican foes are miles apart in ideological and policy terms. As the hours went by, Obama engaged in wonky exchanges with the Rs -- sometime calling them out on key factual disputes, such as whether the Congressional Budget Office said his overhaul would lead to higher premiums. (Obama got the better of that argument.) But all this back and forth kept illustrating the basic divide. The Republicans do not believe it is Washington's mission to take major action to challenge the insurance industry and extend coverage to most of the nation's citizens without health insurance. Instead, they want to move, as they repeatedly said, "step by step." But the Democrats believe that the only way to cure the health system of its ills is to adopt comprehensive change. Obama politely derided the GOP approach as one of "baby steps." He and his fellow Dems again and again explained what they see as the fundamental physics: to prohibit insurance firms from screwing people with pre-existing conditions, you have to place these consumers in large pools of the insured; to make the pools cost-effective, you have to extend coverage to people without insurance (including the young and the healthy); and to ensure that this is fair, you have to provide subsidies so that the low-income people brought into the pools can afford the plans. The Rs don't think the Ds and government can handle such a big and expensive job. The Ds don't think the Rs and industry can remedy the problems with small measures. That's a mega-divide. It cannot be subjected to a split-the-difference compromise. It cannot be easily bridged. And everything else -- phony talk about a government takeover of health care, GOP complaints about the number of pages in the Democratic bill, calls for starting over, tussling over medical malpractice reform, debating the budget numbers, decrying carve-outs and special deals -- is just window dressing. There's no other path for the Democrats: either they dump health care reform or do it themselves. This summit demonstrated the time for talking is done. 02/26/10 http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/02/26/with-health-care-summit-over-time-for-talking-is-done/
4. David Sirota: Glenn Beck’s Terrorist Rant Let’s pause and give thanks to Glenn Beck. No, seriously—because that’s what he’s due. We owe this talk-show-host-turned-political-leader gratitude for using his televised keynote address to the Conservative Political Action Conference to so frankly outline what the conservative movement has become—and why it repulses so many Americans. Coming days after an anti-tax terrorist kamikaze attacked a government facility in Texas, and following Republicans like Sen. Scott Brown and Rep. Steve King expressing sympathy for that terrorist’s grievances, Beck’s homily stands as the moment’s most forthright manifesto on the right’s authoritarian objectives. Really, the threat isn’t even veiled. To understand it, just ponder comparisons. For instance, ask yourself: What is the difference between Beck’s decree and that of Rwanda’s genocidal leaders in the 1990s? The former broadcast a call to “eradicate” the “cancer”-like progressives; the latter a call to “exterminate the cockroaches.” Likewise, what separates Beck’s screed from a bin Laden fatwa? They may employ different ideologies and languages, but both endorse the wholesale elimination of large groups of Americans. And so we finally see tyranny’s hideous image within our midst: It’s not a tightly cropped mustache in a beige uniform; it’s a clean-shaven baby face in a suit—a rodeo clown with a chalkboard who unfortunately speaks for modern-day conservatism. We should thank him, at least, for admitting what his movement truly wants. 2.25.10 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/glenn_becks_terrorist_rant_20100225/ 5. PAUL KRUGMAN: Afflicting the Afflicted If we’re lucky, Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans responding with slander and misdirection. Nobody really expected anything different. But what was nonetheless revealing about the meeting was the fact that Republicans — who had weeks to prepare for this particular event, and have been campaigning against reform for a year — didn’t bother making a case that could withstand even minimal fact-checking. So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right. But Democrats can have the last laugh. All they have to do — and they have the power to do it — is finish the job, and enact health reform. 2/26/10 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/opinion/26krugman.html
6. Steven Pearlstein: At summit, Republicans prove they aren't putting America's health first I'm not sure what else was accomplished at Thursday's Blair House summit, but surely one result is that we learned what Republican "leaders" really think about health care and health insurance. The most important thing Republicans think is that if there are Americans who can't afford the insurance policies that private insurers are willing to offer, then that's their problem -- there's nothing the government or the rest of us should do about it. "We just can't afford this," said Eric Cantor, the fresh-faced House minority whip from Virginia, while John Boehner, the House Republican leader, called it "a new entitlement program that will bankrupt our country." What they were referring to, of course, was the $125 billion a year that Obama and his Democratic allies propose to spend in subsidies so tens of millions of low-income households can afford to buy health insurance and handle the co-payments. But if paying for those subsidies means raising taxes on high-income households with lots of investment profits, or capping a tax break for people with extravagant health insurance, or charging a modest fee on medical device makers that refuse to moderate future price increases, then Republicans are agin' it. That was their clear message Thursday. It was their message during all those years when their party controlled Congress and the White House and they did nothing and said nothing about the plight of the uninsured. And it is clear that they would continue to do nothing if, by some miracle, Democrats were to drop their plan or embark on a more modest approach. For Republicans, the uninsured remain invisible Americans, out of sight and out of mind. 2.26.10 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/AR2010022505948.html 7. Joe Conason: Shut down Jim Bunning's "charitable" fraud Until today, it hardly seemed possible that Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., could be more widely despised than he was, but he has succeeded in diminishing his already low stature. Loutish, eccentric and mean, he says that his filibuster against extended unemployment insurance benefits is spurred by his concern over the federal deficit. The jobless and their children may depend on that assistance for rent and food, but Bunning insists that the Obama adminisration use stimulus funding to pay for unemployment extensions. He doesn’t give a damn that on Sunday benefits will run out for hundreds of thousands of struggling families. While even Bunning’s fellow Republicans dislike him intensely, none of them cares enough about the unemployed to tell him to sit down and shut up. That has been left to the Democrats, who should make Bunning the poster boy of the right-wing filibuster — a symbol of obstructed democracy and discarded humanity. Here’s a suggestion for anyone who runs into the former baseball pitcher on the Senate floor. Tell him that if he is truly worried about the deficit, he should stop using the Jim Bunning Foundation to shelter the money he makes from baseball memorabilia. Ever since he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Bunning has operated this phony “charitable” operation as a front for his business selling autographed balls. As this outfit’s sole employee, working one hour a week, he has paid himself hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past 10 years — considerably more than the amount donated to any actual charity. Indeed, the only charities to which the foundation gives any significant sums are Catholic churches attended by Bunning and his family (so he gets other people to make his religious donations as well). Perhaps those churches ought to reconsider accepting his generosity in light of his nasty conduct toward the unemployed, whose plight is a matter of grave concern to the Catholic hierarchy. 2.26.10 http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2010/02/26/bunning/index.html 8. FRANK RICH: The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen. What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base. Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin’s memorable final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention earlier this month: “I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help.” It’s enough to make you wonder who is palling around with terrorists now. 2.27.10 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28rich.html
9. REED ABELSON: The Cost of Doing Nothing on Health Care “Hands off my health care,” goes one strain of populist sentiment. But what if? Suppose Congress and President Obama fail to overhaul the system now, or just tinker around the edges, or start over, as the Republicans propose — despite the Democrats’ latest and possibly last big push that began last week at a marathon televised forum in Washington. Then “my health care” stays the same, right? Far from it, health policy analysts and economists of nearly every ideological persuasion agree. The unrelenting rise in medical costs is likely to wreak havoc within the system and beyond it, and pretty much everyone will be affected, directly or indirectly. “It will break all of our banks if we do nothing,” said Peter V. Lee, who oversees national health policy for the Pacific Business Group on Health, which represents employers that offer coverage to workers. “It is a course that is literally bankrupting the federal government and businesses and individuals across the country.” 2.26.10 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/weekinreview/28abelson.html 10. Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery: Why Do Some Conservatives Play Footsie With Treason? Oath Keepers members are cops, sheriffs, and military men and women determined to resist the tyrannical orders they believe are imminent from the Obama administration. The fantasies they spin—a "globalist" leadership intent on declaring martial law, putting God-fearing Americans in detention camps, and asking UN blue helmets to keep order while it imposes health care reform and who knows what else—replicate almost exactly the fears far-right cranks have peddled for generations. Replace "socialism" with "communism" and you are pretty much back to 1964 (or 1934 or 1884, for that matter). Over the past year, we have seen cynical politicians and talk-show demagogues increasingly willing to traffic in fear. It's no longer just handfuls of militia types trading overheated conspiracy theories; it's America's most popular cable news network giving gobs of airtime to people who all but advocate armed insurrection. It's the man who is now our newest senator chortling, on live TV, that maybe Barack Obama was born out of wedlock—don't you wish guys still had to face an affaire d'honneur for comments like that?—a scurrilous point we take note of only because it indicates that Scott Brown gets his talking points from extreme-right sites like WorldNetDaily (WND). If this were all just so much blowhardery—designed merely to drive ratings and bait liberal bloggers—it would be slightly tawdry but perfectly ordinary political theater for the groundlings. But what may have started as tactical rhetoric has become a philosophy of governing. As MoJo blogger Kevin Drum has put it, the congressional minority's guiding principle is now "What part of NO! don't you understand?" This is the true danger of condoning rhetoric like Oath Keepers': It's not just that it might push some from the paranoid fringe to the terrorist fringe. It's that the political debate becomes corroded to the point where we as a nation no longer have enough common ground to agree to disagree. When one side's goal is to stonewall and destroy rather than discuss and engage, we get paralysis—it takes two to tango, but only one to stonewall. (And stonewall-and-destroy is by no means a strategy unique to Republicans—yes, kill-the-health-care-bill lefties, that means you.) There are many ways to attack democracy, and one of them is to slowly, cynically undermine the founders' mandate: to work together toward a more perfect union. 3.01.10 http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/editors-note 11. PAUL KRUGMAN: Financial Reform Endgame So here’s the situation. We’ve been through the second-worst financial crisis in the history of the world, and we’ve barely begun to recover: 29 million Americans either can’t find jobs or can’t find full-time work. Yet all momentum for serious banking reform has been lost. The question now seems to be whether we’ll get a watered-down bill or no bill at all. And I hate to say this, but the second option is starting to look preferable. The problem, not too surprisingly, lies in the Senate, and mainly, though not entirely, with Republicans. The House has already passed a fairly strong reform bill, more or less along the lines proposed by the Obama administration, and the Senate could probably do the same if it operated on the principle of majority rule. But it doesn’t — and when you combine near-universal Republican opposition to serious reform with the wavering of some Democrats, prospects look bleak. How did we get to this point? And should reform advocates accept the compromises that might yet produce some kind of bill? Many opponents of the House version of banking reform present their position as one of principle. House Republicans, offering their alternative proposal, claimed that they would end banking excesses by introducing “market discipline” — basically, by promising not to rescue banks in the future. But that’s a fantasy. For one thing, governments always, when push comes to shove, end up rescuing key financial institutions in a crisis. And more broadly, relying on the magic of the market to keep banks safe has always been a path to disaster. Even Adam Smith knew that: he may have been the father of free-market economics, but he argued that bank regulation was as necessary as fire codes on urban buildings, and called for a ban on high-risk, high-interest lending, the 18th-century version of subprime. And the lesson has been confirmed again and again, from the Panic of 1873 to Iceland today. 2.28.10 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/opinion/01krugman.html 12. Bunning and the tyranny of the petty Republican Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky taught Washington an important lesson when he single-handedly blocked his colleagues from considering a temporary extension of federal unemployment benefits, highway projects and other expiring programs. Bunning argued that the $10 billion in new spending should be offset by cuts in other programs. But rather than prompting a debate over whether deficit spending is the best way to stimulate the economy, he inadvertently made a persuasive case that Senate rules no longer work in today's hyper-political environment. Far from preventing the "tyranny of the majority" that Alexis de Tocqueville decried, the rules are giving rise to petty tyrants. It's bad enough that the Senate enables a mere 41 senators to thwart the will of the majority through filibusters, which we've criticized numerous times, regardless of which party was in control. That rule allows a minority to block not just a vote on a bill but even the process of debating and amending it. What's worse is that the Senate often allows individual senators to block consideration of bills that leaders of both parties have agreed to debate. We welcome efforts to trim the deficit, which is a legitimate concern. But senators also should be willing to debate their ideas and accept the consequences when they don't have the votes to prevail, especially when they don't have enough even to sustain a filibuster. Anything else is just obstructionism. The Senate has witnessed too many episodes in recent years of individual members abusing the leverage provided by the body's arcane procedural rules. Those rules, which assume a degree of comity and cooperation that no longer exists in Washington, have to change. We don't need lawmakers to work hastily, but we do need the system to function rationally. 3.02.10 More at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-bunning3-2010mar03,0,2044437.story
13. Jessica Arons: The World According to Stupak President Obama's healthcare proposal adopts language on abortion from the Senate health reform bill that requires insurers to segregate public and private premiums and use only private money to pay for abortion services. But Representative Bart Stupak will have none of it, claiming that the legislation still allows public funding of the abortion. In fact, the legislation very clearly prohibits direct government funding of abortion. But Stupak also objects to "indirect" funding, refusing to vote for a reform bill unless it prohibits taxpayer money from "subsidizing" health plans that cover abortion care. The amendment Stupak sponsored, which is currently part of the House bill, does bar so-called indirect funding. It forbids insurers from selling plans that include abortion coverage to any people who receive help from the government in paying their premiums--a restriction that would apply to approximately 85 percent of customers in the new health insurance exchange and thus virtually eliminate abortion coverage from the exchange. An analysis of Stupak's opposition to indirect funding, however, reveals implications that go well beyond the fight over abortion. Money in Stupak's world is "fungible," or interchangeable, meaning whatever money the government gives you frees up private money for you to use on something else. So every dollar the government pays toward your health insurance premium allows you and the insurer to spend private funds in that plan that you might not otherwise have had on abortion. To Stupak, that subsidization is the equivalent of a direct payment. But by that token, every government benefit a woman receives, whether monetary or in-kind, whether for healthcare or for something else, could be seen as subsidizing an abortion if she has one. 3.02.10 More at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100315/arons |
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