This week, Tom Delay pranced, gun nuts preened, and Bob Novak went to the big "Crossfire" set in the sky. And, of course, TPM readers shared their thoughts with the world.
Reader-bloggers Garry Owen and dickday didn't much care for Mr. Novak. Maybe it was all the evil?
Pres. Obama gave a speech to the veterans of Foreign Wars annual convention on Monday in which he spelled out his view of the US's now-declining strategic stakes in Iraq and its continuing strategic stake in Afghanistan.
His words were considered and important.
On Iraq, he said,
In Iraq, after more than six years of war, we took an important step forward in June. We transferred control of all cities and towns to Iraq's security services. The transition to full Iraqi responsibility for their own security is now underway...
Taking umbrage at the attention that the Doonesbury comic strip has drawn to a "Birther Bill" sitting in a House committee, Texas congressman Louie Gohmert (Republican) recently told Washington Post blogger Mary Ann Akers that the bill, H.R. 1503, has nothing to do with needling President Obama. If it ever was voted up and signed, Gohmert says, the bill would not take effect until the next presidential election in 2012. It would mandate that the campaign committees of the various contenders for president submit birth certificates and "other documentation as may be necessary to establish that the candidate meets the qualifications for eligibility..."
Gohmert served as the Chief Justice of the Texas 12th District Court of Appeals before his election to Congress in 2004. He voted for the Central America Free Trade Agreement, supported drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilderness, and he opposed same sex marriage. Gohmert also and joined the House Immigration Reform Caucus--the hard core nativist group of 93 representatives opposing any legislative measure that smells even faintly of amnesty for undocumented immigrants. From that platform, he also co-sponsored H.R. 1868, the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2009, which would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to preclude automatic citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants that are born on American soil. This bill, which currently has 41 co-sponsors, is unlikely to get out of committee, and if enacted in the future it would run smack dab into the birthright citizenship provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment.
I had an epiphany this afternoon. I was watching Chris Matthews and this spokesperson for the Gun Owners of America was on. He defended all the people bringing Semi Automatic rifles to Obama events. So Matthews asked him, "Do you think people should be able to bring a loaded gun and sit in the first row of a President Obama event. And the gun owners flack says --"Yes."
My epiphany was :"Wow! There is a real American Neo-Fascist Movement abroad."
Two must-read posts here and here by James Fallows, on the question of how the wingnuts have got so much mileage out of blatantly false claims about the Obama-Will-Kill-Grandma and other not-so-funny insanities of the month.
One of Fallows' readers asked:
does the new media ecosystem have a greater ability to stop charlatans? Clearly yes.
I beg to differ. What has to be faced, people, is that in the new media ecosystem, anything goes. Anything goes, and goes. In the world of the blogosphere, cable TV, and talk radio, nothing stops. This is Newton (Gingrich)'s new law: Charlatans eat charlatans to nourish themselves, as in the impressive new horror/sci-fi/parable movie "District 9."
The liars and garbage-hounds cannot be blotted out. They can be opposed, and defeated. But to think the media system is self-aerating is delusional.
Israel Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon sent this note out on Twitter earlier today:
Hopes the rumored settlement freeze is just a rumor, because it hasn't gone through appropriate forums.
This is the best news I've heard in a while. Ayalon's plea may mean that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be using his skills as a crafty political executive to sidestep some of his more bureaucratic and recalcitrant allies in cooking up a deal with George Mitchell and Barack Obama on settlements.
There are -- as Ayalon indicates -- lots of rumors bubbling out of the region that George Mitchell's team will soon announce a plan to launch negotiations toward a two state solution with a number of key confidence building measures tucked into the first phase.
Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is in Israel this week. He's making a point of touring many of Israel's (illegal) settlements in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. (Richard Silverstein has one version of Huck's settlement-focused itinerary in this very informative blog post.)
While visiting with Jewish settlers in occupied east Jerusalem today, he said the U.S. should not "be telling Jewish people in Israel where they should and should not live."
More than a dozen friends and acquaintances have asked me to respond to the Agha-Malley oped in the New York Times, rather unfortunately titled "The Two-State Solution Doesn't Solve Anything"--a follow-up, it seemed to me, to their rather bleak, and not entirely conclusive article in the New York Review last June.
Perhaps I am distracted by the need to finish painting my deck, but I don't really see why the article has raised so many anxieties. I'm not at all sure what it adds. The argument, at bottom, is that the Palestinians and Israelis each have "core" grievances, the former dispossession, the latter, existential terror, and that when seen as ideological expressions of their respective national movements, these explain why the two sides are talking past each other. "The first step will be to recognize that in the hearts and minds of Israelis and Palestinians, the fundamental question is not about the details of an apparently practical solution. It is an existential struggle between two worldviews."
Really. A struggle between worldviews. Therefore, peace is more or less impossible, or at least the two-state solution is, because one worldview says a "Jewish state" contradicts the pain of the Naqba, and the other worldview says a Palestinian state contradicts Zionism's essential fairness--and also means accepting people who refuse to have the pain of the Naqba contradicted, and so forth. Put Ismail Haniya and Menachem Begin in the room and this is what you get. Obama has better steer clear.
When folks talk about their fear of "socialized medicine", I'm always wondering what they prize in our present system? The instability of coverage, fear of being locked out by a preexisting condition, the craziness of reimbursement rules? Some will say a fear of Soviet-style lines for care, but we have them-- which I was reminded of last night as I went to the emergency room with my wife.
We went to the emergency room because she had intense pains, fever and other symptoms that her doctor said on the phone had a chance of being fatal if not treated immediately. So we ran to the local hospital-- luckily only two blocks from our home, one of the best in New York City (Columbia Presbyterian). With our lovely private health insurance --also one of the better ones (Oxford) -- the results were: a long wait to even see the triage nurse, and then being told my wife would have to wait EIGHT HOURS to see someone. The triage nurse didn't disagree with her doctor's diagnosis of the possibility of the fatal condition, but that was the timeline for everyone who wasn't basically bleeding to death on the spot.
For weeks now, health care reform has taken center stage in Washington, on every news program, and in contentious town halls across the country. Not even the Army's troubling suicide numbers, the fate of the American POW being held by the Taliban, or the elections being held this week in Afghanistan have been able to break through this non-stop media circus.
After the new GI Bill went into effect earlier this month, it looked like August might actually be a slow time for vets' issues. I was prepared to spend hours watching pre-season football and America's Best Dance Crew. But then veterans joined doctors, the British and everybody's Grandma as the latest group to be thrust into the national health care fight. And maybe it's about time. The "health care reform will destroy the VA" rumors were starting to pop up at town halls almost as frequently as protesters with handguns.
The campaign to stop corporate subsidized hate speech from Glenn Beck is succeeding. More advertisers pulled out yesterday.
Eight more Glenn Beck advertisers, including Wal-Mart - the world's largest retailer - have confirmed to ColorOfChange.org that they pulled their ads from the controversial Fox News Channel broadcaster's eponymous show. Allergan (maker of Restasis), Ally Bank (a unit of GMAC Financial Services), Best Buy, Broadview Security, CVS, Re-Bath, Travelocity and Wal-Mart join the dozen other companies who previously distanced themselves from Beck.Twenty companies have pulled their ads from Beck's show in just the last two weeks. The moves come after the Fox News host called President Obama a "racist" who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" during an appearance on Fox & Friends. Previous companies who pulled their ads include ConAgra, GEICO, Lawyers.com, Men's Wearhouse, Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance, RadioShack, Roche, SC Johnson, Sanofi-Aventis, Sargento, and State Farm Insurance.
Senators Kent Conrad and Chuck Grassley want to set up a national system of health care cooperatives to compete with the likes of Aetna, United Health and other big campaign contributors. Does anyone want to bet that the federal money used to get these cooperatives off the ground will overwhelmingly be wasted?
It's a pretty safe call that most of these cooperatives will not prove successful and will at best be small actors in the market. (We have evidence on which to base this assessment.)
So, our great fiscal conservatives are apparently prepared to throw billions of taxpayer dollars in the toilet for the purpose of preventing the creation of a serious public plan that could compete with the insurance industry. There's nothing like a principled fiscal conservative.
I would have preferred a single payer system like Medicare, but became convinced earlier this year that a public, Medicare-like optional plan was just about as much as was politically possible. Now the White House is stepping back even from the public option, with the President saying it's "not the entirety of health care reform," the White House spokesman saying the President could be "satisfied" without it, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius saying that a public insurance plan is "not the essential element."
Without a public, Medicare-like option, health care reform is a bandaid for a system in critical condition. There's no way to push private insurers to become more efficient and provide better value to Americans without being forced to compete with a public option. And there's no way to get overall health-care costs down without a public option that has the authority and scale to negotiate lower costs with pharmaceutical companies, doctors, hospitals, and other providers -- thereby opening the way for private insurers to do the same.
President Obama didn't think so back in the days when he was running for president and it may be time for progressives to start rethinking the question as well. To be clear, mandates or something very mandate like, are an essential part of a universal health care plan. They are needed for universal coverage, this is largely addressed by insurance reform measures that prohibit discrimination based on pre-existing condition and denial of coverage. With these measures in place, a person can first sign up for insurance after they get sick. It's sort of like buying car insurance after you have been in a wreck, and then having the insurer pick up the tab.
Of course, if everyone waited until they got sick before they bought insurance, then the system does not work. Hence the mandates. But it is important to understand that the mandates are not about extending coverage, they are about preventing free-riding. They are, in effect, a form of taxation, and a a very regressive one.
So, in a context where a public plan looks to be dead in the water -- thank you Kent Conrad -- the question is whether progressives should support a regressive tax, the proceeds of which goes to the insurance industry.
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