barth's Blogtag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//16192009-11-08T01:48:45ZMovable Type Pro 4.21-enMissing President Bush but trying to learn lessons anywaytag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.3007502009-11-07T17:20:13Z2009-11-08T01:48:45ZDo we miss him yet? Republicans surely don't, but maybe the rest of us, motivated by the daily mess created and exacerbated by the least competent person to serve as president since either Andrew Johnson or James Buchanan, do. It...barthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
Do we miss him yet? Republicans surely don't, but maybe the rest of us, motivated by the daily mess created and exacerbated by the least competent person to serve as president since either Andrew Johnson or James Buchanan, do. It was, after all, his blundering and constant attempts to feather the nests of his benefactors and friends that showed our less progressive friends and relatives that assault on government was inspired by nothing more than greed and was not in the best interests of anybody but those who directly benefited from the bizarro operation of government by those dedicated to its destruction.]]>
What happened Tuesday really has no overarching importance. I voted at high noon on Tuesday at a polling place that was practically overrun a year ago, and where I was the only voter to be seen for the ten minutes or so I hung around. As much as I believe that everyone should vote every time they are permitted to, in memory of those who gave their lives to give us that opportunity, if for no other reason, I really cannot fault the Virginia or New Jersey Democrat who could not be bothered to vote their party's candidate this week. Neither gets an ounce of my sympathy, though I am sorry for both states, especially New Jersey which will have to slide back into a form of Bush-like government with one of his clones and disciples in Drumthwacket, the curiously named Governor's mansion.
The talking heads, unbowed by their repeated announcements of the President's inabiity to defeat his primary opponents, or the McCain surge after his "brilliant" pick of a vice presidential candidate, cannot be stopped from their silly bilge. The silliest I am able to stomach, Mourning Joe, whose celebration of imaginary Republican victories would put Baghdad Bob to shame, and his stupid beyond all belief sidekick, were just full of headshaking crocodile tears for the end of the dreams of the Obama administration and health care reform based on the election results (even while warning against drawing broad conclusions from them. Yet, through all the bile one thing did seem worth noting and they did, as I have as well.
It is that the electorate is unusually angry. They have no real cause to be angry. What has happened has happened in their plain sight and, in voting for The Idiot in 2004 to demonstrate their support for "a good guy" over someone who liked windsurfing, brought all of this on all of us, but we are not allowed to say that the electorate is stupid.
But they are and they are blameless and, indeed, there are ample reasons for their anger. We were driven to the edge of a cliff a year ago, by people with resources beyond the dreams of most of us, and the government which is supposed to protect all of us, was even stirred into immediate action. Yet when our new president sought to get us off the matThese Rich People put us on, only the most limited of a New Deal could be enacted, sort of a New Paperclip because the moneyed class and the political party they control announced they would do nothing to help since their party was no longer being allowed to control any branch of the government.
Rather than insure that The People could never do this again; rather than restore the regulatory protections that the Roosevelt administration pushed to prevent another Depression, which the aftermath of their repeal, if nothing else, proved their effectiveness, Congress --- in the darkness created by an obsession with less important things --- went back to their old ways to protect their contributors rather than do what they were elected to do.
Neither can we do anything about global warming, campaign finance reform, a proliferation of guns to the point that even people on a military base are not safe, an educational system sliding into the ocean as what teachers are not fired can longer afford to live on the salaries they are paid. We just can't.
Yes, the electorate is angry, and though their anger ought to be somewhat self-directed and they have not lived up to their own responsibilities there are ample reasons for their anger. The New Deal happened for many reasons, but one of them was a real fear of revolution from a public thoroughly fed up with a government that could not respond to the crisis at hand. No political party saw profit in that state of affairs, a circumstance that may not exist today.
We are coming to the same place now and coming real fast. It is time to stop yelling at one another on cable tv, and for something real to start happening.]]>
One year latertag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2997502009-11-03T14:44:42Z2009-11-03T20:05:07ZPresident Kennedy's inauguration on January 20, 1961 is the first Great National Event which I can actually recall. The flights of Alan B. Shepherd and John Glenn, leading to the actual exploration of another celestial body in 1969 also come...barthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
President Kennedy's inauguration on January 20, 1961 is the first Great National Event which I can actually recall. The flights of Alan B. Shepherd and John Glenn, leading to the actual exploration of another celestial body in 1969 also come to mind, as does the fall of the Berlin Wall, a tribute to the airlift in 1948 in President Truman's administration and President Kennedy's endorsement of the hopes of "free men everywhere" as it is to anything or anyone else.
And then there is Election Day, 2008. Hope. Freedom. Renewal. Long lines of people in states where their vote has no real bearing on the outcome, wanting to be part of something. And they were. And we are on our way to becoming once again, the land of the free and the brave; the last best hope for mankind.
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This was not the only placewhere there appeared reminders of President Kennedy's warnings against a belief that things happen instantaneously and without hard work yet with the mission clearly stated: "but let us begin." To those impatient with the pace of change and with our frightened opponents using everything in their discredited playbook to slow us down, today might be a good day to reflect on what has taken place over the first year since our liberation. Eugene Robinson is, as always, very helpful in that regard.
Do not let the Mourning Joes and the other leftovers from the discredited past rain on our parade today. Jon Corzine certainly deserves to be re-elected against the symbol of the Bush administration who is opposing him, but Corzine's ego, and enormous wealth amassed at, of all places, Goldman Sachs, puts his election in jeopardy. In Virginia, a remnant of the old Democratic Party got the nomination over a Bill Clinton sycophant, and then promptly tried to tell everyone he is a different Democrat than President Obama. He deserves to lose and will. That what is left of the Republican Party is self destructing before our very eyes in the northernmost reaches of the State of New York is not our struggle; it is theirs.
None of these races will say anything about the Obama administration, no matter what you hear from the electronic box tonight. If President Obama does not agree with everything you espouse, try to think about the alternatives. . Go out and vote today: if you live in New York City you can even vote on the Republican line for a Kennedy Democrat running to be re-elected as Mayor, but spend tonight in celebration of what we finally accomplished last year and of all that is before us until we make it all the way back.
A Postscript: Much commentary abounds today about what Election Day, plus one year means including this from Ms. Huffington complaining that the president is too "timid" in the way he "governs." Someone I know responds as follows:
Brainwashed as so many of us have been by Presidents talking in the first person about about what "I am going to do" in office (even to the extent of Bush II calling the United States "my country" in the sense that he is its personification) many of us believe that we elect a president to "govern." Governing under our system is a more complicated process which, sadly, has broken down under the weight of the enormous television imposed costs of political campaigns and the means by which they are financed. It is not the President's "timidity" which retards our progress, but the effects of a corrupting system which like a virus, also gets in the way of any attempt to cure us of it.
As much as low level "corruption" of the process has always been with us---it is somewhat inevitable to the republican system---two factors have worked together to make a difficult situation that much worse over about the last 30 years: they are Buckley v Valeo, where the Supreme Court seriously retarded the Watergate-inspired attempts to control campaign financing and spending and the tremendous growth of television as to only real way to effectively campaign for office. I am sorry the President has disappointed you, but he is far from the being the problem which is very serious and, worse, may beyond our ability to repair.]]>
Liebermantag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2992892009-10-31T21:19:28Z2009-10-31T21:59:06ZI came late to the bash Lieberman party. Orthodoxy, or knee jerkism has never much appealed to me and I do not expect or even want politicians to agree with me on every issue. I voted for Presidents Carter and...barthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
I came late to the bash Lieberman party. Orthodoxy, or knee jerkism has never much appealed to me and I do not expect or even want politicians to agree with me on every issue. I voted for Presidents Carter and Clinton twice in general elections each even though their version of a Democratic Party is not mine, nor that of Presidents Franklin D Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, but they were better candidates than their opponents, so I did what one does.
Moreover, the state Attorneys General who fought back when the Reagan Justice Department abandoned so many of its traditional functions (at least since the Kennedy years), included Connecticut's Lieberman and that was worthy of some respect, it seemed to me. ]]>
While I did not agree with Senator Lieberman's views on the war in Iraq, the issue was, as somewhat discussed here, a closer one than many on this site will concede. That Senator Lieberman supported President Bush on this issue could not be a disqualifier in and of itself. It was a tough time when that vote was taken, and three Senators who I admire cast a vote opposite from what I thought was the right one (Kerry, Clinton and Edwards, of course) so another wrong vote could not justify a primary vote to deny the party's nomination for another term for the same Senator who should have been elected Vice President in 2000.
I should have known better (as should Vice President Gore). More importantly, Connecticut voters should have known better. President Roosevelt taught us the lesson of just how far the party label can take us, and he did it about 14 years before I was born.
It was 1938 when President Roosevelt made clear what Democrats were trying to ignore. The huge majorities they had in the Congress were illusory and while the despair of what President Hoover had wrought, and the Great Depression which the country was in, permitted the President elected in 1932 a great deal of leeway in fashioning the New Deal, the moment the emergency ended, the fact that the "party" such as it was consisted of a loose coalition of true New Dealers and the racist pols of the south who were Democrats since the period before the Civil War and remained so through Reconstruction and for many years thereafter.
The most progressive Democratic President before Franklin Roosevelt was Woodrow Wilson. He was as "progressive" as the southern wing would tolerate, and for all his brilliance, was a racist as anyone else. Yet, until President Roosevelt's control of the party ended the "2/3 rule" which effectively gave the south a veto over the party's presidential nominee, that was as good as the party could be.
Frustrated by the alliance of southern "Democrats" and conservative northern Republicans who were increasingly opposing New Deal proposals, President Roosevelt tried to back candidates to run against the worst of these so-called "Democrats." And, friends, when I say worst, I mean worse than anything you can imagine from a 2009 vantage point.
To many Southern Democrats, it was strong medicine when in 1932 Franklin Roosevelt wooed the Northern Black Belt as no Democrat had done in mortal memory. When he gave Negroes prominent seats at his inauguration, put them in bigger jobs than they ever held in a Democratic administration, Southern Democrats tried hard to swallow it as political expediency. Such demagogues as Georgia's Eugene Talmadge gagged for public edification when, during the 1936 campaign, Mrs. Roosevelt was photographed between two young Negro officers of the R.O.T.C. at Washington's Howard University. But in this year's primary fight, Demagogue Talmadge's fire has been directed at Roosevelt's wooing Negro votes far below the Mason-Dixon line. Moreover, for the first time in years, South Carolina's Ellison D. ("Cotton Ed") Smith, who walked out of the 1936 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia when a Negro pastor was called on to pray, last month managed to put some life into his traditional campaign plank: White Supremacy.
1938 was a bad election year for the New Deal and President Roosevelt, and it basically ended the progressive movement in its highest 1933ish sense until President Truman introduced the Fair Deal after the war, and desegregated the armed forces. But 1938 was a good year, too. It established once and for all what the Democratic Party would become, an event not fully realized until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began the realignment of the parties into the structure we have today, where the Republican Party essentially represents the views of the southerners who brought down the New Deal.
But, as it turns out, not all of these regressive faux Democrats have left our party, and not all of them are southerners trying to appeal to people from whom race is always the deciding factor or people who have good records opposing racial classifications but otherwise hold the anti-government, let them eat cake philosophy that President Hoover allowed to all but destroy our nation. Some are actually secret Republicans (of the 1950s variety) pretending to be Democrats. The aforementioned Presidents Carter and Clinton fit, to one degree or another, that description.
And then there is Connecticut. One of its 1950s Senators, Prescott Bush, had a respectable record on civil rights and was one of the leading Republicans to oppose Senator Joseph McCarthy and his methods, at least when it became possible to do so without being tarred as a Communist.
Senator Bush's son and ne'er do well grandson both became President, of course, but his real heir in smiling yankee Republicanism appears to have been Senator Joseph Lieberman. Sen Lieberman was first elected to his current position by defeating Sen Lowell Weicker, another of those guys who just failed to see that the Republican Party had moved away from where it had been in the Eisenhower days. Senator Weicker was, as Senator Kennedy's book reminds us, a supporter of massive reform of the way we insure our citizens against the cost of medical care.
Yes, well what a Democrat means to me is what it meant in 1960 when President Kennedy summoned my generation into public service. It meant the dream of opportunity and freedom here at home and throughout the world. President Kennedy said that "freedom doesn't come from the generosity of the state, it comes from the hand of God."
And America's mission is to pay any price, bear any burden, support any friend, and oppose any foe to assure the success and survival of liberty. In our time, the Democratic Party has been the great hope of people rising in our country, and it remains that way.
That's why I say he's running a single issue campaign. Every campaign, as President Clinton reminded us, is about the future. And what I'm saying to the people of Connecticut, I can do more for you and your families to get something done to make health care affordable, to get universal health insurance, to make America energy independent, to save your jobs and create new ones. That's what the Democratic Party is all about.
He is a single issue candidate who is applying a litmus test to me. It's not good enough to be 90 percent voting with my colleagues in the Senate Democratic Caucus. He wants 100 percent. And when a party does that, it's the beginning of the defeat of that party.
I want Democrats to be back in the majority in Washington and elect a Democratic president in 2008. This man and his supporters will frustrate and defeat our hopes of doing that.
That was, of course, a lie. And it was an easily documentable lie. For instance, read this fascinating piece from the New York Times in early 1993:
The First Lady said the Administration was willing to consider changes in President Clinton's health care plan so long as the final product guaranteed "universal coverage with comprehensive benefits." She said that the only proposals that earned serious consideration by those standards were the President's plan and those offered by liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans.
They are "the only ones that recognize the importance of achieving universal coverage," Mrs. Clinton said in a meeting with 22 journalists at the White House.
She brushed aside other plans put forward by conservative Democrats, notably Representative Jim Cooper of Tennessee and Senator John B. Breaux of Louisiana, saying they did not guarantee universal health coverage.
Mr. Breaux's bill has been endorsed by two influential Senate Democrats, Sam Nunn of Georgia and Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, and Senator Dave Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota. Mr. Cooper has 49 co-sponsors in the House -- 22 Republicans and 27 Democrats. Thus, Mrs. Clinton today declared herself squarely against a sizable bloc of lawmakers in a fight in which every vote counts.
"I believe a lot of Democrats who had previously voted for President Reagan and President Bush voted for President Clinton because they really felt he was a different kind of Democrat," said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who is a vice-chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. The council is the centrist group once led by Mr. Clinton that defined the New Democrat.
"In the first four months of the Government, there has been some disappointment both on a policy ground and a personnel ground," Mr. Lieberman said.
Yet there was Senator Reid and President Obama assuring us last December that Fox News' favorite Democrat, the guy who campaigned against the election of a Democratic Party nominee for President, spoke that the Republican National Convention and supported several of its candidates for seats in a Congress he claim to hope would be in control of the Democratic Party, telling us that all of that was out of deep friendship with Senator McCain and meant nothing significant. The FOX News people could barely disguise their glee at yet another example of feckless, unprincipled Democrats, as they showed Senator Reid explain:
Joe Lieberman is a Democrat. He is part of this caucus.
especially savvy because Obama and Senate majority leader Harry Reid know that in order to achieve virtually anything on the Democrats' long list of ambitious legislation, they will need every vote they can possibly get in the Senate. Obama's biggest challenge in both chambers of Congress will be keeping the varying factions of his own party together, especially the more liberal members and the more conservative so-called Blue Dog Democrats. To that end, Lieberman can be an asset, especially in helping to convince his fellow moderate members in the so-called Gang of 14, which includes some Republicans like McCain and Lindsey Graham. "We need every person that we can in Congress working constructively to move forward with the new agenda for our country," says Senator Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat. "Look, we're the majority party, we have the responsibility to act, and we've got to bring in the broadest possible coalition in order to get that done, and Senator Lieberman can be a very valuable member of our team."
"This is the beginning of a new chapter, and I know that my colleagues in the Senate Democratic caucus were moved not only by the kind words that Senator Reid said about my longtime record but by the appeal from President-elect Obama himself that the nation now unite to confront our very serious problems,"
I am not sure whether it was the incoming White House that really showed a lack of resolve and principle or whether it was the Reid people, but all those who went along with this foolishness should either fix this or hang their heads in shame over what they did to their own agenda. This is how President Carter wrecked his presidency moments after taking office by not understanding who his friends would be, and that he needed friends and to keep his enemies on the defensive. By 1980 President Carter's uselessness made Senator Kennedy our only hope, but the nonsense that passes for political thought in this country brought us President Reagan instead. I have higher hopes for President Obama, the only person I have ever voted for in a primary who was then elected President but this should be a lesson learned that will not be forgotten.
And, of course, the real villain of this piece is Senator Lieberman himself. He often sees himself as on a higher moral plane than the rest of us and his lecture to President Clinton in 1998 was certainly justified on that basis. But there is a strong moral component in this health care debate as discussed here, by me, and here, by a rabbi in New York City speaking to a Yom Kippur congregation.(Of course, since the rabbi is a Reform Jew, the antipathy that the Orthodox have toward Reform Jews makes it impossible, most likely, for Senator Lieberman to accept this rabbi was legitimate, but I will not get into that here.)
It is not war, thank God. It is just politics. But there are rules that apply to almost everything we do in all of our endeavors. And this week's Regina Spektor-ism, though written in a completely different context, applies as fully as if she were a political commentator, which she decidedly is not:
Two birds of a feather Say that they're always gonna stay together But one's never going to let go of that wire He says that he will But he's just a liar
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Time magazine nails the health care debatetag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2984172009-10-27T18:20:47Z2009-10-27T18:21:40ZA great piece which really explains the issue, how backward we have become in this area and what the stakes are. They report:While every American may be entitled to at least adequate health care, he is not getting it, and...barthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
A great piece which really explains the issue, how backward we have become in this area and what the stakes are. They report:
While every American may be entitled to at least adequate health care, he is not getting it, and will not, until a momentous national debate reaches election-year levels of acrimony and is somehow resolved.
... Apart from such standpatters ... and its arch-conservative Republican allies, there is a growing consensus that some national insurance blanket must be thrown over the ailing body of health care.
Rarely have I seen such excellent reporting in the mainstream press. The fact that this article appeared in its issue dated March 11, 1970 should not diminish our gratitude to Time for its excellent coverage of this problem. ]]>
Citizen Responsibilitytag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2979372009-10-24T15:36:37Z2009-10-24T15:45:03Zbarthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
If you are of a certain age, you have heard this so many times, you can probably probably feel the beat when it gets played again and again.
As we watch a nearly dysfunctional legislative process try to accomplish what strong majorities of Americans want them to doagainst the will of the torrent of money dangled as campaign contributions before the very eyes of those privileged to serve as our Senators and Representatives, those words, from a cold and snowy January day more than 48 years ago, deserve another reading:
In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.
Now the trumpet summons us again -- not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need -- not as a call to battle, though embattled we are -- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation," a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.
Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?..
I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it. And the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
...[W]hether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.
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He did not serve long enough to be our greatest president, but he was the most inspirational of my lifetime. And the message he sent, that the success of our "endeavor" is the hands of our fellow citizens as much as it is in any president, is not only in keeping with the republican form of democracy under which our nation was established, it is true and proven to be so on issue after issue after issue.
Did Brown versus Board of Education change the racial climate of this country, or the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 or 1964, or was it the Voting Rights Act of 1965? And if it was a court decision, or important legislation, how did that come to happen? Was it because of a particular leader, or was it that the American people finally demanded that it be done (partially, and sadly, as a memorial to its murdered president).
What finally ended the Vietnam War? How was the the expansion of that war into Cambodia stopped? What made Congress pursue a Watergate scandal many of them would rather have swept under the carpet?
Us.
Of course, before "they" make "a statute of Us" we are going to have to do something. We can stop letting some guy who knows about our fleeting attention spans distract our attention by pretending his son is flying around in a aluminum covered helium balloon. We can even stop arguing about whether FOX News is a "news organization" or a "talk radio" outlet (or a dessert topping which doubles as a floor wax).
It is dangerous to talk about politics as if it were war. They are not the same; not even close except when politics fails and war ensues as when our nation was born. But Winston Churchill's famous exhortation to Commons when he was asked to form a wartime government at one of the worst moments in Britain's history has some application to our present situation in describing our collective responsibility:
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat [but] I take up my task in buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. I feel entitled at this juncture, at this time, to claim the aid of all and to say, "Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength."
Our founders explained to "a candid world" that governments
deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed [and t]hat whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government
That does not mean, as Senator Coburn and his ilk suggest, that when one disagrees with the government, that resort to violence is justified. But it means that government has an obligation to be responsive to the will of the people assuming that it does not want to oppress those who disagree. A government that does not do that, is an invitation to anarchy. We cannot allow that to happen.
The loud noises of the summer were, we know now, not functionally different from the story of the boy supposedly flying in a shiny baloon. They were designed to attract the attention of the blow dried cutie pies on television (such as the one who could not tell the difference between Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton), and away from the issues at hand.
That easily performed magician's trick works to allow those with money to flash it around members of Congress who have every reason to consider whether their future in office will be better assured if they vote as the electorate may want, or the way the people with money demand. If the voters are passive, show interest only at election time, and decide which candidate to support based on campaign commercials, the "earth tones" of the clothing worn by the candidate or who is better company while drinking beer, then common sense dictates that one's political position should be up for grabs for whoever can pay for the commercials and consultants that can secure an election.
If, on the other hand, we make noise, we support our candidates not because they agree with us on every vote, but they are honest, and share our general outlook, we can change the world. We can. We have done it many times before.
When one of, our perhaps the, greatest of our presidents assumed office during a financial crisis so deep that banks had to be briefly closed lest they collapse as Americans panicked into thinking their money was safer in mattresses, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the unprecedented step of using radio to speak directly to the nation and, in doing so, explained each person's responsibility for resolving the crisis:
It has been wonderful to me to catch the note of confidence from all over the country. I can never be sufficiently grateful to the people for the loyal support that they have given me in their acceptance of the judgment that has dictated our course, even though all our processes may not have seemed clear to them.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights--among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however--as our industrial economy expanded--these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.
"Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
Our course has been set. We know what our mission is. Only we can achieve it. Let's do it, in the memory of our great leaders, but, more importantly, for ourselves and our posterity.]]>
Voicestag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2965732009-10-17T17:38:32Z2009-10-17T17:51:08ZThe forums created by modern technology allowing for the expressions of pain that some of us feel so often to be heard by those willing to listen provide for sort of an inexpensive therapy, and there is always the chance...barthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
The forums created by modern technology allowing for the expressions of pain that some of us feel so often to be heard by those willing to listen provide for sort of an inexpensive therapy, and there is always the chance somebody will read what is posted and be motivated to do something good for us all. We are reaching the point, though, where those voices better start getting louder and louder because we are in real danger of destroying whatever it is that has connected us as a nation.
Nothing less than our very system of government is at stake. We are watching the spectacle of a Congress beholden to the contributors who make possible their continued hold on office unable to respond to the call of a vast majority to reform health care, to protect our posterity from the doomsday path on which we have placed our nation and to regulate wizards of finance whose obsession with their self-interest have put the financial security and well being of the rest of us in permanent jeopardy. This is a recipe for disaster all by itself and placed side by side with the fact that we are no longer able to have civilized discourse over opposing views, the future looks bleak indeed. ]]>
Power to the people We don't want it We want pleasure And the T.V.s try to rape us And I guess that they're succeeding Now we're going to these meetings But we're not doin' any meetin' And we're trying to be faithful but we're cheatin', cheatin', cheatin'
and so, as Regina knows better than most, we are on the precipice and it remains unclear which way we will go.
There are other voices which are out there, of course. Many of them are expressed in the printed word on Daily Kos, TPM and other places where the devoted can tell one another that they are not alone. Others are on television. Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow are out there teaching and cajoling and Keith Olbermann bared his soul a week or so back and repeated the whole thing last night to demand that our nation rise to the time at hand. If you haven't seen this, stop wasting time here and go watch it.
But I remain forlorn and dubious about the capacity of the system at hand to respond to any crisis or, indeed, the problems which beset us. It is what President Carter was trying to express in what has come to be known as his "malaise speech." But his point, which might have been better expressed, but perhaps not, was well taken. My own inadequately expressed fears have been posted, among other places, here and here, but the point is that if we do not wake up and take responsibility for how poorly our government functions, we invite anarchy or worse.
Yes, the failure to enact campaign finance reform is the primary villain, but as the Star Trek movies explained, once you have been assimilated you lose the ability to fight back, so it is hardly surprising that the forces who control would not allow the process which permits it to allow us to change it and to most people in this country, including the press, and bloggers even on progressive sites, find the subject to boring to even consider. That's how the Borg assimilates you on Star Trek whereupon resistance becomes futile.
Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan -- something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get -- that would compete with private health insurance plans?"
Favor 62 %
Oppose 31 %
Unsure 7 %
John Chancellor once explained that the word "landslide" should only be applied where one side gets 60% of the vote. This polling, which reflects sort of a low point in public support of what some idiot decided we should call "the public option" establishes by that definition landslide support for it.
Yet, Tim Phillips tells Rachel Maddow with a straight face, and backed by much of the press and broadcasters, that most of the public is against "Obamacare" and it is widely reported and said that "the public option is dead."
This is playing with fire, folks. An unresponsive government acting on behalf of its benefactors instead of the people who vote cannot last long. It can last while people are sleeping---which they are---or while they are obsessed by cable driven foolishness about a helium balloon)---which they are, but then something happens and people wake up, though sometimes not for very long. (For the cable nets to rise up against a guy for fooling them, instead of asking themselves how they got so easily fooled is simply amazing.) I wonder if any other president will be reading books to schoolchildren while our nation is being attacked but I am not convinced it is impossible.
Yes, there are voices. I heard Vin Scully a couple of times this week as the Dodgers march on. He is 81 years old now but sounds almost exactly as he did when he was 41, when I first heard him, or when he he was in his sixties, when he broke my heart by describing the "tying run and now the winning run" in 1986. And most importantly, he broadcasts alone and describes baseball in a prose poetry that is worth hearing even if one does not care what he is describing.
That tells us again about the power of words. I heard a judge the other day, a man I have respected, blurble out some nonsensical explanation about why he could not find a politician guilty of a crime that nobody could reasonably believe he did not commit and I was deeply disappointed. It was not just that we have not advanced as far as I had thought, where a man could not attack a woman, even a person too timid to testify against him, and not face meaningful sanction simply because there is no witness to the event who can specifically recount the crime----as if murder could never be prosecuted because, after all, the victim is dead. More than that sad fact was that the language was mangled and reason set on its rear in order for the judge to explain his verdict. If the judge was some old unreconstructed fool, I could understand and hope for better days to come. That is not the case with this judge: a good man who just whiffed when he could have done something important.
But Regina Spektor, once a little 9 1/2 year old girl leaving the land of her birth, the Mother Russia, to flee with her parents from the antisemitism which would have doomed her, to a country that spends as much time trying to rid itself of immigrants as it once welcomed them to our shores, but fortunately found room for Regina, tells us that things change. Take, for instance, "The Man of a Thousand Faces" who
used to go to his favorite bookstores And rip out his favorite pages And stuff them into his breast pockets And the moon to him was a stranger Now he sits down at the table Right next to the window And begins his quiet ascension Without anyone's sturdy instruction To a place where no religion Has found a path to our alikeness And eats a small lump of sugar And smiles at the moon like he knows her
So, we keep going, with hope that we are slowly entering a new age of enlightenment where we, too, can smile at the moon like we know her.
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Filibusters (a special midweek post)tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2964682009-10-16T19:15:41Z2009-10-16T19:18:30Zbarthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
The link here is to the Official Explanation of why, in the current view, the mere threat of a filibuster, is the same as an actual filibuster and why it takes sixty votes to pass a bill in the Senate and not just a simple majority. The link does not explain how, in that event, major legislation has been passed with fewer than the votes needed for cloture nor why advocates for, say, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, stayed with the bill until they got the votes for cloture, rather than just mark it off calendar.
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It's an interesting exercise in the pusillanimous to explain why one has to give up the fight because of a threat of a fight. I will accept that modern practice has made the "cots"-type filibusterdramatized so well on the West Wing to be either passe or fictitious altogether (though I am not convinced that is so).
But accepting this memo as correct, what of it? If Republicans want to keep suggesting the absence of a quorum, to prevent the Senate from voting on a good health care insurance reform bill (preferably a medicaid for all bill, but one with at least some government agency which will provide competitive insurance for those unwilling to accept the gouging of a private money making company with a ballpark named after it) then let them do it. No, it will not be covered on live tv except C-SPAN (the cable nets have flying balloons to cover and would not have time to show quorum call after quorum call, but the fact that the Senate is unable to do any business for this reason will be reported, and, from time to time in this ordeal, perhaps over 50 some odd Democratic Senators could sit in the chamber so that the absurdity of the suggestion of the absence of a quorum was illustrated in a way the fools we live with could understand and the American people would see why they are being denied what a majority of them want.
Senator Reid: why not just try it for a week or so instead of letting Senators Snowe (R-Maine) and Conrad (D-Insurance Companies) write the bill?]]>
Wintertag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2953522009-10-11T20:24:04Z2009-10-11T20:32:36Zbarthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
I know. These pages are meant for the weighty issues of our time, but I have written my diary of the week about such things and now find it is time to contemplate the winter. ]]>
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.
They tried to tell us this all season: our eyes and our hearts deceive us. He is the same Papelbon as he always was; just tryin' out a few new things that did not work.
Yeh, and Papi is back, even though he can't hit a lefty to save his life.
Players get old just like the rest of us. We are grateful for what they've done and resist putting them out to pasture. And, after all, won't Damon be playing tonight? Isn't Pedro pitching tonight?
But I do not regret losing those two guys. They no longer can contribute in the way we---the Boston Red Sox---need them to.
I saw it in midseason and the Joy of Sox people were so upset at my saying so that they all but banished me from their knitting circle. But that could not change the facts. We were relying on ghosts: players whose past cannot make up for what they have in the present.
Theo taught us this lesson. You can't get too attached to these guys. They serve a purpose and then they leave. Sometimes they come back finding the adulation we give them something to treasure. Dewey left; he's back. Jim Ed was angry once; now he's back. Luis went to the Yankees of all things, but he's back. But none of them still play. They all have great meaning for me and I treasure what they gave us when they could. But that was then, and this is now.
I don't know if Daniel Bard is our closer next year. I doubt it. Paps still has a year on his contract and he will have to try very hard to redeem himself, so Bard the Closer can wait a year, I guess.
Ortiz is a platoon DH at best. At best. And Mike Lowell---I love the guy. His big hit in the eighth today reminded me of what a guy he is and I hope when it is all said and done, he, too, stays with us in some way. But as a player, I think we are nearing the end if not at it. Same, in every way, goes for Tek.
It was not a great year for Theo. He made up for it by a few midseason deals. Wagner was worth getting, I guess, considering we gave up nothing for him. Vmart has value though not as much as people keep saying.
I do not think we were ever in the running for Texeira who used us to jack up the price for NY, which is fine with me but we put too many eggs in that basket last off season.
Jason Bay either gives us a hometown discount or can leave with my blessing. He did very well---a more than adequate replacement for That Guy on the Dodgers. But he is not worth the kings ransom people say he is worth. We can do better.
A little more Bart before I go:
Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.
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Why are we in Afghanistan?tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2952672009-10-10T18:22:17Z2009-10-10T18:23:15ZI do not know what to do about Afghanistan. Though I was in high school when this question arose about another war, I did not know what to do about Vietnam either, but I did learn a few things watching...barthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
I do not know what to do about Afghanistan. Though I was in high school when this question arose about another war, I did not know what to do about Vietnam either, but I did learn a few things watching what happened and reading about it for many years since.
And it is this: deciding what to do is not helped by politicians announcing what they would do or suggesting that anything other than saluting and doing exactly what some field commander is treasonous, wimpy or surrender. ]]>
What follows is not for those of you, admirable though your sentiments may be, for whom war is never warranted. This is not for those who believe---who still believe---that the United States should pretend the rest of the world has nothing to do with us. It is definitely not for those who think there is nothing about Afghanistan that should be of concern to those of us living safely over here.
You are entitled to your opinion and in some ways I respect how you come to these views, if that is anything other than simple reflex. I do not agree with them, anymore than, had I been alive in the 1930s, I would like to think I would have urged American involvement in the European mess before our involvement was forced upon us. (That reminds me to note, by the way, that Pat Buchanan, mirroring the views of his 1930s counterparts, is one of those who see nothing of importance for us in Afghanistan. That should be enough to convince you how wrong a view it is, but suspect it does not.)
Well before 9/11 we knew what the Taliban were all about. We heard about ancient Buddhist shrines being destroyed. We knew of the systematic torture of their opponents, and the gross subjugation of women. We saw the evil there, but as in Darfur and Serbia and Cambodia well before that and so on, we did nothing. There was no oil in any of those places. We have our own problems. We can just look the other way, turn the page, tut-tut-tut, if we would like, and think about Ryan Secrist (whoever he is).
Since then, we have read and loved The Kite Runner but the ugly story it tells about life with these thugs does not seem to resonate here in a country once the haven for the oppressed but now obsessed with how to punish "illegal aliens."
Even after 9/11, when there were, apparently, next to nobody involved in these matters who did not know that those attacks were launched by people who were permitted to exist, and train and recruit and plan by the Taliban which controlled Afghanistan, many in the United States government, including, tragically, the throughly incompetent President of the United States and the shortsighted Secretary of Defense, had no interest in ridding Afghanistan of these evil people. Richard Clarke tells us that the Defense Secretary wondered what purpose there was in making the rubble bounce, and the President grabbed Clarke by the lapels to tell him, in essence, I don't care about Afghanistan; I want Iraq.
So half-heartedly we marched off to Afghanistan, largely abandoning it, as is our custom, as soon as we could pay attention to something else: the phony, immoral, pigheaded and racist insistence that Muslims are Muslims, and an attack by Afghani harbored Saudis can be fought by attacking Iraq.
So the Taliban are back in parts of Afghanistan, and spreading into Pakistan. We are told that we can fight Al Qaeda, but let the Talib back into control of Afghanistan, a terrifying prospect, it would seem to me. Yes, we know that Afghanistan is impervious to foreign invaders. In fact, it appears that there really is no "Afghanistan" at least in the terms of what was established in the aftermath of World War I but simply many ethnic groups with an antipathy toward those who are different from them (sort of like pockets of this country, but worse.)
In 1967, Norman Mailer published a book called Why are We in Vietnam. It was not a polemic, nor did it debate the issue of the day (at least overtly). It was a novel about a hunting trip in Alaska, including an American businessman who wanted to shoot a grizzly bear and apparently thought of little else. But though the book used the word Vietnam once, and on its last page, it was about war for the sake of proving one's masculinity rather than for reasons of true security. In 1967, Norman Mailer was in a gross minority, swimming against a strong national tide in the opposite direction.
And yet so many of the heirs of that permanent blight on our national history, that blow to our national psyche that torments us today and makes rational discussion of the prospect of war so difficult, engage us in the same foolish approach to this issue: that what the general says is what we must do, our honor is at stake, the men and women who have given their lives deserve as much, we can't just run and turn tail, blah, blah, blah.
If you send troops in, we'll have a second chance at governance. You need to put Karzai's feet to the fire, or the next government's feet to the fire, to do a better job. But it's impossible to bring about better governance without security.
At a time when the sacrifices of our American and allied forces in Afghanistan are increasing, we should give the utmost priority to listening to our commanders on the ground. We owe it to all those who have lost their lives, the thousands who are fighting there today, and all the families, to provide our forces with the adequate number of troops to accomplish the mission that they set out to do....
Politics, indecision, or ambivalence has no place in this process when we are clearly at a crucial stage of the war where time and decisiveness are critical. As many have recently said, time is not on our side in Afghanistan. Indecision and delay only embolden our enemy while losing the support of our allies and those we are there to protect.
"I am deeply troubled, however, by reports that the White House is delaying action on the General's request for more troops and questioning its strategy after the President endorsed 'an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy' six months ago. If these reports are accurate, and General McChrystal believes that without timely reinforcements our efforts in that country may end in failure, then the Obama Administration must act quickly to give him the resources he needs to achieve our goals. It's time for the President to clarify where he stands on the strategy he has articulated, because the longer we wait the more we put our troops at risk.
"I also believe it's important that the American people and Members of Congress hear directly from General McChrystal about the situation on the ground, and soon. General Petraeus' testimony before Congress about his strategy for stabilizing Iraq and achieving success there was critical in helping Congress make informed decisions, and I believe testimony from General McChrystal would provide similar value regarding Afghanistan today."
Yeh, that's a great idea. Let's have the military challenge the civilians elected to run our government and start yet another war in our country over who determines our foreign policy. And, here's another great idea: let's question the manliness of anyone who wants to carefully consider whether pouring more troops into a country theoretically governed by a corrupt group with little support among the people. Yes, General Westmoreland, I can see that light at the end of the tunnel. Yes, President Thieu, you can dictate the shape of the table before we begin to find a way out of this mess.
Have we learned nothing?
Apparently not:
Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) and former prisoner of war:
"There has been a rise in al Qaeda activity along the border. There has been some increase in U.S. casualties. I am concerned about it, but I'm not as concerned as I am about Iraq today, obviously, or I'd be talking about Afghanistan. But I believe that if Karzai can make the progress that he is making, that -- in the long term, we may muddle through in Afghanistan."
"Despite our successes in Iraq and the hard won understanding we have gained about what it takes to defeat an insurgency, it seems we now, regrettably, must have the same debate again today with respect to Afghanistan. In all due respect, Sen. Levin, I've seen that movie before."
Are you kidding me, Senator? I know you did not get newspapers while you were in North Vietnamese custody, but you have been back for awhile. Is that what you learned from Vietnam?
"Nobody is talking about just leaving. Nobody is talking about just a counterterrorism strategy," said Sen. John Kerry , D- Mass. , the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee .
Kerry, however, like other Democrats, said questions about the honesty and legitimacy of the Afghan government in the wake of its tainted recent election and reports of widespread corruption demanded rethinking whether even more U.S. troops could win popular support against the Taliban and secure the country.
"Until those questions are satisfactorily answered, it would be irresponsible to make a choice about committing troops to harm's way," Kerry said. "The troops deserve a strategy that is every bit as good as the sacrifice they're being asked to make."
I am very proud of our President and, frankly, of our election of him to that office. As Rachel Maddow and the Times have explained, the Nobel Prize does not raise questions about whether the President "deserves" it, but demonstrates the extent to which the hopes and perhaps lives of so many around the world are wrapped up in his unlikely presidency, and the new direction he has put us on.
I am grateful that he is in charge of the executive branch of our national government and that he will determine the basis upon which these important decisions will be made. There is no easy answer and almost anything we do will be the wrong thing in at least some respects. That is a given.
That is why these decisions cannot be the product of political jockeying. Senator Vandenburg's famous iteration of the idea that politics stops at the water's edge is really misleading. It doesn't and shouldn't except that military decisions must be made by civilians, not generals, and they must be made with the best interests of the nation in mind, not the political capital that must be spent or may be reaped. The Bush administration's "roll out" of their war in Iraq just before off year elections is the modern proof of this. Senator Vandenburg's support for the President of a different party when he told Gen MacArthur that he would not be permitted to drag the United States into a war with China, is perhaps a more stark vindication of the rule.
Had President Kennedy allowed the military to determine how to respond to the Cuban missile crisis, it is possible there would be no world to worry about anymore. Fortunately, by then the President had learned the folly of just doing what the military suggests, since they steered him wrong at the Bay of Pigs.
I do not know or have the answer and, frankly, I suspect there is none to be gotten. I think that American acquiescence in the return of the barbarous Taliban to Kabul is immoral and that expecting that Al Qaeda will not expand its writ in a Taliban controlled Afghanistan is a fool's errand. I agree that the scarier situation is in Pakistan and that the current governments in Kabul and Pakistan are not the best, or most trustworthy of allies. Our military is stretched very thin right now and its ability to protect us may be seriously compromised already, not to mention how much worse it will be by a prolonged fight in Afghanistan.
So, what to do?
I don't know.
All I know is that we have a wise man in the presidency and one element of his intellect is that he will listen to all the voices there are before deciding what he wants to do next. Presumably, Congress and the American people, such as they are, will have some input in all of this, unlike during the almost regal presidency we just ended where what the President said was supposed to be the law.
But in that debate, the question cannot be how things will look, or whether our manhood has been vindicated, or General McChrystal repudiated.
The question must be what is best for us, for Afghanistan, and for the world at large, knowing that whatever we do, it will be done to further those ends, whether it works or not.]]>
Because it is righttag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2938362009-10-03T15:20:06Z2009-10-03T17:14:22Zbarthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
Forty-six years ago, the President of the United States, the youngest ever elected as President, addressed the civil rights issues facing the nation and explained the core reason why they had to be resolved:
We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.
The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?
This year, President Kennedy's youngest brother, the one who survived into the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and most of the decade which followed, wrote for what he called a "final time" to a new President he helped to elect about the cause of his own life, a guarantee to American citizens of affordable health insurance to insure that care for those who need it, and almost all of us will, does not depend on one's bank account:
you have also reminded all of us that it concerns more than material things; that what we face is above all a moral issue; that at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.
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Last week, on Yom Kippur, a rabbi in New York City, stood before a congregation contemplating their lives and their obligations andtold them that:
we have the opportunity to determine whether we will provide healthcare for everyone in our society, and if so, how. At one point in the history of our nation, you bore no responsibility for how I fared after my working days were over. But the last great economic crisis prompted us to rethink that.
Now we agree that every American is entitled to a certain minimal standard of living in retirement. We call that social security - a name which implies that the safety of our society depends on this basic mutual responsibility between neighbors.
Our generation is now asked to consider whether we are responsible for the health care of others. And this time it's not about a man sitting on the sidewalk of Lexington Avenue asking for change, or a child whose parents cannot afford to treat her illness. Fortunately, those members of our community are entitled to health care.
No, this time it's about those sitting here in our sanctuary tonight. There is a very real possibility that the person sitting next to you is without health insurance of any kind. Or that the person in front of you is worried that she may not be able to afford her premiums if they continue to go up. Or that the person behind you will fall sick and his provider will deny him treatment for one reason or another. The current system is incomplete, expensive and frustrating. We cannot deny that it is broken.
Now, we all know that the challenges involved in reforming the system are numerous and complex. We need to offer coverage to all citizens. We need to reduce the cost of care. We need to maintain the availability of top-notch treatments. But in the midst of the debate, we also must ask ourselves: Are we grasshoppers? Will we let ourselves be swayed by misinformation and gross fabrications? Will we cede the debate to those who aim to scare us into inaction? Are we simply afraid of change?
The issue is not the degree to which the President's political fortunes will be enhanced or diminished by the votes to come, or whether Senators Baucus, Conrad and Lincoln are looking our for their constituents or their campaign contributors. There is no need to dwell on who is the most impolite member of the House of Representatives: one who yells "you lie" while the President is addressing a joint session of Congress, or another who describes the other party's health care plan as based on the two words "die sooner." This stuff tells us a lot about our debased political culture (of which, sadly, we see evidence on this site every day, just as it has become almost all we hear from conservative voices) but does not even rate as a "secondary consideration" against the issue staring at us in the face.
If you want to appeal to the demons in our public life, to encourage those who oppose abortions and wish to impose their beliefs on everyone, to oppose a new, fairer system to provide heath care to themselves and to their neighbors, by suggesting that by doing so, they will be helping to pay for someone doing something they believe to be immoral, you are a coward, a fraud and immoral yourself.
If you use this opportunity as another occasion to turn our beloved Statue of Liberty on her head, and repudiate the basis on which this continent became the haven for the oppressed from anywhere else in the world, by railing against "illegal immigrants" as if a desperate flight to our shores was an evil close to murder, and to try to scare your fellow citizens that health care for all will mean that such "illegal" people will get cared for when they are sick, you are a charlatan, a fraud, and immoral to your Ebenezer Scrooge soul.
And the issue is not the size of government or its role in our lives. As Rabbi Friedman's sermon quoted above suggests, that issue was resolved during "the last great economic crisis" before our current one, and our greatest President explained why we had to change our views:
In the old days, for the bulk of the population, the elections were only a seasonal diversion--a circus with an oratorical sideshow--with the real job done by quiet economic and social-perhaps I should say back room--pressures behind the scenes.
Today there is emerging a real and forceful belief on the part of the great mass of the people that honest, intelligent and courageous government can solve many problems which the average individual cannot face alone in a world where there are no longer one hundred and twenty acres of good land free for everybody...
In answer to the demands of the American people we have expanded the functions of the Government of the United States. We are handling complicated problems of administration with which no other party has ever had to wrestle.
But we have lost our way. Though President Roosevelt died before I was born, his legacy lasted well into my lifetime, until a corrupt president gave way to two nobodies whose inability to inspire anything except empty slogans who in turn was replaced by a ideologue dedicated to destroying the nation's belief in the government as a source of good deeds for its citizens and who, sadly, succeeded in doing so beyond all reason.
The president between the two Bushes, a moderate Republican to my ears, but twice the successful nominee of the Democratic Party, mimicked his predecessor, the Great Reagan, in holding that "the era of big government is over" but that capitulation to the the greedy and selfish among us was surely wrong. We are a better nation than that, I think, or, at least, I hope.
It is hard to tell, frankly. Legislation which mandates that everyone buy insurance, that those who have what members of Congress, themselves covered by a generous government sponsored health care insurance plan, decide are "gold plated" plans covering others pay additional taxes for such a benefit, but does not create a plan to make it impossible for private interests to gouge the public (I am sorry, that means health care providers as well as insurers) is not an improvement on the shameful system we have now. It is a gift to insurance companies and their allies in the health care racket. Just saying something is an advance does not mean that it is. (Can you say, "No Child Left Behind" and not cringe?)
The question is not what will this health care reform do for me, though it will do much for me in the long run. The issue is what is the right thing to do.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
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Drowning in Delusionstag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2926262009-09-27T15:55:41Z2009-09-27T16:00:00ZSomething is very wrong. You know it and, as Senator Robert Dole used to say in another context,"the American people know it." We no longer sound like the people of the United States. We are not the country of hope...barthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
Something is very wrong. You know it and, as Senator Robert Dole used to say in another context,"the American people know it." We no longer sound like the people of the United States. We are not the country of hope and light, the beacon to the oppressed of the world which we have been in the best moments of our national history.
We are now becoming increasingly selfish, stupid and self-delusional and there can be little question that each of those benchmarks of what passes for political "thought" in this country, carry seeds of disaster and of our demise as a great nation.
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You hear it everywhere. The President spoke about how bewildered are the leaders of other industrialized nations, some the leaders of very classically conservative governments, about our inability to find a way to insure the medical care of our citizens other than the destructive employer based program we stumbled into after World War II. Today, Tom Friedman wroteabout our national response to China's campaign to "green" its own industry, comparing it to how we once responded to the launch by the Soviet Union of the first man made satellite
This time, Mr. Friedman writes,
[i]nstead of a strategic response too many of our politicians are still trapped in their own dumb-as-we-wanna-be bubble, where we're always No. 1, and where the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, having sold its soul to the old coal and oil industries, uses its influence to prevent Congress from passing legislation to really spur renewables.
This is not to mourn a lost time when all was well, the way the Reaganauts do. The days when people were openly discriminated against because they were black or Irish or Jewish or Catholic or women or homosexual is not an era to which we look fondly. But the country which had a rendezvous with destiny, the one that could roll up its sleeves and do what had to be done, and the nation motivated to be the best, the most enlightened, and the place which shows the way, is the nation we were born into and which we are losing or, perhaps and sadly, we have already lost.
We have lost it, if that is what has happened, to another disease to which we have often been victim. It is the self-delusion which comes from thinking that if we just say something often enough it must be so. Such as
The last thing in the world I think Democrats and Republicans are going to do at the end of the day is create a government-run health care system where you've got a bureaucrat standing in between the patient and the doctor.
because a system where a for profit insurance company bureaucrat fills that function is certainly superior.
But being a good citizen does not require that one determine their views on legislation by "what it will mean to me" or to "my pocketbook" as we are frequently told. Indeed, of course, in addition to being selfish and to that extent, un-American, it is always a false argument: our history and common sense tells us that we rise and fall as a nation, not as individuals and our momentary advantages are always outweighed by the forces around us, and the lives led by our fellow citizens
As the new year began on the Jewish calendar last weekend, a rabbi reminded a congregation in New York City of a different view, the one which is what truly made our country what we want it to be. He said, among other very important things, that
we must do even more for the disenfranchised, the poor, and the medically uninsured in this country. Our health care system must be fixed. Supporting the weak and the needy is a mainstay of our character and a purpose of our existence. 'Large-heartedness' said our President 'is part of the American character.' ...
We ... will not be judged by our success in times of prosperity. That is easy. Rather we will be judged by how decently we comport ourselves in times of adversity. That is the challenge.
I should make it very clear that I do not think we're doing enough, that I am not satisfied as an American with the progress that we're making. This is a great country, but I think it could be a greater country...I'm not satisfied to have fifty percent of our steel-mill capacity unused. I'm not satisfied when the United States had last year the lowest rate of economic growth of any major industrialized society in the world. Because economic growth means strength and vitality; it means we're able to sustain our defenses; it means we're able to meet our commitments abroad. I'm not satisfied when we have over nine billion dollars worth of food - some of it rotting - even though there is a hungry world, and even though four million Americans wait every month for a food package from the government, which averages five cents a day per individual. I saw cases in West Virginia, here in the United States, where children took home part of their school lunch in order to feed their families because I don't think we're meeting our obligations toward these Americans. I'm not satisfied when the Soviet Union is turning out twice as many scientists and engineers as we are. I'm not satisfied when many of our teachers are inadequately paid, or when our children go to school part-time shifts. I think we should have an educational system second to none...
These are all the things, I think, in this country that can make our society strong, or can mean that it stands still. I'm not satisfied until every American enjoys his full constitutional rights. If a Negro baby is born - and this is true also of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in some of our cities - he has about one-half as much chance to get through high school as a white baby. He has one-third as much chance to get through college as a white student. He has about a third as much chance to be a professional man, about half as much chance to own a house. He has about uh - four times as much chance that he'll be out of work in his life as the white baby. I think we can do better. I don't want the talents of any American to go to waste.
I know that there are those who want to turn everything over to the government. I don't at all. I want the individuals to meet their responsibilities. And I want the states to meet their responsibilities. But I think there is also a national responsibility. The argument has been used against every piece of social legislation in the last twenty-five years. The people of the United States individually could not have developed the Tennessee Valley; collectively they could have.
A cotton farmer in Georgia or a peanut farmer or a dairy farmer in Wisconsin and Minnesota, he cannot protect himself against the forces of supply and demand in the market place; but working together in effective governmental programs he can do so. Seventeen million Americans, who live over sixty-five on an average Social Security check of about seventy-eight dollars a month, they're not able to sustain themselves individually, but they can sustain themselves through the social security system. I don't believe in big government, but I believe in effective governmental action.
And I think that's the only way that the United States is going to maintain its freedom. It's the only way that we're going to move ahead. I think we can do a better job. I think we're going to have to do a better job if we are going to meet the responsibilities which time and events have placed upon us. We cannot turn the job over to anyone else. If the United States fails, then the whole cause of freedom fails. And I think it depends in great measure on what we do here in this country. ..
In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt said in his inaugural that this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny. I think our generation of Americans has the same rendezvous. The question now is: Can freedom be maintained under the most severe tack - attack it has ever known? I think it can be. And I think in the final analysis it depends upon what we do here. I think it's time America started moving again.
It is not because of Nixon's "six o'clock shadow" that Senator Kennedy won that debate and won that election as fable has it. It is because John Fitzgerald Kennedy struck a chord in the new generation of Americans to whom the torch was then being passed, and it was those people, our parents and grandparents, who saw a better country ahead.
We have just gone through another such election, but the question remains---the same questions asked by President Kennedy while he sought his election in 1960, by President Obama when he sought his, by President Roosevelt in the 1930s and by a rabbi in New York City last week. What kind of people are we and what kind of country do we want to have.
We are at that crossroads again and I fear what the answer may be. I wish all those for whom the next day is one of prayer and redemption the very best, and the hope that we can mark the day with greater resolve to do better for our country and its people and that others find another way to resolve the same. ]]>
A Time for Reflectiontag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2911632009-09-19T18:38:41Z2009-09-19T18:51:48Zbarthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/ My
faith is my own business, and not something to diary about. It is not
my intent to proselytize, nor to preach. Not everyone sees the world as
I do, and I do expect that anyone should, but one of my obligations as
an American, as a Jew and as a human being, is to promote the well
being of those who need our help. I am not perfect, and do not do as
much as I could, but I try and that, it seems to me, at least, makes me
as observant a Jew as the person who attends every service, or just
those on the High Holy Days.]]>
I do not need lectures from the
self-appointed guardians of "family values" about what is right and
what is wrong. Just as I feel no imperative to convert others to my
faith, my belief in religious teachings does not require that I want a
government which determines who can marry the person they love, or one
which proscribes when a woman can terminate a pregnancy in its earliest
stages, or even a government that gets to determine for the rest of us
when life begins. Those who claim to speak for God ought to have to
prove it, but they cannot--that is what faith is, as opposed to science.
Faith is based on those things that cannot be proven, but which a
person simply believes. For one person to require others to share those
beliefs is wrong--deeply wrong.
Today, I "attended" a service for
the New Year by watching a webcast from the most beautiful synagogue I
have ever seen, and one where I have been physically present from time
to time, most significantly on the Rosh Ha-shanah which almost
immediately followed the September 11 we will all remember for the rest
of our lives. It was a tearfully memorable event that day, ending with
"America the Beautiful." It was memorable again today, and included a
sermon which many things which are important to me, one of which being
the absolutely Jewish imperative to help to provide health care to all
who need it as well as affirming our obligations to one another as a
community and as a nation.
And
of the many divisions in our country, this seems to be one of them.
There are people marching in Washington today, proclaiming themselves
to be the guardians of "values" but I wonder where those "values" come
from and on what they are based. Is there a religion or faith that
preaches that people should be denied medical assistance except that
paid for by a company which makes money and had ballparks named after
it? What religious teaching says that a person who is "an illegal
immigrant" should not be entitled to benefit from a government health
insurance program? The teachings I grew up with, and the one that
Catholics (as far as I know, maybe Protestants, too) are, to the
contrary, to welcome the stranger in our midst. I heard that repeated
again this morning and am reminded that my "values" and just not the
same ones as those being celebrated in Washington's streets today.
I accept, as we all
must, the pluralism of our country and the fact that a portion of our
country tried to separate from us almost 140 years ago, and were
returned under our Constitution and laws by force of arms. Whether that
was an appropriate exercise of military might or not, the requirement
that others share my views is an abomination. At the same time, I
refuse to allow other people to impose their beliefs, or their faith,
on me. And those who put forward their political opinions as being
based on religion ought to explain that or be labeled as frauds.
I
will spend the week as my own faith dictates and consider my own place
in all of this and try to do better in all the ways I have failed in
the year gone by. Whether you do that or not is your call, of course,
but we all have a collective responsibility to listen to one another,
to respect the views of those with whom we disagree, but to make
certain that we insure that all who live in our midst have the same
opportunity for decent medical care as their need requires.
L'shana tova.]]>
Questions about health care and then sometag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2896282009-09-12T16:54:07Z2009-09-12T16:56:11ZBefore we get too wrapped up in the shame of it all, or whether the President was telling the truth or not when he was called a liar, may I just ask why a person who needs medical care should...barthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
Before we get too wrapped up in the shame of it all, or whether the President was telling the truth or not when he was called a liar, may I just ask why a person who needs medical care should be denied it and permitted to suffer or maybe die because he is an "illegal immigrant"?
Ah, never mind. We are too mean, and self-centered a nation to worry about others these days, I suppose, or to do something just because it is the right thing to do.
The President, we are told, needs to explain to the millions who have medical insurance and "like it" why these reform are necessary. Morning Joe tells me this every day: "I got news for you, Mr. President, most people have health insurance and they like what they have." End of story. ]]>
Some of us are about to enter a period of introspection as the New Year of our faith commences. Many of us will hear sermons about our obligations to our fellow man. Things like this:
Do we believe that we are behaving well, as individuals and as a society? Would we, without qualification, proclaim that we have done our very best to raise up those who are trapped in an economic circumstances and a social environment which destines a group of citizens to poverty and suffering?
As in personal behavior, so in public policy, we should apply a moral standard which compels us to take a measure of how we are doing. For the Jew, it is not sufficient to obey commandments. Ultimately, the measure proclaimed in the Torah and by which we measure ourselves on Yom Kippur when we stand together and alone before God, is 'Are we living and behaving with holiness as the plumb line in our lives? Are we morally straight in our own eyes and before God?'
We have much work to do together
So, no, the system in place now is unfair and frightening. To me, and, by all rights and reason, to my neighbor.
That is what Senator Kennedy was telling us, through our President, and what he told us and the Pope, through Cardinal McCarrick. It is our moral obligation to do something about this, if we can. As the President reminded us, we have risen to the occasion in our past, in the deepest of the Depression and in the aftermath of the murder of our beloved President Kennedy, but we have to do it now without either event screaming at us, because we can.
But just repeating popular mantras won't do the trick. Yes, everyone is for affordable health care and insurance. Yes, we don't want people to be denied coverage because of "pre-existing illness or conditions" nor do we want people to lose their insurance because they got sick, or laid off.
But, ladies and gentleman, nobody wants to say this clearly and unequivocally, but THESE THINGS COST MONEY. Congress can pass a bill, "reforming" the insurance industry and require them to insure people who will have larger medical bills than most, but that will not make rates go down or become more affordable.
Public plans which tell medical professionals that they will be paid only a fraction of what they can be paid by other plans will fail, because medical professionals will not accept patients covered by that plan. And, I am sorry, Mr. President, costs will not be reduced by "eliminating fraud and waste."
Costs will be reduced by only one thing. Competitive pressure or a single source of medical insurance which mandates what doctors can get unless the patient is footing the entire bill themself. (This is what some people who do not speak English call the "single payer" system.)
So, if we cannot have the latter system (called "Medicaid for all" for many years) because it suggests a Soviet takeover of our government (or whatever the stupid excuse is today), then there needs to be a reason for insurance companies and doctors to keep the amount they want to take from sick people, or from those who insure sick people, to a reasonable figure.
That, Republicans have taught me, is called competition. The vaunted free market has not brought us this competition for a variety of reasons. Hence, the government has to do this. Period.
I agree with the President on this point. If someone has a better idea (and not the unregulated free for all that would come from allowing insurance companies to compete across state lines) we should all be willing to listen to it. If it turns out that is a better idea, or even if it might be a better idea, then let's do that.
Or, let's create a government backed insurance company which is not trying to make money and does not need to advertise or have ballparks named after it, compete with all the greed and selfishness that is out there today.
Pick one. Let's do it.
Now.]]>
Staying Calm, but Remaining Firmtag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2883022009-09-05T16:02:20Z2009-09-05T16:05:08ZOur system of government is not generally amenable to Big Ideas or to enacting the platform of a strong leader. Our founders had enough of the royal prerogative and sought to retard the ability of a single leader to impose...barthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
Our system of government is not generally amenable to Big Ideas or to enacting the platform of a strong leader. Our founders had enough of the royal prerogative and sought to retard the ability of a single leader to impose his (or even her) will on the rest of the country. We not only do not have a royal "leader," we do not even have a Prime Minister whose government is established on the basis of control of the functionally important house of the country's legislature. ]]>
Such a system requires consensus and consensus rarely rallies around a "plan." Consensus requires that reasonable people find a common ground.
I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people, dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.
Action in this image and to this end is feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors.
Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form.
That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.
It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.
I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.
But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me.
I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis. . .broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
But that is not the usual way things get done in our system. When Margaret Thatcher wanted Britain to adopt more conservative policies than it generally had in the postwar period, her party controlled Commons and if it did not agree with her proposals, her government would have fallen, and new elections would have to be held. We do not operate that way.
The great civil rights legislation of the 1960s were not the product of a party's control of the White House and Congress, though that existed from 1961 on. It was enacted when Congress, facing with a public mourning the death of its young president, and, perhaps, a degree of remorse for the savage attacks on him by the right wing before he was murdered, honored him by enacting his proposals.
The point is, despite a news media which acted as if the prior president had the dictatorial or royal powers he believed to be within his office, the radical change in the way Americans receive health care and insurance to pay for it, is, perhaps, beyond what our political system can handle. It is a system which is hard to energize in the most important of areas, and it is horribly corrupted today by its failure to meaningfully regulate how to finance political campaigns. As a long, rambling essay in this spaceargued last week, and as Bill Moyers more succinctly explained,, a Congress which depends on big money for its members to remain in office will always try to find a way to keep happy those who have that money.
If it were up to me, or, I suspect, President Obama, the government would simply extend the care and coverage under medicaid, medicare, or that afforded to veterans or members of Congress, all federal health insurance and coverage programs, to the rest of us. That is the "single payer" system which much of the industrial world has adopted under democratic systems of government structured differently than ours.
But, alas, that is not how it works. It is not up to me, or President Obama or you, per se. We always call our system the best one there is, and there is much to say for it terms of stability and the fewer radical swings that other countries face (think of the huge number of governments in Italy in the postwar years). But our system is not necessarily the best one for what needs to be done here.
It is, however, the system we have and one unlikely to change in the near future. About fifteen months ago, I tried to explain to others who, like me, originally supported another candidate for President, over President Obama's more generous views about the varied political forces in our country, that since I do not get to pick my top choice, it was necessary to decide among those who could actually get elected.
I am glad that I did, and that others did, too. The result was, as it turns out, a better candidate than the one I first supported and his election as President.
So, we will not get the health care program I favor. Yet. Maybe ever. That is not good, and says a lot about what's wrong with our country: that thuggery and lies will trump reason and the best interests of our citizens.
But we need something. Whether it includes a "public option" or a trigger for one, both pale substitutes for the single payer system we ought to have, whether President Obama and Rahm Emanuel are not as good at the inside baseball of Washington as we had hoped, whether Max Baucus of Montana ought to be as important as he is in deciding whether my unemployed ex-wife should have health insurance or not, we need something. We may have lost the war, yet again, but let's not throw this whole effort away.
Please.]]>
EMK, a post scripttag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2009:/talk/blogs/esaslaw//1619.2872012009-08-28T21:49:05Z2009-08-28T22:08:12Zbarthhttp://edsbarth.blogspot.com/
it was posted, the inveterate blogger knew it was a mistake. He is not on deadline; he does not get a dime from these scribblings. Why rush it? Why pile on while everybody (including some who feel guilty about the attention lavished on some pop star's death) gushes on and on? Even President Carter had something nice to say, but if everybody who has so much to say about Senator Kennedy today, managed to vote for him during one or the other primary in 1980, we might have been spared Ronald Reagan. (The Roger Mudd thing was so bogus. We all knew why he was running for President. He was too polite to the aforesaid twerp then occupying the office to say so, but the right answer would have been sort of like, it's time for an actual Democrat to be President instead of some guy who calls himself that, but the word means something else in the South than it does to the rest of us.) ]]>
What moved me to a second eulogy, though, was an odd line in the Globe's editorial about Senator Kennedy,
which seemed almost compelled to intone that he "was not a great man"
whileotherwise extolling his career. Putting aside the question of who
or what gets to declare a particular person "great" and when they do
that (President Harding was said to be "great" upon his death in
office; not so much today, y'know) and not wanting to discuss
Chappaquidick any more than necessary (I was tired of this conversation
the minute Nixon the moralist decided we had to talk about it
incessantly), I have to wonder what the criteria for greatness is.
I
don't know which politicians, or ordinary people, were unfaithful to
wives, drove while intoxicated, and made the wrong decision after a
tragic incident which may have involved one or both of the
aforedescribed vices. Washington and Lincoln were probably off the
hook, given that the automobile did not exist in either man's lifetime
and Lincoln was also a famous teetotaler, which exempts him on two
counts. I do not minimize the woman's death, but Senator Kennedy was
never charged with or conviocted of her murder and the hypocrites who
suggest his last name had something to do with that, but defended the
most recent past president's avoidance of military service and the
quashing of his own problems, are not worth listening to. (Yes, as fas
we know, none of that guy's problems led to anyone's death, but he is
married to a woman who had an automobile accident resulting in a death,
and her character is not regularly assailed).
But, without
delving into a "judge not, lest you be judged yourself" rant, it is
worth considering what the man went through, watching two brothers
murdered while serving in office and, no doubt, questioning when the
same might happen to him. Watching him trying to answer, in 1970 or so,
Barbara Walters' inane question about whether "it was worth it" given
all of that, especially recalling the venom hurled at him over the
years (and watching the same crap being thrown around as if it were
legitimate commentary on the current President's initiatives), it is a
wonder that he did not spend each moment of his life curled in a fetal
position chugging down as much alcohol as he could.
It was said
then that if he, too, was assassinated, one might question why he
remained in public service given his responsibilities to the fatherless
nieces and nephews looking to him in the wake of his brother's deaths.
The best that could be said is that neither of his brothers would have
wanted him to slink away in fear but instead to represent what they
stood for, and that he did flawlessly.
Since I am posting on
this subject again, it is worth addressing one other thing that has
bothered me since Senator Kennedy;s death. Chris Matthews' inanity
aside, President Kennedy was murdered by a nut, not "a Communist"
(Oswald was a communist when that suited his craziness; not so much
when it didn't. He killed the President to "do something" and not for
politics, I am sure, and Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy for
equally nutty reasons, and not, as Chris insists, in support of Arab
terrorism.) This is important to keep in mind, while Matthews and
others treat nuts as if they have reasonable political points to make,
rather than just threatening harm to those with whom they disagree.
More
to the point, Matthews' attempt to distinguish the EMK of the 70s, 80s,
90s and 00s, from the Robert and John Kennedys of the 1950s and 1960s,
is more a reflection of the different times than any different
philosophy. Had President Kennedy lived, he would have been as much an
advocate for universal health insurance as we was for medicare before
his death, for instance.
Rest in peace, Senator. I am proud of
my baseball team (even as poorly as they play) because of the beautiful
tribute they presented before Wednesday's game. I do not say the
mourner's kaddish as often as I might, but I will tonight. I am so
grateful for all he did for us and so sorry for our loss that I am
truly bereft and unable to consider much else of national import. ]]>