Patriots and Tyrants

No one is impressed with your knowledge of spelling or grammar. "Learn to spell" is not an argument. Criticizing someone's use of verb tenses is not an argument. If you understand what someone wrote well enough to ridicule or correct their spelling or grammar, then you probably understand it well enough to write something about their actual argument. Please do not use bandwidth and storage space doing your impression of a kindergarten teacher.

That is all.

I'll be surprised if some Progressive Caucus members don't vote nay on this rotten failure of a stimulus package. First of all, the bill sucks. It is too small and the money is not spent appropriately. Second, it will probably pass, so if some members want to cast a protest vote they will be safe in doing so. But I'd rather the progressives withhold their support entirely until the bill is fixed. At best, the garbage Reid and Pelosi have come up with will delay a deepening of the recession. It's literally less than half the necessary size. At some point, sometime, progressive Democrats will have to risk something bad happening in order to make something good happen.

So how many times a day am I told that the Congressional Democrats can't be all left-wingers because a real left-winger can't win in vast swathes of the country and so we would be in the minority and then what?

The answer is, I hear it a lot! My argument is, being more left-wing would make the party more effective on a per-congressperson or -senator basis. The Republicans accomplished almost their entire agenda when they were in power, and even now, when they are in the minority, they can have a great deal of influence over legislation. This is because they are more ideologically uniform and extreme with a few exceptions. They are also more dedicated that the Democrats, which I think goes along with the uniformity and extremity. As a rule they don't need to compromise with each other. Therefore they are able to simply act, rather than begging dozens of collaborators in their own party not to shaft them.

Right now there are 255 Dems in the House. Would you  give up 35 of them to get 220 actual liberals and leftists? I would. 220 is still a majority, and with a majority of legitimate Democrats there would be nothing in the way of progressive legislation.

The Senate is more difficult because its rules are designed to keep democracy from working. But with 56 Dems in there now, I would trade the current situation for a Senate with 51 progressive Democrats.

Maybe you like different numbers, but my point is, there's more to it than the numbers. Once you have a majority, the value of adding to it starts to diminish, especially in the House. I understand the fifty state strategy and what it accomplished. But I don't think that we actually gain by adding a Republican to the Democratic majority. It makes it harder for the actual Democrats to solve problems, because there's always some fake there in their meetings screwing things up.

Many liberals seem inclined to believe that if most people were better educated, or if they were better informed, or if we had more informative media, then they would all stop voting Republican. Rich people would be the only Republican constituency. I even hear liberals talking this way about people like Dick Cheney -- doesn't he understand this or that?

I think this way of looking at Republican voters is very misleading. Most people are not completely cut off from schools, and libraries, and NPR, and the Internet, and bookstores,and opposing viewpoints. Especially not these days. Besides, there are plenty of people supporting Republicans who definitely have access to all of these things. This is not a matter of education and access to information. It is a matter of priorities.

Take the Iraq war as an example. We all know that a lot of people believed that Iraq was connected to the 9/11 attacks, even though that is completely untrue. Millions of people still believe this lie. Obviously that belief made one more likely to support the war at the start. If those people had been better informed, if the local news was reporting each night, IRAQ HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11, would there have been more opposition to the war? I think not. I think this is looking at the problem backwards. People didn't support the war because they had this mistaken belief -- they had this mistaken belief because they wanted the war, and felt like they needed some reason to want it that didn't sound totally nuts. People supported the war because they wanted the war. You can lock them inside a teach-in at Columbia for six hours, and they're still going to want the war, because it satisfied some psychological need for them.

With the economy right now, many liberals seem to think that once people who voted for Republican Senators see what happens without enough aid to states, then those Senators won't be Senators for much longer. But this assumes that those Republican voters voted the way they did because they wanted help for their state economies, or lower unemployment, and so on. Do you really think that after the evidence of the last twenty years, someone voted Republican because they wanted sane economic policy?

I think it's obvious that they didn't care about that either way, or they would have supported the Democrat. What you think are in the best interests of Republican voters in Utah or Kentucky aren't necessarily what those people think are in their best interests. Possibly  those voters feel that it's in their best interests to achieve the catharsis of watching a foreign city destroyed, or to maintain the feeling of well-being they get from pretending that they are superior to African-Americans. Maybe they feel that it's in their best interests that women be forced to give birth, or for Christian fundamentalists to run the public schools. Maybe they don't vote for sane economic policy because they aren't voting on that basis.

I think that for many liberals this is a difficult problem. It's one thing to think of Republican voters as ignorant suckers who we have to rescue from themselves. It's not as pleasant to think of them as opponents who must be defeated in order to set the country on the right track. But I think the latter is the actual situation. Republican voters know what they are doing, and they know what they want. They want something crazy, but they can still vote, and you can't persuade them because your goals and motivations are totally different from their goals and motivations. I think we'd be way more effective as a party if we all understood that. Republican voters don't' care if we have a depression, or at any rate it is not a primary issue for them. They have their own issues, and we are never going to find common ground with them.

Ultimately, it really is about moral values. The complicated part is that not everyone has the same moral values, and sometimes it's impossible for everyone to see their moral values expressed through the government at the same time. 

Stan Collender.

This whole pathetic episode has made even clearer the problems with our political system.


1) The presence of an anti-democratic body within the federal government.

2) The absence of a real, viable leftist party.

3) The cowardice and insularity of the leadership of the less conservative major party.

4) The importance of fundraising in elections.

5) Right-wing voters.

We need to eliminate the Senate, period.  At the very least we need to eliminate the filibuster immediately. We need a  strong, effective national labor/socialist/green party, and we need to make whatever changes to ballot access, fundraising, or election laws are necessary to make that possible. We need a complete removal and replacement of the Democratic leadership class. And we need all federal elections publicly funded, with private donations made illegal.

As for the right-wing voters, they're the most important problem. The present system would actually work if there were no conservatives in it. The presence of wackos is the biggest impediment to fixing any of the other problems, but to the degree that we can accomplish these other changes, the wackos will become less relevant.

It started out too small and improperly designed. Now it's even smaller and more malapportioned. They cut funding for state aid, education. I could puke.

Here is what should happen, but won't. Reid should be stripped of his leadership post. The new leadership should eliminate the filibuster and strip Nelson of any privileges. The actual Democrats should put together the $1.25 trillion bill they should have started with, pass it, and then go into conference and make the House bill match it. Obama should sign it.

Alternately, they should pass this garbage now, and then make it very clear that this failure will corrected as part of the budget process later this year.

Instead, Ben Nelson gets to walk around with his dick in the air, all these sellouts and sleazebags get to keep their jobs, and rest of us suffer. Disgusting.

I think it is a mistake to portray voters, Republican or Democratic, as victims of politicians. There seems to be a hesitance, for example, to blame Bush II's failures on the people who voted for him. They're just regular Americans, after all, and they're suffering the same as the rest of us.

I think this is a mistake. People who voted for Republicans are regular Americans, and they are suffering, but that doesn't change the fact that they are getting what they voted for. Whether they voted for Bush out of fear, ignorance, apathy, or hatred, they are grownups and they're responsible for their actions. What is happening now is the fault of people who voted for Republicans. It is not the fault of people who voted for Democrats, with the possible exception of people who voted for frauds like Ben Nelson.

We can't move forward effectively as a nation if we don't expect people to take responsibility for their own democracy. Despite the Republicans' best efforts, we still have some kind of a democracy. In a democracy, the voters get what they want one way or another. It's true that there are structural problems with our government -- the electoral college, the senate -- but even those things would no longer exist if the people had demanded those changes. Politicians are people we hire to do a job. If we are stupid or short-sighted in our hiring practices, then we're responsible for the screwup just the same as if your boss carelessly or intentionally hired an incompetent to work with you.

This voter-as-victim mentality also negatively affects our rhetoric and our tactics. How can we fight if we can't identify the enemy? We're not fighting with, or for, people who voted for John Kyl or Jim DeMint. We are fighting against them. They are part of the opposition as surely as any Republican elected official. The mainstream media bear some responsibility as well, but anyone with roughly average intelligence and any interest can find out what is really going on. I do not believe that people are helpless before the mightly power of the local paper and the 11:00 news. They can look and think, if they want to. It's not Chris Matthew's fault if people want to be ignorant, stupid, or crazy and vote on that basis. 

A democracy is not a commune. There are winners and losers. There are correct decisions and incorrect decisions. The difference between us and them is that when liberals and Democrats win, everyone benefits. When conservatives and Republicans win, everyone suffers. But that doesn't absolve of responsibility the people who voted for their own suffering.  

"I really don't understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work if one of the parties is insane."

Right.

You don't negotiate with madness.

I am tired of hearing that people who think Obama is mishandling the stimulus bill are "panicking." Yesterday on the TPM front page, Josh quoted a reader saying, "I don't share the sense of panic expressed by some Obama supporters over his approach to the stimulus package."

This is crap. Thinking Obama is wrong is not "panic." I am disappointed that Obama is screwing up this very important legislation. I am concerned that his attempts to cooperate with Republican wackos might screw the entire country. I am angry that he seems immune to the reality of his own situation. None of those things are panic. I simply believe that he has approached this in completely the wrong way, and that he does not have a handle on the situation, and that as a result the stimulus bill may end up too small and badly designed.

So, Obama wasted time talking to the Republicans about the stimulus, weakened the bill on their behalf, and in return they trashed the bill in the media and voted 100% against it.

I'm sure various Obamians will argue that he played this whole game with the Republicans just to control the narrative at some unspecified future time, or that it's always worth opening the door to your opponents even when they are scum who want to destroy you, or that it's more important to Change the Tone.

Well, the thing is, Obama is not Batman. He does not always have just the right gadget on his Obamabelt, or a secret plan that will befuddle his opponents. Sometimes he is, and will be, wrong. Sometimes he does, and will, make mistakes. He was wrong to to think that he could find common ground with a dishonorable opponent, and it was a mistake to deal with the Republicans.

As for the narrative, if the Dems don't get this bill back up to par in conference, and it works poorly as a result, the Republicans will say "OMG, we totally gave him everything he wanted and Reid and Pelosi were super mean and now look, we had a way better bill just ready to be pulled out of our ass." And all the media idiots will say "oh-ho ah-hah, does this statement from the Republicans make Obama look weak, stupid or like a big silly goose?" 

You control the narrative by taking control of the narrative. You don't take control of the narrative by letting your enemies dick around with you and then pretending you have some super poli-ninja backflip maneuver in store for them.

We know the following things about the health care system in the U.S.:


1) There are 30,000,000+ people without coverage.

2) Those without coverage pay too much.

3) Because private insurers make their profits by covering healthy people and denying care to those who need it, health care is an excellent example of a good that a market cannot provide efficiently or effecitvely.

4) People without health coverage do not get important preventive care, leading to more serious and expensive health problems.

5) People with health coverage get overtreated because much of the payout from insurers is based on how many services/tests/procedures the doctor or hospital performs.


We also know that in civilized countries, there are national universal coverage systems. If you think about the fact that today, someone could get fired or laid off, lose their health coverage, get hit by a car and end up owing thousands of dollars, or that someone could suffer a heart attack or stroke from hypertension that went undetected because that person did not have access to regular primary care, you realize that the situation is not only outrageous but literally deadly. When you look at the fact that dozens of other countries have fairer health care systems that cost less while providing better outcomes, then things start to look ridiculous.

Some wingos think that national health care systems are some sort of fascism, or something, but you probably know that old quote about capitalism giving the rich and poor alike the right to sleep under the bridge at night. Personally I don't think of "dying from a preventable condition" as a "freedom." I think of it as a cruelty. And everyone knows someone whose cousin's best friend's mom was in Canada and had to wait 39 weeks to get their inflamed appendix removed, or whatever.  The fact is, the system in the United States does not do a good job of controlling wait times. But more importantly, all (that's all) health care systems allocate care. The question is, do we want to allocate care based on wealth and employment status, or do we want to allocate it based on need?

But really, I think it's important for liberals/progressives/leftists to discuss health care systems in a productive way. People who like being sick or dead more than they like efficient, fair, high quality health care cannot be part of such a discussion. At some point we need to realize that we will have to move forward without 20% or so of the people in the country. Opposition to universal coverage is like climate change denial or neo-Hooverite "cut spending during a recession" talk; it's ignorant, it's often mean-spirited, and it's largely irrelevant to solving problems. Conservatives can believe what they want. When we fix the health care system without them, they'll benefit like everyone else.

One problem with our discussion of health care is that people seem over-focused on single-payer systems. There's an article in the latest Harper's magazine that refers to all universal coverage systems as "single-payer." This is just incorrect -- there are as many universal health care system types as there are countries with universal health care systems. Hybrid systems are common. The Canadian system is different from the English system, which is different from the French or the Swedish system.

As a socialist, I lean toward actual national systems like Great Britain has. In such a system, the doctors actually work for the government. Canada has a successful single-payer system, as you know, which is basically like our system except that there is one major insurer, which is the government, and it covers everybody. France and Germany have a "social insurance" model, with hundreds of insurers run by employers and the government. This sounds like it could never work but apparently it does. Actually I should just link to this much better explanation from PNHP:

Health Care Systems - Four Basic Models

Anyway, I am posting this as a discussion starter, or a polemic, or both, or whatever. The important question at this point is not, "Should we have a national universal coverage system?" The important questions are "What will our national universal coverage system look like?" and "When the hell can we get it???"

Global warming irreversible for next 1000 years

I'd just like to go on record with a prediction.

Starting with today and going forward, no Bush Administration official at the Assistant Secretary level or higher will ever be punished in any meaningful way for the various crimes committed during the Bush Administration. Some lower-level functionaries and stooges might get some trouble, but the main dirtbags are going to retire rich and happy, secure in the knowledge that they made the country great again.

For this purpose, "meaningful punishment" means actual imprisonment for at least one month, and/or a fine substantial enough to cause actual hardship. It does not mean a millionaire is fined $10k, or that someone is merely humiliated. Humiliation means very little to someone with no conscience. So hearings and truth commissions don't do the job. There has to be an actual trial and conviction.

I will further predict that once "the country" has "healed" and "we" have "moved forward," within 20 years we will see yet another Republican scandal which we will be expected to forgive in the interests of not making Washington Democrats feel awkward when they go to work. And finally, I predict that, if I am wrong and someone is actually convicted and punished, that conviction will not be a bar to employment in any future Republican administration, if there ever is one.

I think that if we want to see these people get theirs we will have to hope that they accidentally go to Spain or something. Personally, I'd like to see Powell go down first just to establish that your reputation won't save you.