The only time I had the privilege of sitting with Senator Ted Kennedy in his Capitol Hill office was when I was in the company of another great American Irishman, Michael Harrington. Mike, who saw Ted Kennedy as akin to the sole politician who could bring social democracy to our shores, had gone to meet with Kennedy to discuss a project I was staffing, Democratic Agenda, our attempt to build a strong left-liberal/social democratic wing inside the Democratic Party. It was the mid 1980s and in the midst of discussing Kennedy's support for Democratic Agenda, he also discussed--with incredible ease--the ins and outs of social democratic governments and parties in South America and Europe.

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President Obama has again demonstrated an uncanny ability to know the right way to approach difficult moments.

He could have knocked the ball out of the park with an emphatic endorsement of the liberal agenda. He could have invoked (directly or obliquely) the health reform struggle. He could have made himself the centerpiece of Ted Kennedy's funeral, even more than any President naturally is.

But he chose to do none of that, choosing instead to honor Kennedy, to keep the focus on him, and, incidentally not give the GOP the opportunity to accuse him of politicizing a funeral.

He delivered a perfect tribute. It was just right and it is what Kennedy would have wanted (not least because it will, ironically, advance Obama's and Kennedy's agenda precisely because of the issue he never alluded to).

Beautifully done.

Political scientists and historians from Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity to Lyndon LaRouche to that woman with short brown hair who, I deduce, must be a scholar of German history, are comparing Obama to Hitler and his likening his health care plan to Nazism. Liberal bullies and freedom of speech haters like Barney Frank are trying to silence these brave Americans who are speaking truth to Nazi power just as they want to smother our grandmothers. But is it so wrong to compare the Communist-Nazi-Muslim-Jeremiah Wright-following Obama to Hitler? Does comparing health care reform aimed at saving millions of lives to an extermination of millions of lives trivialize the holocaust? I think not! They say those who don't learn their history are condemned to repeat its mistakes. Well, a quick look at the history, the facts and data analysis reveal the frightening and shocking similarities between Obama and Hitler. Will America realize this before its too late?

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The general handwringing in Washington from the Repubs on the new deficit numbers are the classic response of people like John Boehner who partied too hard in college to ever get to that morning Econ 101 lecture. Paul Krugman straightens him out.

There are two main reasons for the surge in red ink. First, the recession has led both to a sharp drop in tax receipts and to increased spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs. Second, there have been large outlays on financial rescues. These are counted as part of the deficit, although the government is acquiring assets in the process and will eventually get at least part of its money back. What this tells us is that right now it's good to run a deficit. Consider what would have happened if the U.S. government and its counterparts around the world had tried to balance their budgets as they did in the early 1930s. It's a scary thought. If governments had raised taxes or slashed spending in the face of the slump, if they had refused to rescue distressed financial institutions, we could all too easily have seen a full replay of the Great Depression. As I said, deficits saved the world.

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Washington, D.C. is an echo chamber in which anyone who sounds authoritative repeats the conventional authoritative wisdom about the "consensus" of inside opinion, which they've heard from someone else who sounds equally authoritative, who of course has heard it from another authoritative source. Follow the trail to its start and you often find an obscure congressional or White House staffer who has seen some half-assed poll number or briefing memo, but seeking to feel important hypes it a media personality or lobbyist who, desperate to sound authoritative, pronounces it as truth. In any other place on the planet it would be called rumor, gossip, or drivel. In our nation's capital it's called "inside information." The process would be harmless except that it creates self-fulfilling prophesies. Since most of our elected representatives would rather not stick their necks out lest they lose their heads, they tend to rush toward whatever consensus seems to be emerging -- which, of course, is based on authoritative reports about the emerging consensus.

In the last few days authoritative sources have repeatedly told me that the public option is dead, that the President won't be able to get a comprehensive health care bill, and that the White House and congressional leadership already know the best they'll be able to do now is move incrementally -- starting with insurance reforms such as barring insurers from using someone's preexisting health conditions to deny coverage -- with the hope of more reforms in the years ahead. The rightwing media fearmongers and demagogues have won.

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I just got the latest mailing from the great Israeli organization Zochrot, about a tour they organized last Saturday to the ruins of the Palestinian village al-Damun.

This report is written is such a vivid and humanistic way, it really brings to life the pain and other emotions of those ethnic-Palestinian Israelis who took part! (Scroll down to see the photos there, too.)

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One day when I was working at the Senate my parents came to Washington on one of their rare visits. I met them in the cafeteria. We had lunch. Then we headed to the Senate subway to ride it back to the Capitol.

And then, standing right there waiting for a trolley car, stood Ted Kennedy, alone.

Of course, I saw him all the time in the Russell building (I worked for Carl Levin and both senators had offices there) but my parents -- liberals like you read about -- had never seen him. Never. And they loved the Kennedys, especially the Trinity of Jack, Bobby and Ted. Plus Jackie, John John, and Caroline.

I walked over to Kennedy (he could see I was staff from my badge) and said, "Senator, could I introduce you to my parents.

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1. Senator, The Messenger of Fort Dodge, IA reports that a World War II veteran named Tom Eisenhower said at your Monday town meeting in Pocahontas:

The president of the United States, that's who you should be concerned about. Because he's acting like a little Hitler, I'd take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me.

This Youtube shows that you did not say a word about your constitutent's threat.
What is your view of "taking a gun to Washington"? Why didn't you say so on Monday?

2. The Messenger goes on to quote you:

"I'm not going to vote for any bill I'm not going to read," said the senator, as the audience rang out with applause.

The Patriot Act of 2001 was 342 pages long. You voted for it. Did you read it? The 2007 omnibus spending bill was 613 pages long. You voted for it. Did you read it?

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It is a small part of his great legacy but it should not go unmentioned that Ted Kennedy was one of the few senators who rarely, if ever, yielded to the pressure to join the Israel-is-always-right caucus. The mindless jingoism of his colleagues was not his way (nor is it John Kerry's) and when he addressed the Israeli-Palestinian issue, he was compassionate and even-handed. He was not your standard "liberal on everything but Israel" type.

Professor Leonard Fein from Boston (of Americans for Peace Now) -- who has spent a lifetime struggling for Middle East peace -- offers this beautiful remembrance of Ted Kennedy today. He describes a small incident in Kennedy's long life but one that tells us a lot about the man.

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I first met Ted Kennedy in the fall of 1995. The context was truly bizarre.

Alan Greenspan had testified to the Senate Finance Committee in the fall of 1994 that the consumer price index (CPI) overstated the true rate of inflation. He told the committee that if it lowered the annual cost of living adjustment (COLA) for Social Security to correspond to the true rate of inflation, rather than the CPI, it could largely eliminate the budget deficit.

Greenspan told the committee that the gap was between 1-2 percentage points annually, so that after a decade, his plan would cut annual Social Security payments by more than 10 percent. And, the great thing was that Congress could do this cut by claiming it was just a technical adjustment.

Over the next half year, the idea of changing the COLA for Social Security gained considerable support in Congress from both parties. (Daniel Moynihan was the strongest proponent.) There was also support for the idea in the Clinton White House.

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Unlike Yasir Arafat's periodic declarations, Salam Fayyad's announcements that his government is preparing the institutions of statehood, irrespective of negotiations with Israel, should be taken seriously--and welcomed. As I argue in a forthcoming article in October's Harper's, Fayyad is no mere technocrat. He represents, and is organizing, precisely the business and professional class that can bring off his vision.Palestinians, too, can create facts. Ironically, Fayyad's political strategy mirrors historic Zionism's success.

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We will miss Senator Ted Kennedy as a nation, and I will miss him as a human being. Over the next few months, as we debate his life's passion, which was Universal Health Care, we will feel his presence everywhere. He will be in the Senate Chamber, in the committee rooms, in the White House, and in the minds of most of the reporters old enough to have witnessed the trajectory of this extraordinary generation of America's First Family from it's beginning. Much has been written about Ted Kennedy already. He was indeed extraordinary. My mother, who was a solid Upper East Side Republican until 2004, once happened to sit next to him at a wedding of a mutual friend. She had never met him before. I'm sure the exchange was lively, and being a Dean, I doubt my mother gave him much quarter. A week later, a beautiful, kind, and very personal handwritten letter arrived from Ted Kennedy. My mother, like so many other Americans, was hooked by the Kennedy charm and grace.

Ted Kennedy was a man with a long career of determination as well as charm. When President Obama signs a Health Care Reform bill late this year, Ted Kennedy may not be standing there next to him, but his presence will be deeply apparent in the Oval Office as the President's pen moves across the page.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy died of brain cancer late last night at the age of 77. In honor of the liberal lion of the Senate, tributes are already pouring in from leaders across the United States and the world - but we want to hear your stories as well. Consider this the open thread for sharing your personal memories of and experiences with Ted Kennedy.

So at least some of the TARP money the government put into the banks last fall appears to be making a profit:

The US government...is sitting on a paper profit of almost $11bn on its 34 per cent shareholding in Citigroup, its only direct stake in a large financial institution...The government said it had earned an annualised return of 23 per cent from its $10bn investment in Goldman Sachs under Tarp. In June, Goldman returned the $10bn and later paid another $1.1bn to buy back warrants attached to Tarp aid. Morgan Stanley, American Express and other banks have done the same, leaving taxpayers with substantial profits.

Back in September, I was in the minority on the left in thinking the TARP bailout plan, with all it's flaws, was better than the status quo and so far evidence is that not only did the plan help stabilize the financial system, it won't cost taxpayers anywhere near the amount feared by critics-- and many of the TARP investments will end up netting profits to the governemnt that can be used for other needs.

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So the good Senator Grassley, who was not so long ago recommending the moonbat Glenn Beck's book, is up in arms at the prospect of a public option:

"Government is not a competitor, it's a predator," he said of the public option that has been embraced by key congressional Democrats. "We'd have 120 million people opt out [of private insurance], then pretty soon everyone is in health care under the government and there's no competitor."

Let's see: And why might hordes of people opt out of private insurance if they had the choice? (Informed estimates are far lower than Grassley's 120 million, but that's not the point.) Could it be that they would rationally judge that a public option would do better for them than private insurance companies that rip people off, dump them when they can, sometimes impose lifetime ceilings (aka rationing), virtually monopolize many markets, charge a gross overhead, require a vast expenditure of bookkeeping hours filling out the many different forms that each company in its distinct wisdom requires, and above all seek to maximize profit?

My excellent general practitioner left his profession a few years ago because he was so sick of the paperwork (more than 90 different forms!) and overall hassle.

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Lucianne Goldberg once said that she would have to shut down her rightwing web site if Ted Kennedy or Hillary Clinton died to avoid all the celebrating from her people.

Well, today she did close the Kennedy threads after allowing a sample to have their say. This is the right in all its ugliness. (Note: they always do this. If a small town Democratic mayor somewhere dies of cancer at 35, these people sing and dance).

Another argument for reconciliation. It is impossible to compromise with people like this. The right is nuts (no matter what those GOP senators graciously say about their fallen colleague).

America has had a few precious individuals who are both passionate about social justice and also understand deep in their bones its practical meaning. And we have had a few who possess great political shrewdness and can make the clunky machinery of democratic governance actually work. But I have known but one person who combined all these traits and abilities. His passing is an inestimable loss.

Most Americans will never know how many things Ted Kennedy did to make their lives better, how many things he prevented that would have hurt them, and how tenaciously he fought on their behalf. In 1969, for example, he introduced a bill in the Senate calling for universal health insurance, and then, for the next forty years, pushed and prodded colleagues and presidents to get on with it. If and when we ever achieve that goal it will be in no small measure due to the dedication and perseverance of this one remarkable man. We owe it to him and his memory to do it soon and do it well.

Since Congress began considering healthcare reform, conservatives and their industry allies -so-called opponents of healthcare reform- have embarked on a shameless misinformation campaign about the consequences and implications of expanding access to affordable coverage. Here, debunked, are three of the right wing's most widely circulated myths about reform.

Myth 1: Healthcare reform will limit patient choice and lead to socialized medicine. The Republican alternative to President Obama's health reform efforts-the Patients' Choice act-states, "The Federal government would run a health care system-or a public plan option-with the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the post office, and the incompetence of Katrina." The Cato Institute has published a brief asking "does Barack Obama Support Socialized Medicine" before suggesting that "reasonable people can disagree over whether obama's health plan would be good or bad. But to suggest that it is not a step toward socialized medicine is absurd." (Patients' Choice Act Summary, May 20, 2009; Cato Institute, October 7, 2008)

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Howard Dean writes that when it comes to health care "The real issue is: Should we give Americans under the age of sixty-five the same choice we give Americans over sixty-five?"

This is without a doubt an important issue, but I think progressives do ourselves a disserve when we proclaim it "the" "real" issue as if all other aspects of the health reform debate are somehow trivial or fake. Consider the basic problem of the self-employed person looking to buy insurance on the individual market. Well, if he tries to buy insurance the insurer will naturally wonder why he wants it. Is he sick? Absent the sort of large risk-pool provided by a large employer, nobody wants to sell insurance to anyone who wants to buy it. Consequently, nobody can buy any decent insurance on the individual market and everyone's ability to get health care winds up inextricably tied-up with their job. The solution is regulation -- make companies stop discriminating against people who may need health care. But this creates a new problem -- if insurers charge everyone the same flat average premium, the pool of people who actually buy insurance will be disproprortionately weighted to those (older people, women, those who are already sick) with higher-than-average costs. Consequently, insurers would go out of business and nobody would have insurance.

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Today, as expected, the White House announced that the deficit projections are worse than it had thought. And as expected, the same old group of deficit hystrics went ballistic. "A 10-year deficit of $9 trillion is $30,000 for each man, woman and child in the United States!" kabaam. "Public debt will total a whopping $17.5 trillion by 2019 — three-quarters of the nation's entire economy!" Kaboom. "The number would send Reagan's stack of thousand-dollar bills into satellite orbit!" Zowee.

Can we please relax?

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I am one of the old time Zionists. I'm proud of Israel and hate the occupation. I am proud of the Israeli army and air force and, like some Quentin Tarantino character, fantasize about an alternate universe in which it was there for us 70 years ago. POW! Bomb Hitler's bunker. POW! Bomb the the Nuremberg Rally. POW. Bomb the German army to smithereens before it even gets near Czechoslovakia and Poland.

I am grateful to live ar a time when there is a Jewish state while wishing it would not use its power to prevent Palestinians from having their own truly independent and secure state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

I guess that all means that I am a left-wing Zionist.

Alot of things distinguish left-wing from right-wing Zionists. Obviously, we differ on the issue of a Palestinian state, the settlements and the brutality of the occupation.

But there is one more way we differ. Left-wing Zionists are not crybabies. We are proud of the Zionist enterprise and the fact that it led to a Jewish state with a fantastic Jewish army and air force. We tend not to get hysterical with worry that Iran is about to destroy Israel because, even if it wanted to, we do not believe Iran could do it. And we tend not to go into the fetal position over every random manifestation of anti-Semitism.

After all, what was the point of having a Jewish country if we had to be afraid all the time?

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The President did the right thing in renominating Ben Bernanke to be Fed Chair, but the Senate should couple its vote to confirm him with new legislation requiring the Fed to be far more open about its doings.

If you'd have asked me three months ago whether Bernanke would be confirmed, I'd have said no. Congress (and much of the public) is still furious about the bank bailouts, as well they should be. TARP saved the Wall Street but Wall Street still hasn't saved Main Street, which was the publicly-stated purpose of the bailouts. The only clear outcome of the taxpayers' $600 billion rescue package is a return to giant salaries and bonuses on the Street.

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Is town-meeting craziness genetic and exclusive to right-wingers? The left-activist historian Rick Perlstein implied so recently in an engaging summary of their eruptions over the years. But to really unpack the orchestrated, perverse passion we've just seen, analyze this:

As New York Mayor Ed Koch rose to address the American Public Health Association in 1979, demonstrators chanted, "Racist Koch, you can't hide. We charge you with genocide." As they pelted him with eggs, Nayvin Gordon, M.D., 31, and two other doctors emerged onstage and grabbed him before being wrestled down by Koch and others.

An isolated incident? Progressive "boomers" who disrupted public meetings and goosed sensation-hungry media in youth are having senior moments about it all and complaining that journalists now dignify political insanity as never before.

Not quite! To see how current protesters miss the real causes and proper targets of their misspent rage, start with a glance in the mirror. It'll show that while progressives got some things right that the right gets wrong, those differences weren't always very clear.

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While employers are guaranteed the right to purchase health insurance, the great majority of states -- which govern the individual insurance marketplace -- do not extend the same protection to Americans who buy individual insurance politics. In most states, "insurers can refuse to sell individuals policies based on their health, recreational activities, occupations, credit histories, and a variety of other factors" -- and state governments do little to stop them. As a recent Families USA report observed, "[States] are doing very little to provide basic protections for health care consumers and many are turned down from coverage or are charged unaffordable premiums or have their health claims wrongfully denied."

Insurance companies earn enormous returns for their chairmen and shareholders, becoming successful by insuring only healthy people while rescinding coverage once a person becomes ill.

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Ah, August - allegedly the slowest news month of the year, according to general wisdom among the media and political junkies. Not so this year, despite Congress being on recess and Obama now on vacation. The battle for health care reform has never been hotter, with one side worried about death panels and socialism, the other fighting for the public option, and everyone in between commenting on the funding and breadth of proposed programs. See TPMDC for blow-by-blow coverage of the debate.

That said, we have a rather special and timely book club this week, with former DNC head, Vermont governor, and presidential candidate Dr. Howard Dean joining TPMCafe for a discussion of what real health care reform means. He'll be joined by an expert panel of strong voices on reform to talk about his book, Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care for Every American and Make Our Jobs Safer. It's a discussion not to be missed - join us.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) will release a new set of economic and budget projections for the next decade on Tuesday. These projections are likely to show a cumulative deficit over the next 10 years that is $2 trillion higher (@ 1 percent of GDP) than the deficit CBO projected in January.

The reason for the higher projected deficit is not that Congress has suddenly blown another 2 trillion of the taxpayers' dollars on frivolous projects. Rather, the main reason for the jump in the projected deficit is that CBO is now projecting lower growth and higher unemployment over this decade than it did last January.

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Guns, ammo and paraphernalia were bought and sold like baseball trading cards at sixty-one gun shows in twenty-seven states during the ten days between August 14 and August 23. Certainly, there are still sportsmen at these gun shows who use their rifles for hunting game and their pistols for target shooting competitions. A few collectors remain, who display antique weapons in the same way as their cousins might collect stamps, particularly at the smaller weekend events. Nevertheless, as anyone who has been around these shows long enough to remember the time when mahogany exhibits of Civil War muskets were the rule and not the exception, the larger expos have changed. Fewer deer rifles and more assault-style guns are sold each year. Hunter orange has been replaced by camouflage fatigues. Preparing for societal collapse has taken precedent over cleaning and oiling up your 30-06 bolt action Springfield.

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You know the saying: life is unpredictable, eat dessert first!

I think it applies to the present moment when we Democrats control both Houses and the Presidency.

It is all very nice to think about the long-term and how it might be lovely to have a bipartisan bill. But that is just old think. LBJ wanted (and got) the GOP on board for his major initiatives but that was not today's GOP. The GOP members of Congress in the 60's were mostly moderates; the radical rightists like Goldwater opposed all Johnson's initiatives including Medicare and civil rights. Not even LBJ would bother reaching for bipartisanship with a GOP made up almost entirely of legislators well to the right of Goldwater.

Johnson, whose 101st birthday is today, understood that he had better get his program enacted during his first two years because after that the GOP would be strong enough to block his efforts. So he passed the most important domestic legislation of modern times between 1964 and 1966. In November 1966, the GOP picked up 47 seats and the Great Society was pretty much finished.

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Today's Ha'aretz reports that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is giving Special Envoy George Mitchell his answer on the matter of Jerusalem's status and settlements.

"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to tell the special U.S. Mideast envoy on Monday that Israel will not accept any limitations on its sovereignty over Jerusalem, and will allow settlers to continue to live in the West Bank," the paper reports.

In other words, Netanyahu is flat-out rejecting the President's proposals and is also telling the Palestinians that they can forget about negotiations. He knows that if the book is closed on Jerusalem and settlements the Palestinians will understand that all they can do is negotiate the terms of their surrender.

I hear from Israel that Netanyahu's rebuff to Obama is a direct result of his perception of Obama's declining fortunes here. He sees what is happening with the health reform issue and Obama's fall in the polls and believes he can prevail over, what he hopes is. a President on the ropes permanently.

This is just one more reason for Obama to forget about Republicans and Blue Dogs and enact the strongest bill possible -- with a powerful public component -- by including health care reform it in the reconciliation bill and passing it with a simple majority.

We'll have universal coverage, Obama will look like the leader we know he is. And all the international players who are counting on his failure, like Netanyahu who works closely with the Republicans, would take serious notice.

The majority rules in this country. And we Democrats have it. We should use it. The implications of failure, or a half victory, will affect every aspect of Obama's Presidency. Thanks to Netanyahu for reminding us.

Mark Schmitt worries over at the American Prospect that the U.S. labor movement is so weakened that we are in danger of constructing an effete liberal coalition of "minority, professional, and younger voters" lacking white working class voters. I'll leave it to others to parse the polling data on voting patterns and instead challenge his argument on the weakening centrality of the labor movement to the Democratic coalition. Let's start with his major piece of evidence:

Labor's lack of clout to pass EFCA in even the most overwhelmingly Democratic -- and progressive -- Congress in decades is an indication that we already have a successful progressive movement in which labor plays only a modest role.

So what does this say about the centrality of labor in the last seventy-four years in which no other major pro-labor law reform was passed, despite many years when Democrats had even greater numbers, as during the Great Society? In fact, we had quite large numbers of Democrats in the past vote for the viciously anti-labor 1947 Taft-Hartley law (creating "right to work" rules and massively limiting union organizing and strikes) and the 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act (restricting union picketing and negotiating rights). In fact, when EFCA comes to a vote, it will no doubt have a higher percentage of Democrats taking a pro-labor position than any other labor legislation since the Wagner Act.

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Look at where we are. We have a Democratic Congress which is refusing to enact the program of a Democratic President (who won a landslide victory running on that program).

What gives?

There are several different factors at play but the biggest one, the one that trumps every other factor, is the intense desire of members of Congress to stay in Congress for their entire careers.

I worked on the Hill for 20 years and whenever a Democrat (I'm sure it's the same with Republicans) is presented with any idea that might cost a few votes or campaign contributions, the response is "no" followed by: "So you want me to stick my neck out on (single payer, gay rights, the Israeli occupation, whatever) and lose the election. I guess you think it would be better if some other guy had this seat."

I have heard this over and over again. You think the Blue Dogs really oppose Obama's plan? I suppose a few do, just the way a few Congressional Democrats really support Israeli policies in West Bank/Gaza. But most are just too scared to buck powerful lobbies, and the loud single-issue voters affiliated with lobbies.

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