"An internal staff report by the United States Embassy and the military command in Baghdad provides a sobering province-by-province snapshot of Iraq's political, economic and security situation, rating the overall stability of 6 of the 18 provinces 'serious' and one 'critical.'" Link.
As only happens in Israel, with an election system that propogates a proliferation of small parties, and increasingly, no majorities, the post-election bartering for formation of a new government is in full force. It's clear, by now, that there will be a Kadima-Labor led coalition, with other small parties joining in. The most interesting debate this past week, regarding this new center-left alliance between Ehud Olmert, the head of Kadima (and of the Israeli government) and Amir Peretz, the head of the Labor Party, was what ministry Peretz--a former head of the Histadrut trade union federation--would receive. It looks now, as if Peretz will become Defense Minister, not Finance Minister, which was his first choice. Soon, American audiences and especially the powers-that-be in Washington will learn the ways of the man from Sderot, an unreconstructed social democrat who has never wavered on his notion that peace in Israel and for Israel is completely intertwined with a more economically populist Israel, where there is an enhanced mininum wage, strong trade unions and defence for workers.
A couple weeks ago I had the temerity to suggest that the Senate Democrats might not want to ally with so-called moderate Senate Republicans to fashion an immigration compromise. I was not surprised when this tiny voice went unheeded and the deal was cut. Now none of the dealmakers should be surprised that the Senate Republicans as a group could not embrace the compromise. Nor, if the deal had gone through, would the House of Delay have accepted it.
I tend to think Greg Anrig's right and Amy Sullivan's wrong in that Democratic messaging and tactics on the question of Iraq remain pretty confused and ineffective. Greg's take on the immigration question, however, strikes me as an example of exactly the sort of unduly critical analysis that Amy's trying to combat. Nothing Greg says is untrue, but his take doesn't seem to appreciate that political competition is fundamentally zero-sum. The immigration debate is playing out in a way that doesn't make either party look really hot, but I think it's pretty clear that the GOP is feeling more pain. And in a zero-sum game, that's all that really matters -- only one party can win the election, and on this issue is working out in a way that favors Democrats even though it creates awkward questions for both political coalitions. That's pretty savvy leadership even if things haven't been going perfectly.
Nir Rosen, a fellow at the New America Foundation who is also affiliated with the American Strategy Program which I direct, has just published a Robert Kaplan-esque treatment in the Boston Review of what he sees unfolding in Iraq.
It's a powerfully written passage that opens with a vignette of Americans killing an Iraqi man inside his home, his family outside, perhaps as part of a scheme engineered by a Shia "translator":
Without strongly disagreeing with Amy Sullivan’s widely praised piece about how there has been some degree of tactical effectiveness on the part of Democrats in recent months, I’m still disappointed at their relative inability to create a clear impression of what they stand for. Watching Reid mumble on C-SPAN last night about cloture this and cloture that as he kept getting distracted by his continually beeping Blackberry seemed kind of emblematic, unfair though that might be. The message never consistently got through that Democrats are for immigration reform because we want to restore some degree of order, lawfulness, and compassion in communities throughout the country where illegal immigration has led to disorder, illegality, and hostility. While the issue creates deeper divisions on the Right, progressives didn’t effectively explain what we wanted to accomplish – the wonky details got in the way, as usual with us. Everything may end up for the best with respect to that legislation falling by the wayside and the election outcomes, but it continues to be more by default.
President Bush said he would begin to veto spending bills if Congress did not cut the federal budget. The President has said that curtailing spending is a priority for his Administration and a vital step in cutting the federal deficit in half by 2009 as he plans. The President has never employed the power of the veto during his five years in office.
A bipartisan compromise on immigration failed yesterday when a Senate vote garnered just 38 votes out of 60 needed to pass the bill. Some Republicans objected that the bill would grant amnesty to some 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the US. Supporters of the bill may try to schedule another vote when the Senate returns from its two-week spring recess, but some contend that a new compromise will have to be sought.
Apologies to the TPMCafe community for the unplanned hiatus between this and my previous post. Back on Monday, I promised a discussion of Major League Baseball’s investigation into steroid abuse, to be led by former Senate majority leader George Mitchell. Here it is, better late than never (I hope).
According to this article, the Bush administration thinks they probably can't get a UN consensus for stern measures against Iran, but believe a narrower coalition could still get things done because "more than 50% of Iran's manufactured goods come from Europe." The article quotes an official as saying "potentially, in a couple of years there could be revolutionary conditions on the Iranian street" if we and the Europeans bring down the economic hammer of sanctions.
Now what I wonder is whether there's any historical precedent for something like that working -- externally induced economic collapse leading to revolution. This sounds to me like what we've been trying in Cuba for the past 40-odd years and that has to count as one of the least-successful regime change operations of all time. You could try and cite South Africa as a successful case, but that was really a very different situation; sanctions didn't induce bottom-up opposition to the regime (that already existed), they helped break South African elites' willingness to clamp down on the opposition. Are there other relevant examples? My memory is that revolutions are actually more common in times of prosperity (rising expectations) than under conditions of poverty (people are too busy trying to survive and are more under the thumb of the people who control the ration cards).
President Bush said he would begin to veto spending bills if Congress did not cut the federal budget. The President has said that curtailing spending is a priority for his Administration and a vital step in cutting the federal deficit in half by 2009 as he plans. The President has never employed the power of the veto during his five years in office.
A bipartisan compromise on immigration failed yesterday when a Senate vote garnered just 38 votes out of 60 needed to pass the bill. Some Republicans objected that the bill would grant amnesty to some 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the US. Supporters of the bill may try to schedule another vote when the Senate returns from its two-week spring recess, but some contend that a new compromise will have to be sought.
The exposure of perv number four raises the question of what the heck an "Internet Protocol version 6 transition program" is. My sources indicate that the basic idea behind IPv6 is that there ought to be way, way, way more IP addresses. That way every random device you like -- an iPod, a microwave, a TV, a clock, etc. -- can have its own IP address and we can all be super-networked all the time. This seems like a decent idea, but I worry it will leave us increasingly vulnerable to cylon attack. Sadly, to the best of my knowledge nobody in the Pentagon is working on countermeasures for the inevitable robot rebellion.
Today at TPMCafe, America Abroad’s Juliette Kayyem responds to Josh and discusses whether or not Bush’s “selective declassification” was actually legal. And what do Kate Winslet and George Bush have in common? Read Larry Johnson’s post to find out. Only at TPMCafe could there be a rumble over the pros and cons of employer-based health care. Max Sawicky, Nathan Newman, Ezra Klein, and Matt Ygelsias all join in.
Regarding the Sawicky/Newman Coffee House throwdown over employer mandates, I sort of doubt that there's a right answer to the question of what progressives should be doing in this regard. Or, rather, the right answer is that it's good for different people to be doing different things. Achieving comprehensive health care reform is going to be very difficult. It's not political feasible absent a rather large shift in the structure of American politics. Getting conservative politicians to buy in to the broad concept that everyone should have health care and that government action has something to do with this goal is part of what needs to happen. For that to happen, the terms of the buy-in are necessarily going to involve not-so-hot actual policy ideas and silly tricks like hidden taxes rather than explicit ones (see Andrew Sullivan fall for the trick).
One thing that always bothers me whenever I look at poll numbers or demographic data about past voting behavior is that there's never any fancy regression analysis or anything. And not just because I'm a dork, but because I care. This stuff matters. When I was working on this white working class article, it became clear that the available data doesn't let you disentangle the questions of age, income, and education in any real way. That seems like a big problem to me. I always wondered if the people who make the big bucks advising political campaigns had some kind of better tools at their disposal, but one brief scene in Our Brand Is Crisis suggests that they do not and involves James Carville seeming to make fun of the very idea that clients should expect their consultants to be able to perform sophisticated quantitative analysis of public opinion data. Considering how much is at stake in elections and how much polling and demographic data influences political strategy, you'd think people would want to invest the time and money to really know what the data really means.
In Josh's discussion of the Libby testimony regarding the NIE, he says "Let's set aside the whole question of whether the president can do that (declassify selectively)" the information. I'd try to like to answer that, not because it matters to an Administration that balks at most legal constraints, but just because there ought to be legal backing to the justified political complaints of the disclosure. And because the timing of the Libby disclosure is very odd given later Cheney comments.
Nathan, or as I call him, "NEWMAN!", invokes the sacred cow of pragmatism. But I have already acknowledged that employer-based health care via mandates at the state level is better than nothing and more likely to happen sooner than a splendid, national single-payer system.
Its no secret that Canada has always had much cheaper prescription drugs than the U.S. But a great article found in the Detroit Free Press yesterday outlines how many seniors are still finding drugs cheaper north of the border, even with the Part D taxpayer subsidy covering part of their costs.
Why is this? Unless you believe this price discrepancy is somehow caused by playing lots of hockey and loving maple syrup, then it’s a pretty safe bet that the political system is the cause of this enormous discrepancy. Here's the deal, because the U.S. doesn’t negotiate prices like every other industrialized nation, our prices are 300% higher then the world average. This means that if Canada’s drug prices are at the world average, Part D would have to use taxpayer money to cover at least 2/3rds of the cost of a drug, just to break even with what a senior would pay for prescription drugs in Canada.I didn't get the point of this column at all, but at one point Jonah Goldberg says: "It's all a bit reminiscent of Irving Kristol's observation that a liberal believes it's all right for an 18-year-old girl to perform in a pornographic movie as long as she gets paid minimum wage." I take it that's supposed to be some kind of self-evident refutation of liberalism but, well, what's wrong with that? How old does Jonah think you should have to be to perform in a pornographic movie? 21? Should the movies be banned? Or is the idea that the minimum wage is destroying vital porn industry jobs and ought to be repealed?
Ezra -- and Max -- have eminent logic on their side in arguing for the superiority of a non-employer based health care system in favor of direct government funding of health care. Except for the tiny flaw that it's not going to happen politically, at least any time soon.
Currently, private funds, primarily employer-paid money pays for 54% of all health care in this country. For the non-elderly population, it is an even greater percentage of health care dollars. So over 8% of GDP consists of private health care spending.
Now, for the government to substitute for that private spending, that would require the US to raise a substantially larger percentage of GDP in taxes than it currently does.
If you saw Cameron's version of TITANIC, I am sure you recall the scene just after the ship disappeared below the surface and the heroine, Rose, was grabbed and forced underwater by another passenger who couldn't swim. Today, Scooter Libby was that passenger and George W. Bush is Rose. Only in this case, there is nothing heroic about George W. Bush. In fact, Bush is a coward.
It is important to put the chronology of the dispute about what the President knew about Iraq and its effort to get uranium and when he knew it in its proper order. First, the October 2002 NIE was issued with the following key judgements that clearly established there was no, REPEAT NO, consensus on Iraq's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons:
How quickly Iraq will obtain its first nuclear weapon depends on when it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.* If Baghdad acquires sufficient fissile material from abroad it could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year.
* Without such material from abroad, Iraq probably would not be able to make a weapon until 2007 to 2009, owing to inexperience in building and operating centrifuge facilities to produce highly enriched uranium and challenges in procuring the necessary equipment and expertise.
Slipping in and out of the illuminations of Kate Steadman, Nathan, & Ezra, a few points about employer-based health care systems (EBS) and mandates that seem to be glossed over.
1. Health care reform typically entails more in the way of shifting who pays for health care than health care itself.
In this here political journalism game, sometimes you read an article and think "damn, I wish I'd written that one." Amy Sullivan on why the Democratic leadership is "Not As Lame As You Think" is one of those examples. I'm not quite as sanguine as she is, especially about the handling of the Murtha incident, but basically I think this is totally right and the conventional wisdom so mistaken that differences of nuance hardly matter. See also Kevin Drum's comments. It's worth saying that, last time I looked, the approval rating for the Democratic congressional leadership was pretty mediocre but would actually have been excellent had committed Democrats been more enthusiastic.
Nathan Newman accuses me of making a mantra of "Little is more anti-worker than forcing them to depend on their employer for medical care." Well, gotta admit, it's catchier than "Om." But he's for the employer mandate in a serious way, which I find so baffling I need to keep reciting my mantra just to stay calm. So, herewith, a quick history of the foresight, vision, and planning that resulted in the glorious invention known as employer-based health care:
Rep. Cynthia McKinney, whose scuffle with a Capitol police officers has made headlines since last week, said she regrets what happened. “There should not have been any physical contact in this incident,” she said. McKinney had previously said that the police officer’s decision to grab her was “racial profiling.” Meanwhile, a grand jury is preparing to hear evidence about the episode.
Former White House aide I. Lewis Libby told a grand jury that he had received permission from President Bush to leak information from a “National Intelligence Estimate” on Iraq. This leak puts Bush at the head of a chain of events leading up to the leaking of CIA employee Valerie Plame’s identity. Libby said that Vice President Cheney informed him of Bush’s permission.
Today at TPMCafe, Matt Yglesias has this post about elections and consultants, and Larry Johnson offers this snapshot of what the first five days of April were like in Iraq. Nathan Newman continues to look into the Massachusetts Health Bill, and Angela Adams Parham discusses the risks and realities of rebuilding in New Orleans. Mark L. Goldberg over at Bolton Watch explains why today is a bad day for Human Rights, and Drug Bill Debacle’s Ezra Klein talks about socialisms. Readers are discussing illegal immigration and “transitional fish.”
I agree with a lot of what's in Jacob Weisberg's column on immigration, but I'm honestly not convinced that "You can't crack down on illegal immigration and liberalize it at the same time." The really pressing issue on the liberalize side is that it's bad to have millions of people living in this country, stuck in the shadows, facing all kinds of problems. Deporting them all would be cruel and impractical. The reasonable thing to do is something along the lines of these "earned legalization" schemes wherein people who've been obeying the (non-immigration) laws pay some fines and back taxes and can get their green cards. This isn't only compatible with "crackdown" measures, crackdown measures would make such a program much more palatable by assuaging these incentives concerns.
Here's one interesting part of the Mass. health law that has largely been undiscussed in the media (from the legislative summary):
Free Rider Surcharge
The Free Rider surcharge will be imposed on employers who do not provide health insurance and whose employees use free care. Imposition of the surcharge will be triggered when an employee receives free care more than three times, or a company has five or more instances of employees receiving free care in a year. The surcharge will range from 10% to 100% of the state’s costs of services provided to the employees, with the first $50,000 per employer exempted. Revenue gained from the surcharge will be deposited in the Commonwealth Care Trust Fund.
De facto holding employers legally liable for the hospital bills of their employees is in some ways one of the strongest ways to encourage them to provide health care coverage-- more important than the measly $295 fee being assessed.
In mid February I obtained a confidential annex to a United Nations report on Sudan’s progress – or more accurately, lack there of — towards peace in Darfur. The annex named the 17 men most responsible for keeping Darfur in a state of perpetual violence and misery and recommended that they have their assets frozen and be placed under international travel ban. Of the 17, many were high level Sudanese government officials. One name in particular, Sallah Abdala Gosh, stood out.
Gosh leads Sudan’s Security and Intelligence Services and is the Himmler-esque organizational mastermind of the Darfur Genocide. He is also a known US intelligence asset. So when I obtained the annex and saw his name, I argued that whether or not the US pushes to include his name on a final list of officials to be sanctioned would be a test of how seriously this administration takes the genocide in Darfur.
Last night, the Administration failed that test, horribly.
In case you haven't been paying attention, the election campaign in Italy has been providing endless hilarity. It all got kicked off, really, when incumbent Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi promised to foreswear sex for the duration of the campaign. This, it seems, has led him to start exploring the world of paid phone sex chat lines, with Berlusconi reporting that "Seven out of the nine young ladies I called said they preferred me, which is very good news indeed." A spokesperson for opposition leader Romano Prodi remarked, "These women say anything to please the desperate men who call them."
This all raises the question in my mind of what we can do to make American politics funnier. The current GOP team is corrupt but, to be honest, they've got absolutely nothing on the Italian right. If we just let them stay in office and get more and more slimey will they start doing funnier stuff? Could that be worth the price?
Several comments on my post “Frogs Churning Butter in New Orleans” highlight the situation of New Orleans’s levees. One writer asks: Has anyone [given] serious thought to the implications of another severe storm hitting New Orleans before real improvements have been made to the levee system? and then comments: It seems to me that there is a rush to rebuild and re-inhabit dwellings to forestall the land grab from developers and other carpet baggers that is occurring. Many here in New Orleans are in the difficult situation of having to make a decision about whether or not to rebuild as we wait for reliable news about flood maps, levee progress, and future plans for the city’s footprint. All of these factors are inextricably linked and no truly informed decision can be made without each of them being addressed. Of course, making an “informed” decision means having correct information, and this we are sorely lacking. In light of this, it may seem hasty to those who do not live here to return and rebuild. Why on earth should we take the chance? Hurricane season is just two months away. But where, then, does one go when one’s life is in New Orleans? While local, state, and federal agencies bicker and stumble around in confusion, do we stay “safely” away until the dust clears?
A car bomb killed ten and injured 30 today in Najaf. The explosion occurred on a street in the vicinity of the Imam Ali shrine, a sacred Shiite site. Because of Najaf’s importance to Shiites, there is concern that today’s bombing will exacerbate sectarian tension. President Bush and other leaders have been calling on Iraqi officials in recent weeks to end sectarian violence by unifying the government.
The death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui resumes today, and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani will testify as a government witness about 9/11. This will also be the first time that a cockpit voice recorder recovered from the plane wreckage will be publicly played. Earlier this week, the jury deemed Moussaoui eligible to receive the death penalty.
It’s official: the US will not seek a seat on the new Human Rights Council. The decision was reportedly made last night when Ambassador Bolton visited Foggy Bottom. I suppose the bright side here is that should the US have ran for a seat, but failed to garner the requisite 96 votes, the relationship between the new council and the US would be even more strained than it is now. Bolton won this round, but I do hope that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee grills him on this decision. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is forging a head as countries are submitting their candidacies for next month's election. And the nominees are...
Arnold Kling is a smart, serious guy. A smart, serious guy who says silly, unserious things:
Many people claim that the American health care system wastes money compared with other countries’ health care systems. However, what this exercise shows is that waste in the American health care system is not confined to that part of health spending that is privately financed. Resources are not managed any better under Medicare than under private health insurance.
Once and slowly: Medicare operates within America's private health system context, bargaining with private providers at near-market rates. It's new drug plan is entirely operated through private insurers, and Medicare as a centralized market isn't allowed to negotiate for lower prices. Nevertheless, it's held down spending growth slightly better than the private industry and has 1/7th the administrative costs.
When Atrios saw this one, he was inspired to remark: "First, we fire all the consultants." I'm sympathetic to the sentiment (see Amy Sullivan's classic exposition of the theme) and certainly key players from the important Democratic consulting firm Greenberg Carville Shrum come off looking bad (especially Tad Devine, Carville actually comes out looking good) but the real villains in this tale are America's ambassador to Bolivia and first-past-the-post voting systems.
Remember the old law-and-order political sally: A conservative is a liberal who got mugged. Maybe there will be a new version. At least one conservative business analyst is warning his political compatriots that their middle class base may melt away when homeowners begin to experience the coming housing crash. Andrew LaPerriere sounds the alarm in the most recent Weekly Standard, telling conservatives to get some answers ready for the people who are going to lose their homes.
Has the housing crash started? And will it bring down the whole economy? LaPerriere travels ground we covered here last summer—skyrocketing home prices that make purchases unaffordable for a growing number of families, the staggering differential between rental prices and purchase prices that signal over-heated speculation, and what happens when $2 trillion of adjustable-rate and interest-only mortgages (one quarter of all mortgages in the US) are reset in the next two years. But he adds a political analysis that is amazingly candid. Calling his fellow conservatives “strangely silent” on the problem and consequently vulnerable to the political fallout when conservatives across the country discover that no one in Washington was watching out for them.
The credit card industry has just won a huge victory in Utah and put one over on cardholders across the country. Thanks to a new Utah law that was passed last month, credit card companies are allowed to add a term to their contracts by which individual customers waive their right to a class action.
This law is a huge victory for Big Credit over consumers. Just ask the law firm that helped draft the new law. Ballard Spahr's press release crows: "Ballard Attorneys Pilot Unprecedented Law."
Unprecedented for a good reason. It's a giveaway to credit card companies that closes the courthouse door in cardholders' faces. And not just Utah cardholders. In Ballard Spahr's own words, the law will "help banks and finance companies defeat class actions filed against them throughout the country."
In the wake of Apple's announcement that it will release a piece of software that lets you install Windows on your new Intel Mac and dual boot, there's some talk up on tech sites debating whether or not it would make sense for Microsoft to buy Apple. Some interesting things come up in the discussion, but it seems to me that there are obvious insuperable regulatory barriers that render it all irrelevant. Microsoft has enough anti-trust problems as things stand and was close to being broken up just a few years ago -- they couldn't buy the closest thing to a competing OS vendor on the planet. All that notwithstanding, I have some concerns about this new Windows-on-Mac development.
Reader J.L. sends in this account of master diplomat Karen Hughes' next assignment:
Somebody draw the short straw? President Bush announced yesterday that he has selected Karen P. Hughes , undersecretary of state for public affairs, to lead the U.S. delegation to the inauguration tomorrow of President-elect Thomas Yayi Boni of the beautiful West African Republic of Benin.Perhaps she'll discover that a lot of people in Africa are worried about infectious disease and widespread poverty.
Clearly smarting under charges that they are "failing" to tell the good news in Iraq, the major TV network and cable channels appear to have abandoned any effort to report what is going on in Iraq. Fearful of being accused of undermining the war effort, the TV side of journalism apparently decided to punt and do nothing. Fortunately, the print media and wires continue to tough it out. Working from the info collected on www.icasualties.org, I have assembled a snapshot of the first five days of April in Iraq. It is not a pretty picture. While it certainly could be worse, the facts on the ground make it very tough to argue that the U.S. is making progress in securing Iraq.
Here is a summary of the last five days (the specific news reports are posted at the end of this article). During the period of 31 March thru 4 April the following occurred:
Potential 2008 presidential candidate Senator Russ Feingold said in an interview yesterday that he supports legalizing same-sex marriages. The issue has come to Feingold’s doorstep with a pending amendment to the Wisconsin state constitution that would ban same-sex marriages. Feingold said that same-sex marriage is “something ultimately that people throughout the country will accept, but it's not an easy issue."
In a New York Times analysis of IRS data, President Bush’s tax cuts for investment income reveal that the richest Americans have received the most help—an average of $500,000 in tax reduction for those earning more than $10 million. This is the first documentation of the results of the Bush-led 2003 tax cuts, which Congress is now debating whether to make permanent.
Readers may be shocked to learn that there still are neoconservatives around who are thoughtful and make a lot of sense. But there are. And Max Boot is one of them, as he once again demonstrates with this Los Angeles Times column on mindless unilateralism. Read it. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
Kate Steadman rightly praises the new Massachusetts bill as a step forward in expanding health coverage for low-income residents, but the least attractive aspect of the bill is the individual mandate which uses the threat of a $1000 per year tax on middle-income families to enforce the mandate.
While there is a nominal tax on employers who refuse to provide health insurance -- just $295 per employee -- the overall burden of paying for health care remains on working families themselves, especially middle income folks who make just a bit too much to qualify for government subsidies.
Karen Hughes scratches the bottom of the moron barrel: "One of the things that I heard as I traveled throughout the Middle East is concern about the Israeli-Palestinian policy." Also: "Those pictures from Abu Ghraib were horrible."
Relatedly, I've been meaning to plug Art Brut, who are "gonna be the band that writes the song that makes Israel and Palestine get along." Maybe Hughes will come to their show here in the District on Sunday and pick up some more pointers.
What would you do if the government refused to let you back in your own apartment for 7 months? Yesterday I joined dozens of residents of the St. Bernard Housing Development in their nonviolent civil disobedience of invading their own homes. New Orleans public housing, though mostly undamaged, has remained mostly closed to legal residents since Katrina. Yesterday dozens of residents decided to open it up. I was along as legal observer and advisor.
Yesterday, the Massachusetts House and Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill that would make the state the first to require all residents to have health insurance coverage. If signed by Governor Mitt Romney and successfully implemented, the Bay State could be the first U.S. state to achieve near-universal coverage. (Hawaii has a universal access law and employer coverage mandate on the books, but hasn’t come close to getting all its residents covered.)
Today at TPMCafe, Danny Goldberg has some issues with George Packer, and reader Joseph Hughes has some issues with both Tom DeLay and Katie Couric (but not Russ Feingold). Steve Clemons explains why, when it comes to Iran, we should listen to Israel; and Matt Yglesias considers Treasury Secretary John Snow’s potential departure. Over at the Drug Bill Debacle, Jeff Cruz explains why choosing the right plan under Part D is literally impossible, and Kate Steadman looks at recently announced plan to provide all Massachusetts residents with health insurance. (The state’s decision raises a couple of questions for reader Delsol.) And read about what’s making headlines today here.
The Bush Part D disaster has been lambasted for being ridiculously confusing. Comparing 40+ plans with different premiums, co-payments, deductibles and formularies is undoubtedly confusing. But choosing the right plan isn’t just confusing, its downright impossible. That’s because the insurers can alter the drugs they cover at any time and as often as they want, while beneficiaries can only change plans during the short open season each year.
The Philadelphia region's largest insurer, Independence Blue Cross, has demonstrated this ability by announcing it will make 22 changes in drugs covered starting June 1st.
This week’s New Yorker has a sixteen page article about Iraq by George Packer. Like his widely praised book, The Assassins Gate, Packer’s piece is beautifully written, carefully researched, filled with compelling personal stories, and insistently myopic as it ornately reiterates the theory of many intellectual liberal hawks that the failing of the Iraq War was not in its conception but in its execution. Echoing Michael Dukakis, Packer and his ilk think that the problem with George Bush is not ideology but competence.
Apparently someone was listening to my post from Monday, as Massachusetts has taken the leap and mandated health insurance for all of its residents. Ok, kidding, I know it's been in the works for months. But I'm thrilled to see a state take such a drastic step in solving insurance problems.
Gov. Mitt Romney (R) supports the proposal, which would require all uninsured adults in the state to purchase some kind of insurance policy by July 1, 2007, or face a fine. Their choices would be expanded to include a range of new and inexpensive policies -- ranging from about $250 per month to nearly free -- from private insurers subsidized by the state.
Brian J. Doyle, the deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was arrested last night for attempting to seduce an undercover cop posing as a 14-year-old girl on the internet. Doyle is also accused of transmitting harmful materials, such as pornographic pictures, to a minor.
Today marked the first time Saddam Hussein was cross-examined since his trial began six months ago. He claimed that his approval of death sentences for Shiites in the 1980s was justified by evidence that they had attempted to assassinate him. Yesterday Hussein was indicted on additional charges for a genocide campaign that killed more than 100,000 Kurds.
Bruce Bartlett has an interesting column on the allegedly imminent departure of Treausury Secretary John Snow. If Bush is genuinely puzzled as to why he's not getting more credit for fairly robust GDP growth, he might want to hire someone who can explain inequality data to him.
. . . to replace Dan Rather. What'll be next -- woman doctors? Senators? It's a strange world.
As I stated on Christopher Lydon's NPR show, Radio Open Source, tonight -- one of the take-aways from my recent Israel trip is that Israeli national security bureaucrats -- diplomats and generals -- have far greater confidence that there are numerous potential solutions to the growing Iran crisis short of bombing them in an invasive, hot attack.
One of the issues that came up in many of the national security related discussions I had was that Israel has maintained and cultivated a very strong human intelligence network inside Iran. The two nations were close strategic allies 25 years ago -- and continue, in many behind-the-scenes ways, to communicate and possibly even to coordinate certain actions. It doesn't mean that Israel is ready to appease Iran's regional ambitions, but it does mean that I have witnessed far more worries about Iranian President Ahmadinejad's anti-Holocaust and anti-Israel rhetoric in the U.S. than I did in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
For a few months now, I've been the crank telling people I think -- really -- there might be military action against Iran. Most seem not to believe this. Now Joseph Cirincione from the Carnegie Institute says he was wrong to be so sure this isn't what the administration wants. I think he's right. And Kevin Drum's right to say Democrats had better be prepared to deal with this. My strong sense from following this issue throughout 2006 is that if this issue really hits the political agenda in a significant way Democrats will manage to botch it both politically and substantively -- the only real question in my mind is whether the politics or the substance will be botched worse. I'd be thrilled, though, if somebody were to prove me wrong about that.
At any rate, I think everything from my February article on the subject in the Prospect still holds. Airstrikes against Iran are, in my view, a totally nutty idea that would make invading Iraq look a stroke of strategic genius. It genuinely makes no sense at all and will exacerbate every problem it's supposed to be solving.
The Hammer has fallen, as my colleagues and I at TPMmuckraker are discussing today with posts on Tom DeLay’s desire to go after Ronnie Earle, who his successor might be and how he will be picked, and a refresher on who voted for the infamous DeLay Rule. Did you catch DeLay’s statement to his constituents or hear about how he’s expected to move to Virginia and work for a conservative organization? (In his interview with Fox News, he explained that he was “looking forward to being liberated outside the House, doing whatever I can to unify the conservative cause.”) There’s already plenty of speculation about how much DeLay’s downfull has hurt Repubs and how good it really is for the Dems, who need to pick up 15 seats to retake the House and, with DeLay’s departure, have just lost their lightening rod. What do you all think?
One would think the mere fact that New Orleans is a major American city would mean that its rebuilding would be one of the major priorities of the nation. If that weren’t enough, one would think the fact that the majority of the damage to the city was by preventable flooding rather than by more conventional hurricane damage, and that said flooding was due to the failure of a federally designed system, then the federal government would feel obligated to do its part in cleaning up its mess.
One would think so, but one would be wrong. The simplest of moral imperatives – “we take care of our own,” and “we take responsibility for our mistakes” – seem to have no force in our current situation. So, since adherence to the (not so) high-minded ideals of solidarity and responsibility are apparently beyond the moral capacity of our country, let’s try to appeal to the more basic instincts. Today, we’ll cover a theme close to this administration’s heart: not showing weakness.
Doing this blog is really challenging. I'm not a pundit. I'm a citizen of a wounded city. Some days I have one or two thoughts worth communicating and other days I'm worthless. Just living is difficult.
The consensus of my friends as well as a trusted Voodoo practitioner I consulted is that our polarities have shifted in Katrina. So much wild energy is on the loose that every person, every place, and every "thing" that didn’t drown in Katrina are out of balance. We lose information and necessary objects, forget simple things, and show up on the wrong day at the vet clinic as I did one morning last week. All our past frequencies are disturbed and distorted. There are forces out there beyond our control.
Hundreds of thousands of people are back on the streets in France to continue protesting a new youth employment law. Last week over one million people protested, sparking fights with police and the use of tear gas and water canons. The new law, meant to solve France’s unemployment problem, makes it easier for employers to fire young workers.
An Iranian military official today said that developments in missile technology now mean the country can “confront any extra-regional invasion.” A new surface-to-sea missile called “Kowsar,” after a river in paradise, is able to evade radar and sink ships. It was tested today as part of a recent series of war games that Iran has been publicizing.
Sorry for a later-than-usual House Brew…everyone here at TPM Media has been pretty busy on the Tom DeLay resignation story. (Visit TPMmuckraker for the latest info…) At TPMCafe today, Matt Yglesias has some questions about the Dems’ “Real Security” Agenda, and Drug Bill Debacle’s Kate Steadman looks at the first announced changes to Medicare Part D. Bolton Watch’s Sameer Lalwani discusses Bolton, Iran, and the Importance of Being Earnest, and Todd Gitlin considers the "bad-faith obfuscation” practiced by the current administration. Readers are talking about DeLay and immigration.
Normally, I pay global warming skeptics no mind. But over the past couple of days I finally heard something that sounded semi-convincing from them -- apparently in the 1970s there was a lot of worry about global cooling. I wasn't genuinely prepared to flip-flop on the issue, but a quick look around wasn't revealing any counterarguments either. But here's the rebuttal I've been looking for in a RealClimate post from January 2005.
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced the first changes to Medicare Part D:
Private health insurers sponsoring Medicare prescription drug plans will be allowed to offer no more than two plans next year, CMS Administrator Mark McClellan said on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reports. Insurers were allowed to offer three plans this year, but some beneficiaries have been overwhelmed by the number of choices, McClellan said. He said the two-plan limit should help simplify the drug benefit. "Two plans should be sufficient," he said. However, some insurers offering plans that fill coverage gaps in the drug benefit might be allowed to offer three plans, McClellan said.
When John Bolton visited Qatar this past weekend, his statement—dismissing allegations of plans to resort to force against Iran and advocating a peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue—was intended to quell concerns of another US-led military action in the region. But these empty rhetorical gestures bear little weight when evaluating the credibility of the Bush administration’s diplomatic efforts. Bolton and the administration seem to be selectively lifting from Wilde’s script for their own production of “The Importance of Playing Earnest.” Instead they ought to consult the playbook of Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations and James Dobbin of the Rand Corp who join the list of regional and security experts advocating dialogue with Iran.
If the Bush administration has perfected the art of devising a foreign policy that's long on airy platitudes and short on figuring out how to accomplish anything, the Democrats' "Real Security" agenda has managed to achieve the reverse. The thing is like a shopping list of stuff the national security establishment ought to have that winds up saying almost nothing about what the stuff is for. What's America's purpose in the world? What are the goals of our foreign policy? It manages to neither endorse Bush's strategy nor outline a different one.
On homeland security this is fine -- it really does go without saying what the point of beefing up security here or giving more radio there is. But on the military side it doesn't make sense at all. Obviously, all else being equal it would be better to have more Special Operations forces than fewer. But it would also be better to have more aircraft carriers than fewer. Or more anything rather than fewer. What's it supposed to be for? Why are these the priorities?
Texas Rep. Tom DeLay is planning to resign. This comes on the heels of his former aide, Tony Rudy, pleading guilty to conspiracy. DeLay said that “The Abramoff affair has nothing to do with me,” and that “liberal Democrats” had been making his reelection campaign difficult and negative-toned.
Saddam Hussein is being charged with genocide for the “Anfal campaign” against Kurds which resulted in the deaths of 180,000 civilians in the 1980s. These charges add to the ones he already faces for the deaths of 148 people in the town of Dujail after an assassination attempt. The Anfal campaign is infamous in part because it used poison gas to kill 5,000 Kurds.Not likely. Last week Scott Paul reported on these pages that John Bolton is lobbying against US membership on the new Human Rights Council. It seems this effort is gaining some traction. On Friday, Bill Frist submitted a Sense of the Senate resolution urging the administration against seeking membership and calling for US non-cooperation with the new council. Today, 17 countries nominated themselves for membership on the council. The United States was not one of them.
An underscore, in bold italics, for Josh's comment over at the mothersite about the country still being "awash in a sea of disinformation, official lies and denial," not to mention "bad-faith obfuscation," about the way the government of the United States plunged into the ongoing disaster in Iraq.
Peter Baker notes, in the WP, that Bush has decided, in his current phase, to go "looser." The headline: "The President as Average Joe." Down below, a little more detail: Bush is "playing up his anti-intellectual, regular-guy image." TV news fell for it, featuring Bush as joker.
On the occasion Baker describes, a speech at Freedom House, Bush spoke thusly: "The globe is warming. The fundamental debate: Is it manmade or natural. Put that aside." Obfuscation is one word for that. Later, it was a slip of his scripted tongue that revealed a more fundamental truth: "Now the elements of a free Iraq are trying to stop the -- the enemies of a free Iraq are trying to stop the formation of unity government."
Dr. Jerry Avorn, author of the superb book Powerful Medicines: the Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs, weighs in on Medicare Part D in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, finding the program both “defective from its conception and then malnurtured at birth.” In other words, the debacle stems both from the way in which the drug benefit was designed and the way in which it has been implemented.
Asking around about the missing Trustees' Report issue, Dean Baker from CEPR pointed out to me that an April release is not without precedent -- the 1998 report didn't come out until April 28, the apparent statutory provision notwithstanding (I say "apparent" because it's hard to just look at the text of a law and be sure you're understanding it correctly, though this particular provision seems reasonably clear-cut).
There are two reasons for concern here. One is that the Trustees need to somehow keep coming up with new ways to justify ignoring the past several years worth of productivity growth, years worth of data that other government agencies routinely account for. The other thing is that the Report's immigration projections -- always implausible -- are now seriously at odds with the administration's immigration proposals.
In a divided ruling today, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal of Jose Padilla, a convert to Islam who was arrested and detained without charges after traveling to Pakistan in 2002. The government argued that because Padilla now faces criminal charges, his appeal is unnecessary. Dissenting Justice Stevens said that “at stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society.”
At least ten people were killed when a car bomb exploded in eastern Baghdad. Meanwhile, four gunmen in a car fired into a marketplace in Basra, killing six Sunnis, including a child, according to police.
I spoke to Sean Kevelighan at from the Treasury Department's public affairs office about the case of the missing Trustees' Report. He said "there isn't a timetable" for the release of this year's report, but that there would be a 2006 report, he just couldn't tell me when. I brought up the Trustees' apparent statutory mandate to produce a report by April 1 and he said he didn't know anything about that, but conceded that there is a statutory requirement to do a report each year. "I wish I could tell you more," he said.
I don't know exactly where this fits on the fishiness scale, but it's pretty fishy.
Matt links to this NY Times story with various multinational companies whining about rising wages in China. But let's be serious-- we aren't talking about South Korea style wage increases. As the story details:
[M]inimum wages — which averaged $58 to $74 a month (not including benefits) in 2004 — have climbed about 25 percent over the past three years in big cities like Shenzhen, Beijing and Shanghai, mostly by government mandate. Wages at larger factories operated on behalf of multinationals — which are typically $100 to $200 a month — are also on the rise.
25% increases on top of miserable wages is still miserable wages.
So, what’s the matter with France? Like many people, I’ve been following the unrest in France over a proposed law (the "CPE") that would let companies fire employees younger than 26 without reason in the first two years on the job. The law was pushed through Parliament by Prime Minister (and presidential hopeful) Dominique de Villepin. Many Frenchmen—especially students and would-be young workers—were so shocked and outraged that they began protesting at rallies, sit-ins, etc. A two-week strike peaked lastTuesday when the unions joined angry students. Protests and marches took places in major cities throughout France. The Eiffel Tower was closed. The US State Department issued a travel warning. According to the BBC, over a million people joined that day in demonstrations throughout France. Union leader Bernard Thibault of the CGT called the turnout “historical.”
Today White House economics adviser Allan Hubbard uses the New York Times op-ed page to make the administration’s familiar case for gutting traditional, comprehensive health insurance and replacing it with catastrophic-only coverage, preferably with the help of tax-free health savings accounts.
If you’ve read this space before, by now you know the biggest problem with such a transformation: It would transfer the burden of medical expenses from the healthy to the sick…
Today at TPMCafe, we’ve got baseball on the brain. Mark Lamster talks about steroids and the history of the game. Also, After the Levees’ Angela Adams Parham discusses the challenges the struggle to get by—and vote—in New Orleans. Matt Yglesias looks at labor shortages in China and explains why embracing the world “socialism” is not a winning strategy for the Dems. Joshua Hudelson has today’s news, and readers discuss flag hysteria and authenticity.
California is one of the most generous states in terms of funding for getting the uninsured, particularly children, enrolled in health programs. But Healthy Families, which is supposed to help fill in the gap between Medical (California's Medicaid program) and those who can afford insurance, has had a fairly low adoption rate.
Sometimes I feel that I'm becoming too much of a predictable leftwinger and need to develop some more nuanced positions to retain "respectable" status and reader interest. So thank God for The Nation which will allow me to put forward my view that embracing the word "socialism" is not, in fact, going to be a winning strategy for American progressives. Consider this my Sister Souljah moment.
It’s all fun and games until… An Iranian official told state television that this week will see a series of wargames played out in the Gulf, among them the test-firing of powerful torpedoes and missiles. "We are going to have very important news that will make our nation proud in the next few days," said Rear Admiral Dehqani. International concern over Iran’s nuclear program has escalated in recent weeks, as Iranian officials have refused to halt nuclear research.
Yesterday Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and British foreign minister Jack Straw demanded that Iraqi leadership unify in order to prevent the ongoing sectarian violence. “It is, after all, the political process that will disable those who wish to engage in violence against the Iraqi people,” said Rice at a news conference in the Green Zone.Atrios wants to know where the Social Security Actuary's Report's gone off to since it's been released in mid-to-late March in all recent years. Reader B.G. emailed the Social Security Administration about this and received the following reply over the weekend:
Thank you for your inquiry.
The 2005 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance Trust Funds, was issued on March 23, 2005.
The report is not out yet and I cannot say when it will be released. I can only advise you to continue to view our web page for more information.
That's not very informative, now, is it?
First off, a big thanks to the Powers That Be at the Café for trusting me with their etherspace on this opening day of the 2006 baseball season (and, not coincidentally, publication date of my new book, Spalding’s World Tour: The Epic Adventure That Took Baseball Around the Globe—And Made It America’s Game.) I’ll be posting for the next few days, and perhaps beyond, on the politics of our national pastime. Today, it only seems right to begin with the subject that has fans buzzing and politicians shaking their fists: Barry Bonds and steroids.
I linked to a story like this once before, with regard to India, once again we see that the "offshoring" of jobs to low-wage China leads to . . . wage increases for Chinese workers. Now in the first instance, this is merely going to lead countries to seek out new production venues that haven't yet seen a China-style boom. Nevertheless, just as China turns out not to have an endless supply of manufacturing workers and India turns out not to have an endless supply of routine service workers, the world as a whole is not, in fact, a bottomless pit of potential low wage labor (indeed, rapidly growing China and India plus the rich countries contain most of the world's population). Plus as Chinese incomes grow, increasing numbers of people around the world will be able to make a living selling stuff to Chinese people.
As Bill Quigley highlighted in his recent posting, living in New Orleans entails an enormous amount of effort and heartache. Living in a car because of FEMA’s bureaucratic delays is one of the mean absurdities that people here face. Many are working tirelessly to rebuild the city’s organizations and infrastructure even as they fight to secure a decent place to sleep each night. In addition to these day-to-day challenges of basic survival, there are other concerns about the cultural and political life of the city that rub salt into already painful wounds. Two of these issues are the ongoing struggle over St. Augustine church and the very real concern that thousands of African-Americans will not be able to vote in the upcoming election in April.
With regard to the current controversy in France, I tend to agree with the right that they should make it easier to fire people. That said, I'm an overall defender of French economic policies. I really liked this column from last year about how French workers are more productive on a per-hour basis than American workers, have lower incomes because they work fewer hours and take more vacations, and how this "work to live, don't live to work" attitude makes French people happier than Americans. Jonah Goldberg drags it up with a "heh" since he regards Krugman's argument as somehow obviously wrong. He doesn't seem, however, to tackle any of the points Krugman actually makes. Instead, French economic policy can't be family friendly, according to Jonah, because French fertility rates are low. I'm not totally sure what that has to do with anything, and would be inclined to observe that they're back on the upswing anyway. Jonah, however, has a rebuttal to this:
While I was on vacation, Andrew Sabl objected to the view that V in V for Vendetta is a terrorist, pointing out that he destroys empty buildings and kills government leaders and members of the security services: "In the film the fascist authorities call V a terrorist about every three minutes, as an organized propaganda campaign to discredit him. Does such incessant repetition work, subliminally, even on film critics?" Relatedly, The Washington Post notes that if we bomb Iran, Iran will use its proxies to fight back, and goes over a little history of US-Iranian conflict:
In typical manner, even as progressives are caught playing defense on "wedge" anti-immigrant measures, the corporate right wing is quietly pushing its agenda through in state after state government. Eyes sometimes glaze over on "tort reform" issues, but the corporate lobby scored a massive victory this week in Florida (adapted from a PLAN post).
From the Sun Sentinel:
The Florida Senate gave final approval Thursday to a measure toppling a centuries-old principle of civil law that will make it harder for people to collect damages when they're injured in an accident.
This is a big one- a return to the day when businesses could negligently maim or kill people, yet escape most responsibility for paying damages by palming off blame on others.
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