Show us the mettle, Joe & Co. If you want to filibuster, make it a real filibuster. None of this namby-pamby virtual stuff, but the real made-in-America kind--the stay-up-all-night, read-from-the-telephone-book, keep-the-chamber-pot-nearby kind, as described memorably by Eleanor Clift in Newsweek a few years back:
They used to call it "taking to the diaper," a phrase that referred to the preparation undertaken by a prudent senator before an extended filibuster. The late South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond holds the record for a solo filibuster from the time when he rambled for 24 hours and 18 minutes to prevent the Civil Rights Act of 1957 from coming to a vote. Thurmond geared up by visiting the steam room to get dehydrated so he could drink without needing a bathroom. An aide stood by in the cloakroom with a pail just in case.
Surely if it's so important to keep the country from lurching into a public option, it's worth putting your body where your sanctimony is. The memory of Strom Thurmond deserves no less.
Update 1, Oct. 28: Don't miss Michael Tomasky in the Guardian on Lieberman's "moral vanity."
Update 2, Oct. 28: When Ryan Grim of HuffPost explicitly asked Lieberman yesterday whether, to block the bill, he'd be prepared to "read from the phone book," in full-voiced filibuster style, he said: "I'd be prepared to."
]]>This disgraceful bow-out is undoubtedly a cave-in to pressure from the usual suspects--organizational Jews who cohabited comfortably with Bush's 8-year stonewall in the Middle East; who have the gall to claim that being "pro-Israel" means slavishly following the Right; who do not represent (who precisely counter-represent) the 78 percent of American Jews who voted for Obama.
For the first time in living memory, a respectable pro-peace, pro-two-state Jewish organization is pulling itself together; and New York's liberal lights have gone dark.
The Jewish organizational establishment these days bemoans the fact that young Jews are drifting away. By advertising their belligerent pettiness, these groups are only guaranteeing that the young will stay largely turned off. The days of enforced uniformity are over. Schumer and Gillibrand have their eyes fixed firmly on the rear-view mirror.
* Update: Smith has revised his piece to say that Gillibrand "was 'unaware' she had been included on the group's list of supporters," according to her spokesman, Matt Canter.
]]>And who was it, conservatives, you expected to keep you safe? Do you really want the government's hands out of your hamburger? Or is the paralyzed 22-year-old Stephanie Smith, a victim of E. coli passed down the food chain by Cargill in the guise of ""American Chef's Selection Angus Beef Patties," which included slaughterhouse trimmings, a case of collateral damage in the War Against Regulation?
It's worthwhile remembering, by the way, what a serious newspaper can do.
]]>Over at the Washington Post, according to ombudsman Andrew Alexander, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli says:
we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It's particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view....I challenge our reporters and editors with great frequency to look at what is going on across the political spectrum . . . at the extremes, among the rabble-rousers, as well as among policymakers.
The Executive Editor does not express himself clearly. Take a close look at the evasive phrases "conservative issues" and "what is going on." Does Marcus Brauchli believe that WP reporters and editors should closely scrutinize the right-wing campaigns that diffuse untruths (Swift boats, death panels, missing birth certificates) and absurdly distorted uproars (Acorn as hooker counseling service, Cass Sunstein as Antichrist, etc.)? That it's time to investigate the organization and funding of such attacks, the ways in which they command the attention of Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, Savage, O'Reilly & Co. and then seep from the rightosphere into the mainstream? Apparently not.
Rather, it would seem (though again, Brauchli's ambiguous wording, if accurately quoted, might be at fault) that Executive Editor Brauchli means that his editors and reporters should take these attacks seriously, let the birther-deather crowd set their agenda, let their obsessions be the Post's obsessions.
Alexander goes on to brandish the canard of canards that has thrilled wingers for some 30 years now:
The most authoritative recent research into the political leanings of newsrooms (including television, radio, magazines and wire services) shows they are considerably more liberal than the general public. At daily newspapers, those who "lean to the left still far outnumber those who lean to the right," said Indiana University journalism professor David H. Weaver, whose researchers surveyed 1,149 journalists in 2002 and recently conducted a follow-up study of 400.]]> It's as if reporters run newsrooms all by themselves. As if we still lived in the 18th century world of one-man publications. As if there were no newsroom traditions or unwritten rules; no publishers; no markets; no corporations; no stockholders. Just journalists opining their liberal-liberal-liberal (did I mention liberal?) opinions. We all remember how that went in the run-up to the housing bubble, the Iraq war, don't we? All those liberal reporters busting our eardrums blowing their whistles?
It's as if my colleague Herbert J. Gans had not written the resounding rebuttal to such profoundly shallow claims almost a quarter of a century ago ("Are U.S. Journalists Dangerously Liberal?" Columbia Journalism Review, Nov./Dec. 1985, pp.
24, 29-33, unfortunately not online so far as I can see). As if whole curricula of research reports had never been published to demonstrate the economically and internationally unliberal (as well as socially liberal) biases of the mainstream. As if the argument had not been presented meticulously, at considerable length, in Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media?
Speaking of Alterman, he and Mickey Ehrlich have just posted on the Right's latest collective uproar about an Obama appointee, the Department of Education's Kevin Jennings, who has the temerity to be gay and once, more than 20 years ago, having counseled a gay high school student in a manner that the Family Research Council and other homosexual-hating slime-buckets deem unrighteous.
NYT public editor Clark Hoyt also wrote last week about the paper having "trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs," and quoted Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, as having "agreed with me that the paper was 'slow off the mark' [on the Acorn story] and blam[ing]
'insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.' She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies." Is a bubbling controversy a controversy that the gay-baiters and Glenn Becks of the world decree to be bubbling?
Why isn't it a bubbling controversy that the right-wing rage machine has a direct pipeline into the newsrooms of the would-be respectable organs of American news?
]]>In either case, whether the Republicans tie themselves to their crazies everyday or only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, the Republicans It would seem that insofar as they wear Joe Wilson's albatross around their collective neck, the Republicans have decided to become a frantic, revanchist, regional party of the Confederacy, prairie DaWN (Dakotas-Wyoming-Nebraska), and Alaska. In which case, full steam ahead or only half steam, they're doomed. Right?
But there's one circumstance in which this Republican doomsday strategy has a chance of working--improving their standing in national politics and enabling them to recover from 2006 and 2008. And this is if the economy founders badly enough and Obama is seen as a loser. In which case, the party's consolidated base recovers the ground lost in 2006 and 2008.
Read this fine piece of 2008 campaign analysis by Andrew Gelman and John Sides; and also the various comments, and Gelman's and Sides' responses. Gelman and Sides on 2008:
]]> [V]oting behavior did not change that much. Obama did win states that Democrats had not won in a while, and demographic trends suggest that Democrats have a chance to win those states in the future. But there were only small shifts in state-level vote margins. Two thousand-eight looked a lot like 2004 and did not signal any wholesale change in partisan loyalties or party coalitions. Moreover, it does not appear that Obama "realigned" specific groups of voters. The widespread fixation on carving the electorate into its constituent groups misses the crucial fact that Obama did better than Kerry in nearly every possible demographic: rich, poor, white, black, Protestant, Catholic, men, women....Voters of all stripes were displeased with the economy and President Bush and so voted for the opposing party's nominee. Then the Republican strategy is nothing more or less than this: to make sure that Obama fails. For the GOP to become a national party, Obama's record must be littered with Waterloo moments. The years of the bloating financial bubble must be forgotten, and the jobless recovery pinned on Obama. The only health reform that passes must be one that seems to hurt more people than it helps. The under-30 voters who went for Obama by 2-1 must be scared witless.Of course, for this strategy to work in the middle run, the Republicans must find a noncrazy candidate in 2012--most likely, a fundamentalist demagogue who talks more smoothly than Sarah Palin. That won't be easy. But they can still hope for interim successes. Since the U. S. Senate is built for a logjam, they can continue to be the party of obstruction for the foreseeable future, and hope for the best later on.
]]>Alexander Zaitchik has an edifying piece up on Salon about Glenn Beck's intellectual debt, if we can call it that, to W. Cleon Skousen, a berserker from way back, Salt Lake City police chief ("He operated the police department like a Gestapo," said the conservative mayor) who specialized in grandiose, fantastical, conspiracy-thick tracts like The Naked Communist. This is the master thinker who has today's Republican Party in thrall.
Puts me in mind of the last lines of Camus's The Plague:
"Rieux...knew...that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for many years in the furniture and the linens; that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the misery and the enlightenment of men, the plague would again arouse its rats and send them forth to die in a happy city."
]]>Get Mary Landrieu's language on ABC's This Week yesterday: "those of us that are against public option [sic] are against it because we think it will undermine the private sector."
And the reason why that's a bad idea is--?
Health care certainly needs doctors, nurses, and people who perform all manner of work in hospitals and clinics. It benefits from prevention, nutrition, technology. And what's the reason why it needs private health insurance companies? I've yet to hear any.
What Landrieu obfuscates, of course, is that the only reason health insurance companies are players in the current debate is that they pay to play. They make piles of money and therefore have political clout.
And remarkably, even if most insured people say they like the particular policy they have, the public as a whole is consistently in favor of single-payer, and likes the public option despite the prospect--or because of the prospect--that it might grow into a national health system.
Wouldn't it be a hallelujah day if an interviewer asked a politician why we need private health insurance companies in the first place?
]]>This is the proud tradition that today's moderate, nonfanatical northern Republicans embrace.
It is the same tradition that the Roberts Court has been promoting in the sort-of United States of America--which is why the Wednesday night heckler Joe Wilson of South Carolina has to be taken seriously.
Who said Wilson's former boss Strom Thurmond was dead?
Update: The Wilson story keeps on giving. Courtesy Jack Bass of the College of Charleston:
Several years ago, [now-Rep. Wilson] loudly denounced the claim of Essie Mae Washington-Williams as being a daughter of Strom Thurmond. Mr. Wilson called her story "unseemly" and a "smear." Her name today is listed on the State House monument to her father, alongside those of his white children.]]>
Here are some numbers to bear in mind, and inscribe on signs, and pass out on flyers, and send to your friends, doctors, uncertains, Blue Dogs, Black Cats, whatever, during this fall's home stretch:
Total expenditure by private insurance companies, 2007: $680 billion*
Total expenditure on administrative costs + profits, 2007: $95 billion
Percentage of total expenditure spent on administrative costs + profits = 14%.
In other words, one in seven dollars Americans pay insurance companies stays with them.
By contrast, here are 2007 figures for Social Security and Medicare administrative costs:
Social Security = 0.9%
Medicare = 3%*
The people who run these companies may not be "bad people," but their institutional interest is not the public's interest. Not. The. Public's. Interest.
* The $680 billion does not include our co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses.
** The Right disputes the Medicare figure. But nobody, nobody, claims that Medicare's true administrative costs are anything like 14%.
Update 12:51 pm. I apologize for earlier figures--my haste and sloppiness were to blame. Thanks to Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago for helping to set me straight.
He sounded like a winner. Like all great preachers, he started methodically and built to crescendos. The Republican responder, Charles Boustany of Louisiana, sounded like a whiner, crying, Deficit, deficit, and government-run, government-run, and built toward nothing. Obama charged the Republicans with specific lies. He made the obligatory gestures toward bipartisanship, including the unexpected shout-out to John McCain, who had campaigned in favor of mandatory catastrophic insurance--and I don't want to be cynical about those gestures, even though I think he's naive about the other party's intentions--but that's not where his stresses fell. He was reminding the majority who voted for him why they did that. He was reminding independents that the reason why no progress has been made toward universality, mandates, and affordabiity is Republicans--as with 1935's Social Security and 1965's Medicare laws. He was reminding them, as well as the few rational Republicans left, that the insurance companies are not the glories of American value.
He did not sound like a patsy. He offered specific programs but the peroration was clear: he stood for values and national character. If he went too easy on the insurance companies for my taste--his audience could have used the information that Americans pay insurance companies twice as much as they pay doctors--he took a proper jab at Republicans (they know who they are) who make up the party of fear. You can say that he's still not willing to talk to Americans straight about the need to limit high-tech medicine for the very old and very frail. Presidents won't do that.
But he bet on the strength of the American character. It was his finest public moment since the Inaugural. I'm betting national decency wins.
]]>Senators John Cornyn and Saxby Chambliss have placed holds on Sunstein's appointment because they find him insufficiently enthusiastic about hunting. Another, yet unnamed member of the World's Most Overrated Legislative Body has joined them.
]]> Before Cantor heads too far out on Beck's limb, he might want to reconsider not only the facts of the matter (Sunstein's brand of "libertarian paternalism" pleased the WSJ editorial board, who called him "A Regulator With Promise--Really") but his metaphor. Actually, a whole army of czars sounds like a pushover. No one to shovel manure, no one to clean up the dishes, no one to mow the lawn of the...czar-in-chief?More seriously, it sounds as thought the wackjob purge campaign has put its ham-fist on the problem with the theory of the unitary executive. If a president is not to do every last piece of executive work him- or (someday) -herself, there must be subordinate executives. If the Constitution and subsequent legislation do not require them to be confirmed by Congress, then it would seem that they shouldn't have to be.
No doubt Professor Sunstein could fill in the references.
By the way, originalists, since when is the Constitution served by a single senator blocking an appointment?
]]>A perfectly sweet day for a rally, personal, nothing strident or threatening. Personal stories. Americans love personal stories.
An old friend I ran into, and then a more recent acquaintance, confirmed my feeling that the tone was far too much Me-Me-Me, I Suffer, not nearly enough We Have a Right. My friend felt the same. We've been running into each other at demonstrations since we were 20 years old together. The first one was to integrate an amusement park outside Baltimore, I hate to say how many years ago. That one exuded confidence--not just moral rectitude. The spirit was, An injury to one is an injury to all. Last night's was more I am injured and woeful. It did not have the sound of victory.
If MoveOn thought to emphasize small-scale stories and candlelight across the country in order to look and sound inoffensive in regions where know-nothing goons go to their rallies packing, it succeeded. But I doubt this is the spirit that will convince Blue Dogs they'd better win this one for Obama if for no other reason than that if the Democrats are mortally wounded by failure, shades of 1994, this spells disaster for the party and the rest of any progressive agenda.
Please do not tell me I lack compassion. Don't get me started on my own medical chronicles. After 60 years of successful crackpot attacks on "socialized medicine," an outraged citizenry needs to speak up as a citizenry, not as a ward.
]]>The president of the United States, that's who you should be concerned about. Because he's acting like a little Hitler, I'd take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me.
2. The Messenger goes on to quote you:
"I'm not going to vote for any bill I'm not going to read," said the senator, as the audience rang out with applause.
The Patriot Act of 2001 was 342 pages long. You voted for it. Did you read it? The 2007 omnibus spending bill was 613 pages long. You voted for it. Did you read it?
]]> 3.He also stated repeatedly he was not for a public option, as he said it does not allow a choice for the consumer.
Senator, in what universe is a "public option" not "a choice for the consumer"?
4. Meanwhile, a blogger who attended one of your meetings today records the following exchange:
A vocal gentleman inquired about whether or not Grassley would denounce publicly people carrying guns to these townhall meetings (as has been done in some places). The inquirer noted that he was a long-time member of the NRA and a 2nd Amendment rights guy, but that Grassley should note that he didn't carry his gun to this meeting, but his umbrella. Grassley was amused and simply said, "We need a more civil society and we need the kind of civility that Jesus spoke about when he used the word agape - interest and seeking the highest good and welfare of the other person.'..."
Senator, is this all you have to say to an NRA member's question about bringing guns to town hall meetings?
5. The same blogger also noted your response to a question about
the so-called "death panel" provision and "unplugging Grandma" as was stated to say. To his defense, Grassley made it clear that he did not make a response to the inquirer at that town meeting that would inflame - but he did see the point of those who are concerned because they are trying to connect several dots in the current provisions of bills being considered. End of that story was that Grassley believes that these end of life decisions should be left to family and any hint of government intervention should be abandoned. It's not acceptable.
Reporters, here is Senator Grassley's town hall schedule for the rest of the week. He'll make himself available to the press for 15 minutes after each one.
Update 1:46 pm: Thanks to Doug Pennington of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence for the supplements.
]]>"Government is not a competitor, it's a predator," he said of the public option that has been embraced by key congressional Democrats. "We'd have 120 million people opt out [of private insurance], then pretty soon everyone is in health care under the government and there's no competitor."
My excellent general practitioner left his profession a few years ago because he was so sick of the paperwork (more than 90 different forms!) and overall hassle.
]]> In the current debate, I've been waiting for somebody to explain why, for the public good, private insurance companies are sacrosanct. Granted that many people want to hold on to the insurance we have. (I have to say that my own has been pretty damn good.) But then there's the doctor who recently wrote to TPM:Doctors, as a group, hate no one more than insurance companies....Remember our daily lives: every insurance company requires that we are certified with them, every company has a different form to use, every company says no to our initial request. Hospitals rarely collect more than 40 cents on the dollar billed.
a universal billing form, available for electronic submission to cut down on paper work and administration costs; a penalty for a claim incorrectly rejected (say a 20% penalty paid by the company when their mistake causes the office or hospital to go back and forth); formation of a public-option malpractice insurance company to lower insurance premiums (participation may require use of electronic records or other public good); standardization of electronic medical record keeping so that all systems can read the others data...etc.He thinks that doctors haven't been sufficiently mobilized in their own professional behalf, and that a strong reason is that the bills in play aren't specifically responsive to their ideas about how medicine ought to be practiced. I've seen this myself.
Similarly, small business owners who could benefit from the bill by getting some help with their own health care costs haven't been mobilized either to pound on the Blue Dogs.
But the essential point here is that the folklore of private insurance has achieved such an exalted position that conventional political discourse takes its wonders for granted. The public option is then cast as the bogeyman. Whether this has anything to do with the upsurge in insurance company contributions to our august legislators is--well, coincidental, right?
It's past time for advocates of reform to stop being cowed by the High Church of Insurance.
]]>One of Fallows' readers asked:
does the new media ecosystem have a greater ability to stop charlatans? Clearly yes.
I beg to differ. What has to be faced, people, is that in the new media ecosystem, anything goes. Anything goes, and goes. In the world of the blogosphere, cable TV, and talk radio, nothing stops. This is Newton (Gingrich)'s new law: Charlatans eat charlatans to nourish themselves, as in the impressive new horror/sci-fi/parable movie "District 9."
The liars and garbage-hounds cannot be blotted out. They can be opposed, and defeated. But to think the media system is self-aerating is delusional.
]]>